This brief essay is not about philosophy or politics or history. When one teaches philosophy to undergrads, one is asked odd questions on a regular basis. I say “odd” because the questions (1) have nothing to do with philosophy and (2) can be answered by thinking about them for about a minute.
School children are told there is no such thing as a dumb question because the idea is to encourage kids to ask questions. There are, in fact, dumb questions—it’s remarkable how many adults still actually believe the contrary. The following questions come very close. Here are three of them:
1. Question: What came first, the chicken or the egg?
Answer: the egg.
Explanation: If one says “the chicken,” one is saying there has always been chickens. There were chickens at the point of the Big Bang, when the planet was cooling, etc. I hope we can all agree that there used to not be chickens. So, at one point, a non-chicken had to produce a chicken (through evolution). The intermediate step: the egg. One does not need chickens to make chickens; one needs eggs to make chickens.
2. Question: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
Answer: No.
Explanation: If you’re in a quiet room, by definition there is no music. However, just about every room one could be in is filled—like jam-packed—with radio waves. Yet, despite the omnipresence of radio waves in your silent room, you do not hear any music. Reason: there isn’t a radio on. There is no apparatus there to receive and amplify the radio waves. One needs a radio to convert the radio waves into sound. Likewise, the falling tree produces sound waves, which, left unreceived, just travel throughout the forest, much like by the radio waves in your silent room. In order for there to be sound, there needs to be ears to hear that sound. So, for that matter, if a radio is on and no one is there to hear it—not even a squirrel or a raccoon—it just produces sound waves. Much like the tree.
3. Question: Do you think aliens have visited Earth?
Answer: No.
Explanation: We can see pretty far, a whole lot farther than Galileo could. Our telescopes are (in my opinion) quite impressive. We can see enormous distances and watch galaxies slowly forming. According to NASA: “The farthest observation that Hubble has made to date is of the galaxy GN-z11, which is located about 13.4 billion light-years away.” (For reference, Mars is 12 light-minutes away.) Nevertheless, aliens (here meant as little green men) would have to come from a place farther than that. And if they were to visit Earth, they would have to obviously travel all that distance; they would have to physically travel a distance that we cannot see.
Therefore, we are talking about a race or species of being that possesses technological sophistication that we could only dream of. So, right there, it raises the question: Why would they come here? And when they allegedly do, they demonstrate incompetence and crash in the desert? And how come no one at MIT or Caltech or Cambridge or Oxford has reported seeing an alien or a UFO? Why is it always some yahoo in the middle of a bean field with a colander on his head?
Let’s conduct a thought experiment: Let’s say you wanted to make contact with the baboons at the zoo. Not to study them; you want to introduce yourself. Now, would it not behoove you to make contact with the smartest baboon? Would you go out of your way to find the dumbest baboon? So, why don’t aliens land their spaceships at MIT?
Yes, pilots for the military have seen strange things during their flights, but I would chalk this up to experimental technology. Given that the aliens in question possess breathtaking technology, I don’t believe it’s a stretch to assume they could be adept at staying out of sight. And this raises another question: Why would the aliens make the trip in the first place? (They were low on salt?) If they are that sophisticated, why not just observe us from a distance? Like you could with the baboons.
I know, I know there are many people who really hope there is intelligent life out there. Not bacteria-like life on the moons of Jupiter in their subsurface oceans but little green men. However, given all the variables that had to be in place to allow for complex life on earth, it would seem a serious long shot that this has happened repeatedly. It’s not arrogance, it’s called being a rational adult.
For what it’s worth, I highly recommend the 2016 sci-fi film “Arrival.” It is an intelligent film about the subject of alien visitation. Check it out. It’s really good.
