What if aliens are real? A thought experiment

This is how strange our times are: recently, two United States presidents engaged the question of whether aliens are real, and it wasn’t even in the top 15 stories of the week. The debate was over not "aliens" as in migrants to a country but "aliens" as in extra-terrestrial, nonhuman beings.

Former president Barack Obama sparked the controversy by responding to a question about aliens in a podcast interview and saying that "they’re real" before assuring listeners that there are no underground bunkers studying aliens at Area 51. President Donald Trump then accused Obama of giving out "classified information" and then pledged to declassify government documents on what used to be called unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and are now referred to as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs).

Those discussing UAPs these days are not tinfoil-wearing conspiracists but rather the secretary of state and senior military officials who argue that someone seems to have some kind of technology that American scientists can’t explain. Still, I find it highly unlikely that anything substantial will come out of whatever documents are released. But let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that science does one day prove the existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life.