With All Due Respect to Extraterrestrial Intelligence

by Mark Ervin

One of the most astonishing ideas humanity has ever contemplated is that of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) in the universe. Any literate person in the modern world cannot stare up at a night sky filled with thousands of stars and not have such thoughts. There are suggestions and hints of the idea in various ancient texts going back thousands of years, it has dominated the subject matter of science fiction ever since the writings of H.G. Wells, and in the last century the most overwhelmingly ever-present notions are connected with sightings of UFOs. Recently UFOs have appeared in various news reports as being seen by Navy pilots, and video of these encounters have baffled the pilots and other observers. They seem to toy with the pilots, staying out of reach, and then speeding away, with no meaningful actions apparent. In fact there are no apparent meanings to any of the reported actions of UFOs. With these recent cases, as with so many others, alternate and more skeptical explanations have emerged which are far more mundane, and in an almost perfect inverse relationship, far less popular and less reported.

People of various backgrounds, from eccentric farmers to respected Navy pilots clearly have seen things for many decades now, and they continue to see them. Excluding all fakes and people identifying ordinary phenomena like Venus or balloons as UFOs, there may be many possible causes for these without any advanced ETI connection. These recent reports by Navy pilots add to a list that is unexplained and also quite interesting, even if in the end it relates to human psychology and shared delusion more than real world objects. But alas, my own view, even while I am convinced they are out there in the cosmos, and while I think discovery of them would be the biggest finding in history, alas, is it's just not ETI.

If you spend very much time thinking about the UFO phenomenon in all its endlessly varied reports, it does defy any sensible concept of respect for the actual "intelligence" of these supposed ETIs. There is what has been called the "marginally detectable" problem with any account of UFOs as extraterrestrial spacecraft. Why in the universe would they engage in behavior patterns that totally avoid landing at The White House, or at a scientific conference even, and then instead, semi-secretly do aerial games with pilots, or even abductions and strange operations on farm animals? Somebody who spends moment's thought on the subject can't rationally claim they have technology to get here from another star system, but don't want to make themselves obvious or contact Earth scientists, and yet are seen here and there by farmers, Navy pilots or whomever else. There is no easily constructed, much less easily defended logic that can go along with that dichotomy. Either they want the human race as a whole to meet them, or they could keep entirely hidden given technology beyond what we can even start to conceptualize.

To attempt to deal with this particular oddity, the notion of psychologically comfortable gradual introduction of the idea of beings far in advance of ourselves is sometimes put forward. But that makes no sense in light of the monumental prominence of this idea in ancient culture, modern culture and all cultures in between. Ancient Jainism had concepts of beings like us "out there." Nobody is going to suffer psychologically from knowing ETI are real or visiting us. A dangerously large number of Americans believe far more bizarre things anyway. Even the most provincial and fundamentalist of world religions will accommodate the ideas somehow (or hide from it as blasphemy and go on as before). They have done that with every aspect of the advancement of the modern world. This is not a reason for ETI to worry about contacting our leaders.

There are other reasons why I don't for one second think there is any chance of UFO sightings being ETI visiting us in ships from other worlds. I agree with what legendary science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke said, that if they were to ever arrive at Earth in a ship, every single human on the planet would know about it. His imagery of first contact, that of great city sized ships hovering above our own cities for the great novel "Childhood's End" depicts what he thought that would be like, and have been stolen a dozen times in silly pop culture things like "Independence Day." That film is part of a very long term idea in science fiction, beginning with Wells' novel "The War of the Worlds," of ETI aliens as an existential threat.

The idea that beings that could be far ahead of us enough to master energy and matter sufficiently to traverse star systems and yet need to be mean to us, take our stuff, or the planet, and kill us, is upon serious reflection quite nonsensical.  It's actually rather close to the level of the comical Twilight Zone episode in which humans find an alien book titled "To Serve Man" and realize its a cookbook. What is actually disturbing by itself how many excellent minds, such as the late Stephen Hawking, were worried about such a threat of first contact. By the way, if you do want to fixate on the idea, the best "mean aliens" novel ever written is Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's "Footfall," but the authors have good and narrowly imagined reasons for them being both meanies and also at about on our technological level.

It's a challenge to sufficiently explain how extremely unlikely it is that if any contact happened, how very far above our level they would most like be. Life, and intelligent life, could possibly have begun forming in the early universe billions of years ago. Civilizations risking their own self-destruction (as we are unfortunately and increasingly) could have emerged and wiped themselves out thousands of times over before the first life forms emerged on Earth. We will not find ETI at about our level--if anything, any contact we might have mean they will be at least millions, plural, of years ahead of us.

With these ideas their superiority in mind, now the notion of advanced ETI as hostile, conquering, or fearful in any way seems like pure lunacy.  Basic logic demands some aspects of what they would not do. With such a knowledge status, there is no disparity, or threat, or aggression that has any meaning (and to face facts, these are inventions of our own minds, in situations of limited resources and imbalance between biology-based rivals). We are thinking of them as having our own baggage of genetic behavior tendencies of xenophobia, of hoarding of goods, of zero-sum relationships. We are projecting our flaws when we think of hyper-intelligent ETI as behaving badly as we do. In fact the darkest answer to the failure of SETI so far is the idea that civilizations hang onto such aggressive behaviors after enough technological sophistication as be acquired that they destroy themselves.

The thing is, odds are they would not be anywhere close to our level, they would likely be so far in advance of us we cannot actually imagine them. Ordinary (not too harsh, not too easy) numbers plugged into the famous Drake equation give us a number of about a million technical civilizations in our galaxy right now.   Probably the most astonishing thing about the Drake equation is that even if you put horrendously harsh numbers into it you still get thousands of civilizations. I think finding out (SETI) is potentially the most important task humanity has. However SETI has failed to this point, and many knowledgeable people are speculating that either we are alone, or so “almost alone”--nobody within many millions of light years--so that searching is impossibly forlorn in terms of odds.

If the UFOs as ETI is wrong, then we find ourselves dealing with the Fermi Paradox, which is the question, given the size of the universe and time enough for many civilizations to emerge, "where are they?" An idea attendant to this has emerged in recent decades, of a "Great Filter," which is some terrible event, that may be either something we've safely passed by as a species, or something ahead of us that will prevent our progress to ever contacting ETI.  ETI is not contacting us then, because other life forms, either before or just after they reach intelligence and technological advancement, destroy themselves.

Here I want to raise the concept for serious discussion that searching and failing to find any sign of ETI, along with UFOs not being alien beings, may not mean a thing about how common ETI is in the universe. Contemporary high level speculation is that due to the short window of time of a civilization's progress (look at our tech progress and more, rate of increase of tech progress, over the last 300 years, consider that any contact would likely be with beings millions of years ahead of us), they would be so far beyond our level we might be unable to even detect them. They may not still travel in any kind of space ship or use electromagnetic waves to communicate than we still use stone tools.

Whether or not you fully or partly buy into Ray Kurzweil's ideas of our own pending Singularity--a technological explosion that will reboot and reformat humanity beyond our current capacity for prediction and understanding--it's automatic that ETI millions of years in advance of us would be all the more incomprehensible. In fact with this view of the Drake equation and reasonable numbers, and then how far ahead of us they are, ETI might possibly be almost everywhere, but doing things we cannot grasp, or detect. Imagine for a moment if a large jet could somehow fly low over a group of Neanderthals 50,000 years ago. Would they think of it as a group of humans on a journey? No, it would be an awesome "thing," new, beyond understanding, but no sign of beings who think and act.

Turn that around, now. Would they be interested in us? Remember that the difference between ourselves and Neanderthals is an tiny fraction of the difference between ourselves and ETI millions of years ahead of us. As  Carl Sagan once said, it makes sense that such advanced beings would about as interested in us as our entire human race is in one tiny bacterial colony somewhere in a distant jungle. After reading everything I can find on this subject, this is my strongest speculation: The trajectory of increasing intelligence suggests that after splitting the atom, technology advances so rapidly and to such an extent that civilizations on our level cannot possibly detect, or even comprehend advanced ETI. It's seemingly impossible. Given the rate of progress increase we see just with our species in the last 100 years, a species at least a million years ahead of us should make us dizzy in the very attempt to imagine them.

In fact if you want a buzz of mainlining the awesome, vastly beyond anything as trivial as alien UFOs, let's lean into such speculation. If we in fact see what they do in any way, what if it is with zero comprehension except as some baffling "natural" phenomenon? We can turn to speculations about mind bending, perhaps even terrifying notions of Type III civilizations (on the Kardashev civilizations of the universe scale, we are a measly Type 0, by the way) at work on some activity that has created the Boötes Void, which is a bizarre and impossibly gargantuan volume of space which is far more empty—apparently empty—than any other place in the universe. What if their actions encompass the universe as a whole at this point, that we see as conundrums of physics like Dark Energy and Dark Matter?  

Further still, perhaps they might be like what philosopher Daniel Dennett called Laplacean super-physicists, knowing all interactions of all elementary particles through all time, meaning all that has happened and all that will happen, perhaps even across multiverses.  Were you already sitting down, and if not you may want to lie down next. Go far beyond even that musing, right up to the outer boundary of all such notions with astronomer Caleb Scharf, who speculates the very laws of our universe are advanced ETI constructions. This is the final endpoint in hyper-intelligent ETI speculation, but no matter how wild, it makes far more sense than UFO beings spending time toying with Navy pilots, abducting folks, or mutilating cows.

So if indeed what they do is likely so monumental we cannot recognize it, then it follows that ETI can be undetected while not necessarily destroying itself--that technological advancement causing annihilation is not needed as the explanation for the Fermi Paradox. Maybe the Great "Filter" is our primitive ignorance. Perhaps we need to show extraterrestrial intelligence a bit more respect.

As several thinkers have suggested, if ETI is out there, or even all around us right this moment, we must face the humbling realization that odds are the human race is simply like a tiny ant colony in a crack in the middle of the bustling superhighway--totally unaware, incapable in principle of conceiving, the monumental and rapid activity all around them. If those higher beings did interact with us at all, our experience of it would likewise be completely beyond our understanding. Perhaps not as grandiose as as Scharf's concepts, but possibly closer to the ideas in Stanley Kubrick's cinematic masterpiece "2001: A Space Odyssey."  

Kubrick and co-screenplay writer Arthur C. Clarke put forward the idea of them occasionally prompting us forward in leaps of conceptual thought in "2001."  Their depiction as an inscrutable black monolith is both literal and symbolic imagery of our bafflement. More articles, essays and books have been written about the film than any other in film history, and one issue of contention about the film is whether the ETI are depicted as benevolent to our species by prompting periodic elevations in our evolution as an intelligent species. But Kubrick made the point that his idea about ETI interaction with us in his film is that their motivations would be utterly beyond us:

"I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001—but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God. I don’t believe in any of Earth’s monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God...

 When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia—less than a microsecond in the cosmology of the universe—can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities—and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans...

Mere speculation on the possibility of their existence is sufficiently overwhelming, without     attempting to decipher the motives. The important point is that all the standard attributes assigned to God in our history could equally well be the characteristics of biological entities who billions of years ago were at a stage of development similar to man’s own and evolved into something as remote from man as man is remote from the primordial ooze from which he first emerged." 

--Stanley Kubrick, 1968 interview

This brings us to the relationship of all these ideas with concepts of gods or god. I suppose it's telling that our views of ETI interaction--whether in uncritically evaluating UFOs or exemplified in diving the finest works of science fiction--conform to our views of either menacing or benevolent metaphysical and religious notions of demons, angels or gods. It's been suggested many times that both of these things represent the zeitgeist conceptions to replace the role of religion and god worship in the modern world. Possibly, and likely an improvement in several ways, if it performs that function. Better than that, I would suggest, is that we be far more open to hints of ETI that conforms to none of our wish fulfillment needs, and is not patterned after our foibles or tendencies. Better that we use the scientific method to evaluate candidates for evidence that really might suggest their existence and activities, if possible, and ponder their possibilities to inspire ourselves, to improve ourselves, and to hopefully be moving on a path that might lead to their level.