The Guy In Charge of Searching for Alien Tech Says It Doesn’t Exist. Yet.
The president of the SETI Institute, Bill Diamond, said there’s no credible evidence of alien technology.
He also claims that the idea the government is keeping alien technology a secret holds no weight.
If alien technology did exist, it would be far superior to anything we’ve already created and we likely couldn’t recognize it, Diamond said.
Bill Diamond has a point. If alien technology is so advanced that it can reach Earth from a distant location we don’t know exists, that technology likely wouldn’t be so flawed that it would crash-land in the New Mexico desert.
In fact, Diamond has a few points. In an interview given to Space.com, the president and CEO of the SETI Institute—which partners with NASA on a mission “to lead humanity’s quest to understand the origins and prevalence of life and intelligence in the universe”—said its pretty farfetched to believe advanced alien technology exists.
“We don’t have any evidence of any credible source that would indicate the presence of alien technology in our skies,” he told Space.com. “And we never have. The idea that the government is keeping something like this secret is just totally absurd. There’s no motivation to do so.”
Of course, if we’ve somehow missed this fancy alien technology along the way, it may be because we couldn’t recognize it to begin with. Diamond said that taking our fastest spacecraft and sending it to our closest neighbor star, Alpha Centauri, would take 80,000 years. “Any civilization that has mastered the ability to traverse the incomprehensibly vast distances of interstellar space would have technology so far advanced from our own as to be beyond our comprehension,” he said. “If such beings exist, they would likely send hardware here first and not biology, and they certainly wouldn’t crash-land in our deserts.”
Diamond further railed against the concept of quick-zipping spacecraft we see in blurred vision for only brief moments. He said aliens, if they came, would know so much about us that if they didn’t want to be seen, they wouldn’t be. But if they were okay being seen, then where’s the evidence? Add in that every UFO sighting was considered an unreliable accidental observation (with no scientific data backed by instrumentation and technology) and Diamond believes we have no reason to even think we’ve missed something. The government not funding the study of UFOs further supports the idea that leaders don’t believe there’s anything to look at, he said, unless it is being done in secret.
Does that mean Diamond believes the entire mission of SETI is futile? No. He’s on the search for life—a far different construct than advanced alien technology. Diamond said the transparent volume of stars and planets surrounding those stars implies tens of billions of potentially habitable worlds. And that’s just in our galaxy.
NASA-led research missions to view planets beyond our Solar System have yielded thousands of unseen planets. Diamond believes there are billions more. “So indeed, the statistical probability that we are alone in the universe is zero,” he said. “Surely there is life beyond Earth.”
That life, Diamond said, just doesn’t zig-zag around Earth’s atmosphere, crashing in New Mexico and drawing circles in crops.
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