You Can Stop Worrying About Aliens

We can debate the existence of life on other planets but considering there are an estimated 50 million habitable planets just in the Milky Way Galaxy, and there are believed to be a few hundred billion galaxies in the Universe, I’d say the odds are good we aren’t alone.

 Star Wars and Star Trek among other TV shows, movies and books have been telling us this for years, even providing examples, but they always seem to place humans at the top of the pecking order.  Spock, highly logical, couldn’t master emotions.  Chewbacca, larger and stronger, had some communication and self control issues.  And Alf ate cats.  But their human co-stars, even with normal human failings, seemed to be positioned a little higher on the evolutionary scale.

Humans are amazing but I doubt we’re the pinnacle of species development.  Whether you’re an evolutionist, a creationist or a combination of the two it would take a pretty big ego to assume chance events or a higher power didn’t come up with a better beast on one of the billions and billions of platforms for life that exist in our Universe. 

And if that higher life form is capable and interested in spanning the tremendous distance between their home and ours, you’d figure they’re technologically advanced enough to do it undetected.  A species that developed a means of transportation that bridges hundreds or thousands of light years but isn’t able to saunter through Earth’s environment both unblemished and undetected is like a mechanical engineer who can’t roll up a car window, or a fireman that can’t put out a match, or a…um…blogger that can’t…um…think of a good third example.

The idea of a bloodthirsty, predatory alien isn’t likely either.  While aggression is one way that a species outpaces its competition, it takes a lot of energy and would leave fewer resources for scientific innovation.  Remember the grade-school bully that took your lunch money, held your head in the toilet for a swirly or grabbed your arm and pushed your hand into your face saying, “stop hitting yourself”; look them up and see how technologically advanced they are.

If you’re worried about being abducted and violated by aliens in their quest to study our species, you can probably let that go, too.  The stereotypical boney framed, pear headed, green alien with a probe and an anal fetish, come to earth to collect samples for later study is impractical.  Lowly humans are able to examine the human body, the earth’s interior and detect what other stars are made of using MRIs, ultrasonic imaging and spectroscopy and we have yet to send a human past our closest space neighbor.  Surely a civilization that can navigate the stars has developed a Dr. McCoy’esk ‘tricorder’ to scan the life forms they encounter instead of molesting them or taking them home like a third-grader with a freshly captured frog.  With that said, we do love our zoos.

Humans may live in cages on distant planets, there may be a UFO housed in a military barn in Rozwell, NM and that might not have been a military drone being trucked down Hwy 81 a couple of years ago but my guess is, you can stop worrying about aliens.