The UFOs are back
In recent years there has been a surge in reported sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). There are perhaps more now than at any time since the 1950s. But there are also many millions more cameras active on the earth than there were in the 1950s, and the cameras are far better, so why are the UFOs still blurry?
One man who has some answers is the scientist and science fiction author David Brin, whose books have won the Hugo, Locus, Campbell, and Nebula Awards. He is a writer of ‘hard science fiction’, meaning that his books feature scientific or technological change that is plausible rather than purely magical. The observation about cameras is sometimes called Brin’s Corollary to Moore’s Law: every year, cameras get smaller, cheaper, better, more numerous, and more mobile.
Brin joined The London Futurists Podcast to talk about UFOs, aliens in asteroids, the difficulty of evolving intelligence, and how to survive the arrival of superintelligence.
Brin works with NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts programme (NIAC), and he has been involved with SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence for 45 years. The thing which annoys him about today’s UFO stories is what dumb things the aliens are reported to be doing. In fact he argues that UFOs are reported to behave in pretty much the way that elves used to behave in the middle ages: prowling around in the dark forest, and occasionally coming into the village to steal children. This similarity suggests that UFOs are springing from the human imagination.
Cat lasers
Most modern UFO sightings by naval pilots are explicable as experiments being performed by humans – military scientists creating glowing atmospheric effects, for instance. A lot of what is being reported are like cat lasers: converging beam lasers being fired into the atmosphere, creating plasma dots. These are not solid objects, but a series of light effects, so they can appear to move around the sky faster than the speed of light.
One of the main reasons for the recent increase in sightings is that military pilots are no longer penalised for reporting sightings. This is a much saner policy than obliging the pilots to keep silent about what they have seen. Overall, Brin is pretty confident that we haven’t encountered intelligent aliens here on earth, but he thinks we might do when we start mining asteroids.
Aliens in asteroids
The moon is a tourist sandbox, and Brin has argued that the Artemis programme to go back there is a mistake. We should go instead to the asteroids, he says, where robots can mine huge reserves of valuable metals. Let other countries raise their flags on the moon, which is a plain of poisonous useless dust. There are few resources on the moon, apart from some ice at the poles. It is handily outside the earth’s gravity well, so there will be cities on the moon eventually, but for now, the wealth is in the asteroids, and the most technologically advanced countries should pursue that challenge instead.
When we do get out into the asteroid belt, he thinks we might encounter mechanical probes, either dormant or defunct, sent long ago by distant aliens to observe us.
In his novel “Existence”, he posits the idea that intelligent aliens have sent out robotic probes, which arrive in a new solar system, replicate themselves, and send further probes to the next few systems, and so on. These probes are designed to watch for new intelligences, and keep watching for millions of years. This is also the core idea in Arthur C Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel”, which Clarke and Stanley Kubrick developed into the film “2001”.
We’re pretty confident now that there are no such probes on the moon, but there could be some on the recently-discovered moonlets which orbit the earth, and the Chinese are preparing a mission to investigate one. But the asteroid belt is a better hiding place.
Intelligence is hard to evolve
There seem to be many, many places in the galaxy where our kind of life could exist. Roughly one in 20 exoplanets has an earth-like planet in the so-called Goldilocks zone. Even here in our own solar system, there are between six and a dozen ice-roofed ocean worlds – moons like Europa, Enceladus, Ganymede, Callisto, and probably Titan. Also dwarf planets like Ceres, and poor, demoted Pluto. We haven’t been looking for extraterrestrial life for long, but we are getting better at it. Brin is delighted by the European Gaia mission, which launched in 2013. It is measuring the exact positions and movements of 10 million objects in space. He finds it sad that so few people appreciate what marvels of science and engineering projects like this are.
The apparent absence of intelligent life makes Brin think that it is hard for intelligent life to evolve. In some of this science fiction, like the excellent Uplift trilogy, he suggests that most of the intelligent life in the galaxy has been coaxed into existence by a tiny number of naturally evolved beings.
Judging by the life on earth, it seems to be fairly easy to evolve to a pre-technological level of intelligence, and very hard to evolve beyond that. There are plenty of examples of the former on the earth, and only one example of the latter – us. Something little short of miraculous happened to us 80,000 years ago or so, and we’ve been re-writing our software with language ever since.
Somewhat lobotomised
Brin may be best known as the author of the book which Kevin Costner used for his movie “The Postman”. He describes the movie as “gorgeous, big-hearted and dumb”. He likes the first two-thirds, and describes the last third as “somewhat lobotomised”, but he can forgive that because it is such a beautiful film to watch.
Perhaps his most famous non-fiction work is his book “The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?”, first published in 1998.
He still thinks that the solution to many of our problems today is an old one: reciprocal accountability. Humans are delusional, but we cannot see our own delusions. Science can help because it always admits that it might be wrong. But in the end the only way to discover errors is competition, and that requires transparency. Sousveillance is the answer to surveillance, except if the majority of people a democracy openly and deliberately set out to repress and persecute a minority. This is what happens in Fahrenheit 451, and it is a harder problem to solve.
Surviving AI
Harder still is the problem of how to survive the arrival of superintelligence. This is not just hard to survive; it is even hard to write about a future world with active superintelligence in it, because you have to write about how something godlike behaves, and perhaps thinks. Most science fiction authors simply pretend that advanced AI never happened. Others, like Iain M. Banks, cheat by pretending that humans could have meaningful conversations with superintelligences that are millions of times smarter, and think millions of times faster. (In the case of Banks, the cheating is magnificent.)
Brin thinks we can survive the arrival of superintelligence by creating several of them, all in competition with each other. Clearly, then, Brin is an optimist. As he reminds us, looking back at all the dystopian science fiction in the world, “things aren’t as bad as we were warned they would be.”
