This Harvard professor claims an alien spaceship visited us in 2017
Sanity checks
He may or may not be right, and there is no way of proving or disproving this idea. But claims like this, especially from experienced scientists are disliked by the scientific community for many reasons.
If we decide that anything slightly odd that we don’t understand completely in astronomy could be aliens, then we have a lot of potential evidence for aliens – there is an awful lotwe don’t understand. To stop ourselves from jumping to weird and wonderful conclusions every time we come across something strange, science has several sanity checks.
One isOccam’s razor, which tells us to look for the simplest solutions that raise the fewest new questions. Is this a natural object of the type that we suspect to be extremely common in the Milky Way, or is it aliens? Aliens raise a whole set of supplementary questions (who, why, from where?) which means Occam’s razor tells us to reject it, at least until all simpler explanations are exhausted.
Another sanity check isthe general rulethat “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. A not quite completely understood acceleration is not extraordinary evidence, as there are many plausible explanations for it.
Yet another check is the often sluggish but usually reliable peer-review system, in which scientists publish their findings in scientific journals where their claims can be assessed and critiqued by experts in their field.
Alien research
This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t look for aliens. A lot of time and money is being devoted to researching them. For astronomers who are interested in the proper science of aliens, there is “astrobiology” – the science of looking for life outside Earth based on signs of biological activity. On February 18, NASA’s Perseverance rover will land on Mars and look for moleculesthat may include such signatures, for example. Other interesting targets are the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
In the next five years, we will alsohave the technologyto search for alien life on planets around other stars (exoplanets). Both theJames Webb Space Telescope(due to launch in 2021), and theEuropean Extremely Large Telescope(due for first light in 2025) will analyze exoplanet atmospheres in detail, searching for signs of life. For example, the oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere is there because life constantly produces it. Meanwhile,the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti)initiative has been scanning the skies with radio telescopes for decades in search of messages from intelligent aliens.
Signs of alien life would be an amazing discovery. But when we do find such evidence, we want to be sure it is good. To be as sure as we can be, we need to present our arguments to other experts in the field to examine and critique, follow the scientific method which, in its slow and plodding way, gets us there in the end.
This would give us much more reliable evidence than claims from somebody with a book to sell. It is quite possible, in the next five to ten years, that somebody will announce that they have found good evidence for alien life. But rest assured this isn’t it.
This article bySimon Goodwin, Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics,University of Sheffieldis republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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