UFOs?

The Hood River Weather site has featured a weekly poll for over a year now, and it's been fun to see how site visitors feel about various issues. One of my 2 blog goals this year is to do a new posting here with each poll, with my personal take on the issue, and y'all can elaborate on yours if you want.

OK, UFO's. In the mid to late 1960's, as a teenager, my fascination with all things skyward and beyond in the Universe prompted me to join two of the civilian UFO research groups in existence at that time: NICAP and APRO. Both groups gathered UFO reports and attempted to impartially separate the explainable sightings from those that would point directly at aliens as the most likely explanation.

I really wanted to believe that we were being visited; that the galaxy was teeming with intelligent space-faring civilizations, some of whom had discovered us here on Earth. After all, Star Trek and numerous science fiction TV and movies had plenty of aliens running around.

But over the years, nothing (including Roswell, alien abductions, and mysterious lights in the sky) has stood out as anything other than natural (and mostly honestly misinterpreted) phenomena. I'm still open to strong confirmable evidence that will irrefutably prove aliens are visiting our backwater section of our galaxy's suburbs. But Fermi's Paradox pretty much sums up my skepticism. Given the age of our galaxy, and the fact that many other solar systems have existed millions of years longer than ours, much older civilizations have had plenty of time to colonize the entire galaxy if that was likely or possible. And it would be obvious. But it's not. In fact, in the EM spectrum, from infrared to ultraviolet, including radio, the galaxy appears to be absent of intelligent signals. Except, of course, our own radio and TV broadcasts, spreading outwards at the speed of light and now in a sphere about 75 light years in diameter from Earth. BTW, for those who would like to participate in the ongoing search for radio wave evidence for intelligent life, I highly recommend running the Seti@home software.

Here's my take on life in the universe: Given that there are likely millions of planets that can support life in the billions of galaxies that exist, molecular and single cell life is probably very common. Multi-cellular organisms (plants and animals) take a lot longer to emerge, and are less common. Intelligent and space-faring life is probably extremely uncommon; the result of a improbable combination of selective, very random events over millions of years of evolution. And, any such civilizations are likely to find the unimaginably immense distances (translate: travel time) between stars insurmountable, assuming they don't become extinct first. Maybe they create intelligent autonomous robotic probes to travel and colonize for them, but... where the heck are they...

So, maybe we are one of some Extremely Isolated Intelligent species in the Universe, which only makes our own human existence even more marvelous and precious and worthy of our best efforts to preserve our planet and not destroy ourselves and our fellow species.

Hopefully this will be the longest post I will ever make in this blog. :)