Filed Under "Opinion"...

So I typically scan CNN for breaking world news, and a few other ... things several times a day.  I don't check the news on my work computer because I'm working.  I used to, back when I was a salaried employee, because my days typically ran more than 8 hours a day (my typical work schedule when I was not on a timeclock was around 7:30 am to around 4:30 pm, and I note "around" because I would typically try to arrive at the office prior to 7 am in order to mitigate any ... overnight IT disasters like a server needing a reboot, etc., and get a start on the day before the computers were needed.  If there were MAJOR updates which needed to be applied, you can bet I would be in there before 7 am, or on weekends.  I've noted most places I've worked, the rest of the staff will usually work later into the day which means I really don't want to try to out-wait them and then fix things, it's easier to beat them to the office.

Anyway, I noticed the headline "As a scientist, I want to believe in UFOs, but..." and it's fortunately offered under their "Opinion" section. 

Now, I want to think of myself as someone who is at the very least familiar with the scientific method.  I do also believe in certain things that cannot be proven scientifically, but those I understand are BELIEFS, not actual fact.  And I accept that I cannot prove it to someone who does not believe.  But I also try to clearly delineate the things I find as factual, versus the things I "believe".

And when it comes to UFOs, I think the bottom line is fairly obvious.  If I see some small blinking dot high up in the night sky, it is a UFO.  That is, I believe that it very well may be an airplane.  I live near an international airport, probably less than 20 miles away, and the little boy in me still thrills to the sight of a large multi-engine passenger plane flying overhead, where I can clearly identify it.  As a child, I lived about 90 miles northwest from where I live now.  I often saw "contrails" - that is, lines across the sky where jetliners flew far up in the air.  We occasionally saw planes lower down.  A fellow who lived across the river owned a floatplane, and so regularly we would see the plane land or take off from the river.  

But the point I want to make is that I often see things which are flying which fall under the classification of an Unidentified Flying Object.  I presume they are flying objects, not spots in my eyeball, because others also can see them.  And I also presume they are vehicles of a sort under human control.  Near the international airport is also an Air National Guard base for a group of cargo planes.  So we see the heavy-lift C-130 planes they use regularly flying overhead in pairs.  

And we also see helicopters.  And personal planes, because about fifteen miles in the other direction is another popular airport for more short-range traffic.  So there's a lot going overhead.  

But as this person makes the rather immediate jump from "Unidentified Flying Objects" to alien spacecraft, I suppose there's a little bit of an intermediate point that should probably have been made.  That being that yes, we very likely do have vehicles that are flying around this planet which certain government agencies are unwilling to admit are theirs, for various reasons.  When, over 35 years ago, I began hearing about aircraft invisible to modern radar, I was not particularly willing to believe it.  But it seems that there are materials which do not reflect, but rather, absorb, radar.  And there are techniques which can be used to misdirect the radar waves so they do not return directly to their source which is seeking to use that return to identify the object which returned them.  

But then I recalled a problem I remembered reading about with early radar systems that were not always able to clearly identify planes that were, in that day and age, less technically advanced than others of the day.  That is, during World War II, I recall reading that some airplanes which were more of the fabric-and-wood sort were harder to identify than their metal-skinned relatives - this being because metal reflects radar, and wood is not as reflective.  Certainly, the motors on these planes, and the guns and instruments were reflective when they were made from metal.  But when you compare the size of an airplane engine with the size of the airplane, and the relative quality of those early radar systems, it's not that hard to understand why radar failed to detect them.  And it's also not hard to understand why airplanes ended up using steel, aluminum, titanium, and other metals became necessary for larger, more powerful airplanes.

But then again, there are enough possible methods of flying a vehicle that might render them difficult to recognize.  As a child, one of my favorite toys was a frisbee.  The round, plastic disk would spend hours flying through the sky, and often back to, or near, me.  It wasn't a boomerang, but it had many flight characteristics which had me readily and easily believing the stories of flying saucers.  While I do not believe a flying saucer that is much like two pie pans bears flight characteristics which we are familiar with, I'm also not prepared to admit that we've completely and totally explored and found every method of aerodynamic flight.  

And after we set that portion aside, there's the rather small matter of the Hubble telescope.  As a kid, I was aware that there were many galaxies out there in sight of people based on this planet, looking up into the night sky with bare eyes, binoculars, hobbyist telescopes, and massive, ground-based scientific instruments.  

And let's take a step back about forty years.  Before we had the Hubble telescope in orbit, we were pretty sure there was a lot of stuff out there in space, but we really had no idea.

Carl Sagan was part of the group that helped to quantify what we now know as the Drake Equation.  That is, the number of civilizations which might exist in the Milky Way that we might be able to communicate with right now.  Developed in the 1960s, we had a little understanding of what we were looking at.  But let's take that equation apart.

R is the variable used to represent the rate of solar system formation.  That is, the number of clouds of material which begin by forming a star, which then leaves enough material for other objects to form and develop what we now think of as a Solar System.  I will say, right here, that I think that it's a bit limiting as we have only our own evolution to point at and say "we're an intelligent species."  I expect that a more highly-developed species might look at what we've managed to do so far and find us rather lacking in a number of key areas, but we're here, and we're capable of positing this particular equation, so we'll have to start with intelligent life being limited to evolving on a planet in a solar system.

And P, a fraction or percentage, identifies the number of stars in R which did leave enough material behind that permitted planets to form.  With the Hubble and other tools, we've learned there are a lot of solar systems out there which like edge-on to us.  And yes, I know that solar system can develop in many different planar configurations.  The only ones we can presently easily identify are those where the light of the star is reduced by some amount when an object passes between it and our observation location.  Certainly, we're choosing at this point to identify that reduction to be caused by a planet, there are many other potential reasons, but we'll stick with that, and note that we're probably able, at present, to identify a solar system as a star with orbiting planets when the planets are within let's say ten degrees of flat.  That is, if you look at a protractor - that is, a thing which you may have used in school to measure an angle, you can go five points above and below 90.  And that means that we're going to ignore some 170 degrees - 85 above and below that ten degree range - where planetary orbits don't block our view of that star.  That means that we're able to identify 5.5% of the solar systems in our galaxy.  And that's if I'm exceptionally generous.  If you think about it, and a planet is earth-sized, we're an incredibly small dot crossing the sun.  Even Jupiter, the largest planet in our galaxy, only crosses the sun once every 12 years if you're looking from outside our solar system.  But then again, we're a little fortunate in that while the Earth orbits the sun, Jupiter does not.  

What's that?  Well, you've obviously forgotten your high school astronomy, or perhaps your astronomy teacher didn't teach you that little fact.  You see, Jupiter is huge.  It's massive.  It's gigantic.  And it's roughly one tenth of one percent of the sun's total mass.  

That's right.  If you add all of the other planets in the solar system together - Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and what the hell, I'll even toss in the asteroid belt and Pluto and everything else except the moons of Jupiter - and all of that mass is less than one fifth of Jupiter.  So yeah, that means Jupiter, as massive as it is, isn't even one percent of the sun.  But here's where things get interesting.

If you've ever spun in a circle holding the hands of someone else, you spun around a shared center.  If you were a very small child, that other person, if they were a full grown adult, might have spun around a center point within their body.  But if you were a little older, that person may have leaned backwards a bit, and that meant the center of your "orbits" was outside both of your bodies.  And that's what's happening with the Sun and Jupiter.  The center of their shared orbit is NOT in the center of the sun.  It lies, in fact, outside the surface of the sun.

Which, if you have an incredibly accurate way to measure it, might permit you to find those solar systems like ours where planets might cause the star to "wobble".  But let's get back to the Drake thing.

Just because you have a planet does not mean much. When the Drake equation was originally written, they specified a number of planets where the environment was suitable for life to evolve.  And yeah, that's still a possible consideration, but we need to honestly say, right here, that we need to expand that percentage beyond what we thought of in 1961.  Why?  Well, we've found life on this planet in places where we did not think it was possible.  So we need to honestly say "yeah, that might be possible for life to evolve there."  So that's going to be L1

L2 is the number of planets where the conditions permitted life to actually evolve.  Once again, our opinion matters little, but it's how we identify life.  We've identified "life" in deep ocean trenches, clustered around vents where water of nearly freezing temperatures strikes hot rocks which were recently magma, and thus that heat is exchanged and the now blisteringly hot water mixes with extremely cold water, and life manages to grow here.  So that percentage needs to be a little bigger now than it was then.

And then there's the ever popular L3 - those planets where the predominant life form on the planet manages to evolve what we might consider intelligence.  Certainly, dinosaurs were intelligent enough to keep themselves alive for a long time.  They didn't manage to evolve far enough to pollute their environment to the point where they managed to kill off other species, but hey, they only had a couple million years where they weren't quite manage to get there.  Just think of how totally we could fuck things up given that we've not even managed yet to maintain a documented civilization for a million years yet.  

But there's L4 - the number of intelligent civilizations which get to 1936.  Yeah, that's right, where they get to a point where someone manages to blast a television signal into space.  Because if you saw the movie Contact, based on the book written by Carl Sagan, you know that one of the first high-power electromagnetic signals blasted off the surface of this planet was sent by the folks organizing the 1936 Olympics in Germany, where Adolf Hitler sought to score some PR points by using that new-fangeled Television thing.  

The last variable - the one each and every person reading this now, and alive, is definitely interested in - is the length of Time - T - where that civilization remains a viable, intelligent, capable of communication, active civilization. We haven't died off yet, but the possibility is there.

And the number which I'm going to add to this equation, which really kills it, is 4.6 light years.  That is, the distance which we think is the maximum distance that any electromagnetic signal can travel before it descends completely and totally into unintelligible noise.  

But let's get to it.  We have R - the rate of solar system formations - multiplied by the fraction P, which represents the systems which have enough material left to develop planets, which is then multiplied by the fraction L1, which are those planets which have enough conditions available to form what we term as an "ecosystem" - that is, a place where life might evolve.  That's a larger fraction than it was in 1960, but it's still a fraction.  A small fraction.  Then there's L2, another fraction, which lets life, as we define it, evolve.  Then we have L3, where that life drops out of the trees and starts using tools to an extent that it develops language, writing, engineering, and ... well, stuff like that.  Those folks who continue to evolve beyond engineering and survival and pull together the werewithall to put together a tool that points at the sky and says "hello, world, we're here" and does so in a period of time where we can detect it, and it's within range - yeah.  

My guess is that last bit - our ability to detect it - is by far the most limiting portion of that equation.  If we open up the equation by removing the first limit - The Milky Way - we have literally billions upon billions of galaxies.  Let's do things the simple way.

Let's say, based on the Hubble Deep Field image, We have a billion times a billion times a billion galaxies in the entire universe.  That would be a total of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 - that's a 1 followed by twenty seven zeroes.  And now, how many stars are in each of those galaxies?  We're not even sure how many are in the Milky Way.  Our best estimate is one hundred billion.  That is, 100,000,000,000.  And if we posit that there are galaxies larger, and smaller, than our own, and we're right in the middle, so we're average, so we may be looking at 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 - one followed by 39 zeroes.  

So let's run the larger Drake equation for fun, and throw some numbers at those 39 zeroes.  That number is all over the board.  Some estimates are that of the number of Yellow Dwarf stars we find that have earth-sized planets, it's 20%.  So let's first start with the percentage of all stars which are yellow dwarfs.  That's 10%, which means we can whack one of those 39 zeroes out of the park.  We're down to 38.  Then there's the ugly little number that shows 20% of the yellow dwarves have planets, so we've chopped off another zero - but multiplied by 2.  So we're looking at 2, followed by 37 zeroes.  

So we have the possibility that there are 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible earths out there.  And let's assume we're a one in a million place.  That's right.  One in a million.  That means that we get to chop off six zeroes!  So we're down to 2 followed by 31 zeroes.  Yeah.  So planets with the potential for life, 2 followed by 31.  And let's assume that one in a billion manage to evolve life.  So we're down to 2 followed by 22 zeroes.  Or 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 - or to put that back in words, that's twenty thousand billion billion planets with some form of plant life, mold, or multi-cellular life.  As it seems possible that at least one, and maybe even two planets in our solar system may have once developed life - let's take it down to 2 out of 8 - which is a rather lofty 25%.  I'm willing to drop it down to one in eight billion, for the sake of argument, so we're looking at one planet of every 8 billion which forms intelligent life - that is, life that can travel under it's own power and use a form of tool.  That leaves us, primates, and ... well, a dozen other species.  So we're still one in eight billion - or 2,500,000,000,000 - that is, two trillion, five hundred billion - that may evolve intelligent life able to communicate with us.  

So we're in the dicey areas.  How many of those managed to evolve the atomic bomb and not use it to destroy civilization?  Or how many managed to evolve beyond fossil fuels?  Or how many evolved to develop interstellar flight?  We're presently borderline on two of those criteria, and nowhere near the third.  The only thing we've been able to do so far is fling a small-car-sized vehicle out of the solar system.  To do that took us a little over 35 years.  And it is an open question as to whether or not we'll be around in 80,000 years to receive the message it might send (assuming it's still able 40,000 years from now) when it encounters it's next EXPECTED star.  Mind you, in a little around four years, 2025, we might be looking at the end of the communication we receive, as the craft will, at that point, be nearly 50 years old.  And we just haven't yet managed to figure out how to build things that run longer than that and can still chat with us.  

But to get back to my central point, anyone with any sort of scientific background has to be seriously questioning if there may be 2,500,000,000,000 other civilizations in the greater universe - that is, if we limit them to the 20% of stars like ours, not the 80% of other stars that might also have planets with life on them - not to mention the other sorts of stellar phenomenon that might be able to host planets or cause life forms to cluster about them.  

And you're thinking we're alone in all of that?  Sorry.  The universe is a place that is beyond our simple ability to grasp.  And when you toss that in the hopper and ask "was that a visitor from another planet" the ability to give a definite, certain answer is 100% not possible.  So there goes that opinion.  But opinions are solely opinions.  

And yes, I do think that it is entirely possible that, in the 1940s and beyond, when we were detonating these massive nuclear weapons in tests about the planet, that we might have been monitored by some other civilizations.  Why?  Think about it.  If a truly interstellar society has evolved, they are undoubtedly asking the same things we are - are we alone?  Do any others exist?  If they do, will they survive?  Any of them have to know the odds are likely against them (that is, when you start with a number like 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 and end up with 2,500,000,000,000, those aren't good odds), and so I'd like to think that with that bigger number representing the minimal amount of resources available and the smaller number representing the number of competitors for those resources, they have to know that there's more than enough to go around - and they want to see what we'll do next.  I hope.