If aliens have really found Earth, they might not be what you're expecting

If aliens have really found Earth, they might not be what you're expecting

Robert Jago

There’s a plausible explanation for the increasing number of UFO sightings, and yes — it’s aliens, but not in the way you might be thinking. Von Neumann machines, autonomous, self-repairing robotic drones, could offer an explanation for the mysterious craft appearing in U.S. military videos.

Real though they reportedly are, UFOs doesn’t necessarily mean aliens — the most likely explanation is that they are experimental drones from a U.S. adversary. However, if they are aliens, they almost certainly are not like the aliens portrayed in fiction. The popular imagination envisions alien visitation one way (Star Trek IV accepted), whether it’s Vulcans, Visitors, Gort, Mork, Alf, Roger Smith or Predator — alien visitation means creatures from another planet coming to the Earth, in the flesh, complete with a big ship, and all the accoutrements our own space travellers have to haul with them.

The probes that sent us back our first pictures of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are travelling fast enough that they have escaped the Sun’s gravitational pull, and so, absent a medium like air to slow them down, they will continue on forever. Each probe is going in a different direction, but two are destined to reach distant star systems in about 40,000 years, becoming, for any residents of those regions, alien visitors — their UFOs. The human builders of these probes envisioned such a scenario, and equipped the probes with directions to Earth, and a sampling of Earth music and sounds.

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However, the scientific consensus — such as it is, for a topic so recently seen as “wacky” — is that moving living beings interstellar distances is effectively impossible without new unimagined physics, unlimited energy or literal magic.