Alone in the Galaxy? And Roswell?

The Milky Way is the immense cluster of stars that turns out to be the astronomical city we live in--think of it as an overgrown Five Buroughs.  It has maybe 200 billion stars--200,000,000,000.  That's more stars that either Donald Trump or Bill Gates has dollars, at least for the time being.  Also, I wonder whether one of the two is far, far richer than the other.  Yet since I have no concept how many they have, other than "a whole lot," referring to billionaires doesn't tell me much.

What could give a better idea?  Well, I've been to Santa Barbara, LA, San Diego, and Tijuana.  Let's pretend that area has 20 million people.  20,000,000.  Takes you about four hours to drive across it if you do it in the middle of the night with no traffic and pretend there's no northbound delay at the border--fat chance.   And pretend you're on freeway at 75 mph all the way, which isn't quite true, either.  You take the San Diego Freeway, you take the 101, and I don't know what you take to cross Tijuana because I'm so boopdeedoo provincial--I was going to say so "damned provincial)."  So the 200 B of the Milky Way, aka The Galaxy, is ten thousand times as big a number as the 20 M of LA-Tijuana.  10,000  --  1 with 4 zeros after it.  So you'd need 10,000 of these areas-I was going to say cities but it's more than a single city--it's a region, maybe 50 miles across in places, 250 miles long?   10,000 of these areas would give the 200 B people.  The United States has enough people to populate about 15 such regions.  India has enough to populate about 50 of them--not much of a start.  Yet the whole crowded human world whole has a decent fraction of 10,000 LA-Tijuanas, maybe 350.  Call it 3%.  If you have any way of Grasping how many humans are on Earth--and I doubt I do--I certainly don't, you may have aGrasp of the suns in the Galaxy.  That's some Grasp.

Here we have a problem we can fittingly say is of astronomical size--we only know much about One Sun, at least by closehand observation, ours, good ole "Sol" we call it.  I think it was also called Helios, some other names.  Sol has Earth and about as many more planets and big moons as we have fingers on our hands, or twice as many.  It seems clear that none of them has produced anybody beside us who fly ships in space, and we don't yet do it very well or very far.  That's the objective evidence.

Yet this city of stars we live in, this Island Universe, this grand and beautiful Milky Way, has 200 billion other chances to produce a planet that gives the right conditions to produce races of beings with spaceships.  That's a lot of chances.  Most of us impressed-with-ourselves "deep thinkers"  (another word for Sway-do Intellectuals) on this subject seem to agree that the odds of our being alone in the Galaxy are low.  Like realllllllly low.

Another thing for you to ponder is that it seems the world of the stars we see has been around much longer than it took Earth to yield humans. We might say that doubles the chance, already astronomically high.  Well, if these other technological beings are probably around, they're way way Out There.  Hey, you could read Andrew Blum's book about the US government investigating flying saucers.  It's named Out There and it's good, very cautious, very diligent.  So if they're out there, then why the h--- don't they come visit us?  Stop by for lunch?  Not hungry?  Have a drink?   Don't drink?  Maybe they're Mormons or worshippers on the Seventh Day, Saturn's Day.  Or maybe we're stuck--they aren't Out There after all.  Or maybe they Have Stopped By but they stay hidden because we're not a really reliable bunch and they're waiting until we learn to be nicer to each other before we get to join their club.  Or they're actually around but are using us for something already, or they don't want to create a planetary panic or . . . .

So there's speculation and then there's Roswell (New Mexico), whatever that means.  Makes a good phrase.  We've got speculation and we've got Roswell, or are they the same thing?  Is there anything at all to make a sober-headed skeptic think "The Roswell Incident" is anything beyond speculation?  I'm personally involved with several sober-headed skeptics and I can't speak for them, but I can list them: my son Eric, my cousin Steve, my cousin Greg, my friend Doc Block, my friend and girlfriend stealer Jason, my friend Seth the investor--you get the idea.  The odds that any of them will read this blog are not astronomically low, but they're not high, either.  As a group they believe in organic evolution, human-induced climate change, and probably don't believe in Roswell, though I haven't polled them.
This "they believe" line reminds me of possibly my favorite line from the original Harold Ramis masterpiece movie, Ghostbusters.  Annie Potts the Ghostbuster secretary is interviewing a job candidate and says, "Do you believe in UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, esp, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full-trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster, and the theory of Atlantis?"  The sheer length of the list wears her out as she says it, and the absurdity of it got me belly-laughing.  The applicant has the correct answer, "I'll believe anything you say as long as there's a steady paycheck in it."

Speaking of believing, those who believe that a non-Earth-built spaceship crashed in the New Mexico desert about July 2, 1947 think some Galactic neighbors did drop by--drop being the important word.  A storm, the story goes, blew up one or more of their ships and killed a few little grey men, or grey women, or grey other.  Hey, if you're not playing by Earth's rules, there might be lots of choices--grey multi-sexes, grey nonsexes.  Whether such creatures exist or could exist is a subject Beyond-----utterly intriguing and utterly frightful, or utterly boring I can hear my son Eric saying, depending on your point of view.  UFO nuts say that life crawled out of a swamp somewhere past Neptune, built ships to cross between the stars, and then couldn't keep from crashing in the New Mexico desert.  How plausible is that?  How plausible is it that such a craft would get hit by a bolt of Earth-born lightening?  Those space ships should be fast, but lightening is not slow.

Steve Hawking thinks that if we get visited by heptapods or other creatures from Out There, it might turn out for humanity about like it turned out for American "Indians" when European "aliens" came calling--slavery, decimation, kicked around good, whole way of life ruined.  If that scenario came true, it would probably not be good for the economy, and the survivors (assuming there are human survivors) might have depression at an even higher rate than we do now, if that's possible.  Oh, it's possible.  Have you ever read about how in 1942 when we were losing World War II, people felt like the world was falling apart and began behaving, in some numbers, like there was nothing to count on?  Lots of people then stopped believing it was worth it to obey the old rules and started playing it fast and loose.  Did things while sober they wouldn't have done in normal times even if drunk.  What the hell?   

Carl Sagan says that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and saying ET phoned home is about as extraordinary as claims can be.  I can think of one other type of claim, or even two, clearly more extraordinary:  a) life after death and b) God, some big-hearted Big Brother hiding out behind the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.  One guy commented that there isn't "extraordinary evidence, just evidence."   Well, then, really clear evidence.  Really good evidence, too good for careful, sober minds to disagree about.  Sagan's examples were, to paraphrase him, he'd like to see sharp clear closeup photos of UFOs, of such quality we can verify that nobody was dicking around with us, or artifacts that we can all see are not from Earth because they're unlike all we know here.

Okay, good start.  This Roswell thing is going to take more than one post.  Maybe more than five.  All I did here was set the stage; we don't even have any players.  Bye.