Why haven't the aliens said hello? Because to them we're about the equivalent of ants.

If you read the recent interviews with reasonable science-minded people talking about UFOs and aliens, one of the big doubts they tend to have — even those who hope aliens are visiting — is: if the aliens are here, if they are interested enough to come across space to visit our planet, then why don’t they just say hello already? The fact that they haven’t strongly suggests to these rational folks that aliens are not here.

I’m not going to argue here that the “objects in the sky that go zip” are piloted by aliens. I think there’s little to no evidence of that, and other evidence for alien visitation is thin at best. However, for the sake of the thought experiments that we all have the luxury of indulging in during this small window of time where there is a small but real chance that aliens are visiting us before the government report comes is released and ruins everything, let’s assume the “objects that go zip” are piloted by aliens. If so, it seems like it is nothing more than human-centered hubris that causes the rational person to ask: why haven’t they said hello?

I’m not saying the aliens are here to talk to whales (though hell, the “objects in the sky that go zip” are so weird let’s leave everything on the table, why not). I’m suggesting that aliens might very well find us interesting, but have no interest in communicating with us.

I recently read Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson’s The Ants. A giant classic of a tome surveying everything humans knew about ant as of 1990 or so. Edward and Bert are two dudes who are interested in ants. Like, really really interested in ants. They have spent their whole lives studying then, hanging around them, and being bit and stung by them. But I guarantee you neither of them has ever picked up a queen ant and tried to talk to it. (Which would be a mistake anyway: to communicate with ants you’d want to address a group of workers — probably through chemical scents or antennae waving — not the queen who is generally just an egg factory. Edward and Bert would know this.) People who are interested in ants study everything about them: how they reproduce, how they evolve, what they eat, and how they fight. But for all that has been learned about them, it is more or less impossible to communicate directly with an ant.

The metaphor at this point should be clear: there’s a chance, maybe even a likelihood, that any alien species that visited Earth — presumably organisms so advanced that they have developed FTL travel — may find us very interesting, and come back to study us over and over again, without ever trying or even being able to communicate with us. It may, like us with the ants, turn out that it never ever occurs to them to try to communicate with us.

Some UFO people have claimed that the “objects in the sky that go zip” have an inordinate interest in our military installations and technology. This too can be framed like the ant analogy: people who are into ants are very interested in how ants fight. Because, well, it’s fascinating: some ants carry out huge battles, some have tournaments. Some use chemical warfare, mind-control substances, and slavery. Others have evolved specialized weapons with which they can snip off the limbs of their enemies. How crazy is it that ants even have enemies! Humans are really interested in ant weapons and battles. Maybe aliens are similarly interested in human weapons and battles. For no reason other than sheer curiosity, and some prurient fascination with violence that maybe is hard-wired into the fabric of the universe.

If we are the ants to the aliens, they might be interested in us despite the fact that they can’t or have no interest in communicating with us. This notion isn’t all bad: ants are fascinating and intelligent, in their way. We’re fascinating and intelligent, in our way. But we probably should stop assuming that we’re operating on the same level as all intelligence in the universe.

This notion also bodes (more or less) well for the worry that extra-terrestrial aliens might be a threat to humans. The idea that they would be a threat to us is undermined by the long history of “objects that go zip” in the sky: if they wanted to farm humans for meat, they would have started 80 years ago. More likely, just like our relationship with the ants, they really have no concept that they even could threaten us, or have any reason to.

On the other hand, every time we plow under some rain forest to grow palm oil we do manage to damage ant habitat without really knowing or understanding how we did so. Maybe it’s UFO exhaust that is heating up our atmosphere? The irony of that would be almost too much to bear.