Are They Among Us?

Next Level Syntax, the doings of "The Others"...

Do you believe aliens have visited this planet?

I have no idea, but have concluded there are three possibilities, each of which has pros and/or cons. Those possibilities are:

1.      The Drake Equation is true, and it simply isn’t possible for two intelligent civilisations to emerge close enough in space and time for them to encounter each other.

2.      The conspiracy theories are true, and we are surrounded by aliens who live among us, work alongside humans in secret underground bases, and probably rule over us.

3.      Numerous artificial intelligence (AI) civilisations roam the galaxies, composed of super-intelligent robotic beings and vehicles, and one (or more) of them finally reached us, but our governments currently don’t know that much about them.

1 and 2 are located at each end of the possibility spectrum, while 3 lies somewhere in between and is, for me, by far the likeliest scenario. I would expect myself to be more inclined to believe in 1, but the emergence of artificial intelligence precludes its being correct, in my opinion. It’s quite interesting that the most “sensible” (and for a long time most probable) candidate is the one that has been most clearly debunked. The batshit crazy theory involving underground bases, etc., is also too silly to consider. We may have a bit of a Goldilocks situation on our hands, here.  

Pros and cons:

1.      In 1961, when Frank Drake announced his argument against the likelihood of us meeting another technological species, it made a lot of sense. The vastness of space made it easy to dismiss the probability we could exist in close enough proximity to an intelligent alien civilisation to make contact.
But in 1961 we hadn’t properly grasped the potential of AI. AI is self-generative, and this is important. Frank Drake included “the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space” in the conditions of his equation, but how little can he have suspected of AI’s full potential? A physical “culture” that is powered by super-intelligent AI can program itself to accelerate its own evolution, generation-over-generation, so that goals are set, and hit, with increasing effectiveness and rapidity. Its means of propulsion, for instance, could evolve from advanced forms of rocket fuel (obtained by AI-powered mining operations on planets, asteroids, moons, etc.) to electromagnetic-based “energy scooping” of fundamental particles as its ships move through space. The dexterous end of the culture would comprise “beings” that could be manufactured from incredibly durable materials to resemble any living creature that ever or never existed (drawing on near-infinite libraries of possibilities), that wouldn’t need to respire, that wouldn’t age, that wouldn’t be remotely affected by unfiltered ultraviolet or gamma rays, or anything else space could throw at them. Frank Drake and his contemporaries can be forgiven for this oversight, but it puts his equation in serious peril as an argument against the possibility we will ever encounter an alien culture.

2.      Ideas about aliens have changed over the decades since humans first speculated on their existence in the late 19th century. From beings identical to humans from Venus, to insectoid forms from other star systems, to the now familiar “Greys” or “Tall Whites”, their attitude towards us has allegedly changed from wanting to help us (Galactic Federation) to wanting to harvest us (Reptilians addicted to human gland secretions). What began as accounts of aliens that were indistinguishable from humans appearing to warn us about nuclear catastrophe slowly morphed into close encounters of the third and fourth kinds (abducting, and then abducting and raping, to all intents and purposes), and on into an even more sinister scenario where evil Reptilians view humans as the source of a high they experience after consuming the blood of terrified or traumatized people due to the presence of adrenaline or other hormones. We’ve had speakers like David Icke telling us the world is secretly ruled by inter-dimensional reptilian beings who can shapeshift into human form, and these “lizards” tropes now form the core of what has become a mainstream comedic notion (thanks to growing distrust in government). And then there are the underground military bases, supposedly occupied by large numbers of aliens working with humans. These terrifying scenarios are unlikely to be true. After all, if this situation was real, we’d surely know about it by now.

3.      An AI culture is the most likely scenario. Robotic beings can remain functional for centuries, don’t breathe or respire, and aren’t susceptible to damage from cosmic radiation. They can become sufficiently advanced in a relatively short time enough to produce spacecraft and new versions of themselves that are so robust as to be virtually indestructible. All of these properties would be necessary for an AI culture to endure the kind of time periods and distances required for it to eventually encounter another intelligent civilisation. None of this excludes the possibility of an AI cracking the inter-dimensional code either; given time, AI could increase its knowledge and general processing power to the point of managing any problem successfully. So when people claim to have seen aliens walk through walls, or materialise before them, they may have been witnessing the “magic” spoken of by Arthur C. Clarke. It is impossible to discuss the Drake Equation without introducing AI, as AI basically stands the equation on its head and makes nonsense of it. I’m not a blind believer in aliens having already made contact with us, but it’s easy to see how enigmatic and threatening the artefacts produced by an AI culture would be to the leaders of this world, and why they’d want to suppress evidence at all costs.    

While such a culture might use telepathy to communicate, they’d be proficient in language at any level between primitive oral traditions, to smoke signals and drums, to cave paintings, to interpretive dance, to hieroglyphs, to words, to scientific symbols, and on to 3-D icons imbued with innumerable chaos-encrypted facets, any one of which embodies a million times more information than all of our accumulated knowledge to date. Their language might comprise symbols arranged in simultaneous rows and columns, representing combined mathematic, scientific, and engineering principles that make perfect run-on sense regardless of the direction they are read; horizontal, vertical, and diagonal. They’d have also catalogued the entire qualitative universe, from the beauty of a sunset (across trillions of galaxies), to the mechanics of every emotion, to the drive behind every mating ritual of every creature, to origin of every hormone that ever caused a stir, however trivial. A super-intelligent culture that betters itself every generation for a billion years could point an instrument at a galaxy (never mind a star system) and stoichiometrically sniff out every element instantly. It could propel itself to any location in that galaxy (to obtain what it needs to survive) in minutes, or seconds, or less.

Is it possible we’ve been infiltrated by magic and cannot believe it is happening?

Can all those fairy tales be the fiction of attention-seekers?