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A portion of the Milky Way’s dense core in a new light as captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. An estimated 500,000 stars shine in this region, known as Sagittarius C. Photo via NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI and S. Crowe.
Science + Tech
ANALYSIS
Science + Tech

The Alien Invaders Are Always Us

Why chase UFOs? Life on Earth is stranger than science fiction will ever be.

A photo from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals a portion of the Milky Way Galaxy in turquoise, black and purple.
A portion of the Milky Way’s dense core in a new light as captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. An estimated 500,000 stars shine in this region, known as Sagittarius C. Photo via NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI and S. Crowe.
Crawford Kilian 31 Jan 2025The Tyee

Tyee contributing editor Crawford Kilian is the author of 11 novels of speculative fiction and fantasy.

One day in 1950, the great Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was walking to lunch with some scientist friends. The talk turned to life elsewhere in the universe. Surely, someone remarked, there must be many planets with intelligent life like our own. If nothing else, the principle of mediocrity applied: we couldn’t be special, so countless worlds must be home to intelligent beings like ourselves.

Over lunch, Fermi blew up the conversation with three words: “Where is everybody?”

If intelligent creatures existed on other planets, Fermi argued, some would have evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. With an enormous head start, such beings could have spread through the entire galaxy in a matter of a few million years — even without “warp drives” and other fantasies. Humans had already been sending radio waves out into space for decades, but if the galaxy was full of advanced civilizations, they weren’t answering.

The Fermi paradox, as it became known, inspired generations of scientists to explore the possibility of life on other worlds. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, has become a kind of science in itself.

But in over 60 years of searching, nothing has turned up.

A black and white photo of Enrico Fermi, who is balding and wearing a tweed suit against a laboratory backdrop featuring a wall of control panels.
Enrico Fermi was an Italian physicist who inspired generations of future scientists to explore life on other planets. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

In popular entertainment, of course, intelligent aliens are as numerous as tourists in Venice — sometimes friendly, sometimes not, but usually looking very human and using technology comparable to our own.

That’s because speculative fiction is rarely about real aliens; more often, it’s satirical commentary on how human societies regard one another. And, ironically, it shows how unimaginative speculative fiction can be.

H.G. Wells launched the alien-invaders genre with his novel The War of the Worlds in 1898; it has remained in print ever since. This was very nearly the peak of British imperialism, and Wells was reportedly inspired by the fatal impact of Europeans’ settlement of Tasmania, which effectively destroyed the Indigenous Peoples who had been living there for tens of thousands of years.

Wells simply imagined Britain, the world’s dominant power, as the equivalent of the Tasmanians facing far superior technology and “minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic.”

While the interplanetary threat was a new angle, Wells was writing in a well-established literary genre: the future war, especially war between the great imperial powers. (In 1908, five years after the Wright brothers, Wells published another novel, The War in the Air, in which German Zeppelins attack Britain and then go on to bomb New York City. The world then slips back into barbarism.)

Arrogance and anxiety

Such novels reflected both the arrogance and the anxiety that rising empires inspire in their citizens. Some new empire was always coming along to threaten the old ones, and future-war novels helped readers imagine how they might sustain their own empires against their enemies.

By the time Fermi wondered why the Earth wasn’t already under alien administration, speculative fiction was portraying any number of interplanetary or interstellar empires, locked in battle over vast distances — naval forces struggling to seize or defend some planet. These were pretty much retellings of the Second World War, but with alien empires instead of the Third Reich or the Empire of Japan. The genre continues to flourish with streaming epics like Invasion and A Quiet Place.

Actual scientists, as I mentioned, haven’t come up with so much as a Martian bacterium, never mind any vast intellects. They have a number of theories for this absence of aliens.

Are we a ‘rare earth’?

One theory is that the principle of mediocrity doesn’t apply. Ours is a “rare earth,” which is uniquely equipped to produce living organisms and then to sustain their evolution over billions of years. Eventually, we evolved into a technology-using species, but nowhere else in this galaxy has life been able to develop beyond the stage of algae — if that.

Another theory is that a species capable of our level of technology (or higher) will somehow self-destruct through nuclear wars, climate catastrophe or some other awful mistake. This is why Elon Musk wants to go to Mars, and it’s been an argument for space colonization since the Soviet Sputnik satellite went up in 1957.

Or perhaps advanced civilizations can travel and communicate using means far beyond our own primitive tools like nuclear power and the electromagnetic spectrum. I used that idea in one of my speculative fiction novels, where alien hobbyists pick up our TV and radio signals, think we’re cute and reply by dumping thousands of years’ worth of alien science and technology on us. Then some other aliens actually go to the trouble to invade.

Spoiler: we barely survive.

Lying low in a dark forest

Yet another suggestion is that the galaxy is a “dark forest” where civilizations maintain radio silence but listen for signals from planets like ours — and destroy them before they can progress far enough to be dangerous. Some civilizations might survive through an abundance of caution, by lying low and avoiding any kind of transmission that could give them away.

An actual alien invasion, however, wouldn’t survive even a basic cost-benefit analysis. As Wells foresaw in The War of the Worlds, a new planet would pose new threats to the invaders — everything from gravity to the mix of atmospheric gases to viruses and bacteria. Spoiler: Wells’ Martians die of bacterial infections, as they should have foreseen if they were so vastly smart.

So while invasion and colonization made our imperial nations temporarily rich and powerful, at interstellar distances they’re out of the question. (Elon Musk’s colonists on Mars would live a miserable life in tunnels, melting water out of the permafrost and then desalinating it while their bones weakened in low gravity.)

Fantasies of alien invasion and interstellar empires are based on the European and North American experience, from the discovery of the Americas to our present day. The fantasies start from the premise that any intelligent species would overrun its own planet and then go into space in search of more planets to plunder and more wars to fight.

After all, imperialism got us into our present situation, and it shows no sign of slowing down just because it’s cooking the planet.

Far more likely is that an advanced civilization would foresee the problems lurking in a program of exploration, conquest and settlement — and drop the idea once and for all.

The civilization would define its own sustainable limits and live within them. Perhaps it might send out interstellar robot probes, and wait patiently for thousands of years for the probes to report back on some particular solar system. Or it could monitor events here on Earth as easily as we detect exoplanets by observing their stars.

And it’s even more likely that advanced civilizations are too advanced even to be compared to us, or to take any interest in us.

No one talks to the bacteria in a mud puddle, or asks an ant, “Take me to your leader.” Still less does anyone want to colonize a mud puddle or an anthill.

All our fantasies come out of our own history, and they are variations on history’s themes.

Far from being imaginative, they show us our own limits. As the renowned scientist J.B.S. Haldane wrote a century ago: “Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

And if we recognize our limits, we might shrug, give up our imperial fantasies and become a truly advanced civilization.  [Tyee]

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