In recent months, several leading astrophysicists from NASA and Harvard have suggested that aliens are not the product of science fiction: that advanced and ancient technological civilizations may exist, but are beyond our understanding or ability to detect. Silvano P. Colombano from the Research Center. Ames at NASA suggests that we may be missing a signal while searching for UFOs.
“Our form of life and intelligence,” Colombano notes, “may only be a tiny first step in an ongoing evolution that may well lead to forms of intelligence far superior to ours and not based on carbon mechanisms.
Why can't we find aliens?
Likewise, Caleb Scharf, director of the Astrobiology Center at Columbia University, suggests that alien life could be so advanced that it becomes indistinguishable from physics. At the same time, Harvard's Avi Loeb suggests that the first known interstellar visitor to our solar system - Oumuamua - may be a probe sent by a space-conquering civilization, and that the scientific community should be willing to accept and accept uncertainty.
After only 50 years of computer evolution, we are already talking about "superintelligence" and are quickly becoming symbiotes with computing power, Colombano says, adding: "I don't want to touch upon the question of our species' survival or its future" role "in millions of years of evolution. I just want to point out the fact that the intelligence that we could find and that could find us (if it hasn't already) might not have been born of carbon-based life forms like us at all.”
“While it is still reasonable and conservative to assume that life most likely originated in an environment like ours, the huge temporal differences in potential changes make the likelihood of a 'coincidence' of technologies very low,” Colombano says.
In a 2018 article calling for a more aggressive search for advanced extraterrestrial life, Colombano argues that we are missing out on non-carbon-based alien life like Earth.
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Colombano also claims that there are certain aspects of UFO sightings that cannot be explained. In his article published by SETI, he notes that some of the signals we might have missed when searching for UFOs.
“We must view the UFO phenomenon as something to be investigated in the context of systems with very low signal-to-noise ratios, but without discarding the possibility of challenging some of our assumptions. In the sheer amount of "noise" in UFO reports, there may be "cues", albeit small, indicating a range of phenomena that cannot be explained or refuted, "he says. The appearance of UFOs is often considered unlikely due to the unlikely likelihood of interstellar travel, but in his opinion, aliens should have mastered this technique.
Scarf notes that Arthur Clarke assumed that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. “If you give a bunch of Paleolithic farmers iPhones and sneakers, you will definitely seem like a magician. But farmers will still recognize you as their own and will eventually start taking selfies. But what if life has developed to such an extent that it has become similar not to magic, but to physics?"
If the universe hides another life within itself, and if part of this life has evolved beyond our own waypoints of complexity and technology, Scarf offers us some extreme possibilities to consider.
An example is Avi Loeb of Harvard, who says that aliens are quite real: “I think aliens are not as speculative as dark matter and extra dimensions. I think the opposite is true."
Loeb also adds that “it is a crime to write off aliens. Because if you look at the history of science, you know that Galileo Galilei argued that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and for this he went to jail. This, of course, did not change the facts. The earth moves around the sun no matter what the church says. And the fact that Galileo suffered for his claims has nothing to do with nature."
“Even if the speed of light were an insurmountable barrier, over the millennia, civilizations would have mastered interstellar travel,” Colombano notes. "I think we need to rethink even our most cautious assumptions."
Ilya Khel