Where Aliens Could Be Watching Us

Where Aliens Could Be Watching Us

Lisa Kaltenegger

The perfect cosmic front seat to Earth with its curious beings, is quite rare. But with about the same technology as we have, any nominal, curious aliens on planets circling one of the 1,715 stars could have spotted us. Would they have identified us as intelligent life?

All of us observe the dynamics of the cosmos every night. Stars rise and set—including our sun—because Earth rotates among the rich stellar tapestry. Our night sky changes throughout the year because Earth moves in orbit around the sun. We only see stars at night when the sun doesn’t outshine them. While circling the sun, we glimpse the brightest stars in the anti-sun direction only. Thus, we see different stars in different seasons.

Where Aliens Could Be Watching Us

Lisa Kaltenegger

I don't think I'll ever NOT be awe-struck by the cosmos.  Its a spectacular and amazing thing.  The immensity of it all remains largely unfathomable to me.

I can't imagine its not teeming with life either.  Further, I can't imagine that some life form(s) or another somehow managed NOT to eradicate itself and has evolved in ways far beyond our ability to understand.  This would seem to have to include awareness of the space around it (i.e., the cosmos) and our little blue marble.

The article isn't terribly interesting to me. It mainly covers the possibility of living beings on planets of other relatively near star systems detecting our existence by the standard astronometric techniques we use to detect them, led by the partial occultation dimming method, which requires the plane of the alien planetary system to be somewhat aligned with that of our Sol system, so that we can detect the minute dimming of the radiated output of the alien star during the passage of the alien planet in front of its star (which event has to be along our line of sight).  

The article seems to follow mostly the conventional consensus SETI approach and belief system, where the ongoing physical contact via UFO vehicles is ignored. The paradigm is of course that absolutely nobody will ever be able to travel between star systems due to the fundamental constraints of the laws of physics, and contact will be severely limited by the great time delay and the great attenuation of radio and other electromagnetic signalling due to the inverse square law and the extreme distances between stars. 

Of course there will be a certain percentage of nearby star systems where the geometry relative to supposedly Earthlike planets of these stars has been such that our planet Earth could have been detected by such conventional means. 

A simple extrapolation of conventional astronomy. 

This seems to be combined in the article with the facile and probably false assumption that the Galaxy is teeming with alien intelligent life forms, ignoring our total ignorance of most of the important factors in the famous Drake equation. Starting with the probability of the origination of life on planets within the "habitable zone". So far there is strong evidence from the failure of ongoing origin of life research (that has been proceeding for more than 50 years), that the probability is exceedingly small of the abiogenic (undirected, due to chance and the laws of physics and chemistry) origin of life. The failure of this research (which of course is obfuscated by its practitioners) has the result that it is apparent that in the absence of special creation, or panspermia (contact by aliens seeding the earth in its early days), life must be exceedingly rare in the Universe. No teeming aliens, just maybe possibly one alien race in the entire Galaxy - namely us. SETI has been unsuccessful simply because there's nobody out there. 

This is the probable picture painted by science at this point in time.

As opposed to the article, more interesting perspectives include taking the UFO phenomenon seriously to the extent that it is admitted that at least one type or category of the UFOs being encountered are alien physical vehicles from other star systems. Implying that somewhere in the science approach to the issue there are big errors. If such advanced aliens do exist then the limitations of conventional human astronomy techniques in detecting us (like the partial occultation method) are irrelevant to them since they may have been around for millions of years of advanced scientific and technological development.