That’s easy: first contact with an alien civilization.
I’m a space and science fiction fanatic. I mainline science fiction novels, keep tabs on the latest discoveries via the JWST, and I think about what’s out there probably more than I should.
There’s a burning desire in our hearts — for some of us, at least — to know for sure that we’re not the only ones, that humanity is not alone in a cold, lonely and infinite universe.
The events of 2026 are testament to that desire to know. Between the government release of UFO-related documents, former government employees coming forward with tall tales of crashed ships of non-terrestrial origin, and the return of Steven Spielberg to the director’s chair for another film speculating about what’s Out There, we’ve been thinking about aliens quite a bit collectively.
As for that central question, I’m not talking about simple cellular life. I don’t think you can find an astrophysicist, astrobiologist, astronomer, evolutionary biologist or anyone in a tangentially related field who honestly thinks life is unique to our planet.
The more relevant question is whether we are the sole sapient species, the lone civilization in our galaxy.
Think about the numbers: There are an estimated 300 billion star systems and trillions of planets in the Milky Way! Life has had a lot of places to evolve.
The Fermi paradox
That was the point the physicist Enrico Fermi made in 1950, when he had a now-famous lunchtime conversation with fellow scientists at Los Alamos. Probability alone indicates the galaxy should be teeming with life.
So, he asked his colleagues, where is everyone?
It’s now known as the Fermi paradox, and it’s guaranteed to come up in almost every conversation about the possibility of intelligent aliens. With so many star systems, planets and moons, surely some other species took an evolutionary path toward intelligence.
It’s a bit more complicated than that, of course. In a universe that is 13.7 billion years old, there has been enough time for innumerable species to evolve and fade, for countless empires to rise and fall. That means the question is “When is everyone?” just as much as it’s “Where is everyone?”
The truth is we’ve only been looking in earnest for about half a century. It’s only in the last four or five decades that we’ve had telescopes like the Hubble, Spitzer, Kepler and James Webb, which have revolutionized astronomy by giving us views we could previously only dream of.
It was only in the 90s that astronomers pointed the venerable Hubble at a black, seemingly empty patch of space, took a two week exposure and changed our understanding of the cosmos forever when the resulting image showed some 10,000 galaxies that were too faint to see before.
That patch covered only 2.6 arc minutes, or 1/24 millionth of the sky!
Despite what we’ve learned, we’ve barely begun the search for other intelligent civilizations.
Drawing any conclusions from our efforts so far would be like organizing a manhunt, then calling it off five seconds later because the suspect hasn’t been caught yet. Fifty years is nothing when scouring the cosmos. It’s less than an eyeblink of an eyeblink on a galactic scale.
Looking in the wrong place
As for the idea that aliens have visited us, that they crossed the interstellar void to etch patterns in our crops, delight stoners with light shows and evade every camera on the planet except for low resolution bricks from the dawn of the cell phone era, I’m not buying it. Neither should anyone else. Likewise for the claim by the JD Vances of the world insisting alleged UFOs are “demons” sent to torment us.
As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it is abundantly clear that the UFO enthusiast community can only offer blurry images not because of a lack of high resolution cameras, but because high res photos of the “phenomena” reveal they are mundane objects. They only become strange spacecraft when you blur them and squint.
But there’s another, more important reason why aliens are not joyriding through our skies: if aliens are out there, there simply has not been enough time for them to become aware of our existence, let alone travel here.
Even light is “slow” on a galactic scale
As most of us know, when we look at the stars we’re seeing them as they were in the past, not as they are now. That’s because the distances between stars are so mind-bogglingly great that even light, which moves faster than anything in our universe, takes ages to cross the void.
The same limitation applies for anyone who might be looking in our direction from somewhere else in the galaxy. They see our star system as it was, not as it is. They see a silent star system without signs of an intelligent civilization.
Our galaxy is more than 100,000 light years across, so let’s say an intelligent alien race exists relatively close by in galactic terms, at “only” 500 light years away.
We have been a technological civilization for only a short time and didn’t create signals powerful enough to reach beyond our star system until the 1970s, according to SETI. That means there weren’t technosignatures hinting at our presence until about 50 years ago.
As a result, the soonest our hypothetical aliens could become aware we exist is about 450 years from now. That is how long it will take light carrying information about our technosignatures to reach them.
If our hypothetical alien friends are looking in our direction (a massive if in a galaxy with 300 billion stars to analyze), and if they have highly advanced telescopes, they might detect us. If we imagine they’re friendly and they send a message saying “Howdy, neighbors! You’re not alone! There are wonders to discover and many civilizations to meet out here!” it would take another 500 years for the message to reach us.
That means we wouldn’t know anything until around the year 3,000, if we survive that long without blowing ourselves up. (That’s a real possibility, and things aren’t looking very promising right now.)
And again, that’s if hypothetical intelligent aliens exist in our immediate galactic neighborhood. If there’s an intelligent civilization that exists, say, 4,000 light years away — which is still not very far in galactic terms — the soonest we could hear from them is about 8,000 years from now. (Four thousand for them to detect our technosignatures, four thousand for their message to reach us.)
The point is, space is big. Ridiculously, incomprehensibly, stupidly vast. More than 99.995 percent of the galaxy cannot be aware of our existence yet, let alone travel here, because of the reasons explained above.
The distances between stars are so great that we cannot comprehend them as they are, because nothing in human experience compares. We can only understand them in the abstract. As terrestrial animals with short lives, we are simply not equipped to live or think on galactic timescales.
To put this in context another way, our closest stellar neighbor, a volatile triple star system, is 4.3 light years away. Yet even with the most advanced propulsion systems currently available to us, it would take us more than 70,000 years to get there!
If we manage to crack fusion and humanity’s most brilliant engineers are able to fit a starship with a compact fusion reactor, the travel time to the nearest star becomes “only” about 7,000 years.
Understanding just how big space is, and how long it takes to travel between stars, goes a long way to explaining why we’re wasting our time and resources with a fruitless search for alleged alien craft in our skies.
So where does that leave us?
I believe that one day we will learn we’re not alone. By we, I mean our species. I really hope it happens in my lifetime, but for all the reasons explained above, that’s wishfull thinking. The universe doesn’t care what we want, and it certainly doesn’t change the geometry of space-time to accommodate the wishes of dreamers on Earth.
Alien: Friend or foe?
I don’t think we’ll have to worry about belligerence. If a civilization is capable of sending ships to us, there’s literally nothing in our inventory of meager, planet-based resources that could interest a species that advanced. They wouldn’t want to eat us, because our biology would not be compatible. The amount of energy our entire civilization can muster would be laughable to an interstellar species.
And as the physicist Michio Kaku has argued, there’s a very strong argument to be made that if a species is advanced enough that interstellar travel is relatively trivial, it would have long ago shed any tendencies toward tribalism, sectarian violence or inventing gods of the gaps. You simply cannot reach that stage of advancement if you’re wasting resources and your most brilliant minds on war and petty divisions. (Kaku knows that better than anyone. His mentor was Edward Teller of Manhattan Project fame.)
The more significant danger, as Kaku likes to say, is that we may be beneath their notice and we’ll get “paved over.” A civilization capable of building cosmic megastructures, for example, wouldn’t consult us any more than we’d consult ants before laying a six lane super highway over their ant hill.
Still, there’s always a chance we’ll encounter something like MorningLightMountain, the nightmare alien intelligence from Peter F. Hamilton’s incomparable novel Pandora’s Star. The problem with MorningLightMountain wasn’t that diplomacy failed. There was no disagreement over resources or territory. Humans didn’t threaten it.
Rather, the alien’s psychology was so different from ours that it could not understand the concept of allowing other life to exist in the galaxy. No amount of discussion or attempts to persuade it would have made a difference, so immediately upon learning of our existence it launched a genocidal war that forms the bulk of Pandora’s Star and its sequel, Judas Unchained, two of the most beloved books in the modern science fiction canon.
Still, I’d like to think there is a galactic fraternity out there, an informal alliance of intelligent species united by curiosity and the effort to understand our universe. Whatever’s out there is likely to take forms we can never imagine and think in ways that never occurred to us.
If one day we do make first contact, I hope the best of humanity will be our representatives. And on that day, I hope humanity will be awestruck by the wonder of the universe, realize that slaughtering each other over land or beliefs is insane, and finally become united as a species.
Or even better, finally united as the children of Earth. After all, Buddy has made it abundantly clear that if I come into possession of a starship, he gets the most comfortable seat on board and gets to drive. The latter ain’t happening, but as for the former, I’d be thrilled to explore the cosmos with my little pal.
Pain In The Bud 