Total number of aliens? You couldn't make it up…
The US presidential election night of 2000 is the only one I’ve ever properly watched on TV. I didn’t have much else to do that evening and my middleaged intoxication with the prospect of an early night was years ahead of me. Also, thinking about it, the lovely general election of 1997 was still a recent memory; I probably fancied another fix of that feeling, basking as I was in the vague late-90s western sense that everything was going to be fine.
Needless to say, I regret staying up. I was tired and hungover the next day and had suffered the worst blow to my sense that everything was going to be fine since discovering that the exhibition at the Millennium Dome was shit. Worse blows were still to come.
I don’t want to dwell too long on that election, even though it was a weird one, with the Florida recount, the “hanging chads” and, as with 2016, victory going to the candidate who polled the second highest number of votes. I only mention it because it was my first experience of the media “calling” states for candidates.
It was really important, all that calling. It established the momentum of events. It effectively made Bush the winner and Gore the irritating plaintiff who was trying to turn back the clock. This problem, I remember feeling at the time, could have been avoided simply by counting all the votes first and then, only after that task had been completed, declaring the result according to who’d got most.
Not who’d got the most votes nationally, I hasten to add! I’m not some sort of interfering communist, talking about changing the electoral system to one where the candidate with the most votes wins! That’s none of my business – I’m not American and we have an even crazier electoral system here, which I want to prioritise for my dislike. So they can keep the state-by-state electoral college stuff as far as I’m concerned.
But I do consider it within my remit as an international pedant to propose that, in each of the states, they count all the votes first, then say who’s won, rather than declaring who’s won on the basis of hearsay about how the count vaguely seems to be going – meaning that, by the time it’s finished, the actual result is old news or, worse still, it becomes an attempt to overrule a media narrative everyone’s contentedly following with an inconvenient truth (do you see what I did there?).
What is the reason for this strange system? It may interest you to know, if you’re looking to bolster your contempt for your fellow humans, that some people claim the reason is that it’s impossible in a country as populous as the US to count all the votes on a workable timescale. When I reply that it seems to be possible in the UK, with a population of nearly 67 million, they hit back, as if this is a clincher, with the fact that the US population is 328 million – like that’s the difference between a bacterium and a blue whale. Perhaps they feel the same about catering: you could organise a party for 67 people but it would be beyond the resources of humanity to throw one for 328.
Or perhaps they take the same view of mathematics as Matt Hancock betrayed when, amid April’s desperate
PPE shortages, he boasted of delivering more than a billion items of PPE to the NHS, as if that number couldn’t possibly be insufficient. It’s the largest integer anyone could think of – other than things like squillion or trillion which must be made up – and no mealymouthed talk of percentages or rate of use or the sheer scale of the NHS can contradict it. It’s a billion! You simply cannot need more than a billion of anything!
The real reason, of course, is impatience. The system is too impatient to wait any time at all for the election result – it needs to guess it and then it needs that guess to be right. Urgency supersedes accuracy. It’s the opposite of all those public inquiries we have into the far-reaching insti
tutional systemic failures of blah blah blah that are designed, in their quest for comprehensive precision, to outlive the last glimmers of media interest and finally produce reports so long Matt Hancock would probably think they contain enough paper to wipe the arses of everyone who has ever lived – “because it’s like a thousand pages, guys!”
Well, this impatience to know has finally afflicted the field of space exploration and the eternal question of whether we’re alone in the universe. Last week, astronomers at the University of Nottingham announced that we’re not. In fact, we’re not even alone in the Milky Way. They’ve calculated that there are between four and 211 alien civilisations in this very galaxy and that the actual number is probably about 36. Great! Good to know. How do they know?
Well, clearly the researchers behind this report have not been around space looking for aliens. That remains an insuperable hassle. We’ve all seen the efforts of Nasa and frankly they’re pathetic. It costs a fortune and they can barely get beyond the moon, unless you count the odd robot hoover they sling into the outer solar system in the hope that it’ll keep texting them back. I mean, come on! It’s supposed to be like
Star Trek: nice big ship flying around, find a planet, park, beam down, see who’s there.
But we’re tired of waiting for that so the decision has been taken to guess. Or rather estimate. As co-author of the research Professor Christopher Conselice put it: “Basically, we made the assumption that intelligent life would form on other planets like it has on Earth, so within a few billion years life would automatically form as a natural part of evolution.”
That’s what I’ve always reckoned as well, so it’s nice to put a number on it. 36. I wonder which of them have the longest tentacles. Maybe someone will make a documentary estimating that and estimating what might happen if they attacked us with lasers.
It’s supposed to be like Star Trek: nice big ship flying around, find a planet, park, beam down, see who’s there