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When tourists plan a trip to Arizona, they are sure to head straight for the Grand Canyon. Me, I would be underwhelmed by the Grand Canyon. To me it is just a big jagged hole in the ground that took maybe millions of years to create.

I would want to see the Barringer Meteor Crater instead. Guess how long this crater took to make… a fraction of a second!

For centuries, the crater was believed to be the caldera of an extinct volcano, even though there has been no significant seismic activity in that region. Arizona is far from any tectonic plate boundary. The planetary geologist, Eugene Shoemaker, was the first to recognize that the crater was caused by an asteroid strike.

According to Wikipedia, the Barringer crater was created about 50,000 years ago during the Pleistocene epoch, when the Colorado Plateau was much cooler and damper. The area was an open grassland dotted with woodlands inhabited by mammoths and giant ground sloths.

The crater is less than a mile in diameter and 600ft deep, a fraction of the size of the Chicxulub crater made by the 8-mile wide rock that it caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene event 66 million years back and drove the dinosaurs (and 70% of all living beings) to extinction.

The Chicxulub crater was so significant that created a boundary between two epochs – the Cretaceous and the Paleogene. If you want to read a ramble about it, I have posted a multi-part series of posts here. Just grab a beer and click the link below…..

https://spunkybong.com/2024/05/09/the-cretaceous-paleogene-extinction-event-episode-1/

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Imagine one day, 66 million years back, God comes upon those little wolf-like mammals, the ectoconuses, living hidden in burrows underground, too scared to emerge and be eaten by some foraging ‘pre-teen’ T-Rex. God says in his booming baritone, “Hi guys, I am sending you a nice present – a rock that will wipe out those scary dinosaurs. You’ll have all the time in the world to be able to come out and multiply, diversify, mutate. Eventually after 66 million years, one particular subspecies will have barbecues in their backyard and rule the earth.”

That is exactly what happened. If it hadn’t been for the Chicxulub meteor, maybe we sapiens would never have evolved.

And now, having achieved our dominance, we are left wondering whether there are others like us in the universe.

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Remember the Steven Spielberg movie, “Close encounters of the third kind”? Amazing movie. There is a part where the aliens are repeatedly messaging where they are going to land.

Actually the signal is a bunch of characters everyone is trying to decipher, when someone (an ex-cartographer) gets a brain wave and says those characters must be map longitudes and latitudes.

Yayyy!!!!!

But wait a minute!! Those alien visitors could not possibly have known about our system of longitudes and latitudes. How did they know that we have 360° around a circle? They could be having a system where they divvy up a circle into 1000°, couldn’t they? So, how would they know that latitudes go from -90 to +90°?

And the longitudes?? The aliens would have had to be aware that 0° longitude is an arbitrary line passing through Greenwich in England that the early 18th Century masters of the world – the Brits – had created. Our definition of 0° longitude came from a completely arbitrary human decision taken more than 200 years back.

To know all that would mean that the aliens knew the minutest details about our culture, politics and history. That begs the question…….If the aliens knew so much about us, why couldn’t they just send us a radio transmission in good old English that read, “Hi guys, we are going to land next to the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming”?

Worse, on deciphering the message the protagonists in the movie start building a long runway with lights on both sides. A runway?? Come on!!! A runway indicates that an object needs air to make a soft landing. Does an alien spacecraft that has travelled millions of miles through vacuum need a fucking runway?

Heck, Spielberg could have done worse. I love the guy’s movies so I’ll give him a pass on this one.

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According to astronomer J Allen Hynek (1910-1986), there are three ways to define our interactions with an alien……..

If an alien comes close enough for us to make visual contact, it is a close encounter of the first kind. The second kind is an actual intelligent communication from a distance and the third is the above two plus an actual physical contact (like in the movie).

So far neither of the above three have occurred. Be that as it may, astrophysicists are unanimous that extraterrestrial life exists. Whether that life is “intelligent” like ours is not known so far.

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If one considers the fact that intentional, intelligent transmissions like FM radio, TV and radar began on earth only 90 years back, one has to assume that whoever could receive our very first signals would have to be situated no more than 90 light years away at the time and is receiving them right as of now in 2025.

That alien TV watcher can’t watch Pornhub for while yet.

Right now, an alien 90 light years away is probably listening to an episode of “Amos n’ Andy” that aired in 1935 and ROFLing, not at the jokes but at how backward we all are, here on earth. And if he then decides to respond, we will receive his transmission in 2115. We shall all be dead by then.

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Within the 90-light year range, several exoplanets have been discovered. The closest known exoplanet is Proxima Centauri B, located approximately 4.2 light-years from Earth. It orbits the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, which is the star closest to us after the Sun itself. 

Let’s imagine that Proxima B is inside the “goldilocks zone” (habitable zone) of its star and it has an alien toddler sitting and watching our TV. What must he be thinking, if he is watching say, a clip of a couple performing a 69 on Pornhub. Will he appreciate the erotic beauty of it? Likely not.

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Jokes aside, it is virtually certain that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, there is no question in the minds of most astrophysicists. That however does not mean that we will be able to communicate with them. The astrophysicist, Neil DeGrasse Tyson explains it beautifully…….

It is known that there is only a less than 1% difference between the DNA of chimps and us humans. What a huge difference that 1% makes! We compose poetry, we are thinkers, philosophers, we have discovered quantum physics, we have created artificial intelligence.

In comparison, what can the smartest chimps do? A chimpanzee has the intellect of a human toddler. It can understand hand signals, pluck a banana beyond their reach by piling rocks one on top of the other and that is all that the smartest chimp can do.

Now imagine an alien species that has a genetic intelligence that is a similar 1% greater than ours just as our genetic intelligence is 1% greater than a chimp’s. What will we look like to them? Definitely not smart enough to communicate with in any intelligent manner. To them, the smartest among us, the Stephen Hawkings and the Einsteins, would be like their toddlers. Their l’il Donny can do the same equations for homework that Stephen Hawking can do.

Would that alien species judge us to be an intelligent species at all? Would they enslave us, make us do domestic chores, put us in a zoo? Would we even know if they did? Or will they find us too primitive to be of any use? Is Earth a zoo for the entertainment of those aliens? Are they laughing at the conflicts we fight amongst ourselves and the Nobel Prizes being dished out for our ”puny” scientific achievements?

There is a very real possibility that such aliens are out there, that they have combed the Milky Way Galaxy in their search for intelligent life, they have visited Earth and they have observed minutely the way we go about our lives.

The most distressing thought that we can have is that based on all the data that the above aliens collected, they have come to the conclusion that there is no “intelligent” life on Earth.

And they have moved on……