Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2019

28 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2019 ASTROBIOLOGY saying that hypothesizing interstellar travel aimed at fleeting close encounters is absurd. Let's see why, taking as an ex- ample a hypothetical technological civi- lization, developed in a planetary system just 200 light-years from us (we want to be extremely optimistic). The beings that make up that civilization represent the culmination of the evolution of life on that planet, they have probably over- come all the struggles for survival that ex- istence entails, including planetary conflicts, natural catastrophes and adver- sities of every kind. Having finally reached high levels of social and scientific awareness, the Gotha of that planet de- cides to start an exploratory mission to another planet, about 200 light-years away, in whose atmosphere the markers that indicate the beginning of possible industrialization are increasing. The other planet is obviously the Earth, which the aliens see as it was in the early nineteenth century. However advanced that alien civ- ilization might be, even the fastest of their spaceships take many centuries to reach the Earth, which means dedicating entire generations to that mission, both on the mother planet and onboard the spaceships (if inhabited). After all these efforts, without telling us and without knowing exactly what awaits them here, the aliens finally arrive and what do they do? They start playing with our planes and, once they land on the surface (let's give a little sat- isfaction even to contactees), in- stead of going to meet the top representatives of science and poli- tics, they introduce themselves to the first stranger who passes by and maybe abducts them. Flying over the too-easy irony of committing a civilization’s resources to crop circles and cattle mutila- tion (we leave this task to the car- toons that accompany the text), we find it more useful to go back to the point where the aliens infer the beginning of our industrializa- tion. Since their discovery of our 200-year-old industrialization only THIS DOESN ’ T SEEM RIGHT... HE LEFT HIS WALLET IN THE SPACECRAFT YOU RECOVERED LONG TIME AGO!