If all reports of mysterious objects buzzing in our sky are interpreted as true encounters, it appears that Earth is under attack.
But spoiler alert: for the main leader of the SETI Institute, founded to seek and understand life beyond Earth, it is necessary to take a step back and cuddle up with a cup of cosmic reality.
“We have no evidence from any credible source that would indicate the presence of alien technology in our airspace. And we never have,” said Bill Diamond, president and CEO of the SETI Institute, headquartered in Mountain View, California . . “The idea that the government would keep something like this a secret is just completely absurd. There is no motivation whatsoever to do that.”
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SETI is a major research contractor NASA and the National Science Foundation, and works with industry partners in Silicon Valley. Space.com spoke with Diamond for an up-close encounter with his own thoughts and counterpoints to claims of extraterrestrial visitation and to ask if there’s any signal in all this UFO noise.
Mind experiment
Diamond said that while we should not completely rule out the possibility that we might one day discover evidence of alien technology in our skies, “nor should we jump to the conclusion that UFOs are alien technology in the absence of any compelling evidence to that effect . And there is no convincing evidence,” he claims.
To help visualize why, Diamond urges people to try a thought experiment.
The fastest spacecraft humans have ever built that is still moving away from Earth is NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. It was ejected in January 2006, passed Pluto and is still counting miles on its odometer.
“If you sent that spacecraft to our nearest neighbor star, Alpha Centauri, it would take 80,000 years to get there,” Diamond says. “Any civilization that masters the ability to span the incomprehensibly vast distances of interstellar space would have technology so advanced beyond our own that it is beyond our comprehension.”
It would look a lot like a smartphone to a Neanderthal, Diamond suggested.
“If such creatures exist, they would probably send hardware here first and not biology, and they certainly wouldn’t crash-land in our deserts,” he said, such as the alleged and much-publicized 1947 dive of a UFO and its accident. sensitive residents near Roswell, New Mexico.
In terms of short distances, that’s traveling a long way and running out of brake fluid.
Where is the mothership?
“Long before they sent any spacecraft into the sky, they would have some understanding of what they were dealing with,” Diamond noted, “since they would already know everything about our atmosphere, our airspace, our technology and more.”
It just wouldn’t happen, Diamond emphasized.
“And if they were, they wouldn’t leave them behind. And besides, if there’s a small craft floating through our skies, where’s the mothership? And if they didn’t want to be observed, they wouldn’t. are!”
Connective tissue
Yet there is some kind of connective tissue in the public mind between SETI and UFOs?
“There’s definitely connective tissue,” Diamond replied. “Why do people have these beliefs? It’s because they want to believe. No one really wants to think this Soil is the only place in the vastness of room where life originated. Even that idea is a bit absurd.”
For example, Diamond points to NASA’s revelations Kepler mission, elevated in March 2009.
That hunter/data collector spacecraft discovered more than 2,700 planets beyond our own solar system. Nine years of collecting data from deep space, Kepler’s message emerged: there are billions of invisible planets, in fact, more planets than stars.
Statistical probability
“Statistically, every star in the sky has one or more planets around it,” Diamond noted. In addition, 50 percent or more of this is terrestrial (rocky surface and similar size) and located in the habitable zone of their guest star, he said.
“That implies the existence of tens of billions of potentially habitable worlds in our Milky Way alone,” Diamond said. ‘So indeed the statistical probability in which we are alone the universe is zero. There is definitely life beyond Earth!”
But the presence, both in space and timeBoth proximity and proximity to advanced alien civilizations are an entirely different matter, Diamond continued. ‘There are countless variables, all of which occur in the sciences astrobiologyplanetary science, astronomy And astrophysicsWe’re trying to find out.”
Coincidental observations
Diamond wonders why an alien civilization would send biology if they couldn’t send hardware.
“The furthest things we’ve sent into space are hardware. And that makes sense,” Diamond said. “But if you did send creatures and the most interesting thing you can do is draw circles in crops… come on!”
Another scoop of skepticism that Diamond has added is that every single UFO – now linked to the term Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) – are all “accidental observations.”
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“That’s why they’re very unreliable. They don’t have the tools, technology or methodology to discern what they’re looking at,” Diamond says.
Finally, the leader of the SETI Institute said: If the government really believed that ET was buzzing our planet, where is the student money?
“The lack of government funding to study UAP/UFO is evidence that the government is quite confident that these coincidental observations are of no use – or – that the government would prefer that we not use the available technology to monitor our airspace closely to keep an eye on because of our own human technologies. that are being developed – in secret,” Diamond said.
“I think this is the most compelling evidence against the idea that we have visitors in the sky,” Diamond concluded.
For more information about the SETI Institute and its programs, visit https://www.seti.org/