My go-to argument for skepticism about flying saucer sightings (which have been in the news again lately) is as follows: Any technology capable of getting here across interstellar distances would be able to avoid detection. And if they wanted to be seen, they’d simply hover over New York City or something. It’s basically the same as my argument against the idea that hypnosis can promote recall of past lives: If the deities or forces that control reincarnation wanted us to remember past lives, we would. And if they didn’t, the Divine will couldn’t be circumvented by a parlor trick. See, avoiding detection by radar and the like isn’t that difficult; we already have ideas (and elementary techniques) about how to do it right now. But people without a background in physics and/or astronomy really don’t grasp just how difficult it is to get from one star to another within any practical timespan. Popular sci-fi makes it look easy, but it’s incredibly difficult. Surpassing the sound barrier was mostly a problem of engineering & metallurgy, but surpassing the light barrier is so hard we don’t even have any widely-accepted (by physicists) theory about how it might be done. Compare the plethora of fictional ideas about what FTL travel might look like (hyperspace, wormholes, tachyons, spacetime folding, etc, etc, ad absurdum) to Renaissance fantasies about going to the Moon; the real thing, when we finally develop it, will probably resemble Star Trek about as closely as a Saturn V resembles a kite towed by birds. I’m defintely not saying that there are no such thing as alien visitors; what I am saying is that I won’t get excited about it until I’m offered more convincing proof than, “Some jet-jockeys saw lights that appeared to move impossibly fast.”
Incidentally, there’s a reason I say “flying saucers” rather than “UFOs”. Even when I was a tween (during the ’70s UFO craze) and people asked “Do you believe in UFOs?” I’d answer, “Yes, I believe there are things that fly that those who see them can’t identify.” At the time, I was still young and impressionable enough to believe in alien visitation, ancient astronauts, the whole schtick. But even then, I recognized using “Unidentified Flying Object” to mean “definitely an alien spacecraft” was dumb.
Isaac Asimov said something like: “People have complained to me that ‘flying saucers’ is undignified, that the proper term is ‘unidentified flying objects’. I wouldn’t mind the latter term, if not for the people who insist on identifying them!”
A major problem with arguments about “the light barrier” and “the sound barrier” is that the two concepts are physically entirely different.
First, “the sound barrier”. The “speed of sound” is the speed with which a compression wave of colliding particles propagates through a medium, a gas, liquid or solid. The “sound barrier” simply means that sound can propagate no faster than the speed of the wave of colliding particles in the medium.
When something moves through a medium at a speed faster than sound propagates in the medium, it has “broken the sound barrier”. For example, a bullet from a gun may arrive at its target before the sound from the bullet reaches the target.
But light does not require a medium to propagate. In 1887, Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley proved that there is no “luminiferous aether” through which light propagates. Light can propagate through a complete vacuum, containing no particles.
The physics of light is completely different from the physics of sound, despite some superficial mathematical similarities if light is considered to be a wave of E-fields and B-fields. But no medium is required for those fields to propagate.
If light is considered to be a particle, ie: a photon, then the physics is somewhat different.
But in neither case does light propagate like sound. That’s where Albert Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity come in. And that discussion is above my pay grade.
I read an interesting, and I think accurate, interpretation about why evidence of UFOs, flying saucers, aliens, etc., is almost universally of such poor quality. Because good quality evidence inevitably shows some natural phenomenon. The result of grainy video, blurry images, or bad lighting leaves room that our pattern recognizing brains jump right into, filling in the gaps. In past times those gaps were full of faeries and monsters, now in our technological times they are full of aliens and machines beyond our comprehension. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a virtual certainty that other intelligent life exists in the universe, but the idea that it has the ability to cross interstellar distances AND it has traveled here AND it is virtually undetectable, well, I will believe that when good quality evidence supports it.
Alex, I’ll take C&W songs that quote Enrico Fermi: