There’s a Starman waiting in the sky

“But where is everybody?” — this deceptively simple question is known as the Fermi Paradox. Enrico Fermi, Italian-American nuclear physicist, often referred to as the ‘architect of the atomic bomb’, wondered about the profound inconsistency between the high statistical probability of innumerable forms of intelligent life throughout the universe, and the low-quality evidence for ET visits to earth. According to a Manhattan Project colleague, Fermi followed up his 1950 query with precise calculations on the probability of earth-like planets, the probability of life given an earth, the probability of humans given life, the likely rise and duration of high technology, and concluded definitively that we ought to have been visited long ago and many times over.

Also Read | Harvard scientist claims he found fragments from alien spaceship

Where are all the aliens?

International news, lately, has begun to answer Fermi. Increasing numbers of disclosures by the US government, both official communications as well as whistleblower revelations, seem to indicate that the earth has been visited by ETs quite regularly since the years Fermi was active at Los Alamos. And we continue to be visited by ETs today. Governments around the world have engaged in fairly systematic secrecy and cover-up, for fear of popular destabilisation and civil and political unrest. As David Bowie put it in ‘Starman’, the first single from his 1972 album ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust’:

There’s a starman waiting
in the sky/ He’d like to come and meet us/

But he thinks he’d blow our minds/

Look out your windows,
I can see his light/

If we can sparkle, he may land tonight/

Don’t tell your papa or he’ll get us locked up in fright.

Fear and panic regarding ET disclosure has been a consideration. But the main interest of the great powers — the US, Russia, China — in maintaining silence and secrecy has been due to competition between them to be the first to succeed in reverse engineering alien technologies. An achievement that would establish unprecedented military dominance over every earthly rival.

And indeed, it is this very quest by our global superpowers for military dominance that seems to have attracted ETs to the earth, starting with the nuclear test explosions at Los Alamos and other sites in the region — such as nearby Area 51, where crashed alien craft have been believed to be stored for seven decades now. As declassified government documents from around the world reveal, the primary locations of UFO encounters are nuclear facilities, during ET surveillance of nuclear arms and submarines, along with sightings around Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many UFOlogists (specialists in the subject of UFOs, ETs, aliens) believe that the earth has been a planet of concern for alien intelligence ever since the development of the atomic bomb — the technology that could easily bring terrestrial life to an end.

There’s a starman waiting
in the sky/

He’s told us not to blow it/

‘Cause he knows it’s all
worthwhile.

What’s especially interesting about this hypothesis for the recent presence of ETs in our solar system is that an idea related directly to it has long been the most convincing answer to the Fermi paradox. With trillions of earth-like planets populating the universe, and conditions to produce intelligent life so statistically probable over the past billions of years, and the rise of advanced technologies far more likely than the silence that we paradoxically seem to face, the obvious answer to Fermi’s question, “Where is everybody?” is: They all blew themselves up!

Many scientists believe, contrary to UFOlogists, that when alien civilizations finally develop the technologies necessary for space exploration, they inevitably destroy themselves by that very technology or its advanced precursors — such as nuclear weapons, AI or what have you.

This means that the answer to the question why no one is here (if you believe Fermi that no one is here) turns out to be the same as the answer to the question why they are here (if you believe, as international news and US government are trying to make us think now). In either case, the presence or the absence of ETs highlight for the world the tendency of intelligent civilizations to destroy themselves in the very process of their advancement.

Let’s say the ETs are here. What is it that they plan to teach us, for making it over the major hurdle that usually wipes out intelligent life around this point in their evolutionary history? I think David Bowie got this part right, too:

There’s a starman waiting in the sky/

He’d like to come and meet us/

But he thinks he’d blow our minds/

He told me/Let the children lose it/

Let the children use it/

Let all the children boogie.