by Tom Shafer
April 12, 2020
Once again last evening, I slipped into my hot tub around 1 a.m., expecting that the warm water would works its magic, soothing my aching hips and legs and even more importantly, relaxing my busy brain. Still rehabbing from my second back surgery in nine months, I recently received additional bad news about my broken body, that I have severe degenerative joint disease in both hips and abnormal lateral uncovering of both femoral heads. An upcoming visit with my new orthopedic surgeon will determine exactly what type of surgery my hips will require, but suffice it to say that I will once more be facing many weeks (hate to use the word “months”) of rehabilitation on the long road to complete recovery.
My damaged, painful hips. Note the protruding femoral heads
(they should be inside socket) and spurring on both heads and socket. Ouch!
Of course, this is yet another surgery attributed to my 2016 death-defying fall in Rocky Mountain National Park (see “To Every Stupidity There Is a Surgery” under the For Your Consideration tab for details). So far, including the two back surgeries, I have also undergone a double inguinal hernia repair, and for the time being (and hopefully forever) am ignoring a torn rotator and impingement in my left shoulder.
The innocent-looking Timberland Falls in Rocky Mountain NP —
which nearly killed me. Falling zone is to the right.
But this is not a ‘woe is me’ story. Though the last three years have been fraught with multiple challenges and significant pain, I recognize that in many ways I am lucky to be alive and that I am blessed to have injuries that are repairable: “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world’s first bionic man. Tom Shafer will be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.” Those of you of a certain age may have just reflexively broken into a familiar hum and will certainly remember these words from the opening of that perfectly ‘70s television program, The Six Million Dollar Man. I may not be bionic, but with a titanium and ceramic left knee, screws and other hardware in my lower back, surgical staples holding my large intestine together, and my soon-to-be-replaced hips, I am well on my way.
But back in my hot tub, I watched as an aircraft appeared on the southern horizon, moving fast, flying east to west. I have to admit that every night, I watch these “crafts” dashing across the sky and scrutinize their movements, assuring myself that they are indeed terrestrial. For me this is a long-time affliction going back to childhood (I blame Star Trek and Lost in Space), though today exacerbated by my own experience in the ‘90s with a “craft” that exhibited extraterrestrial qualities (see “Ghost UFO!” under the For Your Consideration tab for that story). Of course, my many, many discussions with father-in-law Richard Seifried color my adjudication of the UFO debate. He was longtime believer in extraterrestrial visitation to Earth, and served with the MUFON community of investigators for the states of Ohio, Oklahoma, and Arkansas for many years. And, he had his own experiences to draw on, and never hesitated to relate them when an opportunity presented itself.
Richard’s book on Oklahoma UFO sightings
Frequently when I think about the UFO phenomena, I am drawn to the Fermi paradox, that given the high probability of extraterrestrial existence in the universe at large, why haven’t we met them? The Fermi story is actually a cute one. Enrico Fermi, a physicist working at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, was having lunch with three fellow co-workers and physicists in 1950, and they were discussing a flurry of national UFO reports. When it was suggested that there was a one-in-a-million chance of incontrovertible evidence of spacecraft travelling faster than light in the next ten years, Fermi supposedly said that the probability was more like ten percent, then blurted out, “Where are they?”
After the laughter subsided, Fermi reportedly spent time analyzing data and calculating a more specific probability based on the number of solar systems like ours that could support earthlike planets, and ultimately concluded that we should have been “visited” many, many times. This work has been replicated and continued by other physicists and statisticians (Michael Hart, Frank Drake, Freeman Dyson, and John Barrow) with varying degrees of agreement and acknowledgment, from those who stand with Fermi’s original hypothesis to the Rare Earthers who believe that complex multicellular life is extraordinarily “rare” – even unviable.
But today’s incredibly powerful telescopes are detecting, almost daily, planets that orbit their stars at “comfortable” distances, ones that are habitable, sometimes known as the Goldilocks zone (of the Three Bears fable). If astrophysicists are right, that perhaps as many as a quarter of the billions of stars in our galaxy alone support habitable planets, then the possibility for life must be exceedingly high from a statistical analysis perspective.
And, if those same scientists are correct in their assessment that our galaxy is fourteen+ billion years old (and that our own sun is only four and a half billion), then it would seem probable that by now, at least one (and likely many more) of those habitable planets would have engendered intelligent lifeforms capable of launching their own interstellar aspirations. There certainly has been sufficient time for that type of advancement and development – maybe as much as eight or nine billion years!
And now, the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute is doubling down on its efforts to find alien life. Scientists there are developing new techniques to detect the signatures (called technosignatures in the scientific community) of life in our solar system and beyond: atmospheric composition, signs of technological activity and megastructures, radio signals (communications), and laser emissions (propulsion systems). By feeding data mined from VLA (Very Large Array) in New Mexico (and other arrays) into supercomputers configured to ferret for these technosignatures, researchers will be able to determine whether a given planet or planetary system might support life. Instead of random searching and speculating, scientists will now be practicing real science, examining the universe systematically with real data!
The VLA in New Mexico (compliments of digiphoto)
So, if you think odds are long that we will discover any of this, well, they are, but maybe not as long as you think. Vegas (as in Las) has actually set the odds of alien life confirmation at +2000 by the end of 2020. In other words, for your $100 bet, you will win $2000 (plus your original $100) if a UFO is filmed hovering over the first Las Vegas Raiders game at Allegiant Stadium in Paradise, Nevada. By comparison, my Cincinnati Bengals are currently set at +10,000 to win the 2021 Superbowl. That tells me that I have a better chance of seeing a UFO land in Paul Brown Stadium during a Bengals’ game than I do seeing my Bengals lift the Lombardi Trophy at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa in 2021.
So, does intelligent life exist beyond our own blue orb? Of course it does. Statistics alone tell us “they” do. Are “they” visiting us now – or have “they” been visiting us for many, many millennia? Or, are we actually “they,” as in we are the colony of some planet in faraway galaxy, an alien ant farm if you will (not to be confused with Alien Ant Farm)? Now those are fun questions! I know what my answer is, but what about you? Go Ants!!
Bill Anders’ iconic picture of earthrise from Apollo 8 — and the moon
(compliments of NASA)
