In an interview where guests were expected to give quick responses, Barack Obama said something that sent believers in extraterrestrial into a frenzy.
In a conversation with the American podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen over the weekend, Obama appeared to confirm the apparent existence of aliens during a speed round of questioning where the host asks guests quick questions and the guests respond with brief answers.
After he was asked “Are aliens real?”, Obama said: “They’re real but I haven’t seen them.”
He went on: “They’re not being kept at Area 51. There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”
Later, because of the uproar, he issued a statement clarifying what he meant.
“I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” he said. “But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”
This is eminently reasonable and is what I also think. He would probably have been better served if he had said “They’re possible” rather than “They’re real” but sometimes when speaking off the cuff, one’s choice of words is not always the best.
But you can expect the tin-foil conspiracy theorists to go into overdrive.
barack obama did a lot of dirt. he’s a rich sonofabitch who protected rich interests. still, i can’t help but like him. i wonder if that’s how the rethuglicans who are capable of seeing charisma in trxmp feel. completely unimaginable from my point of view, but maybe i have a framework for understanding. i like the way he handled that. what can i say?
Have they never heard of the ‘Great Filter’?
I have come across articles that explain why it is rare that planets have the right ratio of oxygen, nitrogen et cetera to become habitable after the initial turnover when some elements get locked down in the planetary core, but I will need some time to relocate the links.
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Meanwhile, here is John Oliver, delivering horrible news in a fun way.
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=NpPWFsONyiM
“Why only a small number of planets are suitable for life”
.https://phys.org/news/2026-02-small-planets-suitable-life.html
I also recommend the book “Lucky Planet” by the geologist David Waltham.
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BTW as the only known ‘psychozooikum’ in the Universe, we have an extra large responsibility to manage the biosphere and survive.
-And if you want to see the final part of the ‘Great Filter’, just look at the blob in the White House. The science journal “Nature” once published a one page story titled “Goliath” about how politicians mismanage the response to an incoming asteroid (this was a decade before the film “Don’t Look Up”).
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A 45 minute video of the bewildering variety of planets. Remember, as far as we know only one type is hospitable for life and we have not found another example.
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“Alien Earths: What Makes Us Special? -- Professor Chris Lintott”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=PFxSj2mrJho
I guess I can see why that would have stood out to someone primed to hear about aliens. It really didn’t to me. I’ve been a sci-fi fan since I was a kid so I pretty much knew what he was intending from the start and that’s even reading it here where the context is making it stand out more. I had to stop and look at it a second time to figure out that was the thing people were stuck on.
My guess is that we will never know if there are sentient beings anywhere else. The universe is indeed vast and it would not surprise me if, somewhere, there exist creatures we would recognize as intelligent. But the very vastness of space, the unimaginable distances between stars, and the probability that we humans cause ourselves to become extinct make it exceedingly unlikely that we will ever know for sure one way or another.
We are it and look at how we destroy our home and fail to unite to make life livable for everyone. “Intelligence” may be overrated anyway.
If there were only one “Earth” per galaxy, there would still be over 200 billion “Earths” in the Universe.
Misuse of statistics. We have 1 planet that is sufficiently accessible where life evolved , but we do not quite know how it started. We have limited access to very few other planets where we think life didnt evolve. The rest who the heck knows. Where does statistics or probability come into it which would both need quite a bit of data to comment on?
Obama may have been wrong to say “statistically”, but I agree with his sentiment. I simply refuse to entertain the possibility that we could be the only planet in the universe of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars that has life on it.
Ooh! Me! I have! I have!
It’s an overrated answer to a non-problem. Distance answers every difficulty arising from the misnamed Fermi ‘Paradox’.
Deepak @8 and file thirteen @#9,
Obama was not wrong to use the word ‘statistically’ since the statistical argument is quite reasonable.
Since we know that life has evolved at least once in the universe (here on Earth) the probability p of life emerging in any given solar system is not zero, though it is likely to be very small.
Thus the probability of life NOT emerging in any other solar system is (1-p) which can be very, very close to one but is not exactly one. Then the probability of life NOT emerging anywhere at all in the universe is given by (1-p)N where N is the number of solar systems in the universe and is of course very large.
While we do not know the exact values of p and N, what we do know is that the value (1-p)N is definitely not zero and can deviate from one quite substantially. For example, with p=0.000001 and N=1,000,000, you get (1-p)N=0.37 which means that, with these numbers as input, there is a 63% chance of life evolving on at least one other planet.
Try it for yourself with small values of p and large values of N.
The same formula also means that for any large N there is a p small enough, that (1 — p)^N can be made arbitrarily small. And the number of solar systems in the observable* universe does have an upper bound, at least under the mainstream theories of cosmology. Therefore the fact that p is not 0 doesn’t allow the conclusion that we should expect life to exist elsewhere in the observable universe. Statistics can’t help us if we don’t know the distribution. And we don’t. The space of distributions consistent with observations is vast.