Aliens

For more than 60 years, scientists have been on the stealthiest stakeout in history. Using state-of-the-art listening devices, they’ve tapped into thousands of homes, waiting patiently for their targets to reveal their presence, and ultimately been rewarded with silence. If this covert activity were occurring in our own country, one might have become impatient and simply walked up and knocked down the door. But the targets are not living in our country, or even on our planet or in our solar system. Our persons of interest are aliens. This is Seti: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, focused on life on planets orbiting other suns. So far, we’ve found no sign of them.

Last week, a team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge professor Nikku Madhusudhan announced that they had found tentative evidence for a ‘biosignature’ embedded in the light from a distant planet. Scientists and non-scientists around the world tried to interpret the results. Was this it? Was this the moment when humanity could finally claim it had answered that ancient question: are we alone? As an astrophysicist involved in the search for life beyond Earth, I can tell you that the results were not that moment. But that doesn’t make them any less exciting.

Over the past three decades, astronomers have discovered planets orbiting Sun-like stars throughout the universe. This discovery ended 2,500 years of debate about whether worlds existed beyond our solar system, but it came with a shock. The most common kind of planet in the universe is the type of world that doesn’t exist in our small corner of the cosmos: what astronomers call ‘Super-Earths’ and ‘Sub-Neptunes’, planets with much greater masses than ours and which could, in theory, sustain life. Astronomers concluded a little over a decade ago that every star in the night sky hosts a family of worlds. Importantly for the search for life, one in five of those stars will have a planet in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone (sometimes referred to as the ‘habitable zone’).

Dr. Jonathan Jiang dreams of beaming an easy-to-read message into space before civilization collapses. He’s run the simulations to test humanity’s self-destruction rate. According to his computers, there’s a 0.1 percent chance that humanity destroys itself in the not-so-distant future. He’s even more pessimistic than Stephen Hawking, who bowed out of public life saying, “I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet.” Jiang, who works for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, co-authored the 2022 paper “A Beacon in the Galaxy,” which argues for the importance of streamlining the communications we send into space hoping they might be intercepted by an interplanetary species.

There is compelling evidence we have threats to global security not from this earth, according to Tennessee congressman Tim Burchett — and it's time the American people learned the truth.  Burchett appeared on John Michael Godier’s Event Horizon podcast last week to discuss the government’s cover-up of extraterrestrial technology. The congressman, who sits on a House committee investigating UFO sightings, claimed that alien spacecrafts can travel at the speed of light, fly underwater and turn people into “charcoal briquettes.”  According to Burchett, the government has been covering up UFO sightings since 1897 when an alleged spacecraft crashed into a windmill in Aurora, Texas.

By the time you read this, Uncle Sam’s latest ‘definitive’ report on UFOs (it’s not the first) will have been made widely available, with the exception of a classified annex (there’s always room for a sequel). If the leaks are to be believed, we will have learned that there’s a lot more out there that we don’t know. Some of the material may well be impossible to explain, but inexplicable is not a synonym for extraterrestrial. Could we instead be catching glimpses of something the Russians or the Chinese have dreamt up? E.T., though, will neither be ruled in, nor, crucially, ruled out. For their part, ufologists will take what they can get.