Expert: James Gort - 4/10/2010

Question
optimistic values for the terms in the Drake Equation particularly for L, will give a large N, meaning that there are possibly (in our Carl Sagan voices) mmmmillions of civilizations out there. Even if N is relatively small, there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, which we can expect to be much like ours. The universe is nearly 14B years old, which is plenty of time for life to form, civilizations to rise and fall, to become very technologically advanced, and for many races to spread through the Galaxy. Even traveling at slow speeds, there is enough time for interstellar travel and colonization. Our planet has been emitting radio signals for about 100 years, a nighttime view of Earth shines with artificial light, and we have launched numerous spacecraft (four have even left our solar system). If we lack the technology to find aliens, they should be able to find us.

But even with all of that, there is no hard evidence of aliens, no radio signals, no UFOs, no ancient landing sites, nothing. Given the size and age of the Universe, there should be many civilizations out there.

Why haven’t we made contact yet? can you give me two or three reason and an explanation to that?

Thanks

Answer
Hi Naz,

This sounds like a homework question.  Hope it isn't, because I'll answer it.

Here are three reasons why this may be so:

1)  We are unique.  If you're religious, this can be interpreted as humans being God's unique creation, with the rest of the universe created for us to ponder.  If you're not religious, the creation of life may be so improbable (requiring just the right conditions), that it almost never occurs.  We are only here to ask the question because we know life occurred once.

2)  Space travel is less interesting than we thought.  In spite of Star Trek, there may be no need to explore distant worlds (other than perhaps the closest ones).  Why waste time, energy, and money on something with little return?  It is very possible that we'd never receive old radio and TV broadcasts from early civilizations (these would be too weak, and be lost in the background of natural radio sources), and advanced civilizations might use point-to-point (i.e., light) communications or low power (cellular) radio.  Either way, we'd never detect these.

3)  Space travelers may have been (or still are) here.  Some relics (like Easter Island statues) may be extra-terrestrial in origin.  One of my former teachers was Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who was the Chairman of the Department of Astronomy, Northwestern University, and was the U.S. Air Force's Consultant for 20 years on Project Blue Book, coined the terms "Close Encounters of the first, second, third kind", and was the scientific consultant for the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind".  Back in the late 1960's, he would tell us that 95% of the cases he investigated could be easily explained, but the remaining 5% were "very interesting".  The correlation among sightings throughout the world was amazing (for instance, civilizations without TV or radio in Africa or Australia would describe EXACTLY the same things as people in Europe or North America.  He was on record as stating there is something that our current science cannot explain.  He didn't know if it was extra-terrestrial or other-dimensions, but he wanted scientific investigations to continue.   He wrote several books on the subject.

Hope that helps.

Prof. James Gort