Extraterrestrial contact: the announcement that never comes

Extraterrestrial contact: the news that is always just around the corner

Can you announce something for which not a single piece of evidence exists? That is the claim behind the story making the rounds: contact has peine and the announcement is imminent. The math backs it up, they say, because with hundreds of billions of stars it seems absurd to be alone. And yet the very same calculation that invites optimism is the one that buries any encounter in the improbability of coinciding at the same time in both space and time.

How many civilizations can fit in the Milky Way?

The figures being tossed around point to three or four civilizations coexisting right now in the galaxy, always with the caveat "if there are any at all." The filter is brutal long before the first microbe. Not just any star will do: complex life requires G- and K-type stars, which are not as abundant as intuition suggests. Add gas giants on the periphery and an abnormally large moon, two details we happen to have but that are far from the norm. The lottery is not that someone exists, it is that someone exists with the minimum conditions.

Why does distance make any contact pointless?

Traveling from one star to another is not a matter of willpower but of physics and centuries. A civilization located 10,000 light-years away could send out its signal today and vanish tomorrow: whatever reaches our radio telescope will speak of someone who is no longer there. Add to that window of time the spatial window —their planet being where it needs to be and us looking in the right direction— and the coincidence stops being likely and becomes a long shot. That is the crux of the matter, and no epic narrative can dodge it.

The imminent announcement that never materializes

Every so often the same sequence reappears. A huge online community devoted to the topic shuts down —millions of messages accumulated, according to the story fueling the anticipation—, the shutdown is read as a sign that something is being prepared, and the conclusion is taken for granted: an announcement is coming soon. None of this is accompanied by a document, an image or verifiable data. In parallel floats the simulation hypothesis, which its own proponents admit cannot be tested, along with the suspicion that our image of the visitor was designed by Hollywood through blockbuster hits.

Then there is the joke. They are coming to pay our pensions, they are asking for social housing, the pilot turns out to be a Martian, they land wherever suits tourism. The anticipation frays into humor because the subject cannot withstand any other format. Some claim humanity could not bear such a presence, that we would fall to our knees; it is an opinion with no way to test it, like almost all the others.

With this material, the conclusion is simple: contact is always imminent and never arrives. A perfect business.