Some people claim that aliens once visited our planet and then disappeared. However, there is no hard evidence for this. But the question of why contact with aliens hasn’t happened yet, if they have the ability to fly between the stars, is really interesting. However, let’s deal with everything one by one.
Aliens and us
Our readers are constantly asking questions about the Universe and our place in it. One of them sounds like this:
Why hasn’t there been contact with an extraterrestrial civilization yet, if there is an assumption that aliens have already visited our planet many times?
Vitaliy.
Actually, this question consists of two separate parts. The first is whether there is any reason to believe that aliens have visited Earth in the past. The second is why we cannot make contact with them.
Myths about paleocontact
The entirety of the enormous number of ideas that aliens could have visited the Earth in the past is called the paleocontact hypothesis. It emerged at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries among writers, and became widely known thanks to the works of various pseudo-scientists in the middle to second half of the twentieth century.
Erich von Deniken and Zecharia Sitchin had a particularly strong influence on the spread of stories about people’s past contact with representatives of extraterrestrial civilizations. The former laid down the tradition of such stories. The latter created the concept of the Anunnaki. You can find out who they are in this article.
Both of them, as well as all their followers, were not scientists, but they skillfully manipulated information so that people unfamiliar with the facts they wrote about got the impression that there was a large body of evidence that the Earth was indeed visited by aliens, although scientists know for sure that this is not the case.
In order to show what the evidence of the supporters of the paleocontact theory is, we need to divide it into groups and analyze each one separately.
The first thing that Deniken’s followers cite as arguments is the myths of different peoples. It is important to note that none of them went on expeditions themselves and rarely did they read the written sources they refer to in the original. That is, there are no sources among them that are not known to scholars.
And serious scientists, reading them, have not seen any clear evidence of contact with aliens.
Almost all the evidence of paleocontact in this category is based on a very loose interpretation of these myths by the authors of books about ancient aliens. An example of this is the Aztec legend of Quetzalcoatl, who was either a bird or a snake and taught people crafts, from which conspiracy theorists derived the claim that this character was an alien. Although, with the same success, the ancient Greek Prometheus could be called that. To put it simply, Deniken and others of his kin have simply picked out everything that looks like science fiction in old fairy tales.
The much-publicized mythology of the Dagon deserves special attention. Allegedly, this West African people have a story about how their ancestors came to Earth from Sirius. This information was recorded in the 1930s, and in 1956 a new expedition refuted these “facts” because it turned out that there were no such legends at all. And the information from the alleged space travelers contains outdated astronomical data, which hints that they could have been voiced by astronomers working in West Africa in the late nineteenth century.
Material artifacts
The second group of arguments is the various remains of aliens or their images and artifacts. Absolutely all of the alien bodies that scientists have come across have turned out to be fakes. At best, they are skillfully made “dolls” sewn from parts of earthly organisms. The same applies to all high-tech artifacts such as crystal skulls, all of which have been made from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Also fake are the well-known Ica stones, which allegedly depict an ancient Earth civilization that could fly into space.
A separate category includes various strange works of art, such as a golden airplane from South America or Japanese dog figurines, in which some people see an alien in a spacesuit. The story with these is that there are a lot of similar works of art, and only some of them raise suspicions that aliens may be involved. That’s why the golden airplane is almost certainly a bird or a fish, and the “alien” in a spacesuit, like many other Japanese dogs, is just a symbol of fertility.
The next group of artifacts is a variety of allegedly alien devices that have come down to us from the past. But in fact, only a spark plug found in a stone in California can be called a high-tech product. By the way, it turned out to be similar to those made in the 1920s, and the trick was in the extremely rapid oxidation that embedded it in the stone.
Most of the “proofs of the existence of advanced technologies” are actually rather primitive objects with slightly unusual properties. The evidence of their “alienness” is that the searchers for Anunnaki either simply do not know how skilled people could be in ancient times, or simply, again, interpret their meaning too freely.
Apart from all of the above, we should mention the pyramids, Stonehenge, Baalbek’s Trilithon, and other megalithic structures. In fact, their massiveness is evidence of the primitiveness of construction technologies rather than their advancement. But supporters of the paleocontact theory do not know this.
So, in fact, there is no irrefutable evidence that aliens have visited Earth in the past. We can’t rule out the possibility that aliens visited us, but there is no unequivocal evidence of this. Science does not deal with such theories.
Fermi’s paradox
However, what is the second part of the answer to the question? Why can’t we make contact with aliens now? This question is called the Fermi paradox, and there are dozens of answers that might seem plausible. In reality, we still know too little about the universe to narrow down the range of possible explanations much.
Exoplanet research over the past couple of decades has allowed us to reject explanations such as “there are no planets outside the solar system” and “there are no Earth-like planets.” Meanwhile, the first possible explanation for the lack of contact with aliens is that they simply do not exist.
It is still possible that intelligent life did not originate anywhere other than Earth, or that all its sprouts died before they learned to fly between stars.
Proxima Centauri b is an Earth-like exoplanet only 4 light-years away. Source: Wikipedia
However, even if intelligent life exists somewhere beyond Earth, it does not mean that it can travel freely between the stars. The speed of light is the maximum achievable for any object in the Universe. And even if you move at it, the journey from one end of our galaxy to the other will take tens of thousands of years. Of course, this greatly reduces the possibility of aliens visiting Earth.
As for the numerous ways to circumvent the limitations of the speed of light, which are commonly called FTL, physicists still cannot answer the question of whether any of them is real and whether they can be realized.
Radio signals that we regularly send into space and try to hear from there work well at a distance of several tens of light years. Beyond that, they become too weak, and ever larger radio antennas are needed to pick them up. So this method is not reliable either.
Even if they can come.
But within the question of possible contact, the most interesting explanations seem to be those that describe a situation where aliens not only exist, but are also capable of coming to us within a reasonable time frame, at least a few decades of Earth time. What then could make them not disclose their presence to us?
To answer this question, we need to realize one important fact. Earth’s written history is about 6 thousand years old. The history of the Homo sapiens species is about 200 thousand years old. And civilizations on other planets of the Milky Way could have emerged tens or hundreds of millions of years ago.
In the Drake equation, which very roughly estimates the number of civilizations in our galaxy, the last coefficient is the average duration of a civilization’s existence. Not only all the estimates, but also the very fact that this value is there does not really follow from anywhere.
Based on the part of our own past that is available for analysis, we simply cannot predict what a civilization might look like after 100,000 or a million years of existence. It is generally believed that a civilization must have a finite time of existence, but the basis for this statement can only be our own limited experience, which indicates that everything has an end.
However, this may not be the case for intelligent life. So it is possible that aliens are not only aware of our existence, but have been observing humans since the dawn of our species. And they may be smart enough not to give away their presence by throwing around samples of their technology.
Or it may be that they are simply not interested enough in us to interact in any way beyond an orbital survey once every few centuries. In the end, we may turn out to be one of hundreds of planetary civilizations that can give a super-intelligent space species nothing but additional trouble.
In any case, if the aliens are not only older but also smarter than us, we should trust their decision. Perhaps it is indeed worth waiting for some time, which seems enormous to us, but is actually not that long compared to our own future history.
After all, the question of aliens is really a question of how we see our own future.
