HEADLINES:
R/€ How to prepare for alien invasion
September 15, 2007 Edition 1
Scott Hillis
When the aliens finally invade Earth, you may wish you had listened to Travis Taylor and Bob Boan. And if the invasion follows the plot of a typical Hollywood blockbuster, they might also be the guys called in at the last minute to save the day.
After all, they have written An Introduction to Planetary Defense, a primer on how humanity can defend itself if aliens show up at our cosmic doorstep. And yes, they're serious.
"The probability really is there that aliens exist and are old enough to have technology to enable them to come here," Taylor said in an interview.
Taylor and Boan are hardly basement-dwelling paranoids obsessed with tinfoil hats and Area 51. Taylor holds advanced degrees in astronomy and physics, and is an associate at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. He and Boan have done consulting work for the US Defence Department and the space agency Nasa.
But their views have won few audiences outside of science fiction conventions, and their book is published by BrownWalker Press, which specialises in fringe topics and books with titles like The Science and Lore of the Plant Cell Wall and ESP and Psychokinesis.
Taylor acknowledged alien invasion is hardly a mainstream concern but said it was naive to assume that any beings advanced enough to master star travel will have evolved beyond war.
"It's a wonderful idea that has no basis in reality," Taylor said.
Taylor and Boan revisit two issues that frequently pop up in the debate about whether Homo sapiens is alone in the universe: Drake's Equation and Fermi's Paradox.
The formula drawn up by US astronomer Frank Drake in 1960 tries to estimate how likely contact with an alien civilisation is, given factors such as the number of habitable planets.
Taylor and Boan plugged in what they felt were conservative estimates, such as that aliens cannot travel faster than 10% of the speed of light.
After crunching the numbers, they say it is possible that our Milky Way galaxy harbours intelligent alien species and there is a high probability that they may visit Earth.
But if there are so many aliens out there, why haven't we heard from them already?
That is the question famously posed by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 to dismiss speculation by his colleagues that intelligent life should be routine.
Taylor and Boan are convinced Fermi got it wrong. Even if aliens used godlike technology to jump across thousands of light-years in a single day, they would still need millions of years to explore all the star systems in the galaxy. They simply may not have stumbled across Earth yet.
Taylor and Boan started thinking about how to respond to an aggressive extraterrestrial attack during a 2001 discussion about defending against terrorist attacks.
"One thing that popped into my mind was that the only way Americans would be in an asymmetric war on the other side would be if we were attacked by aliens. Everyone chuckled, but then after a minute the comments started setting in," Taylor said.
"Then we really got to talking about it and we thought, well, you know, we really might need this contingency plan anyway."
Failure to prepare may mean humankind will have to dig in and fight with improvised weapons and hit-and-run tactics, much the same way Islamic extremists have battled the US military in Iraq, Taylor believes.
"You'd have to create an insurgency, a mujahideen-type resistance," Taylor said. - Reuters
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