the first contact

We have no idea what the first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization would be like.

Perhaps the Martians have sent ships throughout the galaxy to discover intelligent species, and perhaps the famous

is one of them.

This 200 meter by 40 meter boulder that arrived in our neighborhood in 2017 took a hyperbolic turn around the Sun and took off as it had come, generating a no less hyperbolic public controversy when two Harvard astrophysicists, Abraham Loeb and Shmuel Bialy, tested the hypothesis that it was an extraterrestrial ship and published results compatible with that idea.

The media jumped on them, the headlines passed three towns, and their colleagues crucified them.

Nothing new, except that Loeb and Bialy never claimed to have proved that

it was a UFO, and his

was an example of scientific rigor.

It's what you have to look for little green men, who take you for a disturbed one.

However, almost everyone agrees that, given the number of planets that can be estimated in the Milky Way - let's not talk about the other galaxies -, it is likely that there is life on many of them, and intelligent life. in some.

Believing that we are alone in this gigantic universe smells stale of holy water.

Science has already expelled us from the center of the solar system, from the center of the galaxy and from the center of creation.

The force that has created us is evolution, and it should exist in any world similar to Earth.

"Believe in the universality of biochemistry," Nobel laureate Arthur Kornberg advised us with an insight far ahead of his time.

Our biochemistry is not the product of chance, but of necessity, since it is based on the simplest organic molecules imaginable,

which must also exist on any planet.

The self-replicating entities that support life (DNA and RNA) are such a simple, compact, and efficient solution to the problem of encoding information and replicating it that it seems extravagant to propose that the Martians use a very different system.

As for Oumuamua, the best I can say is that it brings to mind Arthur Clarke's best novel,

, where an even larger object visits the solar system, turns and heads off.

In this case, the humans manage to land on it before it leaves.

The object is a rotating cylinder, and I will say no more.

Read the novel.

The probability that biological Martians will visit us is negligible.

Interstellar travel takes millions of years, and the reasons for sending Captain Kirk and Dr. Spock are far from clear.

Science fiction writers often fix this with a network of wormholes, as if moving to another star was a matter of taking the subway and getting off at Betelgeuse, but they forget that traveling through a wormhole faces fundamental physical problems.

If a ship arrives here, the visitors will not be heptapod octopuses, as in the movie

The visitors will be robots, and the civilization that built them will have disappeared millions of years ago.

So is the matter of interstellar communications.

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