I’ve often wondered if supposed aliens come here on vacation or is this just a business trip? Maybe you have seen a UFO. Or maybe you have even been abducted and probed or whatever the bug-eyed beings do when they snatch up a human. I have talked to people who swear they have seen strange things in the sky. Personally, E.T. has never phoned me, nor do I expect he will anytime soon. But if we’re going to get that call from outer space, the aliens better start dialing soon.
About fifty years ago, a radio astronomer named Frank Drake cobbled together The Drake Equation (duh) meant to help us all understand the likelihood of extraterrestrial life. Famous astronomers like Carl Sagan pondered astrobiologics along with Nobel winner Melvin Calvin and other scientific luminaries known as the Order of the Dolphin. With 200 billion stars, it must have been a long equation.
In the fifty years since then, we have narrowed the odds of life out there down to anywhere between one in under a thousand to billions. My mother is in her eighties and she could throw a strike in that ballpark without the aid of steroids. So basically, we aren’t really any closer to finding perceptible life in the universe. But how close is it to finding us?
Not very.
Our best shot at attracting E.T.’s attention was in the 1950’s when powerful television and radio transmitters were blowing gigawatts of signals into space like Tom Brady passes before the Super Bowl. Now with cable and satellites doing all the heavy electronic lifting, earth is virtually silent to aliens cruising Uranus looking for Clingons. The little green men and women will have to sling some signals our way if we want to have an iChat. Earth is basically off the alien grid. That’s either good or bad, depending on the person you’re talking to.
“Say what?” said a man wearing an aluminum foil hat crimped into the shape of a satellite dish. “If we are not visible to them, how will they find us? I knew we’d screw up this whole alien/UFO business.”
He was selling foil hats wrapped around magnets.
“I’m moving to Ontario,” he said.
He may want to move to British Columbia instead. BC beat out Ontario as the UFO hot spot last year. Sorry Roswell, times change, even for aliens.
Yet, even with the rumors of our signal-transmitting demise, people yearn for a close encounter of the third kind. Even though it can toss a quirky dent into your reputed sanity, hundreds of people still report UFO’s. With earth’s growing invisibility, however, what are the aliens thinking?
No response to that question.
Somewhere, on a planet in a galaxy far, far away, a being with a tiny, amphibian-ish body, no discernible sex and an enormous, eye-bulging head is sitting in a recliner, remote in three-fingered hand, thinking we’ve dropped off the face of the planetary broadcast system. One day he/she is enjoying reruns of “I Love Lucy,” and the next is wondering what happened to those strange beings from that weird little blue planet down on the corner of the Milky Way. Aliens know Dick Clark, but not Tony Soprano. Maybe that’s not a bad thing.
It is possible – even likely, according to some experts – that we will extinct ourselves with old school nukes or new school genetic engineering before the end of this century. Maybe a tiny virus will squeegee the earth clean of human civilization. Or maybe we will just sit in the dark until some extraterrestrial stumbles upon us like finding an old sock behind the washing machine of the universe.