A Distant Probability

THE US IS on a shooting spree of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) ever since it took out a Chinese spy balloon and at last count, three of them had been obliterated using missiles. The world, online and offline, is speculating about the possibility of these objects being from aliens, and the White House issued a carefully worded clarification stating that there were “no indications” of extraterrestrial origins. But were they not to do so, the chances are still next-to-zero of any such visitations.

Consider the number of assump­tions one has to make for aliens to be here in this form. That they must cross solar systems and galaxies using tech­nology that humans can only imagine in science fiction and having done so, would hover around in clumsy little vessels in the sky? That would need them to suddenly revert to an earth-like degree of sophistication from super-advanced technologies. It took just over 80 years since man built machines that took to the skies to come out with stealth aircraft capable of eluding radars. Imagine what would happen after a few hundred or thousand years of develop­ment? It would be ridiculously easy to be impossible to detect. But the US man­aged to find three UFOs just by looking because now they were focusing better after the Chinese balloon incident. No alien jumping solar systems would be so clumsy unless they wanted to be found.

That man made God in his own image is equally true for aliens. Most of us think that alien evolution must follow the same trajectory that led to the progress of life here. But humans are a recent blip even on earth and it would take just one unexpected cataclysm, like the meteor that made dinosaurs extinct, for mankind to vanish. If we manage to colonise space, it has to be done in that little window when we survive. For aliens to exist, there must be the probability of life. Once that is overcome, there is then the probability of consciousness because without it, there is no development of technol­ogy. And why should consciousness develop at all? In the uncountable spe­cies that exist on earth, only one has got it and that is five billion years after the formation of the planet. Quite possibly, it came about by pure chance.

The only thing that gives credence to the idea of life elsewhere is the sheer scale of the universe. It is so immense that at some corner, trillions of kilometres away, some jumble of chemicals might come together to create it. But that might be all it is. Even if it grew some version of a brain and consciousness, why would that life have something that we humans take for granted—curiosity and yearning for new discoveries. We are invested with psychological traits that need not be shared by life forms elsewhere. We are fixated by aliens because of our fear of strangers and our fear of loneliness, contradictory emotions that make us both want and protect ourselves against them. Why should aliens also feel the same? Unless, of course, there is one creator and that is just putting too much faith in god.

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