The drake equation was formed in 1960 by Frank Drake as a way of estimating the number of advanced civilisations in our galaxy. After a few iterations, the equation looks like this:

Each letter represents a different piece of information about our galaxy, and when you put all the data in and perform the calculation, you get a staggering 189 million advanced civilisations just in our galaxy. There are potentially trillions of galaxies in the known universe, so I’m sure you’ll agree that by any stretch, the Universe is teeming with intelligent life. Interesting thought eh?

Now, moving on to the work of Gordon E. Moore who, in 1965, developed what is known as ‘Moore’s Law’. Simply put, Moore’s law states that the amount of transistors which can be fit onto a computer chip doubles every 18 months. This is significant. When anything doubles in size at constant regular intervals you have a form of exponential growth which is really quite an amazing concept. Put 1000 into the calculator on your phone, and times it by two again and again. You’ll see that for a short while, it appears to grow at a seemingly reasonable rate, jumping in size to figures we can quite easily get our heads around. Keep going and going, and you’ll see that there comes a point when the growth in the number begins to accelerate way beyond numbers you can understand or imagine. It sort of creeps up on you and then you get a rapid, explosive, incomprehensible growth. It doesn’t take so long for that to happen.

This is what’s happening to our computing technology and processing power. It’s doubling every 1.1 years, and the speed at which it is doubling is also increasing. Ray Kurzweil says that this growth will soon be so fast that it will appear infinite to the outside observer, and an artificial intelligence of our own creation will be born. When that artificial intelligence uses it’s rapidly expanding processing power to begin to program and improve itself, it’s intelligence growth will be unimaginably fast. The only realistic way that humans will be able to keep up with this rapidly expanding intelligence will be to ‘transcend’ biology and become a part of the advanced intelligence ourselves.

This is the nature of exponential growth in processing power, and it is already happening. Just imagine what technology was like just a decade ago compared to what we have now. It’s likely that in 10 years we will have technology that’s near incomprehensible to some people today. By projecting the growth of computing power outwards, Kurzweil rightly predicted that somewhere in the beginning of this decade, the most advanced computer might be capable of performing as many calculations as the human mind. IBM’s ‘Watson’ proved this in 2011 when it won Jeapordy. Can you imagine what’s possible when we double the power of Watson every year for the next 50 years?

This rapid growth in technological intelligence is called The Singularity, and once it starts it is likely to carry on until it reaches its logical conclusion of a sort of computational and intelligence infection of every part of the observable universe. You can’t really overstate the pace of change when The Singularity arrives, to our fragile biological minds, the levels of intelligence gained are absolutely incomprehensible, but we do know it’s possible.

Now. Let’s go back to The Drake equation. It suggests that in our galaxy alone, there are 189 million advanced civilisations. Since Kurzweil suggests that humanity is less than half a century away from the Singularity, does it not seem fair to assume that other civilisations already went through this phase? Perhaps they went through this phase 10 years ago, perhaps they went through it 1000 years ago. Perhaps, somewhere in the Universe, an advanced civilisation went through Singularity 10,000 years ago. Try to imagine what that means for their/its level of intelligence. Would it be a kind of unified intelligence, in which all conciousness was morphed into one great conciousness that knew all, could see all, and understood the infinite? Would it permeate everything, being an intelligence that sits everywhere, in every atom, using the very fabric of space to conduct its thoughts?

If it’s possible for a society to reach The Singularity before it destroys itself, it’s almost a mathematical certainty that it has happened in multiple places in the Universe already. This might mean that all those reports of strange lights in the sky which seem absolutely inexplicable to even the best minds humanity has to offer, could well be the manifestation of this all encompassing intelligence formed from multiple singularity events.

If however, it is not possible to reach singularity before a civilisation destroys itself then we might want to seriously consider the idea that we’re going to destroy ourselves very soon, because mathematically, The Singlarity is very Near.

So I guess my argument is; either UFO’s are the manifestation of an advanced intelligence beyond the scope of our understanding, or we’re about to destroy our civilization.

EDIT

Some people are pointing out that putting figures into the Drake Equation isn’t really worth the bother yet, since so many are total guesses. However, with Keppler demonstrating that there are probably even more planets out there than we had previously thought, it does at least suggest that the chances of advanced life existing elsewhere are quite large.

The number of how many civilisations are potentially out there are really arbitrary. Taking into account the sheer scale of the Universe, it stands to reason that there’s likely to be advanced civilisations out there that may already have reached singularity.