President to the Royal Society, and personal astronomer to the queen, Lord Martin Rees has come out making some profound statements about the existence of extraterrestrials and the possibility for their presence on Earth. While he has made no specific claims about their presence or intentions, he has stated that life from other worlds could be so profoundly different from what we can currently understand that their presence here could go undetected easily.
Lord Rees made the comment shortly after the first conference of the National Science Academy, saying, “They could be staring us in the face and we just don’t recognize them. The problem is that we’re looking for something very much like us, assuming that they at least have something like the same mathematics and technology.” The statement is just the sort of scientific thinking that has broken from the dogmatic view of the universe as a place where the laws of physics have no exceptions and that we, with our limited understanding of the way it works based on our time on one planet, know exactly why an alien race couldn’t visit us. The assumption is being largely viewed as a breath of fresh air by the UFO community as well as many astronomers who don’t necessarily believe reports of UFO abductions, but certainly are open to the possibility that there is more in the universe than what can be observed with the limited capacity of the five senses humans have.
Lord Rees went on to indicate there were unfathomable possibilities in the universe including ones that could not necessarily be understood by humans. He drew the parallel that the almost magical qualities of quantum physics cannot be understood by a chimpanzee, and likewise there are likely complex factors of the universe that cannot be understood by human beings.
Sir Francis Drake, creator of the famous Drake equation, then voiced his concern over the potential muting going on of Earth’s television signals by using digital television rather than the previous analog radio waves. The fifty light-year wide bubble of transmission is ever growing as the radio signals penetrate deeper into the void of space, and have already reached several star systems. But Drake, and many scientists like him have voiced their concerns that there may soon be no reason for extraterrestrials to believe there is actually a race of intelligent and technologically adaptive beings on Earth. This is also, of course, assuming their primary means of detecting these factors is through radio signals.
Still, the prospect remains that an alien being could be, for example, incorporeal and only able to communicate with the minds of very specific individuals and only at very specific times. What if this were the case? It seems almost like a scenario that sets itself up for an inability to prove or disprove itself. Particularly if any such race had any motivation not to have itself detected, or was merely observing humans as we observe ourselves through the very television waves that may have brought them here.