I was thinking more about that “Silurian Hypothesis” direction – how could we look for evidence? Also, what if we assume that at least some percentage of those “alien encounters” are genuine reports. It has to be caused by something. If it’s not the aliens, what is it?

So, we’re assuming an ancient, Saurian civilization that managed to survive the K-T event because they burrowed into the mountains – hiding from predators, growing some kind of mushrooms as food, or even mining for minerals. Let’s say this survival made them appreciate underground life even more and this became a thing for them. Let’s say they became very good at carving into rock.

Also, let’s say they had 65 million years to evolve biologically and develop technology. This is a huge period of time. If we assume literally any kind of advancement over such a long period, they would be extremely advanced. We are literally nothing to them.

Also, if we assume that the “alien abduction” stories are true, and also those stories about weird events and disappearances around Mt. Shasta and similar places are true, they treat humans the same way we treat cockroaches – as a pest that needs to be controlled, and with casual cruelty. This part is most concerning, because we seem to be dealing with the concept of a technologically very advanced civilization that has absolutely no empathy, or compassion, or soul of any kind. They are, in essence, a super-powerful nightmare, and this is the point where I started thinking that maybe we don’t actually want to be looking for evidence, because if we assume it’s true, the most likely way to make them react is to go actively looking for them and interfering with their business, because we wouldn’t like the way they would react. It would not be first contact, it would be pest control. It would be gardener pouring molten metal into an ant colony, where we are the ants.

Then it occurred to me that we might be accidentally doing things that would annoy them – mining, fracking, detonating nukes underground and so on. It might even be something completely innocent that we can’t even imagine being a problem; for instance, let’s say such a civilization uses some kind of biotechnology based on mycelia and fungi in general, and we do something that disrupts that. They would see this as someone cutting their undersea fibre-optic cables and disrupting their Internet. If our existence is contingent upon not annoying them enough for them to do something about it, and we don’t know what could possibly annoy them, we are essentially in an unmarked minefield. It’s not a pleasant thought.

But the assumption is that they are behind the UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena). They are inspecting our nuclear weapons and energy installations. If something is either interesting or threatening to them, they will simply go and take a look. One would think that nuclear energy would be threatening to them, and maybe it is, but maybe it’s just something that’s interesting because they hadn’t thought of it. Maybe they are using geothermal energy or something completely different, and they never thought of nuclear. Or maybe they find nuclear use interesting for some other reason we couldn’t even think of – some kind of religion based on U235 as a holy sacrament of the Earth. I’m making stuff up here. In any case, the idea that we’re going to accidentally fuck around and find out is unlikely if we assume there will be warnings in form of increased UFO activity and interference with that specific thing we’re doing.

The problem is, if we assume those beings exist, the only consistent way to interpret their nature and actions leads to terrifying conclusions. Those are not highly spiritually evolved beings. They seem to have all the empathy of a crocodile eating a zebra alive. There’s nothing we would identify as positive emotions, or a soul – just cold, casual cruelty. They are just things with technology, and they treat everything else as things. Essentially, they are the ultimate achievement of atheism and materialism – extreme technological and intellectual advancement, but no soul, no empathy, no deep emotions, no connection with God. Those are not beings you want to contact, be contacted by or stumble upon by accident. Ideally, you don’t want to know they exist. I started by thinking how one might look for evidence to prove such a theory, but very soon I realized that this is absolutely not something I would want to be involved with. It’s a terrible godless evil; an intelligence with great power but of a cold, terrifying and deadly nature. If any of those stories about “alien” abductions, experimentations etc. are true, literally everything about them is worse than death, and power-wise, they are to us what we are to the animals in a national park, or fish we catch and release for sport.

I regret even thinking about it, now that I explored the corollaries. That’s why I prefer thinking that all the “alien abduction” stories are not physically real. The corollaries are exceedingly unpleasant.

Whenever I show doubt about the aliens, someone inevitably cites all kinds of anecdotes about abductions, sightings and so on, and asks “what else could it be?”

I hate that question. That’s how stupid ideas without any basis in reality held on for centuries. Milky way was made because someone spilled milk in the sky, because what else could it be? The planets are Gods moving in the sky, because what else could it be? The stars are the hearths of ancestors in heaven because what else could it be? The constellations are heavenly homes of the spirit totems, because what else could it be? The plague was caused by the Jews poisoning the wells, because what else could it be? So, now it’s the aliens, because what else could it be?

“What else could it be?” is a sentence that should be punished by public ridicule, because everyone who ever used it was an idiot. It’s like answering every single question in science with “Jesus did it”.

It’s obvious that stupid people hate having question marks in their worldview, and they prefer whatever answer to statement of ignorance, but I don’t. I have no problem with stating ignorance. I don’t know what caused all sorts of things and I’ll tell you I don’t know, but then a stupid idiot with lots of confidence will state he knows the answer, because what else could it be?

Let me cite something that has absolutely no basis in evidence or knowledge of any kind, and is purely a hypothesis, but it provides an alternative to aliens – and, also, to the alternative claim that it must be demons, or nonphysical entities of some kind. It’s called the Silurian Hypothesis.

It goes like this. The dinosaurs evolved into a sapient species at some particular part of the world. This species had a habit of burrowing into the ground, and had whole underground settlements. Whether it was for growing/storing food, or for mining some resource, or for protection against big predators, or all of the above, I can’t tell you, but let’s say they were technologically in an early bronze age, 65 MY ago when the asteroid struck. Since they were dug into rock like Dwarves into Moria, they managed to survive the impact and its aftermath, and if they grew mushrooms or something underground as a food source, they could have survived just fine. Let’s say that the aftermath of the disaster put evolutionary pressure on them, and they evolved both intelligence and technology, and 65 MY is a very long time, mind you. Humans stretch some 200-300 KY into the past. 70 KY ago the Neanderthals ruled Europe. Civilization goes back some 5 KY. 11 KY ago we were in an ice age. So, 65 MY is enough for continents to shift, let alone for a species to evolve intelligence and technology that’s so far ahead of ours that it looks like visitors from another star system, because “what else could it be?”. What else could it be, the Fairies could be fucking in the sky, you fucking idiots. But let’s keep with the Silurian hypothesis. The objections would be as following: a civilization would strip Earth for mineral resources, leaving nothing for the early humans, who on the contrary managed to find things like copper, gold, zinc and iron all over the place, without having to dig into the mountains. Well, as I said, 65 MY is a long time, long enough for the mountains to erode, for the strip-mined sections to be washed away and new, abundant mineral sources to be revealed. One would expect technological signatures of such a civilization to be obvious; not really. Our signature was very obvious when we were broadcasting TV and radio all over the place, but now that we’ve transitioned to watching YouTube over the Internet, and it’s all transferred via fibre-optics and focused microwave beams, it’s pretty much undetectable. Extend this for a thousand years, and it’s the difference between the age of an ox cart and the age of iPhone. Technology of a species that’s been working on it at some pace for a million years in continuity might be something we might not even recognize as technology. I don’t know, using mycelia of fungi as computational devices or communication. Something. Whatever I make up is probably much inferior to what they would think of. They could use either geothermal sources for energy, or they could use nuclear energy, or something even more sophisticated that we wouldn’t even recognize. Let’s say they really like living deep in the mountains because that’s how they were saved from the cataclysm and they worship the mountains on a genetic level and go out only to explore this recent infestation that’s been spreading on the surface. Let’s say they have all kinds of flying saucers and “alien” shit. Let’s say they look generally anthropomorphic, and they are dinosaur-descendants like the birds, only some different branch, so they look more reptilian, so there’s your reptilian “aliens”.

Mind you, I pulled the whole thing out of my arse, mildly inspired by a Dr. Who episode, and I can now say “what else could it be?”.

Fuck you, that’s what it could be.

There’s been lots of very weird American talk about the aliens in the last two years or so. “Weird” because usually their government seems to deny and/or suppress such “leaks”, and this time it looks very much like they’re the source. So, what’s my take on it?

When I was a kid, I thought the existence of aliens was a sure thing – all those UFO and abduction reports had to be at least partially true, the size of the Universe practically guarantees that someone is out there, and sooner or later someone would figure out a way around the limitations posed by the speed of light.

The change in my thinking happened when I researched a few things for completely unrelated reasons; I researched evolution of life and mass extinctions, and I realised that our existence is contingent upon multiple extremely unlikely things. For instance, single (non-binary) stars are extremely rare, and binary stars tend to produce solar flares of extreme strength that routinely sterilise the habitable zone. I hear it commonly claimed that our Sun is an average, ordinary star, but that’s actually very far from reality. Our Sun is extremely well behaved for a star, and that’s a necessary condition for life not having to reboot after every major solar event. Also, the solar system is very unusual in a sense that it doesn’t have gas giants closest to the star, and instead has them in the outer system. Furthermore, Earth has an extraordinarily powerful and stable magnetic field, which is the reason why it doesn’t look like its twin planet, Venus, and the smaller sibling, Mars. This magnetic field, along with axial stability, seems to have a common cause – the Theia impact in the formative phase of the solar system, where a Mars-sized planet collided with Earth, and the ejecta from the impact formed the Moon. Apparently, the heavy core of that planet merged with the Earth’s core, while the lighter parts formed the Moon, leaving the Earth with twice the expected amount of heavy elements, whose radioactive decay keep the Earth’s interior liquid, and core spinning. There also seem to be some atypical things about Earth’s core that are still poorly researched, which might actually contribute to the magnetic field’s strength. Also, the Moon seems to axially lock the Earth, making it an extremely stable environment for the evolution of life.

Life itself in its most basic form seems to have come from space, and the evidence for this is that we’ve found all the basic chemicals for it on the asteroids and comets, and the earliest life on Earth seems to have formed as soon as the planet itself solidified enough. So, life had a very early start here, and yet it took an inordinate amount of time for it to form multi-cellular organisms, and the amount of luck necessary for that to happen seems to be extraordinary. I used to think that life itself is unlikely, but once you get it started, it will eventually evolve into intelligent life. However, based on what I’ve learned, the opposite seems to be the case. Life itself might actually be quite likely, and will probably start whenever the conditions are even the least bit favourable. Anything more complex than the simplest single-cell organisms without a defined nucleus and organelles, however, might be extremely uncommon and likely requires singular extremely unlikely events across billions of years.

Then we come to radiation. There’s cosmic radiation, and then there’s solar radiation. Earth has multiple layers of shielding against both – there’s the magnetic field, then the thick atmosphere, and then there’s the ozone layer. Without those, life might exist in the deep oceans, but not on land. Also, without the magnetic field, the oceans would evaporate into space, like they did on Mars, and probably on Venus as well, if they even formed in the first place.

I’m not saying that life is impossible somewhere in the atmosphere of the gas giants, or in the oceans of their satellites. I would actually be surprised if it didn’t exist there. However, I would also be extremely surprised if we found anything multi-cellular.

Our kind of life – multi-cellular, on the ground and not in a liquid or gaseous medium, complex, intelligent, and forming a civilization – has so many extremely unlikely prerequisites, that I became convinced that as large as the Universe is, it is too small for this to happen more than once. Earth indeed seems to be the centre of the Universe, if we define central in the terms of significance, because everything of significance seems to happen here. Sure, the Universe is big, and full of stars and black holes, rocks, dust and gas, but rather than being a “pale blue dot” of insignificance in the middle of nowhere, Earth seems to be the most special planet around the most special star, where extremely unlikely things occurred across time, to make everything we know possible.

My next argument against aliens is that, if they exist, they are inconsequential. We can argue back and forth as to why an alien species would come here, and produce nothing more than sightings of unexplained things, and occasional abduction testimony, but the fact remains that if the aliens are here, they are doing nothing of consequence as far as human life is concerned. If something is inconsequential, I’m certainly not going to dedicate much thought to it.

Sure, something might happen to change my mind – for instance, if aliens actually do exist and contact us, then they will cease to be inconsequential, and I will have to revise my ideas about how common our type of life is in the Universe, but so far it seems to be that the more we know, the more special Earth seems to be.