They are coming

Why wouldn’t aliens be invading us?

Imagine, if you would, that you are at a party with a group of friends. Perhaps it's a rowdy affair with the liquor flowing as strongly as the music is blaring. Or perhaps it's a more refined soiree with petite hors-d'œuvres and small glasses of sherry. Whichever type of party you would attend, imagine, if you would, that while you are enjoying the evening a friend of a friend approaches you to start up a conversation.

You’ve never met this person before, but they seem rather bright and carry their part of the conversation well. As the conversation goes on, you can see that they are as committed to a single idea as they are intelligent. Ordinarily, this would be quite a good thing, and you would have taken this friend of a friend to be an academic if their obsession was physics, or maths, or philosophy. However, this friend’s obsession is about aliens and not just any conspiracy about lizards ruling the earth, or aliens building the pyramids, but about an imminent invasion of our blue planet by a hostile invading space-fleet. 

They seem so passionate about this, and clearly well read, but a lot of what they say passes clean over your head. They talk about “p(doom) levels” and “updating their priors”, and other terms you aren’t familiar with, but which feels quite academic. They mention all sorts of theoretical scientific theorems, mathematical postulates and even some recent astrophysics discoveries such as inconclusive signals found in deep space. 

They certainly have been saying a lot, but it all feels rather circumstantial and incredibly hypothetical. So, in the interest of getting back to your party, you ask him what evidence they have that an invading fleet of hostile aliens is on its way to conquer earth. It seemed like a straightforward question; if only it had a straightforward answer, you may have been able to enjoy the rest of the party.

Unfortunately, the “evidence” they have seems to rest entirely on imagination. Not their imagination, but yours. For the next two hours that pass, you are asked question after question about how you could imagine anything except an invasion being the most obvious answer. After all, this pessimist argues, you can imagine orders of magnitude more negative actions taken towards humanity than positive ones. It is illogical to assume aliens would be beneficent towards us. What’s more, they say, just look at our own history. When wasn’t exploitation and hostile actions the norm?  Why should we expect anything else from visiting aliens?

And even if they didn’t want to actively harm us, look at how we “accidentally” treat animals. Aliens could very well simply want to build an interstellar warp highway or some such megastructure that destroys earth accidentally as a side effect. To aliens, we may be nothing more than ants. How many ant colonies haven’t humanity accidentally wiped out while building our highways and byways?

Perhaps, you say wearily, but why would aliens come here at all? “Why wouldn’t they?!” exclaims your debating partner. Every mineral and substance on earth can be found in much greater amounts elsewhere in the cosmos. It’s terrestrial life, and humans particularly, which are unique to earth. And can you imagine any other motive for coming to earth, once they hear all of our broadcasted signals that are sent off into space, than to destroy or enslave us?

But how can anyone know that there is a fleet on its way to us now? Well, that’s just logical, they say. The galaxy is billions of years old, and even earth is a few billion years old. Imagine, if even one civilisation arose a million years ago, they’d have an enormous technological head start on us! Where would we be in a million years? Of course they’d have space travel by now. And, since the distance between stars is so vast, we must assume that there is a spaceship between two stars at any given point in time. It just makes logical sense that somewhere there is a spaceship en route to earth. With all the signals we push out into space, they undoubtedly know we are here.

And with all the thousands of sightings of UFOs (or UAPs as they are now called) all over the world and across history, that is a lot of eyewitness testimony that there is something alien that knows we are here. Logically, not every UFO encounter can be a fake.

Alright, you sigh and say, supposing all of that is a fact, how would these aliens even conquer earth or do whatever negative things they want to do to us? Can’t we fight back? Can’t we win. The prophet of alien doom looks smugly at you and says that they don’t need to provide a plausible scenario to you. After all, they say, if you were to play a game against the best chess grandmaster, they wouldn’t know how you’d lose, but they would still know you’d lose all the same. Since any alien fleet that could cross the interstellar gulfs would be more technologically advanced than we are, they would win by default. They are the chess grandmaster and we are the rookie player.

It is at this point that you make an excuse and flee the debate, but the conversation stays with you all night. The prophet of alien doom certainly had an answer for everything, and you could indeed imagine on some planet in some universe they’d be entirely correct. However, there literally was no evidence for anything the doomer said. Chess is not an analogy to real life, and mysterious signals in space does not an alien civilisation make. The universe being old may mean there is a spaceship somewhere, but it also may not, and it doesn’t mean that spaceship is coming after us. 

While alien life somewhere in the galaxy is mathematically probable, and it is possible they want to come eat you, you’d give it less than a one in a million chance of actually happening. Or, as the doomers put it, your p(doom) value would be at around 0.0001% for an alien invasion.

While an alien invasion may sound silly, do we really have any greater evidence that superintelligent AI entities in the future will harm us?