Photo by Eliza Boylan for The Lafayette
Current technology is inadequate to attempt contacting extraterrestrial life.
President Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post last week that the Department of Defense would be releasing government files related to UFOs and extraterrestrial life.
But is the government really hiding top-secret alien knowledge from us?
“There’s no way you could keep that a secret,” said physics professor Stephanie Douglas, who researches star clusters. “People love to talk about conspiracies, but astronomers love to talk about stuff.”
Douglas mentioned other instances when astronomers were overeager to share their extraterrestrial findings, including news of the first gravitational wave detections that was leaked to scientists in 2015, before the news was meant to be officially announced.
Physics professor David Nice, who also researches astronomy, agreed with Douglas, saying that “it would be hard for us not to know” if there were aliens on Earth.
Douglas does believe, however, that “aliens probably exist.”
“It seems unlikely that in a universe as vast as ours, that there’s not other forms of life out there,” she said.
Nice, however, is more skeptical.
“What I think is ‘I don’t know,’” he said.
Regardless of one’s belief in the existence of possible friends from the cosmos, the issue of actually finding them remains the biggest hurdle.
“We only have one data point about what life looks like,” Douglas said. She recalled one short story that she still remembers from middle school, where the extraterrestrial life forms are revealed to “look like hamburger patties,” referring to “They’re Made out of Meat” by Terry Bisson.
Both Douglas and Nice noted the inadequacy of current technology in establishing contact with alien life.
“Our signals have only gotten at most 50 light-years away,” Douglas said. “That’s not a big part of the galaxy.”
“It is very hard to travel from one planet to another,” Nice noted. “It is very hard to even send signals that are strong enough to be detected on another planet.” He imagined that “maybe we will be able to someday, but I don’t really see how.”
Douglas noted that oftentimes UFO sightings are a “trick of perspective.”
“That might be something that is detected on a radar system, where you don’t know what it is and you never identify it,” he said of UFOs.