Are aliens visiting our planet? Very unlikely. Here is why.

Let us consider what kind of alien civilization could visit us and what it would take for them to be able to do so. What steps do they need to take in order to visit us and be responsible for the abundance of UFO sightings all over the world.

How do advanced civilizations develop? Well, let us look back in our own history and determine what forces drove our evolution and desire to ‘conquer space’. How have we become a space exploring life form?

First there need to be specific circumstances in which primitive life form develop into more advanced (intelligent) life forms. In humans we can find that this has been the result of several ice ages, combined with a diet of food high in protein so bigger brains were developed. Also, human tribes started migrating from warm savannahs to colder regions where developing skills like navigating, planning, hunting, trading, and other skills like making weapons and clothing were crucial for surviving the harsh northern conditions. Tribes that stayed put, are generally living the same way their ancestors did thousands of years ago and are still small tribes unless modern civilizations have ‘swallowed’ them. So complex societies can only evolve by a very specific evolutionary selection where life forms were forced to adapt to ever changing circumstances. That must be true for any space exploring race too, they must just like us be very adventurous and extremely curious. Their development must be quite similar to ours. Otherwise, they would be perfectly happy to sit beneath whatever alien equivalent of a Mango tree there is available all their days, singing happy alien songs. They must have evolved to be at least just as enterprising as we are.

So, on earth, slowly complex societies evolved, that can only evolve in species that can communicate, negotiate, are empathic and take care of each other. Only mammals do that on earth, no other species is capable of doing that. Our biology is suited for complex societies, but not like ants where there is no real complexity, only robot-like behavior. No fish, bird or reptile community will ever mature to complex societies, it is simply not in their genes, they don’t need it because they don’t have to put so much energy over multiple years into raising their offspring like mammals do and they can’t because they simply lack communication skills. For example, writing is crucial for large scale communication of knowledge an ideology. You need perfect eye-hand coordination for that. So, aliens must be some sort of mammal-type lifeform with similar characteristics like ours.

What is the basis for complex societies? Power, ideology and organization. These came with the development of weapons, armies, and writing. How was the world conquered by the white man? By organized armies, faith and firearms. Without ideology or religion and without ways to enforce authority, no complex large-scale societies can be built. And no large-scale society can last without a strong military institute to protect it from rivalling neighbors and imperialistic foreign powers. What do you do when you see your neighbor is getting way too strong? You attack him. Our history is a bloody and oppressive one. Our world would soon become a battlefield, ruled by a few powerful nations. This is just basic stuff, evolutionary principles. Eat or be eaten. Expand or disappear.

Then came the discovery of fossil fuel. Do you realize we would be in the Middle Ages still, riding on horseback and sailing across the world if machines were not invented that run on fossil fuel? With wood only we could only power heavy steam engines, and our forests would have been long gone.

Do you realize that fossil fuel is the result of plant material piling up over millions of years and being crushed into the earth by pressure (charcoal) and turned into oil and gas by bacteria? And that some of it is returned into the atmosphere by volcano’s due to the plate tectonics of our planet? That if that would not happen, the atmosphere would sooner or later be depleted of carbondioxide — our beloved greenhouse gas — and the planet would freeze over (it has happened in our past, the era of ‘snowball earth’)? May we assume that processes like that are common in the universe and on other planets, or that they are quite rare? Can we take for granted that we have a planet full of fossil fuels in the ground? If a planet simply has none, no advanced technology can emerge, you cannot create advanced stuff without sophisticated machinery, no solar panels, wind turbines or fusion reactors can be made without first creating a society based on fossil fuels.

So, industrialization requires some form of energy source that is stored in the planet for billions of years. You cannot go from the stone age to solar powered, intermediate steps must be taken. The infrastructure for advanced studies and advanced technology is built on ‘upscaled’ technology.

Why could science develop only after the industrial revolution? Because a small section of society could suddenly live a life of wealth and riches and have the privilege to study and experiment without having to do daily labor like the common man. Science in the beginning was a privilege of the rich. So, any alien civilization must at some stage have the same ingredients for development, and sometimes just bloody luck.

After the invention of printing technology and the sudden spread of knowledge in written form more people could share and develop new knowledge and insights, and by building bigger and faster ships man could travel the world and discover it’s resources, chemicals, history and life forms.

Then we must consider what fueled our technological world. The sad truth is WAR. All technology related tot space exploration is developed for war effort. Consider a peaceful race, living in harmony with nature and each other. What use would a weapon be? Why invent a fireweapon? Why rockets?

Every new invention was put to use to wage war and be superior to other nations. It is no coincidence that space exploration started immediately after the two biggest wars our planet has seen. Everything was there, technology, infrastructure, a complete war machinery with large factories able to create rockets first developed to fire at each other in war. We knew all about ballistics, thanks to our war efforts.

And so, space exploration started because ‘we had to be the first ones to set foot on the moon!’. The ‘space race’ was a race between two superpowers. Who is the strongest? Who will be the first?

The only reason we have come this far is we have a terrible past of war after war after war. Humans are aggressive and imperialistic and always have been. And in the process of trying to outsmart each other, advanced weapons were developed. Sharp stick became spears. Spears became arrows, arrows became fireworks, fireworks became missiles and missiles eventually became rockets and suddenly we were able to escape earth’s gravity. But what if earth had been just a bit larger? Do you realize we are lucky that the gravity of our planet is just about right, so that we can overcome it with a rocket? Imagine a planet that is just a bit bigger. You need a lot more fuel to power a rocket, but that makes the rocket heavier, which means you need even more fuel which makes the rocket heavier… and so on. On a slightly bigger planet, its life forms are gravitationally locked to their planet. So, any ‘space faring nation’ can only live on an earthlike planet, not much bigger. But here on earth we could escape gravity and so we headed for the nearest heavenly body, our moon.

But wait, imagine we would not have had a moon…. There is scientific consensus about the role of the moon for the development of life on earth and it is quite a significant role but let us put that aside for a moment.

Imagine a planet without a moon, what would the first step be to explore space if there was no place to go to first? What is we only had Mars as our nearest neighbor? What if John F. Kennedy would have said ‘We choose to go to Mars”? It would have been impossible, even now, after 50 years of space programs, no human has ever set foot on Mars. Space exploration is not something you just ‘do’, you need to take little steps and going to the moon is a step that is jut in reach after you have managed to leave the atmosphere for a quick round trip. But another planet… that is quite something else. That is just a step way to big to take as a first step. So, any ‘space exploring race’ is likely to have at least one moon.

To sum it up, an alien civilization must go through roughly the same processes as human civilization did, with roughly the same ingredients and parameters. They must have complex and large-scale societies like ours where billions are spent on science and progress, a history of warfare and competition, access to some kind of fossil fuels, live on a rocky planet like our, approximately the same size, preferrable with a moon. And they must have the same amount of obsession with space and exploring other worlds. And their development must be way ahead of us, say a few hundreds or thousands of years.

If we look at our own civilization it is very much the question if and when we will ever reach this point. We are depleting our resources in a fast pace and consuming more of it every day, ignorant of the impact on our planet. According to several studies, we are already to late to turn the tide, and we will face severe consequences of our actions in the decades to come. If sea levels rise as predicted, most of our coastal areas will be flooded in the next 100 years or so, taking most of our overpopulated cities. We probably will never reach Mars in the end (and why should we? Only a fool would choose to live alone on a hostile dead planet), let alone another solar system.

We think of ourselves as ‘civilized’ but, genetically we are just cavemen, and we act on basic instincts. We have more than one hundred years of science and yet most of us still believe in ancient books and Gods and a ‘spiritual world’. Most of us still believe in bizarre religions, concepts and fake news.

Why should this be different for any alien species out there? Why do we think of aliens as some sort of ‘godlike’ creatures, superior to us, in control, with clear motives and intentions? How likely is it they will develop the same complex societies and technology without the drive of expansion, imperialism and pure greed? If aliens are life forms that develop like life on earth, they are governed by the same basic drives and instincts like reproduction. If not, they would die out, simple as that. No purely rational being would choose to reproduce and take care of offspring… simply because there is no other reason to exist than to reproduce, that what life is all about! What is the use of being alive? That is the biggest question of mankind since we started… thinking! And it still is, because there simply is no reason, life is just…life.

If we consider how far away the nearest stars are, how many sunlike stars there are with earthlike planets in the habitable zone, how small the changes that all the aforementioned processes and events have taken place in a similar way as here on earth, we need very strong evidence to accept the idea of aliens visiting us.

If we put aside impossible science fiction like warp drives and worm holes and just accept that if we see something moving and flying in a way that defies the laws of nature it is simply NOT a physical object, we can safely state that even though we cannot explain certain observations we can be pretty sure it is not ‘THEM ALIENS’.