Aliens aren’t real and I’m tired of pretending that they are in order to humor the nerds

Written March 01 2026

There is a particular kind of online nerd that is really concerned about human ‘civilization’. Not in any actual, anthropological sense; they’re not interested in history, except for the broadest strokes, they do not care about culture, the arts or any of that. These are the people that want to protect human civilization from aliens and extinction-level events by building a colony on Mars or the Moon or wherever. They’re also usually into this weird effective altruism/effective accelerationism cult stuff and worry about chatbots too much, but that’s for another day. What drives me nuts is these people’s obsession with aliens and finding aliens or not finding aliens and contacting aliens and having to, for some reason, fight existential wars with these aliens.

What bothers me is that I don’t think aliens, in the way that these people imagine them, are actually real. Usually, when people talk about this, they mean alien civilizations, essentially something like the Vulcans or Klingons from Star Trek. Basically, lifeforms that are just as ‘advanced’ as us, endowed with intelligence and language and a social structure pretty much like those of Earth, with nation states (or a post-nation state, as in Star Trek), an industrialized economy and so on. I think the notion that any alien ‘society’ actually shaped like this exists out there is ludicrous.

The Drake equation, which all these nerds base their ideas around, tries to give an estimate of how many civilization are out there in our universe that are capable of interstellar communication. I think the equation falls flat in two major ways. First, it presupposes that any intelligent life will form civilizations. This is ridiculous. Humans have existed for several hundreds of thousands of years before forming anything close to civilizations. Civilization is really, really recent. Several thousand years recent. Agriculture has been practiced for around 12.000 years. Cities have existed for around 6.000 to 10.000 years. Anatomically modern humans, people nigh indistinguishable from us today, have existed for over 300.000 years. The vast majority of human history has existed outside of civilization. And we, homo sapiens, are not the only ‘intelligent’ lifeforms on planet Earth. Other human species have existed before us and were likely similarly intelligent. Neanderthals might have even used spoken language like we do. Yet only we developed civilization and only in the correct climactic conditions which we only reached ca. 12.000 years ago with the end of the last glacial period. To suggest that any sufficiently advanced lifeform must necessarily develop a civilization betrays a fundamental lack of understanding.

Similarly, the Drake equation assumes that a fraction of the civilizations thus formed will go on to develop the necessary technology to transmit signals into space. That is true. The fraction is zero. True, we have managed to do exactly that, but it is again completely baseless to assume that anyone else will. Precondition for transmitting such signals is an industrialized economy. Earth has industrialized exactly once in a very specific place (England) at a very specific time (late 18th century) under incredibly specific conditions (capitalist social structure, easy access to coal etc.). People like to make jokes about ancient Greek steam machines or some guy in the Ottoman empire inventing a steam engine to power a kebab grill; these are not signs of an early industrial revolution. The industrial revolution has happened exactly once in human history, there is no indication that it would have happened elsewhere or at a different time if it hadn’t happened in England in the late 18th century and there is actually quite a lot of evidence that we will never industrialize again should our civilization someday collapse because all the easily accessible coal deposits have been used up by now. The Industrial Revolution was entirely contingent; it was not inevitable or necessary. And it was only possible in the first place because bacteria several million years ago couldn’t digest wood and thus left it lying around, slowly turning into coal. To think that aliens, even if they were sufficiently intelligent and had created civilizations, might ever industrialize is pure wishful thinking.

To summarized, there are no alien civilizations with spaceships and laser guns out there. If you worry about the Dark Forest Hypothesis or the Human Zoo Hypothesis or whatever, that says a lot more about your own utterly pessimistic and fearful understanding of the world than it does about any aliens out there. Are there aliens out there, like in general? Sure, probably. At some point we will probably find the remnants of bacteria on Mars and science magazine clickbait headline writers will finally feel vindicated. Maybe we’ll even make it to Europa (and I have very strong feelings on space exploration and colonization as well, but I won’t bore you now) and find an algae film or two floating on the water. That is entirely possible and I will gladly welcome these extraterrestrials into the giant sisterhood of life. Until then, I will remain opposed to the notion of aliens.

Finally, I feel like I must somehow justify myself here: I love science fiction. I love aliens. Star Trek is one of my favorite TV shows of all time. I love sci-fi novels about aliens and space. Hell, I write about alien encounters. I like aliens, trust me. But I find it weird that people transpose these sci-fi concepts onto real life as if they were actually real. They are not. The aliens in sci-fi aren’t evel real; they’re a reflection of us and our fears and wants.1 To be actually scared that aliens might come attack us because the Dark Forest Hypothesis said so is like being scared a dragon might attack your village because you read The Hobbit. I’m sorry, if this comes off as overly aggressive or patronizing, but I cannot stand talking to or listening to these people any longer.

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