Reflections on the Fermi Paradox

In a period of less than one hundred years, humankind advanced from traveling by horse and buggy to making a trip to its planet's satellite. Just imagine what the humans might be able to accomplish over the course of the next ten thousand years! That is possibly enough time to develop techniques for long-term human hibe
ation, to build extremely fast spaceships, and to explore every planet within a thousand light years.

Many years ago the famous physicist Enrico Fermi, when asked about aliens, replied: Where are they? Fermi makes a strong point. Stars in our galaxy range up to ten billion years in age and our own planet has more than four billion years of history. Within such of time scale, ten thousand years is hardly the blink of an eye. Indeed, there were even intelligent humans ten thousand years ago, and what if the alien civilizations have been around for even longer, maybe even for millions of years? Aliens, if they are out, would have visited us long ago, and without any visible signs of alien visitation, Fermi concluded that we are alone.

Fermi's logic, however, relies on a couple of underlying assumptions that have yet to be proven. First, it assumes that alien technology is no more advanced that what we can imagine for ourselves in the future. Second, it assumes that the alien visitors, once they got here, would want to immediately and directly announce themselves. In other words, it is possible (even likely) that aliens have been here and we just do not know it.

The moral of this story is that the quickest road to finding aliens might come from looking into our past rather than looking into deep space. Every plausible sign of alien contact needs to be investigated. Of course, it is now well-known that the Egyptians did not need alien help to build the pyramids and so forth, but other phenomena are not so easy to explain. Among these stand the mysterious drawings on the desert floor near Nazca, Peru, drawings that were clearly intended to be viewed by an intelligent creature from the sky.

Scientists have determined, via radiocarbon dating of wooden stakes used to mark out the drawings, that the Nazca Lines date from around 600 A.D., but science has made little progress on determining why the people of Nazca drew those lines. Dozens of explanations to counter alien notions have been put forth but none are convincing. Sadly, even the late Carl Sagan, one of the great proponents of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, felt compelled to join the debunking effort, suggesting that they merely worshipped the Moon and made those drawings to entertain their god. I think it unlikely that Sagan, even with his powerful telescopes, found eyes of the Moon and so it is highly doubtful that the people of Nazca, with the naked eye, were able to see eyes on the Moon. As anyone who has studied the ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle would know, humankind has acquired a lot of knowledge over the years but we remain no more intelligent than our ancestors.

By no means does evidence of alien visitation have to be exclusively archaeological in nature. If the aliens are far advanced (it seems likely that their technology would exceed the mere ability to travel across the galaxy), they could easily assimilate the basics of the our mentality and absorb our spoken languages. In general, therefore, every major instance of supe
atural phenomena in past history needs to be carefully scrutinized for signs of alien involvement. One such instance in post-mythological times was Muhammad's encounter with the archangel Gabriel, which produced far more than what could be attributed to ahallucinations. I'm sure almost everyone in the world (who is not a Muslim) would instantly write Muhammad off as a quack, but let's be careful. From the other side of the world we see another sign of potential alien contact, namely, the Nazca Lines, arising during Muhammad's lifetime.