There Are Aliens, but Probably Not Here

TL;DR: There are probably aliens elsewhere in the universe. But the UFO’s we’ve heard about lately are not them. Instead, what we’re seeing is ordinary phenomena, treated irresponsibly and incompetently by the news media.

1. Is there life elsewhere in the universe?

The Drake Equation is supposed to help us estimate the number of civilizations in our galaxy that we might detect. It says:

The # of civilizations we can receive signals from = (the average rate of star formation in our galaxy)*(the fraction of stars that have planets)*(the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets)*(the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life)*(the fraction of planets with life that develop intelligent life)*(the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signals into space)*(the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space)

(That’s how it’s listed on Wikipedia.)

The main problem with this equation is that it gives us the desired quantity in terms of seven other quantities that are almost all unknown. (Maybe the first one is known?) So that’s not so helpful for estimating anything.

Here’s another try. There are said to be on the order of 10^22 stars in the known universe. What’s the probability that at least one of those stars, other than the Sun, has life living around it? Obviously, no one knows. But there is an argument that there are probably some such other stars, given the information that (i) there is life here, and (ii) there is an extremely large number of other stars.

Note: It’s hard to appreciate how large 10^22 is. That’s ten thousand million million millions. We can’t adequately grasp such an astronomical quantity. But here is something that helps: Have a look at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image (below). That picture came from aiming the Hubble space telescope at a particularly dark-looking area of the night sky (to avoid light from “nearby” stars). The image captures ~10,000 points of light. Each one of those dots is a galaxy, containing an average of 100 billion stars. Some of those are ~13 billion years old. That’s all found in a tiny area equal to one 26 millionth of the area of the night sky. If you hold up a 1 mm square at arm's length, it would cover up those 10,000 galaxies.

In place of the 7 quantities in the Drake Equation, let’s just say there’s a quantity, p, which is the physical probability (or “objective chance”) of a random star having at least one life-supporting planet. We know very little about the value of p. It’s nonzero (since there is life here), and I think we can safely say that it is lower than 50%, maybe much lower.

We can entertain hypotheses about the value of p. Suppose p is, say, 1%. In that case, there should be about 10^20 life-supporting star systems out there. Suppose p is only one in a million. Then there should still be about ten million billion life-supporting stars. If p is one in a trillion, there should be ten billion life-supporting stars.

Of course, it’s easy to hypothesize values of p such that it’s unlikely that that there would be more than one life-supporting star in the universe. Just set p really, really low. But not too low – if life is extremely improbable, then we shouldn’t be here. (In general, if a theory assigns an extremely low probability to some event, and we observe that event to happen, then this is strong evidence against the theory. So we have strong evidence that the value of p is not so low that we should expect there not to be life anywhere in the universe.)

To create any reasonable chance of having exactly one life-supporting star, we have to set p extremely close to 1/10^22. If it’s less than that, then we should expect not to be here ourselves. If it’s more than that, then we should expect there to be multiple life-supporting stars. But it would be a bizarre coincidence if p just happened to be extremely close to one over the number of stars in the universe. (There’s no reason for p to be tied to the # of stars that happen to exist in our universe.)

Mathy aside: Here's the formula: P(exactly one life-supporting star) = (10^22)*(p)*[(1-p)^{(10^22)-1}]. If p is almost exactly 1/10^22, that comes out to close to one third. Otherwise, it comes out to about zero.

This type of argument, btw, can be applied to any event with an unknown physical probability: In a large number of trials, it is highly unlikely that the number of occurrences of the event will be exactly one. The larger the # of trials, the less likely this is. If the # of trials is one of these astronomical numbers like 10^22, then it’s incredibly improbable that you have exactly one occurrence.

Caveats: There could of course be other information about the probability of the event that this reasoning ignores. E.g., we could have other evidence that indicates that life is extremely difficult to create, so difficult as to have a probability less than 10^-22. I haven’t addressed this. I also haven't addressed the proportion of life-supporting planets that develop intelligence.

2. Could Aliens Come Here?

Contrary to slightly scientifically-informed opinion, it's not impossible or ridiculous that, if there were intelligent aliens in our galaxy, they could come here. This would not require some new physics or warp drives. It would require what we consider extremely long voyages. Most stars in our galaxy are thousands of light years away, so it would take at least thousands of years for an alien civilization to reach us from most places where they could be, even tens of thousands of years. However, I don't see what's impossible or absurd about this.

If there is another planet where civilization arose, it probably arose millions, maybe even billions of years before we did. That's because of the extreme differences in the ages of planets across the galaxy, as well as the extremely unpredictable course of events leading to civilization.

If there is a civilization millions of years more advanced than us, it probably cured aging within its first 100,000 years. Members of that civilization could very well be millions of years old. They would have enormous wealth and material resources. And they could very well have launched missions (either manned or unmanned) to other stars thousands of years ago, planning to hear news from those missions thousands of years later. This doesn't strike me as particularly unlikely at all.

3. Are the Aliens Here?

3.1. What the Media Says

Lately, UFO enthusiasm is spreading. The New York Times ran this headline and teaser text: “U.S. Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects, but Can’t Rule It Out, Either: A new report concedes that much about the observed phenomena remains difficult to explain, including their acceleration, as well as ability to change direction and submerge.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/us/politics/ufos-sighting-alien-spacecraft-pentagon.html)

Fox News reports that UFO’s have gone from the fringe to the mainstream. They mention “serious defense implications”, and they include some of the mysterious footage. They include a UFO enthusiast  talking about the amazing capabilities of these objects. (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/unclassified-ufo-findings-us-intel-community-cant-explain-aerial-objects)

Tucker Carlson has reported about UFO’s repeatedly. Marco Rubio is urging the government to seriously investigate them.

Here, the Today show gets in on the excitement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKsLK_Na7iw

And CNN too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTvm_xDVaDI

Some of these reports mention that the Pentagon found no evidence of aliens, but they go on to imply that it could still be aliens, and they try to make it sound as if that’s a likely theory. They show clips from some of the UFO’s that have been caught on camera, sometimes they interview UFOlogists, but they do not interview UFO skeptics. They mention that the U.S. military has “confirmed” that the videos are “real”, or that they were taken by military personnel.

3.2. Elon Musk's Argument

Elon Musk tweeted the graphic shown here.

It raises an interesting point: Why do UFO's only get photographed with really low-quality cameras, or in really bad conditions (out of focus, low light, very far away, etc.)? This continues to be true, even as high quality cameras become more widespread.

Hypothesis: It's a selection effect. High quality images get selected out because they never look like alien spacecraft, because there aren't any alien spacecraft around here.

3.3. What Is Happening?

There are a few video clips that keep getting replayed. I did a little searching for explanations, and here is what I found:

a. Gimbal video

This is a video taken by a military pilot. It shows a black, roughly round object with a kind of halo of light around it. The object seems to rotate slowly. It’s very mysterious. (“Gimbal” is the Navy’s name for the video.)

Here is an explanation (includes the original video clip, with explanation of what it actually is): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr1cfpos6vo

Summary: The video shows infrared glare from the engine of another airplane. The actual airplane can’t be seen, just the heat from the engine. The camera rotates during the filming, which causes the glare to rotate. There is an automatic compensation mechanism in the camera that causes the horizon to continue to appear level even when the camera rotates, but it doesn’t stop the glare from rotating. A similar effect was reproduced by a debunker using his own infrared camera aimed at a passing jet.

b. FLIR video of "tic tac"

This is a video of a blurry, tic-tac-shaped object. At the end of the video, the object seems to shoot off to the left suddenly. This seems to show amazing maneuvering capabilities.

Explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1di0XIa9RQ

Summary: It is a very far away airplane, seen from the side, moving to the left. It is so far that it just appears as an elongated smudge. The object stays in the center of the picture for most of the video due to the auto-tracking camera. At the end of the video, the pilot switches lenses and changes the zoom from 1x to 2x. This causes the camera to lose the target lock and hence stop tracking the object. Hence, the object appears to shoot off to the left.

c. GoFast video

This is a video, taken by another military pilot, of a roundish object which appears to be flying extremely fast, close to the surface of the ocean.

Explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyEO0jNt6M

Summary: The object is probably a balloon. It is not close to the surface of the ocean; it’s roughly halfway between the altitude of the airplane and the ocean surface. The apparent speed of the balloon is due to parallax – basically, the balloon appears to be moving quickly relative to the water because the jet is moving quickly while the camera tracks that balloon.

d. The Pyramid-shaped UFO's

This is a video taken from a U.S. naval ship, which appears to show pyramid-shaped, flashing objects flying through the air.

Explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r2oaQWmqkk

Summary: If you film a light with a camera that is badly out of focus, the light will appear to take the shape of the lens aperture. Some cameras have triangular apertures. The video shows a normal airplane with flashing lights. The ship that took this video was under the flight path of airplanes flying from Asia to Los Angeles.

e. More

Those were all from Mick West, who is a dedicated UFO debunker. Here is a playlist of his videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-4ZqTjKmhn5Qr0tCHkCVnqTx_c0P3O2t

3.4. Conclusion

This was another case of the news media being full of crap. I see two possibilities:

1. Dishonesty: They’re trying to make viewers think that maybe there are space aliens here, when they know that’s not true. Why might they do this? Clickbait. They don’t care about accuracy; they just want people to watch and share their stories.

2. Utter incompetence: It took me under an hour on the internet to find the above explanations. I looked for explanations on YouTube, and the first video I found referenced Mick West. I then looked up Mick West’s web site, which lists all his videos. That was my research. So we can infer that the “journalists” working for the UFO-crazed media sources did less than that amount of research. Which is to say, they must have made no effort at all to find explanations for the videos that they keep replaying clips of.

After you see enough BS like this, you realize that this is just how the media operate. They make approximately zero effort to check their stories, and they try to sensationalize and spin everything.