Robert Jago: If aliens have really found Earth, they might not be what you're expecting
Robert Jago: If aliens have really found Earth, they might not be what you're expecting
Don't think Vulcans or Gort. Think self-replicating machines.
By: Robert Jago
There’s a plausible explanation for the increasing number of UFO sightings, and yes — it’s aliens, but not in the way you might be thinking. Von Neumann machines, autonomous, self-repairing robotic drones, could offer an explanation for the mysterious craft appearing in U.S. military videos.
Over the last few years, several videos have been made public, which show unidentified flying objects hovering in mid air, taking sharp turns and experiencing g-forces that would kill a human pilot. Former U.S. president Barack Obama spoke about these objects to Stephen Colbert on the Late Show earlier this week. “What is true,” he said, “and I'm actually being serious here, is that there are, there's footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don't know exactly what they are. We can't explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know, I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.”
The evidence Obama is talking about may go beyond what we have seen so far. In an interview with 60 Minutes last weekend, a U.S. navy aviator explained that these UFO encounters are now occurring almost daily. And details of these encounters aren’t going to be the private domain of presidents and generals for much longer.
As part of the COVID Relief Bill signed by then-President Donald Trump on December 27th of last year, Congress required the U.S. director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense to produce an unclassified report on UFO encounters (called UAPs — Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the Bill) to Congress within 180 days. That deadline is June 27th, just a few weeks from now.
With the U.S. military confirming the veracity of some leaked UFO videos, and the Congressional report on the horizon, the stigma surrounding talking of UFOs appears to have gone. Speaking to 60 Minutes, US Navy Intelligence Officer Luis Elizondo said: “I'm not telling you that, that it doesn't sound wacky. What I'm telling you, it's real.”
Real though they reportedly are, UFOs doesn’t necessarily mean aliens — the most likely explanation is that they are experimental drones from a U.S. adversary. However, if they are aliens, they almost certainly are not like the aliens portrayed in fiction. The popular imagination envisions alien visitation one way (Star Trek IV accepted), whether it’s Vulcans, Visitors, Gort, Mork, Alf, Roger Smith or Predator — alien visitation means creatures from another planet coming to the Earth, in the flesh, complete with a big ship, and all the accoutrements our own space travellers have to haul with them.
However, the scientific consensus — such as it is, for a topic so recently seen as “wacky” — is that moving living beings interstellar distances is effectively impossible without new unimagined physics, unlimited energy or literal magic.
At the 2008 Joint Propulsion Conference in Hartford, Connecticut, scientists and engineers from dozens of universities and research centres, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, MIT, and the U.S. Airforce Research Lab, concluded that the energy requirements for interstellar travel would require humanity to virtually dismantle the outer planets, and the effort would cost multiples of the total Gross World Product — i.e. the value of all goods and services produced by the people of the planet Earth in a year. If aliens can conceive of space travel, they could also likely conceive of a cost-benefit analysis — trekking across the stars doesn’t make sense.
Outside of near-Earth orbit, the job of scientific discovery in space is something done by robots, probes that our species has been building and sending aloft for half a century.
Even today, while we are waiting for the UFO report to come out, craft from Earth are flying over Mars, crawling over its surface and orbiting above. Similar craft are around Mercury, Venus and Saturn. Once Earth’s spacecraft are sent into space, they — with few exceptions — stay there. The relics of Earth’s interplanetary ventures can be found melted on the surface of Venus, frozen on the surface of Titan and shattered and blown about in the winds of Jupiter. Most spectacularly, five of humanity’s machines, now finished their work for man, are travelling into interstellar space, where they will eventually rendezvous with alien star systems.
That last fact is one that few people may be aware of — interstellar space probes seem like something from the far future, but the first of them was launched as far back as 1972.
The probes that sent us back our first pictures of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are travelling fast enough that they have escaped the Sun’s gravitational pull, and so, absent a medium like air to slow them down, they will continue on forever. Each probe is going in a different direction, but two are destined to reach distant star systems in about 40,000 years, becoming, for any residents of those regions, alien visitors — their UFOs. The human builders of these probes envisioned such a scenario, and equipped the probes with directions to Earth, and a sampling of Earth music and sounds.
Our own primitive first steps at space exploration may be showing us what space exploration looks like across the universe. Whether human or extraterrestrial, robots make sense for space travel. It isn’t just about physics, logistics or economics either. In a 2020 article in Scientific American, astrophysicist Martin Reis and astronomer Donald Goldsmith give one additional reason in favour of robotic space exploration — they wrote that while robots get better every year, humans don’t: “The contrast between astronaut and automated space missions will grow ever stronger as we improve our miniaturization, virtual-reality and artificial-intelligence capabilities.”
For a vision of what the future of robot-led space exploration looks like, take a look at the book, Spin, by Canadian science-fiction writer Robert Charles Wilson. In his book, he describes a galaxy-wide ecosystem of autonomous robots — nanobots launched by innumerable different civilizations, which have gone feral, developed intelligence and taken over. The nanobots in Wilson’s novel have been programmed to travel at conventional speeds to a star system, harvest local resources, build more copies of themselves, and repeat the process ever outward across space and time. These types of self-replicating robots are called Von Neumann Machines — named after physicist John Von Neumann, who proposed these autonomous self-replicating robots in 1948.
Charles Wilson summarizes the purposes of a Von Neumann machine through his novel’s character Jason: “They eat ice, and they shit information.” In an interview with the author in March, he expanded on these robots’ purpose: “We have to ask what would motivate a technologically advanced civilization to deploy von Neumann machines capable of interstellar travel. I suspect the best answer is ‘curiosity’ —creating a steady source of new knowledge that might not pay off for centuries but would eventually create a steady trickle of information relayed back to its originating world.”
Charles Wilson based his book around Von Neumann machines because “Even the most plausible versions of warp drives seem to depend on new physics, new materials (like exotic forms of matter), or the deployment of enormous amounts of energy. Von Neumann machines of the kind we’re discussing may be beyond our current technological capabilities, but they don’t require us to re-think our understanding of physics or to generate and manipulate unprecedented new forces.”
Dr. Seth Shostak is a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute. SETI stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — its mission is to “detect evidence of technological civilizations” beyond the Earth. Dr. Shostak explained his personal view of the types of alien life we may encounter: “I personally think that most of the alien intelligence is machine intelligence.”
Dr. Shostak’s aliens are “big machines that repair themselves endlessly. They can't build the machine again necessarily, but they can keep the machine going for an indefinite period of time ... if you have something like that then, that's probably what dominates intelligence in the universe.”
He explained that because there are so many billions of potential alien civilizations, and they have had billions of years to expand and explore space “if any of them are interested in moving out, there's been enough time. They've had enough time to essentially be everywhere in the universe” — but no sign of them has yet been found.
If there is intelligent alien life, and if it has gone into space, then its most-likely appearance would be as large, plodding, lonely machines, coasting between the stars forever, like our own interstellar Voyager and Pioneer probes. They would look a lot like Oumuamua. Oumuamua was the unusual extra-solar object that passed through our solar system in 2017. Some, including Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, suggest that Oumuamua may have been “a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth’s vicinity by an alien civilization.” If it were, the presence of UFOs in our skies suggests it may not have been the first alien visitor.
Imagine an alien civilization, one not much more advanced than our own. One with more sophisticated artificial intelligence, one with advanced robotics, and nano-technology that allows it to harvest resources from space and convert these into spare parts to repair itself or even produce new machines. This civilization could have once been like our own and set off to learn more about the universe. Maybe this is something that happened millions of years ago, and maybe this civilization has long since passed away into extinction. But once sent on their mission, their robotic probes would continue indefinitely, exploring, and reporting back to no one.
If this happened even once, given the hundreds of millions of years available, these machines would be everywhere by now, including in our solar system. They could be here, on an endless study of us and our world, waiting for orders from their home world that will never come — and so, like our own probes, they keep on going. What would these alien probes look like as they investigate the Earth? On June 1st we may find out.
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If they showed up in orbit and sent messages down, I could understand that.
If they snuck up, and used their Technology Indistinguishable From Magic to hide from all our radars and observations and just observe, I could understand that.
"Sneaking" around so badly that they're seen every day for long periods, and many know there's something there, but not what, I can't even imagine a motive.
Comments also apply to a hypothetical human state (or group) that had discovered Wakanda-level technology out of the comics. Russia would announce it to be terrifying, China would sell it; nobody would use it to scare the crap out of a nation with 10,000 nuclear bombs. Nor would any modern leader use it to Take Over The World. America has kind of proved that vast technological differences can be used to kill people, but not to run nations and force them to be productive.