The other night I saw a UFO. It hovered over the valley with a continuous blue-white light and alternating green and red lights. This may or may not have been an alien, but it got me thinking. If this was another sentient being that had traveled the far reaches of space to come here, all they were doing was hovering over the valley. If aliens do exist, it is no wonder that they haven’t contacted us. We are more than just children in their eyes — we are bullies on Earth.
It irks me that people think aliens would come here to hurt us or extract resources. If they have mastered interstellar space travel then they wouldn’t need our resources. The universe is ripe with resources more abundant than those found on Earth.
There are planets entirely composed of water and even one that is a giant diamond. Thinking that aliens would come here for our resources or to hurt us is a simplistic mindset.
In order to travel through space a species needs a level of intelligence that we cannot comprehend. Physicist Michio Kaku uses the Kardashev scale to illustrate this. This scale is a way of ranking a civilization in terms of its energy use. A Type I civilization has mastered most forms of planetary energy, such as solar, wind, geothermal and hydrological. A Type II civilization is one that has moved onto the power of the sun. They harness the power of their nearest star. A Type III civilization is able to harness the power of multiple stars.
Currently, humans have not even reached the Type I level. We are stuck burning fossil fuels to derive our energy. If aliens exist and are watching us, then their civilization is light-years ahead of ours. Yet we believe we could comprehend the way they operate.
We are transitioning from a Type 0.5 to a Type I civilization. Look at how poorly we are managing this transition, though. We are living in the most technologically advanced times in human history.
According to Credit Suisse Research Institute, “with the richest 10 percent owning 86 percent of the wealth. The top one percent alone own 46 percent of all global assets.” This is just in terms of money, though. “The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that nearly 870 million people of the 7.1 billion people in the world, or one in eight, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2010-2012” But the world produces enough food to feed everyone.
If a civilization has mastered interstellar space travel, then surely they have already solved these societal problems. If they are capable of traveling light-years and are masters of the very fabric of space and time, they probably feed everyone on their planet.
Maybe that’s why we only see UFOs. They are afraid of us and don’t want to interfere with our attempts to solve our global problems. We divide among our own species by arbitrary categorizations such as race, sex, class, gender and religion. When you come down to it, we are all humans. We can barely handle each other, let alone another species that is more intelligent than us.
Next time you see a UFO, realize that whatever it is, it has traveled billions of light-years to Earth. Would a sentient being with greater intelligence than we can fathom come here to cause us pain and suffering? That seems to be a cop out. We can not even comprehend how you can travel across space. We can not even come close to guessing a UFO’s motive for being here.