What If Our Lives Are An Alien Experiment? | Unveiled

What If Our Lives Are an Alien Experiment?

The universe seems like a vast and empty place, with billions of distant stars but currently no substantial signs of intelligent life beyond our own. But maybe there are much deeper and more insidious reasons than we even realise for our apparent cosmic loneliness. This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if our lives are an alien experiment? First off, what are the chances of alien life existing in the first place? The Fermi Paradox, proposed by the 20th century physicist Enrico Fermi, summarises the problem. It argues that; given the billions of stars not just in the Milky Way but across all the universe, and the millions of Earth-like (or potentially Earth-like) planets out there (many of which are much older than our own), it stands to reason that at least some of those celestial bodies should have developed intelligent life, and even interstellar travel. In fact, the Milky Way should’ve really been colonized already, a long time ago. Clearly, though, as far as we’re aware, no advanced alien race has yet to conquer the entire galaxy, unless they’re so advanced that they remain completely undetectable to all of our technologies. According to the Paradox; this either means there are no aliens at all, or that the aliens are purposefully avoiding or hiding from us. As such, the idea that our lives could simply be an experiment carried out by an alien race is a solid answer to the Fermi Paradox problem… because, if true, the alien experimenters wouldn’t want to intervene by alerting us to their existence as it would ruin the integrity of their study. Which takes us neatly to the Zoo Hypothesis, another idea on why we seem to be alone in the universe. The Zoo Hypothesis suggests that there are many alien civilisations out there much more advanced than us, but that the reason they haven’t declared themselves to us is that they’re waiting for us to pass a certain point in our own evolution - be that technologically, ethically or philosophically. Only then will they make first contact so that humankind can finally integrate into an interstellar community that we’re currently unaware of. Until then, we’re like caged animals in a zoo, with our alien onlookers preferring not to cross-contaminate between their lives and ours. While this type of well-meaning observation could very easily fit the definition of an “experiment,” it’s not necessarily the active and nefarious brand of alien experimentation we might expect. The pseudoscientific “Ancient Astronauts” theory claims to offer some kind of reason for what the aliens end goal is. The theory - which, by contrast, isn’t widely supported in academic circles - focuses on ancient megastructures which it says are the product of extra-terrestrial intelligence. The Pyramids of Giza, the Easter Island Statues, the Nazca Lines and Stonehenge; all have been linked to supposed “ancient astronauts” at some stage. According to advocates, these buildings and monuments are call-backs to when aliens were setting up their experiment millennia ago; they were left here to see how we (the puny humans) would react to them. Some versions of the theory even suggest that if we can one day ‘solve’ the mysteries of places like Stonehenge, only then will we be deemed worthy of the attention of our alien overlords. Given that archaeologists and historians have more feasible explanations for most (if not all) of these structures, though, it’s not an idea that has ever especially taken hold. So, failing the ancient astronaut proposal, there’s the theory of panspermia, which argues that human life on Earth is actually extra-terrestrial in origin. This could mean that we just happened to grow from far-flung materials that by sheer coincidence crashed down onto our planet, or that aliens from the distant past purposefully sent us to Earth, once again to begin their experiment. Otherwise known as Directed Panspermia, the theory has had some high-profile supporters - including Francis Crick and Carl Sagan. And some recent discoveries have continued to stoke the debate, including in 2015 when UK scientists found a microscopic, metallic, unknown particle during an otherwise routine collection of space debris. According to the theory, that particle was actually a seed sent to Earth to spread biological material, and seeds like these could have been showing up for millions of years to essentially create humanity. As for where these aliens could’ve come from - regardless of whether they are, in fact, us or they aren’t - a couple of relatively close possibilities have been tabled in the past. First, there’s Mars. In one of the simpler theories around, humankind is but the remnants of an ancient Martian race that fled its home when the Red Planet became impossible to live on, billions of years ago. Elsewhere, we have the very hypothetical “Planet Five” - a now-non-existent world which believers say was once a part of our Solar System, before it disappeared around four billion years ago amidst the Late Heavy Bombardment. In either case, humanity are the leftovers of an alien race that we no longer know about because it no longer exists. In this way, our lives essentially are a long-winded alien experiment in that we’re actually the descendants of ancient creatures that hopped off of their original planet rather than perishing with it. But those theories still bill us as the almost accidental after-effects of some sort of ancient alien behaviour. The more disturbing interpretation of the Zoo Hypothesis has us as the specifically-chosen ‘guinea pigs’ or ‘lab rats’ in an ongoing study conducted by higher beings. And if that’s the case, we have to wonder what the aliens’ true intentions are… Are they really just leaving us alone to develop at our own pace, or are they exerting some sort of control like a real-life simulation game? Are they manipulating our world from behind the scenes, perhaps to discover new truths about their own existences? And, if they knowingly started the experiment, couldn’t they willingly end it, too? Perhaps they’ll one day decide that it isn’t going as they had hoped, or that they’ve collected all of the data they need. What would happen to us then? Naturally, we’d never actually find out any of this - at least not without breaking the bonds of the experiment itself - but if our lives really did turn out to be an alien trial, that trial would never pass even the most lenient ethics board in our own world. With no consent agreement or any indication that we’re even being studied, no right to withdraw from an experiment we don’t even know is happening, and no idea about what will happen at the end of it because we didn’t even realise it had started… we’d be in a completely helpless situation. The best we could really hope for is that the all-powerful aliens would at least grant us a global Q&A to bring us up to speed with our own insignificance, once the experiment concludes. Of course, they could also just plain eliminate us and switch focus to another planet, galaxy or universe instead. If we really are just the product of extra-terrestrial intervention, being watched, controlled, and studied from the present day all the way back to when we first crawled out of the sea, then the whole of human history could well feel quite meaningless. But, if these particular theories ever proved even half-true, it’d completely change everything we thought we knew. And that’s what would happen if our lives were an alien experiment.