OVER AT SUBSTACK, I have an essay on all the stories about aliens that are coming out.

One explanation for alien visits and sightings, which I heard from (I think) Greg Benford at a party (it might have been Jerry Pournelle at a different party, it’s been a while), is the “graduate student hypothesis.” We’re being studied by alien scientists, but, like human scientists, all the grubby fieldwork tends to get left to grad students. Grad students are in their 20s (or whatever the alien equivalent is), get bored doing all the grubby work, and occasionally get drunk and set out to spook the locals just for fun. (The drunk part might explain all the crashes, too . . . )

But of course we can’t know. Even if we met and studied aliens it would probably take a lifetime or more to really understand them. Without any data there’s really not much we can say.

We maybe have some data, or at least inferences. Are they friendly? Unclear, but if they wanted us wiped out they probably could have just nudged an asteroid onto a path that that would have killed us all, or at least destroyed civilization, by now. Are they keeping us in an interstellar quarantine? If so, not very effectively given all those crashing spaceships.

I mentioned the crashed ships as a means of transferring technology. Perhaps they’re trying to protect our mental health. On Earth, at least, less advanced civilizations that encounter more-advanced ones tend to suffer a deeply destructive societal depression of sorts. So the idea is that we’re being allowed to retain our self-esteem by reverse-engineering their technology, making us feel proud of our achievements, rather than receiving handouts that would simply underscore our inferiority. Perhaps it’s also a way of making sure we only get technology that we more or less understand.

Read the whole thing, of course.