A NASA scientist has claimed intelligent alien life may have already visited Earth, and we simply did not notice their presence.
Silvano P. Colombano, who works for NASA, says the extraterrestrial tourists would have looked hugely different to any of the current life on Earth.
Earth is currently dominated by carbon-based organisms but , he says, alien visitors would likely bear no resemblance to anything on our planet due to the different world they originate from.
NASA is currently helping to fund the search for alien life via the ‘Search for extraterrestrial intelligence’ (SETI) which scans the universe for signs of civilisations.
Dr Colombano believes it is possible this hypothetical population of aliens are so advanced they have mastered space-travel and have technology we cannot even comprehend or imagine.
He has also claimed current ideas regarding aliens are too narrow and has implored experts and the public to open their minds to the possibility.
Silvano P. Colombano, who works in NASA’s Intelligent Systems Division, believes we could have missed alien life,as it could be very different from the traditional carbon based life humanity is used to. Pictured, a classic ‘flying saucer.
‘I simply want to point out the fact that the intelligence we might find and that might choose to find us (if it hasn’t already) might not be at all be produced by carbon based organisms like us,’ Colombano wrote in a study.
His paper was first presented at a ‘Decoding Alien Intelligence Workshop’ in March, which was organised by SETI.
He believes that alien life may have gone far beyond human technology, and may even have mastered interstellar travel.
‘We need to re-visit even our most cherished assumptions,’ he wrote.
‘How might that change the above assumptions about interstellar travel?’ he wrote.
He says scientists are too focused on pursuing signs of modern human technology on other planets that they may be missing signals of a civilisation inhabiting a planet far older than Earth
As we can not imagine or comprehend what this would look like, it would be easy for humans to miss signs of civilisations on other planets, he postulated.
‘Our typical life-spans would no longer be a limitation (although even these could be dealt with multi-generational missions or suspended animation), and the size of the ‘explorer’ might be that of an extremely tiny super-intelligent entity.’
A pair of Australian radio telescopes pointed at the same spot in the sky have revealed new clues on the nature of mysterious signals known as fast radio bursts. The ASKAP managed to detect several fast radio bursts during its observation (artist’s impression). However, one expert warned that radio waves could be out of date.
‘Considering further that technological development in our civilisation started only about 10K years ago and has seen the rise of scientific methodologies only in the past 500 years, we can surmise that we might have a real problem in predicting technological evolution even for the next thousand years, let alone 6 Million times that amount!’
He also warned that radio waves, could be out of date.
He called for physicists to take part in ‘speculative physics’, grounded in our most solid theories but ‘with some willingness to stretch possibilities as to the nature of space-time and energy’ and to ‘consider the UFO phenomenon worthy of study’.
The space expert also claimed not every UFO sighting can be ‘explained or denied’.