Aliens may have already visited us

New York, Dec. 7: Did we really have those visitors, those aliens?

If a Nasa scientist is to be believed, then Earth has already been visited by extraterrestrials but we did not notice. For our idea of them and the reality may have vastly differed.

According to Silvano P. Colombano, a computer scientist at NASA Ames Research Centre and a professor, the size of the ' explorer' might be that of an extremely tiny superintelligent entity. “If we adopt a new set of assumptions about what forms of higher intelligence and technology we might find some of those phenomena might fit specific hypotheses, and we could start some serious enquiry,’ he wrote in a research paper.

His paper suggested that humans expected them to be carbon- based organisms but they need not necessarily be so. This would allow them to remain undetected, he hypothesised.

“I simply want to point out the fact that the intelligence ■ we might find and that might choose to find us ( if it hasn't already) might not be at all produced by carbon- based organisms like us,” Colombano wrote the in ■ paper. Scientists must "revisit our most cherished assumptions" and consider the idea of different characteristics if they were to advance in the search for extraterrestrial life. They should also explore the possibility that interstellar travel is already feasible for extraterrestrials,” Colombano wrote.

Humanity must take a relook at what civilisation may actually look like when scanning the universe, he suggested and when doing so, it must consider that "technological development in our civilisation started only about 10,000 years ago and has seen the rise of scientific methodologies only in the past 500 years". Humans may have a real problem predicting technological evolution even for the next thousand years, let alone six million times that amount, he said.

He said the scientific community assumed a low likelihood of extraterrestrial travel and a high likelihood of hoaxes and hence overlooked the UFO phenomena and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was not given the importance due to it. He also called for a more aggressive approach to future exploration.

— Agencies