The French essayist Michel de Montaigne was familiar with the feeling: “Our world recently discovered another and who can guarantee that it will be the last?” Eighty years before he wrote his essays in 1571, news of Columbus’ shore leave had reached Europe, and while, as we now know, it was not a discovery, knowledge of the dimensions, possibilities, and moral tests of the new continent changed that old europe.
It was the beginning of the modern age, and we postmodern skeptics have never been able to get rid of the thought of this possibility. It would be the greatest news of our lives: A new world, a new planet or at least a little greeting from there would change everything. As for Montaigne, a new era would dawn.
Anyone who follows American newspapers a little may wonder whether it will be that time again soon.
Since the New York Times first reported a few years ago about inexplicable sightings of missiles over ships of the US Navy and associated short clips were published, we are experiencing a new boom in the once so popular UFO topic. Now the American government has published a report that collects and evaluates the many strange sightings. The simple principle according to Karl Popper applies that theories are only worth something as long as they have not been refuted. Should the governments of China or Luxembourg prove tomorrow that they are secretly producing highly mobile small drones that do not move with any known propulsion technology, the riddle would be solved and the New World postponed. But such a simple solution doesn’t seem to be in sight. You don’t have to be a military expert to suspect that the American armed forces are not willingly publicly admitting that they are overtaken, surprised and overwhelmed by foreign missiles.
A public pedagogy problem arises: how do you even address this issue? If you want to be regarded as a fanatic, as a loner and conspiracy theorist, there is no easier topic than here: If you are too close to a party, you should announce out loud that you have seen a UFO and you will be surrounded by a lot Have air to breathe. But the other way around, the problem must also arise: If these sightings were frequent, witnessed by healthy people and cannot be plausibly explained, then communication must be found that does not panic people and does not make the communicating institution ridiculous .
The subject is treated like premarital and extramarital sexuality up to the middle of the last century
Barack Obama is a good man for such a task: everyone knows him, he is considered cool, clever and has so far not been noticed by the trumpeting of wild theories about how things are going. Last month he admitted that “there are recordings and reports of objects in the sky that we do not know what they are!” And he added that he couldn’t say everything he knew about it. This statement joins a whole series of corresponding articles and statements that carefully give the UFO topic a new seriousness. Former Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid wrote in the New York Times an article about his efforts to at least officially investigate the unexplained celestial phenomena. Reid comes from Nevada, where sightings of flying saucers have been folklore for decades, and Area 51 in Roswell has long been a popular culture myth. Since the days of the Cold War, official secrecy has also helped keep the issue in the hands of avid private investigators and counter-investigators.
The entire subject is treated like premarital and extramarital sexuality up to the middle of the last century: ignoring it or giggling at it, an embarrassing, private problem of people who do not get enough fresh air.
But times change. The astrophysicist Avi Loeb, born in 1962 and formerly head of the astrophysics department at Harvard, tried to broaden the perspective in his new book “Extra Terrestrial”. In it, he examines the example of the spatial body ‘Oumuamua, which has completely different properties than the previously examined rocks roaring in space. Among other things, it accelerated without any discernible drive, without a plausible explanation. Loeb formulates the hypothesis that it is a fragment of a spaceship made by aliens. That would explain all the strange properties of the thing, but other hypotheses do not explain anything. This is no proof, but it is an invitation to change the mindset: Why should man on earth alone in his glory wearing sandals and shorts be the only being on millions of planets who invents an aircraft? Why is it more accepted to assume that the earth is the only living, inhabited planet in the entire universe than to argue the opposite?
One day in the distant future the whole cramp will possibly dissolve, then the giggles about life in space will seem like today’s travelers who take the flight to New York, the astonishment of Montaigne and the idea that the earth ends at Gibraltar.