The Fallacy of the Categorical Negative: Extraterrestrials Have Never Visited (And Probably Never Will Visit) the Earth

Astrophysicists have calculated the age of the Universe to be about 13 and three quarters billion years old, and geologists have calculated the age of the Earth itself to be just over 4 and a half billion years old. Because of the Asteroid Belt (the remains of a former planet shattered by a massive primordial collision with another astronomical body), the development of sapient life on Earth has been put at a severe handicap, as evolutionary progress has been repeatedly disrupted by periodic large meteor strikes from asteroids, which have caused numerous instances of pan-species extinction. With the arrival of homo sapiens, we ourselves were almost wiped out by another collision some 70,000 years ago by a more minor large meteor strike that reduced our species from many thousands of members to only a few hundred (!), and consequently we have to this day the narrowest genetic spectrum of diversity of any other species of primate, including some ape cousins who are now extinct.

After civilization finally began among humans about 5000 years ago, advances in philosophy and the sciences (the key components for the steady and stable progress of higher civilization) enabled humankind to begin grasping and interacting with the true nature of the universe and ourselves. However, science and objective philosophy met with repeated obstructions from secular and religious institutions of power, which prized a monopoly of control, rather than collective human progress. We are a species that has conflicting tendencies between a will toward animalistic domination of each other and a desire for the altruistic improvement of the well-being of our fellows. This fundamental conflict (however accustomed we may be to its tension in many disguised and euphemistic forms) creates another source of fundamental constraint on the advancement of sapient achievements on our planet. Therefore for many, it is hard to be objective about the very idea that other species on other planets in other star systems may have outpaced us by probably thousands if not millions of years.

And yet there is hope that we will at last no longer falter. If we observe merely our own progress as a global civilization within just the last two hundred years since the philosophy of the Enlightenment liberated us intellectually (and psychologically) from the blinders imposed by absolutist secular and religious powers, it is not unreasonable to speculate how much exponentially greater might be our accomplishments in science and technology over the next thousand years, if the principles of the Enlightenment are not weakened, repressed, undermined or eroded by forces who prefer domination and subjugation of their fellows, rather than real civilized advancement.

So now we have scientists who categorically reject even the possibility of extraterrestrial visitation of our planet by a sapient species, in the past, present, or even in our near future. They claim this response stems from the same healthy skepticism that governs all their other scientific positions, approaches and attitudes. Yet objectively speaking, such an absolute position on the mere possibility of contact here on Earth with what would have to be a more advanced species of sapient life is not in principle or practice a scientific attitude, nor is it a rational philosophical stance. In fact, such a position smacks of pre-Enlightenment dogmatism and prideful anthropocentricism. One thing is for sure, the powers of our present global civilization have promoted this position, and those powers have repeatedly betrayed an attitude that the mass of the human population must be intellectually and materially repressed.

We must admit that scientists, however well trained in the scientific method, can be as fallibly human as laypeople. Scientists are hungry for money and financial security. They need ample funding so they can pursue their various expensive projects of experimental and expeditionary research. Therefore, they take their cue from those with economic and political clout, and thus. they are willing to lay aside the principles of the Enlightenment (and even stark material evidence that contradicts dogmatic positions of our uniqueness in this corner of the Milky Way) and support articulately a false and misleading position in which their benefactors (or potential ones) have (for whatever unknown reasons) a political stake. That said, it is no transgression of Enlightenment principles for a scientist to say, "in my own personal researches and in examination of materials made available for my empirical examination, I have not found evidence of visitation by intelligent extraterrestrial entities." However, it is another matter entirely to flatly dismiss the very theory, given just how old our universe is and the inevitable propensity of any sapient mind, wherever it might hail from, to continue to explore as far as developing technology will permit (including other inhabited worlds).

If we are to advance as a civilization and surmount the worrisome problems we now face, we must not permit any form of dogmatism to corrupt the purity of scientific inquiry. Where one kind of dogmatism is permitted, more will build upon the precedent of such intellectual perversion. If the Academy does not wash its hands of resorting to double-talk with the public, it will mean the same thing to its future health as the present contamination of our system of public education, where anti-intellectual forces are hard at work to effect legislation that will compel our children to be taught Creationism as though it were a science, and make it a required part of the mandatory curriculum of our public school system. You can't have some things diverted one way, and expect the rest (i.e., what you presumably prefer to value) not to follow.