Who Cares About Aliens Anyway?

Image courtesy of ScientificAmerican.com

By Eduardo Castillon

In the last few years, videos and documents have been released by the U.S. government detailing sightings of unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP). However the public reaction to such information was minimal. 

Decades ago the public would have blown up over such an event. People of the last century would have been watching shows like The X Files or Star Wars and wondering when we’d see these interstellar civilizations.With the vastness of space, people assume we’re not alone in the universe, and that it’s only a matter of time before we make contact. All we have today is grainy infrared footage with the muffled audio of pilots reacting.

Skeptics reacted in time to the new releases. For starters, nothing really new came from the footage. Aliens once again flew lightyears to our planet to zigzag around in the sky for a little bit before disappearing. Furthermore, much of the footage can be explained by common visual effects of infrared cameras. If this instance is another hoax, where are all the aliens supposedly populating the stars?

This same question was asked by physicist Enrico Fermi. His confusion over the conflict between the high predictions for extraterrestrial life and the apparent lack of genuine alien encounters. The Fermi paradox, as this problem would be called, still perplexes experts to this day. For aliens, as we commonly think of them, to exist a number of specific conditions would have to be met, with each condition only having a certain probability of occurring. The Milky Way is thirteen billion years old, while earth is roughly four and a half. That leaves a lot of time for these conditions to have been met, yet for all the signals we’re sending into space we haven’t gotten any answers. A popular answer is that one or more of these conditions have been hypothesized to be great filters, that is, a condition that is so improbable it has prevented these estimated civilizations from existing. 

Despite the Fermi paradox being about seventy years old at this point, it isn’t exactly common knowledge. It likely isn’t the reason why people haven’t cared about the recent UAP report. So what’s the deal? 

Like I noted above, the last couple of years have been dominated by politics. But, funnily enough, politics have also dominated the narrative on aliens, western neoliberal politics in particular. Think back to many of the depictions of extraterrestrial civilizations in the media. America’s politics has played a vital role in popular sci-fi through the decades.

Enter the Cold War, where communists hid behind every bush. Flying saucers with scary death rays were analogous to Soviet planes dropping atom bombs. Fiction of the time would speak to an “us and them” mindset. We knew who we were, the representatives of liberty and democracy, and we were to overcome our ideological rivals, Fascism and Communism. When the Soviet Union fell, it was to be Fukuyama’s End of History and Western liberalism’s great triumph. This optimism is seen in science fiction films like Star Trek, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and even more recently with the 2016 film, Arrival. 

The themes of these pieces of media hold the optimistic ideal of western neoliberalism. Rationality and science were to prevail against all those pesky differences that divide us: little unimportant things like race, religion, nationality, culture, traditions, or even language. 

In The Day the Earth Stood Still, the alien, Klaatu, is amazed that leaders of different nations might not all come together and hold hands. His solution? Through absolute power any aggression could be completely stomped out. His giant killer robot is actually a policeman, keeping aggression at bay with the threat of a penalty “too terrible to risk.” Through the ensured peace of this, people of different planets can unite under a single authority and focus on more rational, profitable enterprises. Even though history apparently ended in the 90s, people are still at war with each other and we haven’t united under one government. Sorry, Klaatu.

The truth is that as time went on nobody was convinced that the post-need society of Star Trek’s Federation was ever coming. The 90s had also brought a sense of nihilism, cynicism, and irony. Little green men in flying saucers coming to abduct cows and probe farmers became more of a running joke than a sensational headline. The internet becoming widely available only accelerated this. Enormous events filmed at multiple angles and in HD, like the attack on the World Trade Center, could be rewritten by conspiracy theorists online. America’s wars serving as the policeman of the world, eliminating aggression in other countries, became just as pointless as they were endless. The efforts of western neoliberalism to replace some of the oldest sources of meaning has only left us with no meaning, and it has made us tired and unimpressed. 

Nobody cares about aliens because nobody at this point is disenfranchised. There is an infinite number of ideas, histories, and identities in cyberspace, and increasingly nothing in real space. The change from an outlooking society to an inward looking one has coincided with anxiety, isolation, and civil unrest. You may have missed it from the constant news cycle on Donald Trump the last couple years, but in 2019 there were global populist riots as necessities became harder to obtain. Then the Coronavirus pandemic put most countries in lockdown with an impending economic impact. Those with power to eliminate aggression have not only failed to keep any peace, but also fail to guide us to anything close to the scientific utopia of their dreams.

Let us return to the Fermi paradox, however. Not only have we not achieved every condition, namely space colonization, but there could be more conditions we’re not even aware of. There is no guarantee that we’ve actually made it past some great filter. For all we know, the great filter could be a constantly mutating virus, atomic warfare, a degrading social fabric, or even an alien invasion. The reason no one seems to care about aliens is because we became bored with the questions asked by the older generations because new problems seemed to stack up every day. If in the last century we asked “who is out there?”, in this one we can only ask “who are we?”