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Where are the aliens?

Perhaps aliens don't exist. Or perhaps their signals are still to reach us

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Devangshu Datta
Last Updated : Dec 21 2017 | 10:40 PM IST
Is there life elsewhere in the universe? More intriguingly, is there intelligent life and have intelligent aliens visited Earth? Conspiracy theorists have long claimed that the answers are “Yes” and that various governments have assiduously suppressed all evidence of such visits. 

The conspiracy theories got a new lease of life recently. The US government has declassified information about the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program or AATI . The AATI was an investigation into Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs).  The releases include video footage of encounters between UFOs and military pilots. AATI was operational between 2007 and 2012. A retired military officer who headed it has come on record, talking about the need to continue investigating UFOs. 

Reports of UFO sightings have abounded since the 1940s.  All sorts of people, ranging from civilians on the ground to experienced pilots, have sighted UFOs in all sorts of conditions, all around the world. Quite a few people claim, more fantastically, to have been abducted by aliens. Area 51, a remote part of the Nevada desert, which contains an US Air Force base, is believed by conspiracy theorists to be a super-secret facility, built to do research into aliens who have died on Earth/ been captured alive/ come as ambassadors (take your pick).    

During the Cold War era, air forces were on constant, hair-trigger alert. Every unidentified object on radar screens was assumed to be a potential nuclear missile. Many UFOs were sighted by military pilots, either on routine patrols, or while “scrambling” to intercept radar blips. In most cases, the UFO was identified. But in some cases, there were no explanations and so, the crackpot theories proliferated. 

The US Air Force put together Project Blue Book, which investigated and collated UFO sightings. Blue Book began in 1947 and reviewed over 12,000 sightings between 1947 and 1969. Most sightings consisted of stars, oddly-shaped clouds etc. But 701 of them remain unexplained.

Britain’s Ministry of Defence convened a “Flying Saucer Working Party”, which despite its tongue-in-cheek name, was a dead-serious committee consisting of bureaucrats and military officers to investigate UFO reports.  As a member of the Flying Saucer Working Party later said, “We were more worried about Russians than about Martians”. Again, there were some unexplained sightings but the vast majority of British UFOs could eventually be identified. 

The AATI videos show encounters between UFOs and American military aircraft. One shows a bright saucer, which seems pretty large, being chased by US navy fighters off the California coast. The AATI was a low-cost project. It spent just $22 million over its operational period. 

Apart from debriefing people who claimed to have seen UFOs, the program is also said to have studied metal debris obtained from such objects.  

So, is alien life possible? The short answer is, yes. It might even be humanoid and carbon-based.  Earth-like conditions may exist in many different solar systems. Thousands of exo-planets have been discovered, thanks to the Kepler Observatory. Some may be similar to Earth. Comets also possess the amino acids necessary for life. Indeed, one hypothesis suggests that life on Earth may have arisen through the transfer of amino acids during a close encounter with a comet. 

The famous Drake Equation postulates that there could be a large number of alien civilisations. In 1961, astronomer Frank Drake listed the variables determining the number of alien civilisations capable of using radio signals in the Milky Way (Akash Ganga) Galaxy. 

Drake looked at the rate of formation of suitable stars, the number of such stars with planets in orbit, the possible number of inhabitable planets, a small fraction of such planets where life might emerge, an even smaller fraction where intelligence may emerge, and finally the probability of a civilisation that has achieved radio communications. He was, of course, making guesses about the actual values. After Kepler, we know that there are a very large number of suitable exo-planets orbiting stars but we’re still guessing about the other variables.  

The Drake Equation led to SETI — the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. SETI uses computing resources donated by ordinary citizens to sift through radio signals in the hopes of discovering messages from aliens. 

However, Drake was countered by Enrico Fermi. The Nobel winning physicist simply asked, “So where are they?” There are many possible answers to Fermi’s paradox. Perhaps, intelligent aliens don’t exist. Perhaps, they’re lying low. There’s also the barrier of interstellar distance. Electromagnetic signals travel at the speed of light. If a civilisation a thousand light-years away discovered radio at the same time as we did, their first signals will reach us around 3000 BCE.  

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