Why I wouldn't trade places with an alien
A recent news story about combat veteran and former NGA/NRO employee David Grusch has made the circuit of the UFO-friendly peripheral news outlets. His claims are the latest in a steady dribble of increasingly more reputable officials saying incrementally more concrete things about off-world intelligence, aliens meddling in Earth affairs and the like.
David gave a few details which feed nicely into my favorite pet theory regarding our neighbors in space. Namely, that they're essentially alien grad students who are just here for the research and are having to deal with a ton of extra bullshit (due to us) that no one budgeted for in their grant proposals. This is also why I think we should be extra nice to any aliens that we do meet.
Let's lay out some backing for this theory. Suppose that there are aliens, and that they have in some way encountered us. This means that N >= 2 for the number of intelligent (giving some leeway here to our kind) species in sufficiently close proximity. If it's possible twice, then the conditions for life can't be that rare so there may be many interesting xeno-ecosystems out there with bunches of neat little alien critters.
Hence, there are many competing opportunities for budding alien biologists to figure out where they want to spend their careers. In the vastness of space, there may be far more life-bearing planets than there are aliens willing to undergo long voyages away from their friends and loved ones just to be able to write a few papers for the Proceedings of the Galactic Academy of Sciences.
This is all to say that there won't be an armada waiting out there behind the moon, rather just a few inquisitive alien dudes who love adventure and think that Earth is worth studying!
I also posit that it is a rule across all intelligent species that the old and illustrious prefer to wait at home in their comfy offices while their younger, less famous colleagues are sent out into the abyss to do the dangerous work. So, we'll be getting the alien grad students and not the Dean of the School of Sciences.
There's one wrinkle, though, for an aspiring Earthologist watching from afar.
Nothing we've heard from any of the UFO folks over the years hints at anything like faster-than-light technology, just a lot of flying around at high but physically feasible speeds in the atmosphere. We have pretty good evidence so far that FTL is either not possible or energetically infeasible. This means that any aliens that are in the Solar System today started their journey a long, long time ago - long before humans ever began the scientific or industrial revolution. Perhaps they set out from home before human civilization even formed!
To put ourselves in the shoes of the alien grad student for a moment (let's name him Marvin, for fun), imagine this - you have committed yourself to an incredibly long trip to study just one out of many promising planets in our universe. You arrive and find that, well, things are happening--and fast. You're interested in (of course) the culture and technology of humans, but that stuff can be captured just by stealing books or catching a stray 5G network. The real work is in the biodiversity!
Animals are neat, and doubly so if they're not from your home planet. I bet that aliens are going to care quite a bit about all the birds, plants, and even microorganisms strewn across our biosphere. Unfortunately, when they were packing their gear and setting their budgets for this trip, they weren't accounting for man's colossal impact on nature. After all, their characterisation of mankind from afar at the start of their voyage (remember that trips in deep space take a long time) would be of a primitive society nowhere close to dominating their home planet. As he arrives, Marvin would be surprised at our progress but determined to finish his original task of surveying the life and geology of out planet.
There's a few hilarious details about Earth and mankind which really fuck this up for Marvin.
First, for reasons that would have been completely unknown to anyone coming to visit us from the stars, we have absolutely colossal, civilization-powering stores of enormously cheap and easily accessed hydrocarbon energy in solid, liquid, AND gaseous forms in many places all across the planet. This is all due to a quirk in our evolutionary history - plants evolved certain kinds of tissue long before decomposers appeared, so we accumulated many gigatons of cheap fuel just close enough to the surface to be accessible, but not so close that they could leak out into the biosphere.
Oil, gas, and coal are the kinds of fuel that let civilizations skip entire centuries of technological development in a frenzy of breakthroughs covering indoor lighting, reliable heating, large-scale manufacturing, and global supply chains. We covered a lot of ground while Marvin was in transit.
But, it gets better.
The discovery of these hydrocarbons' usefulness helped kickstart an industrial revolution, but this was occurring in parallel and unrelated to ongoing developments in philosophy and science which laid the groundwork for rationalism and the scientific method. Only a few generations separate the invention of the coal-powered steam pump and Newton's discoveries of calculus and the law of universal gravitation; as best as I can tell, there's no obvious reason for why these advances (which I take as important starting points for major scientific & technological changes) had to occur closely together in time, but they did.
To top it all off, we began our transition from a global patchwork of top-down hierarchical social systems into representative government not long after. I would argue that the latter are far more effective at development than the former.
Let's take a second to bring it all together and figure out what it means for poor Marvin who just wants to get his data and graduate on time.
He had no idea that the Homo genus was capable of getting this much progress so quickly. He thought that he'd be tagging whales and maybe dodging a stray atl-atl or two. Instead, thanks to the triple coincidence of scientific, industrial, and political revolutions all overlaid in a century-long span, Marvin shows up and finds a radically different Earth than he expected. He immediately starts getting clicks on his Geiger counter because we went from complete ignorance to thermonuclear warfare in about 20 generations. Also, humans got so good at reproducing and staying alive that they have turned essentially the entire useful bioproductive surface of the planet into agriculture. Finally, those bountiful hydrocarbons have vacated their original homes deep beneath the surface and are now adding a major surplus to Earth's thermal budget.
It's pretty clear that mankind is going to genocide about half of Earth's native wildlife into extinction between carbon-induced heat retention and outright habitat destruction. Marvin certainly can't get all his specimen collection done in time. Also, he didn't budget for stealth ships and long-range scanners to tiptoe around modern man - he thought it was going to be a safari! He's in a real pickle now. The best he can do is try to stick to the original plan, get some data, and buy time.
Of course, like any good grad student, he had to take ethical research training which generally frowns upon aggressive research conduct like eradicating mankind because of its anti-environmental tendencies. He is also respectful of the fact that simply showing up could cause the collapse of entire nations and untold suffering. He isn't especially driven by the plight of the poor humans - he just thinks the research would look better if mankind continued on for awhile, blissfully unaware of his existence.
As a consequence, Marvin is content to stay in the shadows and pick up a few samples here and there.
He'd like to strike a deal with the leaders of Earth for a few more nature reserves to make his life a teensy bit easier, but since some are insane and most can't be trusted, he knows that this is more trouble than it's worth. He makes contact with a few good ones, and lets them know the jig. Obviously, they're not willing to hamstring human progress just for an alien stamp-collecting expedition, but they clearly recognize the inevitable fact that our society will need to confront: that we are not alone. So, Earth's few info-privy leaders drip out little bits of information to help get the public more and more used to the idea of aliens being out there.
In the meantime, Marvin is quietly collecting get data on Earth's species before they go extinct. He doesn't really have the right tools for the job and neither do his underlings, so they fuck up sometimes. They're also in a major hurry because everything is dying off super quickly. Once, they forgot to top off the energy tank on their space Camry and ended up losing it and the collective DNA of the fauna of the southern Rockies somewhere over Nevada.
Another time, Marvin was fixing a sensor in the middle of the night in western Siberia and didn't notice a group of hikers sneaking up on him from behind a boulder. He got spooked when he saw them, and accidentally lit them up with his Alien Power Drill. He tried to make it look like a terrestrial predator got to them, but he doesn't really know much about what part of a human tastes good - he mostly eats something akin to algae. He just cut out the tongues because they’re soft, pink, and easily accessed, leaving the rest of the bodies behind.
Lots of weird, sloppy little accidents occur because Marvin never thought he'd have to deal with so many humans. Marvin and his team don't dislike humans - they actually think humans are very cool! Marvin loves Earth, and he loves studying all of the organisms on it. He sees the fascinating quirks of Earth’s natural history reflected in the nature of man. One of his favorite hobbies is to just watch videos of humans talking and socializing in various places. It's just that sometimes bad things happen to Earthlings because there are so many of them and Marvin is just trying to get his work done.
Marvin is still often surprised by humans. It astounds him that Earth has an atmosphere capable of producing spontaneous gigajoule-sized ionization strikes and that some humans find the sound of them comforting! One time while traveling through deep space, Marvin bedded down for a long sleep expecting to find that the maize-based civilization on Earth’s less populated continent cluster would later raise to primacy due to their strong social organization and abundant resources. Despite the other civilizations having a nearly 3000 year head-start on settled life, the former were closing the gap extremely quickly. What he failed to account for was that they were too skilled at sanitation! When they began intermixing with other subgroups, they had none of the disease or parasite resistance and quickly died off. When Marvin woke up and could only find their ruins, he was quite sad. He really liked those humans. Still, this will make for an interesting research note in First Contact Biology.
He has watched our scientists go from the vacuum tube to superhuman artificial intelligence in a single lifetime, but when he periodically checks in on the debris and ships that he left behind on Earth, he discovers that humans haven't even attempted to do any serious reverse-engineering. He finds that this is because the bureaucrats refuse to let any humans who occasionally enjoy psychoactive, non-ethanol consumables get close to Marvin's ship. Can't their leaders see that this rules out all the smart, creative ones?
"Truly", he thinks, "this is a bizarre planet". While his sociologist classmates will eat this shit up, he really wishes he didn't have to deal with it.