by David Neil Bain

Created on: June 30, 2008

Have aliens visited our planet? I have a simple answer, but only if I reframe the question as a simple question.

If by aliens you mean any life forms that originated off earth, it has been suggested that microscopic life forms seeded the earth from somewhere else, perhaps space itself. We may be our own Martians. But I don't think that is what most people mean by the question. I think they mean something like "Have people from other worlds come to earth?" People? Some would argue that aliens are people too. Certainly Star Trek represents other intelligent life forms as people 99% of the time, in the sense that human actors can play the parts, but I don't rule out the possibility that intelligent life forms may be very different from us. The English Astronomer, Sir Arthur Eddington said "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." I believe the same is true of life, including intelligent life, on other worlds.

So I ask instead, "Has any extraterrestrial intelligence reached Earth?" I do not refer to intelligent "life," because I don't want to rule out artificial intelligence. Are intelligent robots, even self-replicating robots, living or not? Does it matter? It may well be that artificial intelligence is the norm in the universe as a whole and intelligent life forms are only the preliminary.

When I was a nineteen-year-old college student in 1959, I sent the same letter to both Nashville papers. I said that Sputnik was a science fiction challenge too. I questioned how writers could continue speculating about intelligent life in nearby star systems, much less planets in our own solar systems, when we, on the verge of space travel ourselves, had never had any confirmed visits from outer space. It was deemed the best letter of the day in one paper and the best letter of the week in the other.

I did not know at the time that I was raising Fermi's question:
In 1950 the physicist Enrico Fermi, questioning generous estimates of the number of civilizations in our galaxy famously asked his fellow scientists "Where are they?" Several writers have jumped right from "We are not alone in the universe," to "Aliens have visited earth." Actually, there are several steps in between. It is quite possible that intelligent species or their intelligent inventions are common in absolute numbers, since the universe is so vast, yet rare enough that two such groups never, or almost never, meet.

One answer to the question "where are they?" is they

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• Next Page >>