Extraterrestrial Civilizations - Isaac Asimov [103]
Unsophisticated human beings with limited experience are impatient with puzzles and seek solutions, often pouncing on something they have vaguely heard of if it satisfies an apparently fundamental human need for drama and excitement.
Thus, mysterious lights or sounds, experienced by people living in a society in which angels and demons are commonplace beliefs, will invariably be interpreted as representing angels and demons—or spirits of the dead, or whatever.
In the nineteenth century, they were described as airships on occasion. In the days after World War II, when talk of rocketry reached the general public, they became spaceships.
Thus began the modern craze of “flying saucers” (from an early description in 1947) or, more soberly, “unidentified flying objects,” usually abbreviated as UFOs.
That there are such things as unidentified flying objects is beyond dispute. Someone who sees airplane lights and has never seen airplane lights before has seen a UFO. Someone who sees the planet Venus, with its image distorted near the horizon or by a mist, and mistakes it for something much closer, has seen a UFO.
There are thousands of reports of UFOs each year. Many of them are hoaxes; many of them are honest, but capable of a prosaic explanation. A very few of them are honest and entirely mysterious. What of these?
The honestly mysterious sightings are mysterious usually only in that information is insufficient. How much information can someone gather who sees something he cannot understand and sees it without warning and briefly—and grows excited or frightened in the process?
Enthusiasts, of course, consider these mysterious sightings to be evidence of extraterrestrial spaceships. They also consider sightings that are by no means mysterious, but are clear mistakes or even hoaxes, to be evidence of extraterrestrial spaceships. Some of them even report having been on board extraterrestrial spaceships.
There is, however, no reason so far to suppose that any UFO report can represent an extraterrestrial spaceship. An extraterrestrial spaceship is not inconceivable, to be sure, and one may show up tomorrow and will then have to be accepted. But at present there is no acceptable evidence for one.
Those UFO reports that seem to be most honest and reliable report only mysterious lights. As the reports grow more dramatic, they also grow more unreliable, and all accounts of actual “encounters of the second or third kind” would seem utterly worthless.
Any extraterrestrials reported are always described as essentially human in form, which is so unlikely a possibility that we can dismiss it out of hand. Descriptions of the ship itself and of the scientific devices of the aliens usually betray a great knowledge of science fiction movies of the more primitive kind and no knowledge whatever of real science.
In short, then, once we allow the practicality of easy interstellar travel, we are forced to speculate that Earth is being visited or has been visited, is being helped or at least left alone by a Federation of benevolent civilizations.
Well, perhaps, but none of it sounds compelling. It seems safer to assume that interstellar travel is not easy or practical
The final conclusion I can come to at the end of the reasoning in this chapter, then, is that extraterrestrial civilizations do exist, probably in great numbers, but that we have not been visited by them, very likely because interstellar distances are too great to be penetrated.
*This statement must be modified in view of the discovery of Pluto’s satellite. Charon, in 1978. Charon has 1/10 the mass of Pluto, so that Pluto/Charon are much more nearly a double planet than Earth/Moon are. Pluto and Charon are, however, quite small bodies, and the line of argument in this section may still be valid if applied to bodies large enough to be Earthlike.
*I must stress that the “evidence on hand” is fragmentary and uncertain. At any timetomorrow, perhaps-new evidence may break the chain of