Category: Culture and Economy

Unidentified Aerial Phenomena are in the news, partly because the Pentagon has admitted to actively investigating them. Director James Fox’s recent YouTube video, “The Phenomenon,” presents a useful historical survey of sightings and Washington’s response to them, including former Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s comment on secret American evidence: “I’m saying most of it hasn’t seen the light of day.” The video ends with the notorious Zimbabwe Ariel School children’s sighting in 1994, many of whom are reported declaring, as adults, “There was no reason for any of us to make that up.” Science thrives on skepticism, and the bar for convincing evidence must be set high, just as it should for the humanities. Nevertheless, skeptics about UFOs shouldn’t be afraid of their own medicine. Doubtful observers advance any number of reasons why a visitation from outer space can’t really occur and why a person who says they’ve seen one shouldn’t be believed. Let’s consider seven of those reasons and some possible objections to them.

Reason #i. UFOs can’t visit our planet because they can’t travel faster than the speed of light.

In his Special Theory of Relativity (1905), Albert Einstein established the cosmic speed limit: 186,000 miles per second. It’s been used ever since to deny the possibility of extraterrestrial visitations, including those from neighbouring galaxies, the closest of which is Canis Major, twenty-five thousand light years from Earth. Our physics and our mathematics, on which our physics is based, cannot contemplate beyond the human brain’s bookends, zero and infinity, the real speed limit to the human mind. We are excluded from either comprehending or manipulating the extremes of our own number system: infinity itself – one number larger than the largest number we can think of – or zero, true absolute, empirical zero. Nothing. So much nothing there isn’t even “nothing.” Is it any wonder that at the extremes, zero and infinity, the unknowables of our finest rational construct meet? That zero divided by zero equals infinity? That parallel lines meet in infinity? Even omnipotent Apple, whose corporate symbol suggests we have transcended the bitten, forbidden fruit, seems to defer to human limitation. Their address? One Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California.

A little Nietzsche is in order:

At present, however, science, spurred on by its powerful delusion, is hurrying unstoppably to its limits, where the optimism hidden in the essence of logic will founder and break up. For there is an infinite number of points on the periphery of the circle of science, and while we have no way of foreseeing how the circle could ever be completed, a noble and gifted man inevitably encounters, before the mid-point of his existence, boundary points on the periphery like this, where he stares into that which cannot be illuminated. When, to his horror, he sees how logic curls up around itself at these limits and finally bites its own tail, then a new form of knowledge breaks through, tragic knowledge, which, simply to be endured, needs art for protection and as medicine.

We can’t communicate with trees, even though they’re alive. We can’t speak to them and tell them what the colour purple is like because they have no eyes to see and no ears to hear. And yet they are alive, move around the sun and rotate through the Milky Way at the same speed we do. By the same token, we can’t explain calculus to a dog or a dolphin, because dogs and dolphins lack capacity for mathematical reason. Therefore, the ultimate relativity is this: “objective reality” measured against the human brain and its capacity to perceive and to think. Inductive reason alone suggests ours cannot be the unsurpassed means to achieve either. So, why would intelligent extraterrestrials who choose to investigate us not possess sensory perceptions and intellectual capacities immensely beyond our own, evolved over millions of years, such as would render their level of consciousness, their arts, their moral discourse, their science, mathematics, and technology, in sum their entire civilized project, so superior to ours we could never hope to grasp it? The speed of light might be our cosmic speed limit. It need not be theirs.

Reason #ii. There’s never been the slightest scientific indication of travel faster than the speed of light.

 

A few years back the Chinese announced a significant breakthrough in quantum physics. They’d launched a satellite called Micius, after an ancient Chinese philosopher who died in 391 B.C. On it, they produced pairs of entangled photons, beamed them back to earthbound labs 750 miles apart, and measured their polarized state. If one particle’s spin state was down, the other was up and vice versa – every time. How could two particles be correlated over distance, with no means of affecting each other? No pulleys. No wires. No discernible means of transmission. Yet what happened to one happened to the other. Einstein disparagingly called this “spooky action at a distance.” How many received laws of physics does such quantum entanglement break? Start with the “universal speed limit,” 300,000 kilometers per second. If one particle’s state is instantly reflected in the other, regardless of distance, how quickly does that reflection occur? Does it occur faster than the speed of light? If so, how is that possible?

Conventional science accepts the principle of “locality.” If one object exerts influence over another, there must be something emitted from the first and travelling over a given space in order to reach the second. The influence cannot be instant and magical like tugs on a Ouija board. Quantum entanglements, however, shatter the principle of locality. They present a vision of reality utterly mystifying, in which particles, pieces of sub-atomic matter or expressions of energy, are no longer discrete, localized, but interconnected over immense distances in ways we do not comprehend – and may never comprehend.

Ordinary science also accepts the principle of causality. I speak. Certain air molecules in my immediate vicinity are activated. A sound wave reaches the ears of my guest. The wave stimulates his ear drum. He hears, then speaks in turn. Now, what if we “quantum entangle” this process? I have no need to speak. My guest instantly hears what I have to say. Articulation becomes unnecessary. No sound waves need be emitted; no ear drum need receive them. Cause and effect disappear. We’ve abandoned conversation in favour of telepathy. In our quantum-entangled state, we’ve entered the voodoo world of the teleportation of information, precisely the world of our Chinese scientists, who, MIT Technology Review reported, “downloaded the information associated with one photon in one place and transmitted it over an entangled link to another photon in another place.” Is it any wonder Niels Bohr once declared, “If quantum physics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet”?

Reason #iii. The Universe began over 13 billion years ago. Why should evolution elsewhere outpace our own?

 

Consider the evolution of the eye. What strange impulse would compel inanimate matter to evolve light-seeking capacities? Billions of years ago, nascent eyes (if one could call them that) were little more than a cell or two of photoreceptors, housed in a cup, a “light patch” at the front end of the most rudimentary creatures, half plant, half animal. What mysterious energy propelled these cells to will themselves a brain, to knit neurons together over aeons of time, millions, even billions of years? Brains are the exfoliation of sight, meant to capture, store, and organize moments of photo-radiation that flower into history and understanding, into consciousness of self, into poetry, music, and a sense of mortality, even morality.

In the blink of an eye. Three billion years of earthly cellular life, virtually blind, three thousand million years, all with no sight. Then 543 million years ago, witnessed by the Burgess Shale of Canada’s own Rocky Mountains, the Cambrian Explosion – 15 million years of evolutionary wonder, geology’s fossil record, the first eye, and ipso facto, the first brain, seemingly out of nowhere. Even Darwin was puzzled by earlier such discoveries. Could this be “a manifest objection to my theory?” he wondered. We’re entitled to ask, that and more. When and how did the primitive crypto-brain, offspring of sight, evolve the miracle of consciousness? In the vastness of our universe, what other Cambrian Explosions might have occurred? If we could only master the politics of self-preservation, of species preservation come to that, what astounding creatures might attend us, they with unimaginable organs of perception, with matching brains, and a metalogic that far exceeds our own?

As for the universe beginning over 13 billion years ago, there too, a little humility is in order. In the beginning was the word. In the beginning was the Big Bang: two party bumper stickers of our current malaise. However, to start with the Big Bang is to start with a mathematical illusion, like an imaginary number, the product of theoretical physics, Christian Doppler, and Edwin Hubble, who asserted the universe is expanding. How did he know? Because the starlight he saw from his California telescope in 1923 was redshifted. When a police siren approaches you, you hear a high-pitched sound. When it recedes, the pitch lowers. The same phenomenon applies to light. Stars approaching us tend toward blue light on the spectrum. Stars receding tend toward red. As we perceive them, most of the stars in the universe tend toward red. Therefore, they are moving away – puzzlingly, at ever faster rates. So, the universe is expanding and accelerating in its expansion. The logical corollary must be that billions of years in the past, the universe had to be smaller – smaller and smaller, denser and denser the further back in time we go, until we reach that cataclysmic moment of infinite compression, infinite potential energy and power, the Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, labelled the Big Bang.

Questionable, nevertheless. Highly questionable – a theory based entirely upon our very human-centred mathematical conception of zero and infinity, the bookends of reason, neither of which works very well. The universe could just as easily be eternal, irrational, ultimately unknowable, a Hindu world without end and without beginning.

Reason #iv. Why do all alien sightings feature child-sized bi-pedal creatures with slanty eyes?

 

The Ariel School students of Zimbabwe were not shielded from everyday talk of alien space craft. They attended a prestige private school on the outskirts of the capital, Harare. One could argue they were predisposed to such conversation, not to mention the eco-arguments of their parents, mirrored in the aliens communicating, telepathically it seems, that we humans were not taking sufficient care of the planet. Might it give one pause when children’s minds come up with stereotypical drawings of skinny humanoids with bulbous, elongated eyes and shiny gray, body-fitting suits? Why should alien beings, so much more advanced than ourselves, be necessarily bipedal, have heads in roughly the same position as ours, two eyes (however elongated), and hands with the thinnest of fingers?

Crypsis. A body’s radical response to its environment – extreme, almost perfectly dynamic camouflage. How did any living thing manage to evolve such miraculous and eccentric abilities, just as one animal, a shrimp of all things, has evolved a visual organ more capable than any other in the world? The mantis shrimp can perceive circular polarized light, the only known creature on Earth that can, leading to the conclusion that perhaps we can only see what our evolutionary capacities enable us to see. We can see no other way, our eyes, not to mention the brains attached to them, being what they are, finite, limited. These alien things that visit us might seem to shape-shift, as cuttlefish could, or mimic octopus, adapting in extraordinary ways to their environment like sea creatures.

Plausible? In Western Papua sits one of the world’s richest marine preserves, the Bird’s Head Seascape, incredibly biodiverse, filled with all kinds of amazing creatures – cuttlefish, mimic octopus, mantis shrimp. Those who’ve dived the reef and seen what these creatures can do, how they can change colour to match their surroundings – even the texture of their surroundings, report an almost dream-like experience. One moment you see them; the next you don’t. They become virtually indistinguishable from everything around them, with such a riot of pattern and hue, like the reefs themselves, almost miraculous.

Reason #v. If aliens are here, why haven’t they formally announced themselves?

 

The late Stephen Hawking’s warnings come to mind. Don’t be so sanguine about contacting creatures from outer space, he counseled a decade ago or more. They may be marauders, ready to take over hospitable places, bringers of slavery, pestilence, and genocide, like the Europeans who invaded the Americas. One counter argument to this ominous view is the following. At the speed of light, we’ve been sending radio signals into outer space for over a century, a hundred-light-year advertisement of our presence, and the calamity hasn’t yet occurred. Another counter argument involves morality, capable of its own mysterious evolution, and predicated on the notion that we are sublunary creatures, in the largest sense, subject both to the limitation of our intellect and the vastness of the cosmos. Could it be that having survived their own technology, something we have yet to prove we are capable of doing, having developed a political regime to accomplish that, aliens have attained a higher level of being? We like to think we are better than wolves. Our visitors might believe they are better than humans. More discreet and gracious than we, perhaps our visitors merely observe, report, and depart?

Reason #vi. There is such a thing as objective reality.

In “The Moral Aspect of Quantum Mechanics,” physicist John Stewart Bell wrote: “It remains a logical possibility that it is the act of consciousness which is ultimately responsible for the reduction of the wave packet [in other words, ‘the collapse of the wave function’.]” The source of such a remarkable declaration is the famous “Two Slit Experiment” which Englishman, Thomas Young, first performed in 1801. Expecting to see two bars as a result, he shone a beam of light through two slits onto a backboard. He didn’t see two bars of light. He saw a series of bands on the screen, some darker, some brighter, and he concluded light was not a particle, but a wave. What was happening was some parts of the wave were interfering with others, augmenting some, cancelling others out, just as ripples of water might do if we threw a stone into a lake. Other people built on his experiment. A century and some later, they fired electrons at the screen and discovered the same patterns of interference. Were electrons waves and not particles? Were they both?

More weirdness. In 1961 scientists found a way to fire electrons at the screen one at a time. How could there possibly be interference now? And yet there was. Could a single particle pass through both slits at the same time and interfere with itself? Seemingly impossible. So, scientists set up a detector just behind the slit in order to tell whether a particle was passing through slit A or slit B. Lo and behold. With detector in place, the interference patterns vanished. The electron had become a particle again. Suspected since the 1920s, the implications were astounding. The act of observing seemed to change physical outcomes. Solipsism reigned. The simple fact of an observing Self altered reality.

In the 1920s, physicist Pascal Jordan wrote, “Observations not only disturb what had to be measured, they produce it. We compel a particular particle to assume a definite position. We ourselves produce the results of measurements.” How can this be? How can nature know we are observing and in turn hide or change her processes depending on the existence of such observation or the lack of it? Could it be in matters of utmost, almost infinite smallness, approaching absolute zero mass, here in the infinitesimal fairy world, we reach the limits of our own rational understanding, not to mention the limits of our capacities of sensory apprehension, however technologically enhanced? Could it be it is not nature hiding herself from us or playing tricks, but our own minds – in just the way our visual cortex seems to ‘flip’ when confronted with a drawing that can be perceived in two different ways? Here, in quantum mechanics, we see the brain bump against its own limits and begin to need art for protection and medicine, not to mention the living, undead God. Max Planck was a Christian. Wolfgang Pauli favoured “lucid mysticism.” Edwin Schrödinger (of Schrödinger’s cat fame), believed in the “indestructibility of Mind by Time.”

Reason #vii. Real science is consensus. “The science” tells us there’s no room for mystification and dispute.

 

There exists a grainy 1920s film on The Solvay Conference, Brussels, 1927, the premier physicists of the day, all foregathered, Schrödinger, Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, like that other galaxy of German musical geniuses a century or more before, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bach. Where do such minds come from? And why at the same time? Long-faced, tight-lipped, the scientists couldn’t agree on electrons. Waves? Particles? Both? Macrocosm, microcosm, the respective purviews of astrophysics and quantum mechanics, both beset by mind-numbing perplexity. After Einstein proposed his own “two-slit” thought experiment, Ehrenfest went to the blackboard and wrote, “The Lord did there confound the language of all the earth.” How far, then, are we really from the Tower of Babel: the thing God worked to punish man’s sin of pride? We thought we could build a tower to the heavens, to the proximate galaxies at least. We thought we were large enough to accomplish that. Then the Lord seeded languages among us, so we could no longer comprehend one another. And that language need not be confined merely to words alone. At its outer limits, the schism at the heart of language may encompass whole ways of thought, such as those defined by science and the humanities as C.P. Snow observed decades ago in his book The Two Cultures. To this student of literature, however, one thing remains clear, something to be kept in mind the next time one hears reports of UFOs: true science has always been based on dispute, on wrestling with perplexity, and, I would add, on humility. Philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr said it best.

Man is ignorant and involved in the limitations of a finite mind; but he pretends that he is not limited. He assumes he can gradually transcend finite limitations until his mind becomes identical to universal mind. All of his intellectual and cultural pursuits, therefore, become infected with the sin of pride.

Some of our finest scientists concur.

Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.

The author of those thoughts was Albert Einstein.