Is This How Aliens Would Spy On Us In Real Life? | Unveiled

Is This How Aliens Would Spy On Us In Real Life?

We know humans are curious creatures. Whether we’re studying ants, trying out recipes, or inventing space travel, our quest to “know more” knows no bounds. With aliens, though, would they share this trait? Would they also harbor curiosity? Research suggests yes. Adaptation, surely an essential skill for any intelligent organism, has been shown to link with curiosity. Therefore, it arguably makes sense to expect that any alien life that does manage to survive would also be interested in learning more about us if they ever found us. It would most likely be within their nature. But how exactly would they do that?

This is Unveiled and today we’re asking the extraordinary question; Is this how aliens would spy on us in real life?

If there is another civilization out there in space, do they know about us? Until now, we certainly don’t know about them… and remain “alone” from our own perspective as a species. As such, it’s hard to imagine any scenario where humans wouldn’t want to learn as much as possible about alien life - if we were ever to discover it. The chance to watch life not as we know it would simply be impossible to pass up… but that doesn’t mean that we’d make contact immediately. Rather, we’d want to view from a distance, and preferably without our subjects knowing anything about us. We wouldn’t want them to know that we know they’re there. It wouldn’t be the only way forward, but many see it as the most likely… which presumably makes it the most likely course of action if the tables were turned, too. An alien race watching us might also prefer to hide themselves. And for any number of reasons, including out of fear; out of concern that they might alter our evolutionary path; that they might spread disease, or kill us off… or simply out of an abundance of caution toward the unknown.

Say an alien group has been watching us, then what do they know so far? One unfortunate aspect of humanity is clear; that we’re a violent species. We’re divided. And war and murder are frequent occurrences. If they’ve been watching since World War Two, then they’ll have seen the atom bombs over Japan. More broadly, they’ll have seen how we treat animals, smaller organisms, and even other people on Earth for personal gain. Indeed, a reconnaissance mission to Earth might turn any potential alien away from ever physically visiting it, based on observation. And so, watching in secret could become crucial, in order to keep tabs on our progress and assess the risk that we might pose to the rest of space. A Von Neumann probe is probably the best way forward.

A Von Neumann probe is a hypothetical spacecraft that’s outfitted with advanced AI capable of self-replicating and putting itself into position around exoplanets, moons, or just about anything else in the universe. Theorized by the physicist John Von Neumann, the probe could potentially mine asteroids for the materials needed to build more versions of itself… but its wider value to interplanetary espionage is clear. If humans were to discover a sure sign of alien life, it’s likely what we would send to investigate it. If it were possible for us to build just one of these probes, then we’d soon have multiple of them - as is their design - watching our cosmological neighbors. So, again, we might expect an alien group to do the same thing when targeting us.

The self-replication is ultimately the most original and vital capability of a Von Neumann probe, as these things could fill a whole galaxy over time - perhaps within just a few million years. As they spread and spread, they give whoever launches the first probe an opportunity to gradually tighten their grip on whatever planet or civilization they wish to monitor… and because of the small size of each individual machine, to do so without being detected. Consider the prospect of Von Neumann probes crossed with nanotechnology, and there’s even more potential to spy and truly remain invisible.

But, according to some, with tech that’s not even that advanced, and only slightly better than our own, an alien civilization might’ve already managed to put such a probe in place around our planet - should they have wanted to. The physicist James Benford is a leading voice here, suggesting that co-orbital objects (or objects that revolve around the sun from the same distance as the Earth does) offer the ideal location (or cover) for alien spy technology. Probes either on, near, or masquerading as co-orbital objects are always close to Earth while remaining a small enough speck (against the backdrop of space) to go unnoticed by even our best telescopes. In general, co-orbital objects haven’t been studied in depth so far… because they were only discovered by us just a couple of decades ago. So, when it comes to mapping the solar system, these things are a looming gray area.

Other potential hosts for a Von Neumann probe (or a fleet of Von Neumann probes) include our moon and even the upper reaches of our own atmosphere. While no real evidence has ever been officially released of possible alien tech on the moon, theories abound… and some are more compelling than others! Meanwhile, the Black Knight Satellite remains the best example of a theorized probe within our own atmosphere - and we took a closer look in another recent video. Most mainstream analysis agrees that it’s probably just a discarded piece of space debris… but could it in fact be the beginnings of a Von Neumann surveillance network?

Then again, there’s some argument that a watching alien race wouldn’t actually need to send probes of any kind at all. It may feel as though telescopes have been around forever, and therefore aren’t especially cutting edge, but actually (even just on Earth, or launched from Earth) they’re improving at a staggering rate. The recently launched James Webb Telescope is 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope - humanity’s former flagship mission. Looking further ahead, however, there are already plans to develop telescopes that are large, powerful and accurate enough to see the surface features of a target planet in detail. Perhaps as clearly as we currently see our own world via satellite imagery. Estimates vary, but at the most optimistic it’s hoped that we might achieve this within the next 100 years. So… could an hypothesized alien race that’s just a century more advanced than us already have this capability? And could they already be using it to watch our every move? Or might they have chosen a different path that we humans are also only just beginning to realize? For example, researchers have theorized about one day sending a group of telescope probes into space that will use our sun’s gravity as a magnifying lens, again allowing them to see far-off planets up close. This project, called the Solar Gravity Lens, is today backed by NASA… but might even a slightly older than us and more developed alien civilization have it already? We can’t know for sure, but we can’t rule it out.

Beyond supercharged telescopes, one of the most popular ET conspiracy theories argues that, really, aliens don’t need to watch us from afar by any means… because they walk (or fly) among us. The idea is that alien beings can so seamlessly blend into human society, perhaps to the point that they bend physics to remain unseeable. On the simplest level, the ever-increasing number of UFO sightings in the twenty-first century has gotten the whole world talking. The footage isn’t only grainy stills submitted by one-off members of the public, anymore… there are now whole libraries of UFO clips, many of which come from within the world’s militaries and governments. So perhaps that’s how they’re spying on us; by simply zooming around our planet going mostly unnoticed, apart from occasionally when they slip up and do get filmed by us using our limited video tech.

But, really, with or without advanced machines and capabilities, it would still carry considerable risk to spy on us from the inside. The safer bet would still be to watch from a distance. From a point that’s determined to be just far enough away that we, the lowly humans, would never know they were there. Extreme space telescopes would then be one method, but perhaps the Von Neumann approach wins out. True, we watch the skies today more than we have ever done in human history… but is it so unlikely that we could still be missing a nearby flotilla of alien probes, surveilling everything we do? Because that could be how aliens would most likely spy on us in real life.