Why Haven’t Aliens Visited? Maybe Our Reviews Are Bad: “Earth? Just One Star.”

“This object does fit the parameters of Dyson’s theory.” – Star Trek: TNG

When I was 12 I was abducted by aliens, they told me to do chores, eat my vegetables, shower, and brush my teeth. I guess I was on the mother ship.

When I was a kid, humanity knew about nine and only nine planets. One big question that we had was, because we were a sample size of one, is whether or not planets were common in the galaxy or rare. The first extrasolar planet discovered was51 Pegasi b in 1995.

The question was answered: there were other planets. But how common are planets?

We keep finding them wherever we look. Humanity has found thousands and thousands of extrasolar planets. In 2014, the estimate was that one in stars have planets about the size of Earth with a surface temperature where life (as we know it) could exist. If that’s the case? It’s certain that life exists outside of the Solar System.

That’s a lot of real estate. But is there any evidence that any of it is in use by things smarter than a paramecium or Kamala Harris?

Kamala, just Biden her time.

Recently there have been two studies by astrophysicists that point to the possibility that there are observable technosignatures, specifically the excess infrared radiation that would accompany something like a Dyson sphere. One group focused on a particular kind of star and found 7 candidates; the other study found 53 candidates looking in a different way.

I am of course referring to the physicist Freeman Dyson who popularized the idea that a civilization could take the material in a star system, munch up the planets, and surround the central star in order to use the energy. Oh, and Dyson also invented the vacuum cleaner. That’s a different Dyson, you say?

Dang.

Why would they need that much energy? Oh, they could use it for anything, making video games, or making PEZ®/Anti-PEZ™ powered starships, or running the air conditioning with the doors and windows open and leaving the fridge door open and the lights on. Man, as a dad, it hurts me to even write those words. But I still claim to be the first person, ever, to use the phrase “anti-PEZ©”.

The Future of Humanity: Galactic Empire, PEZ-Driven Starships, and Girls Drinking Beer

The starlight would fall on the sphere, it would be used to create useful energy, and the remainder would be infrared, otherwise known to most humans as “heat”, but not the 1995 movie since aliens don’t have any use for Robert DeNiro either. The big surprise is that some of these stars were radiating more than 60 times the amount of “heat” that they should be, indicating it has been absorbed by . . . something.

But some sponges are more a-loofah.

Now, that could just mean that Yo Mamma is hanging out around in space, or it could mean that there’s an explanation we’re not yet familiar with.

But then there are the fleeing O-Class stars. O stars are very hot and very young stars that burn out very, very quickly (in a cosmic time scale), with total lifespans of as low as 4 million years. Sure, that sounds like a long time, but it’s only half as old as Joe Biden.

The end of an O-Class star is nearly always a supernova – a huge explosion. Isn’t it odd that 25% of the O-Class stars that have been found are being ejected from the Milky Way galaxy at a high rate of speed? It’s almost like there might be an alien intelligence throwing bums out of the neighborhood before the pee on the garage.

What does Taylor Swift have in common with John Wilkes Booth? They both know how to get a crowd excited.

Well, I guess that was an oddly specific example.

I’ve also written before about other examples of possible technosignatures.

Bikinis, Aliens, And Tabby’s Star

If other intelligent life has existed in the past and developed significant technology to gather most of the energy from their star, would they come visit?

I’ve made my opinion clear that if intelligent life exists elsewhere (which I think is probably a certainty) then the Solar System has probably been visited. By Little Green Men? Dunno about that, but it’s much easier to send a toaster than a living critter into space. They could send an A.I. out here, have it wait and watch.

This is called a Bracewell probe, and is really the plot to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sending a probe out would be relatively cheap and easy. Okay, I couldn’t afford to do it, but it would be cheap and easy if you have experience throwing O-Class stars out of the galaxy to improve the resale value of your Dyson sphere.

“Hot singles are looking for dates in your area, Dave.”

If we start hunting around the local Solar System, that would be my first guess of what we’d find, and it would probably be on some sort of weird elliptical orbit around the Sun so it can observe without being observed.

Will we ever make the jump to becoming a species that harnesses the power of our star? I don’t know. We certainly have some roadblocks to doing so.

  • We’d have to overcome our tendency to turn wealth into hedonism, and avoid a civilizational tombstone that says “We Were Happy Childfree Couples and Wine Aunts” in our own Mouse Utopia (link below).
  • We’ll have to make sure that A.I. doesn’t turn on us.
  • We’ll have to ditch anything made by Boeing™.
  • And, of course, we need to make sure we don’t blow ourselves up.

Want Dystopia?  Because this is how you get Dystopia.

At some point, and I think this might be in the next decade if we haven’t blown ourselves up, I think we will finally have reasonable proof that intelligent life exists. In my lifetime, then, we will have gone from not knowing if other planets exist to knowing that other life exists out there.

And if other life exists out there, there’s one thing I know for sure.

If it bleeds we can kill it.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

32 thoughts on “Why Haven’t Aliens Visited? Maybe Our Reviews Are Bad: “Earth? Just One Star.””

  1. Mr Wilder,
    I enjoy your site and your puns.
    I left a reply to your comment over on Arthur Sido’s site “Happy Pride Month, Y’all”
    Rather than re-typing the whole thing I ask that you go over & read it.
    It concerns ‘Parasite Pill 2.0 (181 pages) and ‘Cosmic Death Fungus’ (36 pages)
    Parasites and fungus CAN affect animal and human behavior.

    On a kinda sorta related note (Oh no, you d’int go there!):
    I wonder if before expiring the late Yacob Rothschild bequeathed his King Parasite
    to his suckcessor through ‘natural’ means (buggery) or surgery?

    Let’s really cross the line:
    When you were young, your parents thought they enrolled you in a Catholic boarding school.
    But they mistakenly dropped you off at the Punnery.

    Take care

    1. There is truth behind almost all stereotypes. There is a stereotype of “crazy cat ladies.” Cats carry toxoplasmosis and can pass it to humans, which is known to cause behavioral changes in rats…

    2. Anon – I have done over 1,500 mold IAQ inspections & fungal remediation sites after I entered into that area in 2000. I worry more about bacteria (think Legionella) than fungal, unless extreme dampness (think Stachy/Trichoderma/Memnoniella/Chaetomium). These require 90% water activity for 8+ days. That’s hard to do.

    3. Thanks for reaching out here, as well! I’m (pun intended) digesting that material . . . And, punnery? Me? Oh, wait, totally guilty.

  2. In 2024 we should have been doing a lot more to explore the solar system and figuring out the answers to these questions but the people in charge decided to subsidize stupid people having children, and as that wasn’t working fast enough, began importing millions of idiots while suppressing the child bearing of smart people. We won’t find intelligent life in the universe in the next decade, we will instead be hard pressed to find intelligent life anywhere on Earth.

    1. Arthur the worst part is already showing up.

      We cannot repair or replace things we used to do in the past. Or at least not without massive over runs in cost and time. I read somewhere that San Fran took 10 years to install a public toilet which the homeless people already ruined. It compared it to the Golden Gate Bridge in time and cost involved.

      When our current crop of electrical linemen retire the lights will go out. Nobody seems to have the dedication, loyalty nor aptitude to do such hard and dangerous work anymore.

      Michael

  3. Again, TPTB want dystopia, the sooner the better; it’s their overriding goal. Delusional, to say the least. Obviously, John B. was no relation to Calhoun on “Amos and Andy”.

    Our worry should be that another civilization discovers us and decides to O-Class Star the Earth.

    As for John C., two snippets:

    1. Graduated 1st in his class at Yale.
    2. His plantation, Fort Hill, was renamed in the 1880s. It’s now some place called Clempson University.

    A final quote from Beaufort SC’s most famous resident, the late novelist Pat Conroy:

    “South Carolina isn’t a state. It’s a cult.”

  4. If we are bound by physics as we understand them, the universe is a huge ocean of stars, an insurmountable distance separating any intelligent life from another, and eternity will be spent with each on wondering if there will ever be a way to span the distance. If not, I have no doubt there is alien life forms studying us at this moment. I wonder if they think this is one of the greatest poo-flinging shows they ever watched?

    1. Sorry, John.

      https://us.vwr.com/store/product/10039666/anti-pez-rabbit-polyclonal-antibody

      HOWEVER, you’re probably the first to use the phrase in a physics sense. As such, you get to choose it’s flavor profile…

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavour_(particle_physics)

      As far as looking for intelligent ETs, an underappreciated part of the problem is the time dimension. From our own experience it takes around a million years for an ape species to develop intelligence. If there’s no ETs at this star on THIS survey mission, you gotta check back from orbit in a million years, just to be sure. The universe is over 13 billion years old. That’s 13,000 survey missions…unless you bury a light sensitive slab on a nearby moon, ready to raise the alarm when it’s dug up and illuminated.

  6. There’s a better way to get there. A way where you won’t need to include the federal government as your ‘partner in space’.

    I do not share your faith in their goodwill, nor in Elon Muskrat’s. Bible says the Earth is for man. Not the heavens.

  7. Hey, John,
    Has anyone heard from crazy ol’ Jim Dakin lately?
    Haven’t been able to find him for a while.

  10. It’s crazy how some people cite the Fermi Paradox as “proof” that there can’t be alien intelligence. As if the defining characteristic of intelligence is the ability to travel to earth and introduce oneself to everyone citing the Fermi Paradox. All that the FP says is there is a formula for calculating the odds of intelligent life, and that we know almost none of the variables w/i that formula.

    Even on earth there have been tribes that didn’t know there were different kinds of people out there until the past century or 2. After 300k years as humans on the same planet. Yet somehow every intelligent race in the galaxy can be expected to have made themselves known to us.

    We might even have been an intelligent race for a lot longer than the 300k or so years usually cited for anatomically modern humans. Check out Cremo’s “Hidden History of the Human Race,” which cites massive numbers of examples of excellent evidence that humans are far older than we thought… and an equally massive number of examples of how academia will move heaven and earth to debunk anything that contradicts them getting tenure.

    Evidence of a megastructure in a far-off system, by an actual expert:

    1. I enjoyed Cremo’s book. Yup, wrote about Tabby’s Star. And how there might be more of them out there . . .

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