You’ve just settled down for the evening.
The pizza you ordered is on its way and your favorite alien-fighting duo Rick and Morty
are about to come on the TV.
Then suddenly you hear a beeping sound and on the screen you see, “Emergency Broadcast.”
The beep stops and you hear the words, “We interrupt this program for an important message
from the President.”
Wow, you think, this could be exciting.
The next shot is the President himself sitting at his office in the White House.
“Dear fellow citizens,” he says, “Today I am addressing you with news that could be
world-changing, for what you are about to hear is without precedent.
Today the United States has made contact with aliens.
This is going to be big, like, really big, bigger than you can imagine.”
Maybe some of you are looking forward to the day of this happening and maybe some of you
are dreading this day.
However you feel, if you believe some scientists, it’s only a matter of time before we are
contacted by aliens.
Some people believe in a kind of alien zoo theory, which means we are already being watched
over, but the super-intelligent life form that is observing us has just not made contact.
Maybe aliens don’t want to interfere and it’s better for us to do things our own
way down here.
That said, they are watching as we pollute our planet.
They have seen us wage wars and create weapons of mass destruction.
They have stood by for a long time, but if some of those environmental scientists are
right, maybe by 2050 human civilization will come to an end.
With that in mind, perhaps those aliens up there in space kinda like us cuddly humans
and don’t want us to self-destruct.
Those guys regularly watch the Infographics Show and they just adore Ed Sheeran.
They don’t want to see doomsday and so have had a chat with each other and agreed to make
contact.
The question is, is there any evidence for this?
What would we do if they made contact?
First of all, it’s unlikely if aliens did make contact they’d be fluent in one of
our many languages and just get the President on the phone and be like, “Hey, we are a
group of intergalactic aliens originating from the planet Karzion.
We’ve just called because we’re a bit concerned about environmental degradation
on Earth and the fact you worship money above all other things.
We don’t wanna sound harsh, but with that and all the hostilities down there we’ve
decided it’s time to teach you a thing or two.
We’ll be down in a minute or two.
Laters.”
That’s a highly unlikely scenario, but since 2007 astronomers have been detecting mysterious
radio waves coming from outer space.
They don’t exactly know what they are, and some scientists suggest they could be evidence
of alien life.
The pulses of these radio waves are short….
milliseconds short.
That’s why they’re called “fast radio bursts” or FRBs if you’re in the astronomy
game.
These bursts are coming from billions of light years away and might only be space phenomena
happening, such as stars merging together, but they might also be extraterrestrial life.
Last year astronomers used a radio telescope to look for more of these flashes, and they
found some.
So far they’ve detected about 60 of these FRBs but two of them are of great interest.
That’s because they are repeating.
Maybe one blast alone could just be phenomena in space, but when they repeat…well…that
could be something staying out there.
There’s this guy named Frank Drake, and he’s the astronomer that kicked off our
first modern type of exploration for extraterrestrial intelligence.
You might have heard something about the Drake Equation, which estimates how many alien civilizations
there are in the Milky Way.
That’s the Galaxy where we live if you’re lost.
It’s Frank’s opinion that there is something like 10,000 broadcasting societies in our
Milky Way, but the Milky Way is a big place and contains maybe 100 to 300 billion stars.
If aliens don’t contact us and we have to find them in this great mass of stars, it
will take some time.
We are getting there, but 2020 might be optimistic.
But 2020 will be a big year, that’s for sure.
Those looking for alien life are getting some new parts for one of their best Telescopes
and if aliens are pointing signals at us from deep space we now have new technology in the
form of something called the “Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System.”
That’s a mouthful, so you can call it “VERITAS.”
This is about as sophisticated as alien searching tech has ever gotten, and 2020 will be the
year it’s put to full use.
With this thing astronomers can look for flashes of light, and those flashes might be aliens.
Think of it this way, if the most powerful lasers we have on Earth were sent out to distant
stars, with VERITAS we could detect that laser flash.
It’s like we are now searching for alien lighthouses.
This project set a Russian billionaire back $100 million, but already it’s been used
to survey 1,000 stars that are all within 160 light-years away.
We just haven’t spotted any signals yet, but this year astronomers are hoping for something
positive to light up their telescope.
That would figuratively and literally be a blast for those guys.
You might now wonder, so what will we do if we do detect something out there?
Well, firstly, scientists have come up with a scale that rates the detection.
If one of those fast radio bursts is spotted it gets a rating from 0 to 10, with 1 not
much to make an astronomer put down his frosty cappuccino and 10 being something that would
make him spill the thing all over himself.
A ten is basically definite alien life that is hovering over Earth looking for a place
to park their spaceship.
The problem is, sometimes the signals that are found could be something generated here
on Earth, and as one scientist put it, astronomers might think they have found an alien radio
signal when they’ve actually only discovered a taxi.
There’s also the fact that what looks like genuine signals from far off in space are
not what they seem.
In 2015, you might have seen the headlines about an “alien megastructure” that had
sat itself in front of something that got named “Tabby’s Star.”
Its starlight just kept getting dimmer and dimmer, as if something was being constructed
in front of it.
It was something never seen, and a bunch of scientists started whispering “alien”
in the lab canteen.
It turned out after more research that the phenomenon was just the star’s light passing
through a great big mass of space dust.
But what if we were really sure that there was something out there?
The problem now is what do we say to it?
This is a conundrum that has driven astronomers and other scientists crazy for a long time.
We might be able to send signals out and they might be able to project signals here, but
how would we really communicate?
Maybe there’s some “language of the universe” scientists have said, something that everything
or everyone should be able to understand.
That’s what scientists are looking for, some signal or language that is so complex
that it is likely to be from an alien civilization.
Then we’d have to decipher it, and we’d need some kind of Rosetta stone for the universe.
That’s the stone that allowed us to understand Egyptian hieroglyphs.
On the other side of the coin, a group of astronomers belonging to something called
“Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence International” are trying to send signals
out to space as beams that carry information relating to the periodic table of elements.
We haven’t heard anything back just yet, and the assumption that aliens will share
any of our science is a very big assumption.
As some philosophers might tell you, we cannot conceive of something that doesn’t exist
to us.
Aliens might have heads, geometry, egos, something similar to Instagram and the Peanut Butter
and Jelly sandwich, but they might also be something that right now we cannot possibly
imagine.
You can’t even try and imagine it, because your imagination is based on things in this
world.
This is the astronomers’ great problem.
When we talk about aliens coming down in spaceships and blowing things up, or them looking down
at us and shaking their big heads in disbelief as we riot at Walmart on Black Friday, we
are assuming aliens are like us, with human reasoning and feelings.
We assume that, because if they can travel in space, they must have human-like intelligence,
but again that’s a big assumption.
Ok, so what if…what if this year we discover a signal and it has been verified as coming
from an extraterrestrial life form?
Would it be like in the movies and a bunch of guys stand around in the White House with
the military man shouting that we should, “Nuke ‘em.”?
Well, there are a bunch of protocols in place for post-detection, but they aren’t international
law yet.
You might say they are more like sound advice.
One of them was created by those alien-searching astronomers we have talked about and it was
called the “Declaration of Principles for Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial
Intelligence.”
Basically, the protocol says scientists must verify the hell out of that signal before
it’s announced to governments around the world and the Secretary-General of the United
Nations.
Step two, you the public receive that “Emergency Broadcast” during Rick and Morty.
Next, governments agree if a signal should be sent back, and if they give the green light,
that message must adhere to certain principles that cover things like territory, justice,
honesty, respect for property, and respect for cultural diversity.
Let’s say those guys get closer and to our surprise they are just as we imagined.
That’s green guys with slim physiques and giant heads, and they are partial to Peanut
Butter and Jelly sandwiches.
What were the odds of that?!
Would they destroy us, like something from that movie Mars Attacks?
Some futurists think no, because they likely would have gone through all the stages of
cultural evolution on their planet if they could develop space travel technology.
They would have seen wars and famine and all kinds of bad business, and come here merely
as very advanced peace-loving friends and advisors.
If they did want to destroy us, it would likely be easy given that they could cross the universe.
Others disagree, painting the scenario of an explorer civilization that would likely
do just as we do and colonize things.
They’d take ownership of us and have us working in their sweatshops making their alien
smartphones.
Just as the now-deceased famous physicist Stephen Hawking predicted, aliens would be
hostile nomads in this scenario.
In his view, we’d soon be calling ourselves Native-Earthlings and talking about the damn
settlers.
We’d also have to do something about immigration calling some human people “aliens”, with
the upshot of that being that we might start to embrace each other down here.
The new threat would be the real aliens.
If aliens have traveled this far, they could be part of intergalactic confederations or
alliances.
That might sound like Star Wars, but why not if they’ve arrived on Earth already.
They might teach us how to travel faster than the speed of light and one day we might become
part of an alliance.
Serious scientists have said this by the way, it’s not just the imagination of an Infographics
Show writer.
If they did want to come join us in peace, we’d have to think about the issue of the
illegal immigration of extraterrestrial people.
No kidding, we’d really have to figure that out and no doubt the public would take to
Twitter and passionately disagree with each other.
We’d have to consider alien pathogens brought here and dangerous invasive organisms that
might have traveled with them.
No doubt there’d be real science, but also a lot of disgruntled earthlings making stuff
up about those dirty aliens coming here to take our jobs and drive up crime rates.
It would be a complicated relationship and can you imagine if those aliens started challenging
world religions.
“Hey guys, those Gods you have been talking about…well…we have something to tell you
about that…”
Maybe this is all just a matter of time, if you believe in the “theory of plenitude”.
That’s that everything is possible in the universe.
As the great Mr. carl Sagan once said, “The origin of life on suitable planets seems built
into the chemistry of the Universe.”
One day our astronomers are going to get that call from outer space and we are going to
stare at our screens with a sense of excitement and dread.
The aliens are coming and things will never be the same again.
You might believe we’ve already seen them and there is a conspiracy to hide that information,
but NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said when he was doing his snooping on the CIA
and NSA databases he could find no evidence of extraterrestrials.
If you believe him, they’re not close yet, but that’s not to say they might well be
on the way.
We feel that this show should be complemented with some of our own perplexing alien investigations,
so take a look at one of these videos, “Is There Evidence That Aliens Did Come To Roswell?”
or “Evidence That Aliens Have Made Contact.”