John Gruber said something I found kind of dumb on Daring Fireball today in a story about how UFO sightings are almost certainly not aliens:
It makes no sense that an alien civilization with the technology for faster-than-light space travel would lack the ability to remain hidden from us, if they so chose. (Same argument goes 100× for any claims that alien ships ever crashed on Earth.)
As the linked New York Times story notes, the thought is that if super-advanced aliens are trying to sneak around our skies, they’re doing a really poor job of it.
This is such a facile take–even if you absolutely do not believe in alien life–that I’m a bit surprised Gruber went public with it. There’s a few problems with it:
- It adopts a human-centric point of view, assuming that aliens would act like humans, when we have no idea of what they would act like (or look like, or anything else about them)
- It assumes that the aliens are constantly inadvertently revealing themselves in a non-conclusive sort of way and that this has to be blundering of unimaginable proportions, therefore it can’t be aliens because they would be way smarter than that–but completely ignores the possibility that if it was aliens, the behavior is almost certainly deliberate. That is, they want people to see UFOs, but not to actually do anything that erases all doubt that they are real and aliens have been here for however long. The likeliest reason for this would be to acclimate humanity to the presence of other intelligent life, especially life that might be superior to ours in important ways, like technology. Knowing that super smart aliens have been observing us for decades or longer as some kind of planetary science experiment would leave a lot of people feeling grossly inadequate, or angry or scared. It would literally change our world and rewrite our history. So maybe the aliens (if they exist) would try a go-slow approach, getting us used to the idea before confirming that they are, in fact, real.
- Also, the whole “Why wouldn’t they just land on the White House lawn” bit is stupid on several levels:
- America is not the world and allegedly super smart aliens would probably know that
- Revealing themselves in such a gross (not to mention trite) display would cause about the worst possible reaction
- Republicans would blame Democrats somehow
Anyway, I think UFOs are probably a bunch of different things–everything from meteorites to planes to, yes, weather balloons, but I also think there is enough evidence to suggest some are perhaps not of this world, or at least not of this world as we know it. Are they aliens? Curious humans from another dimension? I have no idea. But I suspect that we’ll have some kind of answer in the next ten years.
And it will not be revealed on the White House lawn.
