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Our World Sucks, So I Asked an Alien Expert Whether Aliens Will Save Us

Living in Trump's America is very emotionally taxing, so I went to astrophysicist James Wright in an attempt to find solace.
Photo by Evan Dalen via Stocksy

Life on Earth is advancing; there's been profound developments in technology, and we've made major social progress in the United States in the last 100 years. Yet our the pitfalls of our world seem to overshadow our accomplishments, from the political unrest in the US, to international warfare, and a change in Earth's climate that could kill our descendants. Most days, I look to the wilted orchid that lives on my desk, Sephiroth, and hope for the best while tenderly petting his thick green leaves. Today, following a series of characteristically ominous actions by the Republicans running our country, I decided to seek solace by consulting an alien scientist who has written about the possibility of intelligent, extraterrestrial life in our ancient past.

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In April, Jason T. Wright, an astrophysicist at Penn State, published a study looking at the possibility that an advanced spacefaring civilization once lived within our solar system. It's a fascinating hypothesis, as most people tend to think of aliens as being very far away. "It is perhaps more likely that [ancient aliens] origin be local, than that an extraterrestrial species crossed interstellar space and deposited [signs of their existence] here," Wright wrote in his paper. (Encouragingly, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson told NBC that Wright's paper is "intriguing.")

Read more: We Asked a UFO Researcher About Kepler's Alien Megastructures

No one, including Wright, knows if aliens exist or not, or whether they may have originated in our solar system or another. If aliens came from our solar system, they may have evolved on Venus or "wet Mars," Wright has hypothesized. Those are just theories, of course, and Wright states that evidence of these ancient civilizations would like be destroyed. But putting his paper aside, I wanted to see if Wright, as an expert in the field, might have any useful information or hope for those of us who are unfortunate enough to be alive in this age of Earth.

"Most astronomers agree that the chances of [intelligent life] existing elsewhere are uncertain but probably high," Wright explained via email. It would be nice to settle this debate soon; however, he says that it is considered probably unlikely that we will make contact with aliens in our lifetime.

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"We are very young for a technological species," Wright said, which may explain why we're not launching ourselves off Earth en masse to escape the waking hell of Trump's America. On the bright side, however, we have "already have built interstellar craft," he said, referring to the space probes that are orbiting through space today. "If we manage to create self-sufficient settlements elsewhere, then we will become much less likely to die out due to some planet-wide catastrophe," he said. "Given enough time, then, it seems reasonable that we might eventually settle other star systems."

"There is no evidence that alien life was once present on Earth, or anywhere else in the solar system," Wright said, disappointingly. "It seems strange and unlikely to me that if there were a previous technological species here that they would all just get up and leave."

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Wright's paper on the possibility of the possibility of spacefaring aliens within our solar system offers some abstract kind of hope to those of us who want to believe that we're not alone, nor have we always been. But for the amateur alien investigator, his careful and consciously uncertain responses can feel a bit frustrating.

For instance, I asked whether, if an alien race did come or return to our solar system, they would save us from the political turmoil, warfare, and social issues affecting people around the world. Wright had written long, thoughtful replies to most of my other questions, but his response to this query was unusually short: He answered, simply, "No."