When I was in 3rd grade I got a book from the Scholastic Book Fair called "The UFO Hunter's Handbook" by Caroline Tiger. It detailed historical sightings of UFOs and described where the best places to find UFOs would be, given the information. I loved that book and the way it presented UFOs as a mystery yet to be solved, one of the last frontiers of true discovery in a shrinking world. It captured my imagination, and my entire life I have looked in the sky, hoping to see one for myself.
There are no aliens.
Life on earth began, depending on how you tell it, either in a coincidental mixture of chemicals, water, and electricity, or from a supernatural force or entity many people call God.
This is not that special.
Like the shape of a river, we are a product of force and circumstance. We have come far from our humble beginnings, harnessing nature, language, and sciences to bend the environment to our will. Since the invention of fire, our biggest threat has always been other groups of people. Chaos and bloodshed seems to have become our riverbed that we cannot change the shape of.
In the 25 years since that book fair, I have seen no evidence of aliens. Blurry videos and targeting system footage keep the doubt alive, but I look for them less every day.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a wonderfully simple triangular chart that attempts to boil down human action into the pursuit of a series of horizontal slices. At the bottom are physiological needs like water and food. At the top is "self-actualization," defined by things like the pursuit of meaning, moral development, and insight. This is where aliens live. Once we have everything we could possibly need (sustenance, community, purpose), we look up to the stars for gods and grey men, reaching for an unattainable new height of satisfaction not satisfied by what the Earth has to offer.
There are no aliens because we will never see them. We are in 2026, with flying cars, flying cameras, cars that drive themselves, invisible money, and virtual reality. Yet we kill each other for governments that act against our best interests and threaten each other over divergent schools of thought indoctrinated in us by people we've never met. Leave people to die on our streets. Refuse to acknowledge the common thread we ALL share in the fabric of existence.
A river cannot act against the forces that shaped it- the flow of the water and shape of the earth dictate its movement for eternity. Is humanity any different? Or are we destined to run the path of chaos and rampant individualism, never escaping to the shore?
If we are truly some product of divinity or astronomical coincidence, destined to explore the stars and spread a utopia across the universe, we will overcome the petty differences instilled in us by the corruption of those in power. We will treat the unfit, unwell, and unlucky with the grace and fairness of community and compassion, flourishing in thought and aspiration, able to reach higher than ever on each other's shoulders, fulfilling all our needs and dreaming of new goals for ourselves.
And when we find another form of life that has reached these heights, able to travel the stars beyond time and space, they too will understand the power of unity and compassion. And there will be no aliens.