ET and AI (and other acronyms)

 

by Craig Willms

I find it extraordinary that the U.S. government is trickling out information on potential extraterrestrial intelligence when for decades the official response was denial and obfuscation. Why now? Is it the worldwide saturation of cell phone cameras? That probably has something to do with it, no doubt. I personally think it has something to do with the coming artificial intelligence. Many things will be revealed when the elite and the money crowd no longer have a stranglehold on information and power. If anything, artificial intelligence will give us true intellectual freedom (right before it annihilates us).

What does AI have to do ET? Maybe nothing, maybe everything. We've been sitting on the doorstep of AI for decades. Finally, computers have the power to process an AI. I wondered if perhaps it is AI that will allow us to know the truth about advanced alien races and ultimately allow us the capacity to join the club of galactic travelers. The idea of communicating over such vast distances and time periods seems a sheer impossibility to our limited human minds, we just can't get past the physics of the universal speed limit. Could it be that we need a General Artificial Intelligence to be able to conceive and comprehend the answer to this conundrum? Maybe that is our barrier to joining the galactic community. 

Many great sci-fi stories, movies and novels point to the advent of human-made nuclear weapons conceivably attracting the attention of spacefaring races, simply because of the immense power of nuclear weapons. It makes a certain amount of sense. Since we have no way of being threatening to something we have no knowledge of, we can't threaten ET. So, it's perfectly possible Earth is merely being monitored and studied. In the course of pursuing this strategy, could the aliens have inadvertently revealed some aspects of their activities? It seems not only possible but quite plausible. There have been too many credible stories and too many paranoid professionals afraid to spill what they've seen on the chance their careers could be damaged. 

From 1947 on we've had presidents press the subject and demand to be fully briefed. Whether these demands were merely placated, or the truth scared them back into silence is unclear. Therefore, nothing that was revealed carried any authority - until just recently. Clearly the cover-up and obfuscation began with the Truman presidency. The Eisenhauer team followed suit. I'm unaware of what Kennedy's, Johnson's or Nixon's role in the lies were. The assassination dominated Kennedy's legacy and Johnson and Nixon were constrained and consumed by the Vietnam War. In this era the government engaged in secretive "projects" that spawned constant rumors. The rumors were a result of incompetence or a designed false flag, that's an unknown right now. Presidents Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Trump all made public declarations on the subject. It was only Bushes and Obama that were silent. Actually, I'm unclear whether Obama said anything on the subject, I did not listen to him very much and don't care, he never said anything that moved me. Now the Bushes... Well... That's another story. Considering that Papa Bush was once the director of the CIA he never breathed a word on the subject that I'm aware of. That's interesting in and of itself, but that Bush II never talked about it makes it very interesting indeed - granting his father's past roles.

If I'm remembering right President Trump had something slipped into a bill that was eventually passed. It demanded a public accounting of the UAP(UFO) subject by a certain date. The DOD did produce a report and released it on time. The report was unremarkable in that nothing was revealed that put meat on the bones of the controversy, but it was the first time the government gave the topic a semi-serious public treatment. The bottom line is that they said many incidents were simply of unknown origin. There was no speculation, just an acknowledgement of an incident and a mystery. Since then, a few more reports were released by the military in an official form, again nothing concrete or astonishing. Still, the weight of an official government decree is a complete 180 from the traditional government response on the subject.

One interesting point in this brave new tone taken by the U.S. government is the fact that the U.S. Navy has had zero involvement in the revelations short of suppling some video footage. The Navy is the grandad of the DOD and the backbone of national defense. It's interesting to speculate on why the Navy is left out of the "official" reports. Keeping the real information close to navy vest seems the only reasonable explanation. Yes, the DOD complied, but only a fool would believe they told the whole truth. 

One thought many people have had on the subject of persistent government obfuscation is that the government doesn't really know what's going on - that they are as confounded as the rest of us. This also makes a certain amount of sense. It very well may be humanity, despite the imagined high-tech reality, is so painfully primitive that ET doesn't even consider the thought of communicating with us. Do we actually try to communicate with ants or termites. They are non-human species that are capable of building immensely large and complex structures in a highly organized hierarchical matrix. Do we try and reach out mentally, to communicate on their level? Not to my knowledge. The same thing could be true of alien species with regards to humans. Human AI may change that.

Humans have only advanced esoteric scientific knowledge in the past 2000 years after more than 100,000 years of existence. We are babes in the wood on the grand scale of the universe. We can barely live with each other let alone exist in a complicated and potentially dangerous galactic neighborhood. Bright minds have speculated that immature and violent civilizations might very well snuff themselves out before they can advance far enough to leave the bonds of their home system. That also seems plausible considering our history as a race. This is why I think AI might be the game changer. 

It may be that AI will never be more than the sum of human knowledge with the ability to instantly analyze and act on it. What if AI free of the moral and biological barriers imposed on our flesh and bone selves is able to actually advance knowledge and comprehension that will solve problems we haven't even identified yet? It could also destroy humanity before we know what hit us. No one really knows where this will go. Obviously, we need Captain Kirk to help us go where no man has gone before!

UPDATE: UFO Over Texas

Something I never mentioned in the previous post was that several witnesses of the Stephenville UFO(s) reported seeing military jets giving pursuit. This was predictably denied by military spokesmen from a nearby air base. Since the story had legs and moved like wildfire through the local and then national media just as predictably the military has changed its story. The claim is now rather than commercial jets and the sunset playing tricks on the unsuspecting it was a training mission with 10 F-16 jets.

Initially the military said that they had no jets flying that evening. I supposed they head slapped themselves "oh yeah, those jets - we did have a training mission - musta have slipped our minds."

The witnesses said they first saw the craft silently moving across the sky (the silence was one thing that caught their attention about the whole experience). A short time later the object reappeared and was being pursued by the military jets. Now I have seen - and heard - fighter jets take off and fly and I can assure you they are anything but silent. They can be heard for miles. Now multiply that by a factor of ten and tell me someone witnessing that would report on the silence???

Writing for the NationalLedger.com Alan Burkhart sums it all up quite nicely:

And, if indeed these are extraterrestrial visitors then why are they buzzing around the planet? If they have the technology to fly across the void to our world, why do they not just land and have a chat (maybe they're afraid of those F-16's)? And why all the lights? Obviously, they don't care to travel with any degree of stealth. They wish to be seen. But why announce one's presence so dramatically and then just speed away?

So many questions.

Some time back, I wrote that there cannot be a massive government conspiracy to keep a lid on knowledge of UFOs because our government cannot keep a secret. I'll admit to having changed my mind. While the bulk of the supposed sightings across the globe are probably either false alarms or hoaxes, too many of them have the ring of believability to be false. Too many people with nothing to gain by fabricating a UFO story have reported sightings in good faith. Far too many of these stories describe one or more of the same types of objects - either cigar-shaped or spherical, and either glowing from within or illuminated by banks of colorful lights.

And, the lies produced by our government are getting sillier by the day. Steve Martin, a pilot who saw the object near Stephenville said, "A bunch of stuff is bubbling up. They may have to tell us the truth."





CW

UFO Over Texas

Larry King was talking about it. The Washington Post, CBS, Fox, the AP and MSNBC reported on it. A UFO over Stephanville Texas seen by dozens of people has stirred things up. Is veil finally coming off this whole UFO scene. One observer was quoted as saying:

“It's unexplainable,” Odom said. “It was something not natural; it was moving way too fast.”

In Mexico over the last few years there have been sightings of UFO's by 100's of people in large crowds, including police and government officials. More than once the crowds saw multiple UFO's in the daytime skies. The skeptics come out of the wood work and claim that ordinary people are not trained observers and don't know how to interpret what they saw. This was case in Phoenix ten years ago when hundreds of people all over the city saw a gigantic UFO that was visible for a very extended period of time. According to the skeptics there are always logical explanations - usually referred to as "atmospheric conditions" or normal aircraft so distant that they look strange to the naked eye. Here an untrained observer cleverly observed the Texas craft:

Sorrells said he has seen the object several times. He said he watched it through his rifle's telescopic lens and described it as very large and without seams, nuts or bolts.

Sorrells said. "It feels good to hear that other people saw something, because that means I'm not crazy."

I reported right here in 2006 about the United Airlines pilots and other ground crew personnel at O'Hare International in Chicago who reported seeing a saucer-shaped craft hovering over the airport before shooting up through the clouds. Again federal officials and skeptics said nothing showed up on the radar and explained it as some type of weather phenomenon.

Citing the lack of any physical evidence the skeptics say we have nothing to prove that UFO's are anything but ordinary events that "look" extraordinary. Hard to argue the point about having physical evidence. However, more and more people are convinced the U.S. government in particular knows much more than they are letting on. Other governments are starting to come forward. The feeling I get is that something is going on and the government does absolutely know some things they are not willing to share, but the bottom line is that I don't think they have any better answers than the rest of us.

This is the very premise of my version of the "Great American Novel" that I wrote a few years ago. It is available here for all to read -- Eye In the Sky -- you tell me: is it actually coming true?



CW

In A Blink of An Eye: A Lonely World

The question of whether there is extraterrestrial intelligence equal to or greater than Earth's humanity has fascinated me for decades. I am not alone with wonder. There is a whole industry of science fiction books and movies that have captivated the curious since the days of H.G. Wells, not to mention active government and private efforts to find ETI. I must admit to being skeptical and hopeful at the same time. I love a great conspiracy as much as the next guy but when it comes to UFOs, aliens and X-Files I would need to see it with my own eyes before being thoroughly convinced. This may sound odd coming from someone who believes in God. The difference I think lies in the spirit that I KNOW exists in me - this is where my very real connection to God is.

While all this (and that) is ripe for argument I think it is misguided to declare unequivocally that God and or ET does not exist. Allowing that God exists outside/apart from our physical space/time continuum we move on to ET by assuming he shares our physical universe.

In 1961 astronomer Frank Drake developed what became known as the Drake Equation as a way to focus on the factors which determine how many intelligent, communicating civilizations there are in our galaxy. The Drake Equation is: N = N* fp ne fl fi fc fL

fp is the probability that star system will have planets

ne is the number of habitable planets in a star system that has planets

fl is the probability that life evolves on a habitable planet

fi is the probability that intelligent self-aware life evolves on a habitable planet

fc is the probability that intelligent life will attempt interstellar communication within 5 billion years of evolving on a habitable planet.

fL is fraction of the planet's life during which the communicating civilizations live

This formula is as good a place as any to begin. As time and our technology continues to progress the figures used to populate this equation will continue to change. In '61 we had no evidence that planets even existed around any star but our own. Today we have indirectly observed hundreds of planets. So at least that part of the equation can be substantiated as having some semblance of validity. The question of time is the wild card.

Question: For each civilization that does communicate, for what fraction of the planet's life does the civilization survive? How long will we survive?

If modern man (homo sapiens) is anywhere from 40,000 to 250,000 years old it constitutes a mere blink of an eye in Earth's geologic time. Next, consider how fast mankind became technological. Taking the advent of the steam engine as the first high tech wonder that changed everything we are looking at less than two hundred years from the dawn of the age of machines to this computer/Internet I am working on right now. In between we have put an man on the moon and have learned control the atom at the nuclear level - for better or worse. That's pretty remarkable, and pretty quick. The sum of human knowledge is increasing at an exponential rate. Machine knowledge or AI is just in its infancy. Imagine what the next 200 years will bring...

Since it is believed that the Earth is around 5 billion years old and the universe as far as we can perceive it is 13 to 14 billion years old then why would it be inconceivable that hundreds if not thousands of space faring races would have risen - and fallen. We are just one planet in a galaxy of billions of stars and the Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies, the numbers are mind boggling.

That being said it is hard to imagine that humanity will go on forever, especially if we never leave this planet and colonize others. If humanity ever does develop the technology to visit other star systems in this galaxy I would be surprised if "we" don't come across extinct technological civilizations in the same way we still come across primitive earthly civilizations. By the same token someday ET will come across ours.

The other thing to consider, leaving science fiction behind, is that perhaps traveling faster than the speed of light is impossible and that the great distances between stars and galaxies will forever make it impossible for planet bound intelligences from ever finding each other. Carl Sagan spoke to this very real possibility, and he may have been been right. Are we a lonely planet?


CW

Coming Clean on ET's

Earth: a Resort or a Laboratory?

There's nothing I like better than a grand old conspiracy theory. They can be a lot of fun and ideally the more preposterous the better. Take the grand daddy of them all - no, not the JFK assassination - I'm talking about the UFO cover-up! After 5 decades and thousands of UFO sightings and alien abduction stories no one has ever produced concrete physical evidence of extraterrestrial visitations. Still, the circumstantial evidence is extremely compelling. The videos coming out of Mexico are remarkable. Most recently UFO's were caught on video by news cameras covering the inauguration of a regional governor attended by many government officials. It's going to be rather difficult for them to issue any sort of denials now isn't it.

For the sake of argument let's say that ET is real and the government(s) knows about them. What benefit to the government is a blanket cover-up? For one, there is the social control issue. Would knowledge of extraterrestrials cause mass panic and lawlessness? It is possible. There is also the stategic advantage over other nations --- since we all know that information is power. There is the fear factor. Since governments, organized religions and the news media are in the fear management business could it be that divulging this information would lessen their grip on us while gaining them virtually nothing? Very possible.

Is the world ready for the truth whatever it is? Paul Hellyer, Canada's former defense minister thinks so. He is calling on the government's of Canada and the United States to come clean with what they know. Because of his former high ranking position he is being taken a little more seriously (and I mean a little) than the usual suspects claiming a massive government cover-up. I heard talk show host Michael Medved's condescending interview of Hellyer on the Salem Radio Network. Hellyer is known as a bit of a radical in his own country but he deserves some modicum of respect.

Hellyer entered the fray after seeing a documentary called "Seeing is Believing" and reading a book by Philip Corso called "The Day After Roswell". Corso was a career military intelligence officer and claimed to have managed research projects connected to recovery of the Roswell craft. Asking the question: was the Cold War a cover to develop "alien technology". Considering how technical knowledge, particularly in electronics, exploded a decade or so after Roswell the timeline seems plausible. Corso claims to have been involved in the reverse engineering alien technology in the 50's. Both Hellyer and Corso have their detractors but given the UFO footage I have seen on the Discovery and History channels over the last few years even the most cynical skeptic could not deny the "possibility" of extraterrestrial visitations.

If ET's are real then one of two scenarios are true. 1) the government - thereby all governments - have entered into pact with the aliens to keep the huddled masses in the dark, or... 2) the government doesn't know any more than we do about an alien presence and is practicing a denial stategy.

Me, I believe the government does know more, but not much more. I believe that they have NOT been contacted by the alien visitors. Then the question becomes what do the aliens want? Science fiction writers have addressed that question thousands of times. Any one of them might be right. Take, for instance, the movie "Predator" and it's premise that Earth is a resort - or a game farm if you will for alien safaris. I addressed this issue in an unpublished novel I wrote in the late 90s. In the "Eye In The Sky" aliens (who, in fact turned out to be human) discovered Earth accidently and upon witnessing the barbaric warrior mentality of us earthlings banned any possibility of contact with us as equals. Earth became a fishbowl for study.

There is another theory that dovetails into the Darwinian/Creation debate called Intervention. In this theory Lloyd Pye asserts:

Among those who study the processes of life on Earth, they must cope with the knowledge that a surprising number of species have no business being here. In some cases, they can't even be here. Yet they are, for better or worse, and those worst-case examples must be hidden or at least obscured from the general public. But no matter how often facts are twisted, data are concealed or reality is denied, the truth is out there.

Pye believes that we (humans) are the product of alien intervention for the purposes we can only guess at. In his fascinating essay "Evidence for Creation By Outside Intervention" he skewers Darwinian dogma and dismisses the notion of Intelligent Design by a Judeo-Christian God. He offers some compelling theories and asks good fundemental questions. He challenges an entrenched scientific community:

Apart from disputes about the date and circumstances of our origin as a species, there are plenty of other problems with humans. Like domesticated plants and animals, humans stand well outside the classic Darwinian paradigm. Darwin himself made the observation that humans were surprisingly like domesticated animals. In fact, we are so unusual relative to other primates that it can be solidly argued that we do not belong on Earth at all, that we are not even from Earth, because we do not seem to have developed here.

We are taught that, by every scientific measure, humans are primates very closely related to all other primates, especially chimpanzees and gorillas. This is so ingrained in our psyches that it seems futile even to examine it, much less to challenge it.

Whatever the ultimate truth is about alien visitation and UFO's I believe the world is ready to know. We deserve to know. Don't we?


CW