Other Views: Might as well be talking about magic

“Did we ever tell you about the unidentified flying object discovered outside Baltimore? In 1949, a farm in Glen Burnie was briefly swarming with state troopers and military investigators checking out reports of a flying saucer. And, indeed, they found what were later described as ‘prototypes’ of aircraft in a rundown barn – experiments in manned flight pieced together by an eccentric designer. What might generously be described as an historical footnote to the nation’s fascination with UFOs later turned up in documents eventually released by the U.S. Air Force and widely reported in 2015 as part of the service branch’s ‘Project Blue Book,’ which investigated unexplained sightings from 1947 to 1969 and found no alien invaders, nor space age technology. Just oddities often made all the more unusual by an odd reflection of sunlight or improbable weather conditions or malfunctioning radar . ... At the current speed of human spacecraft travel, it would take an estimated 75,000 years to travel a mere four light years, which is about how far Proxima Centauri b, the closest planet considered to be potentially habitable, is to our own. So the working theory is that some alien culture might travel for thousands of years to get here (or at least years if they somehow discovered travel approaching light speed), and then merely spend their time buzzing commercial airlines and military aircraft or flitting about in view for a few seconds before disappearing into the sky? We’re going to call that improbable. We might as well be talking about time travel or magic.”

Megan McArdle, The Washington Post:

“Whether we’re being visited, and what they might be up to, is the most important question of anyone’s lifetime, because, if so, everything that currently obsesses us, including the pandemic, will retreat to a historical footnote. It might well be the most important question for our species since Homo erectus debated whether to play with fire. So I’ve been surprised to find that the story of unexplained sightings, which has now been percolating for years, has been mostly a subplot to more ordinary human politics and folly . ... Historically, low-technology groups have almost universally fared badly when coming into contact with higher-technology cultures, even when that contact was made with the best of intentions. Perhaps the aliens, if they exist, are advanced enough to have solved that problem. But the alternative is so horrible that I suspect for many of us, it simply doesn’t bear thinking about.”