I wandered around the Natural History Museum[1] for an hour, or so this week. It’s one of the London Kensington museums that never loses its appeal. It’s a glorious place of assembled artifacts. At this time of year, it’s bubbling with children of all ages. Those ancient beasts that once strode the planet captivate and fascinate young minds. We can project all sorts of personalities upon them and know for sure we will never meet them wandering the streets.
I didn’t get to meet Titanosaur, one of the biggest animals to have walked the Earth but must go back and make sure I do. We share our planet with the remains of these giants. Luckily, we didn’t have to encounter them on the way to work in the mornings.
I like the reminder that human time and geological time are completely different spaces. We ponder the big news of the day over a tiny passage of history whilst the great expanse of life on earth sits quite in the background. Everything that made us, took billions of years to come to be.
Tracing the past, a couple of hundred million years isn’t much[2]. Yet, in one million we’ve come to dominate the planet as no other life has ever done before. We still have the choice as to our fate. Burning copious quantities of fossil fuel does seem foolish when seen in context. Will self-aware humans be a flash in the pan that comes can goes almost unnoticed by history?
Although, I don’t dismiss even remote possibilities when it comes to the unknown, the claims that non-human sightseers have been visiting us here on Earth does seem purely fictional[3]. There are several distinct arguments against such extraterrestrial alien holidaymakers.
Given the age of the universe, the coincidence of existence of multiple intelligent beings is possible, but they will certainly be separated by unfathomable distances. Even accepting the proposition that one day physics will provide a wizard transport system to cross those vast distances the needle in the haystack problem still means meetings may be extremely unlikely. Then there’s the arrogance that we presume such alien beings will have a shape, form and chemistry that has any meaning to us. Let’s face it, the abundance of life on Earth may be only a tiny range of what’s possible in the greater scheme of things.
No, I will continue to believe that there are rational explanations for lights on Salisbury Plain or deep in the Arizona desert. ET isn’t likely to be bothered with either. Unexplained aerial phenomena will continue to interest people, much as dinosaurs do but one is knowable today and the other may not be for generations, if ever.
[2] https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/mediapacks/earth
[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66320498?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=KARANGA
John Vincent 