In a review of current debates about whether extraterrestrials have visited Earth, Elizabeth Kolbert discusses the Fermi paradox, which asks, in reference to aliens, “Where are they?” (Books, January 25th). Some useful context is the Rare Earth hypothesis, which argues that advanced life is an extremely unlikely outcome of Darwinian evolution; after all, life required nearly four billion years—almost one-third of the age of our universe—to develop on Earth. There is growing consensus that intelligent life here may well have depended on improbable contingencies such as the Chicxulub asteroid impact, sixty-six million years ago, which obliterated the dinosaurs. Fermi’s question, seen in the light of the Rare Earth hypothesis, could yield the answer “They are not there.”
Pedro Lilienfeld
Lexington, Mass.
Speculation that advanced extraterrestrials might exist somewhere raises a more interesting question: What if they’re already here? The U.S. Navy recently confirmed the authenticity of videos showing bizarre, Tic Tac-shaped aircraft darting through American airspace. It took centuries for the Catholic Church to allow Galileo’s observations about the solar system to supplant medieval cosmology. Today’s strictures on the inconceivable are loosening much more quickly: the 2021 Intelligence Authorization Act calls for the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force to deliver an unclassified report by late June. In the 2020 documentary “The Phenomenon,” which I wrote, Christopher Mellon, a former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, said, “These things are real, they’re here, this is happening now.” Perhaps a new Copernican revolution is closer than we think.
Marc Barasch
Berkeley, Calif.
In considering the likelihood that the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua came from an alien civilization, Kolbert consults the pseudoarcheologist Erich von Däniken, whose work subscribes to a kind of temporalism. Von Däniken asks his readers to believe that ancient peoples lacked the brains and the ambition to conceive of and build their monuments, from the pyramids to Easter Island’s moai, without extraterrestrial guidance. Christians and Muslims may have constructed enormous cathedrals and mosques to signal to God, but, according to von Däniken, the (much earlier) inhabitants of what is now Peru drew the Nazca Lines to signal to aliens; abstract thought was beyond them. The suggestion is that our non-European forebears, in particular, were subservient to alien visitors. A reference to von Däniken may be apt in the context of theories about aliens, but his work enjoys no respectability among scientists today.
Jim Kelly
Rio Rancho, N.M.
The Quiet Abolitionist
Dorothy Wickenden’s account of three important women in pre-Civil War America fills major gaps in my knowledge about Frances Seward’s impact as an abolitionist and a women’s-rights pioneer (“Civil Wars,” January 25th). Nearly ten years ago, I visited the Seward House Museum, in Auburn, New York, which at the time understated Frances’s significance, portraying her as a sickly woman who was uninterested in entertaining at her husband’s parties—a mere sidebar to Seward’s illustrious life. Wickenden’s description of Frances’s connections with influential women such as Harriet Tubman and Lucretia Mott reveals her bravery in combatting slavery and standing up for equal rights.
Monica Lamont
Baldwinsville, N.Y.
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