NASA Announces How It Will Report ET Contact
NASA Chief Bill Nelson says looking for extraterrestrial life is part of NASA’s mission, as its top scientists call for a detailed system for classifying ET life.
In a huge departure from the US government’s historical treatment of UFOs and possible ET life, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in an interview with University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato, “[W]ho am I to say that planet Earth is the only location of a life form that is civilized and organized like ours?”
Meanwhile, top NASA scientists are calling for a scaled system for reporting any evidence of extraterrestrial life modeled after NASA’s progressive scale of Technological Readiness Level already in use for new spaceflight equipment.
Instead of the binary “life or no life” way of looking at off-planet discoveries, these scientists are suggesting a more nuanced way of reporting what they find. Cheryl Costa, retired journalist, UFO statistician, and author of the UFO Sightings Desk Reference, thinks it’s about time.
“I think it’s long overdue, they’ve been talking about this stuff for years. They know that there have been unidentified things in our skies since biblical times,” Costa said. “The fact that they’re finally owning up to the idea of classifying alien life. Their scale is going to have to run the range of organic molecules all the way up to sentient beings, so it needs to be a pretty big scale, and it’s nice to start seeing bonified scientists looking at this issue and saying ‘OK, we need to do this.'”
And what about NASA Administrator Bill Nelson’s comments?
“I think it’s refreshing that the NASA chief came out and said ‘Yeah, maybe’ on the UFOs and off-world life. I think they still know more than they’re telling us. I’m happy NASA is coming out with this stuff, I think they’re trying to feed it to us a little spoonful at a time. They don’t want to scare the populace,” Costa said.
This seems to be a big change from the past when, during the Cold War, the government ran a concerted effort to discredit anyone who spoke out about UFOs, what was the mood like in the country back then?
“Let’s go back to the Cold War, post-WWII, yeah we had foo fighters, I’ve interviewed former vets flying B-17s and things who said ‘Yeah, we saw those things and we thought it was the other side,’ then after the war, they found out the other side thought it was us,” Costa said. “The more common aspect of UFOs being reported in the last two generations started with us setting off three nukes back in 1945. Within two years we suddenly had them on scale, what they called the “massive wave of 1947,” and that was a big deal. Then what happened a few years before the Roswell incident? In 1938 on Halloween Eve, Orson Welles scared the snot out of the country.”
“So here we are in 1947, we’ve got this wave of UFOs going on, think about those guys, barely 10 years before talk of aliens scared the heck out of everybody. So, there was this whole idea that maybe the American public isn’t ready for this.”
Now in 2021, not only are governments exploring space, but private companies are in their own space race. Now that we appear to be “ready” for this, could we see Disclosure in our lifetime?
“I think we will have to, we’ve got so much going on with our environment. And two things the ETs who have talked to people on the ground have said “Take care of your planet,” that’s been a continuing thing, and the other driving thing is they’re very concerned that we have a proliferation of nuclear weapons. And our whole present-day sighting is driven by the fact that we set off three nukes back in 1945 and the aliens have been very touchy about that. They don’t want us off this rock with our current politics and all that,” Costa said.
And there is hope with the latest developments at NASA and existing departments within the agency we may see evidence of off-planet life.
“There’s a whole division in NASA that looked at the idea of what some of these exoplanets had for gravity and atmosphere. They’ve gone out and postulated what kinds of life might survive in those environments, and it was very creative how they looked at it, and a very possible thing because life always seems to find a way,” Costa said.
Harvard Professor Avi Loeb Says Universe Created in a Lab
One of the greatest mysteries of our universe is the question of what existed before the Big Bang and how our universe was created. Could it have been created in a lab by a higher form of intelligence—an extraterrestrial intelligence?
Scientists have studied for years the possibilities that may have created the Big Bang; how our universe was created. Now, Avi Loeb, Harvard Professor of Science and author of “extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” proposes in his latest editorial for Scientific American that our universe may have been created in a lab.
Modern physics has a problem, we do not yet have a good understanding of how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity. If we did, we could in theory figure out how to create a “Big Bang.” This idea led professor Loeb to his theory.
“If we imagine a civilization that had science and technology for much more than a century like we did, then they could have arrived at a theory that unifies quantum mechanics and gravity, and if they figure out how the Big Bang can be created perhaps they could also produce it themselves in the laboratory,” Loeb said. “And if that happens then there is a very interesting possibility, just like in nature, for example, a chick comes out of an egg, becomes a chicken and lays another egg, and so forth. You can imagine a universe like ours giving birth to an intelligent civilization that can create a universe like the one that made it.”
Imagine if different civilizations were given a letter grade; professor Loeb puts us at a Grade C, while the more advanced civilizations have higher grades.
“One can, in principle, classify civilizations in the universe into different classes. Type C civilization is similar to ours where we rely on the sun to keep us alive and we are using our environment the way it was provided to us. But then one can imagine a civilization Type B, which is not dependent on the star next to which it was born, in. fact it can create a habitat that supports its life far away from the star,” Loeb said.
“You can imagine them creating a platform where a civilization can live happily, using nuclear energy supplied to it from nuclear reactors and not from the star that it happens to be born next to, that would be Type B. Then Type A civilizations would be those that are capable of recreating the astrophysical environment that they live in, in particular, the universe as a whole. So, creating a universe in the laboratory implies that you’re at the top of the class of civilizations in the universe. We haven’t reached that yet because we don’t have a quantum theory of gravity.”
