I used to be thrilled about the idea of aliens from other worlds flying around our planet in high-tech space ships. But then I grew up and realized something sad.
They aren't real. The chances of them arriving are slim to none. Mainly, because the distances in space are just too incredibly, mind-boggling huge to support plausible interstellar space travel.
The fastest that a ship can theoretically travel is the speed of light. And that is a highly dubious feat, since light waves and particles have near-zero mass.
A massive space ship would be lucky to achieve half that speed. Faster than light warp-drives and worm holes are literary devices invented by science fiction writers to make it possible for their characters to get from place to place for their adventures. If they made their stories realistic, the books would be incredibly, painfully boring. Like a 100,000 pages of dialog as the characters take centuries to travel from place to place.
The nearest yellow star, like our sun, is 4.7 light years away. And as far as we can tell, there are no planets that can support life. Looking further, there are only 64 yellow stars within 50 light years away. And the odds that another habitable planet out of the infinite universe just happened to be so close to ours is near zero probability.
But let's say there is one such planet that close. And those inhabitants have the technology to send a ship here to observe us. One that can fly in and out of our atmosphere, defying gravity, maneuvering in incredibly wild ways, fly ultrasonic without creating a sonic boom or maybe even have cloaking capabilities - à la Klingon warbird.
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My favorite UFO photo. A light fixture reflected in the window
through which the photo was taken. |
Don't forget that this ship would have taken centuries to reach us, and if those aliens live that long, they would have a long, boring drive. Or their children's children's children would be the ones to finish the mission. (Mom! Are we there, yet?) If they traveled twice as fast as the fastest current space drive we humans possess then it would take 640,000 years. Wow! Even if they sent a drone with artificial intelligence, the ones who stayed behind would not get the results of such a mission for a 1000 years.
What then, would be the point? Unless they wanted to make contact and use our planet for something important like an outpost or a colony, sending a probe to watch (and probe) us would seem incredibly boring to them and a waste of time and effort and money (if they use money). Kind of like us sending a submersible to study sea slugs and waiting 20 lifetimes for the results.
Another nail in the coffin is the fact that sightings have not increased much in the
20 years they have been keeping track of sightings in earnest. Yet the world population has grown by 30%. That's a heck of a lot more eyes. You would think sightings would have gone up by the same percentage.
Also, smartphone usage has gone from 0 to almost 1.5 billion in just the last 10 years. You would think that with all those high-resolution cameras clicking selfies, there would be some pretty good images of our alien visitors by now. But the images we see are still the same blurry, shaky footage that we saw in the 1970s. Where is the improvement? The only improvement seems to be in stunning CGI manipulation. That doesn't instill much confidence. With all the Photoshopped, nonsensical click-bait around, even if we did get to see the latest space ship in all it's glorious detail, it would be suspicious because so many people are creating hoaxes these days with their editing software.
And what about all the outdoor security cameras and dashboard cameras and body cameras in use today compared to even 10 years ago. Where is the footage? Come on! We can find footage of the latest terrorist bombing or meteor strike or plane crash, but no UFOs? Why is that?
Maybe everyone should stop pointing their cameras at kittens and point them at the sky.
I have a darn good memory. And one thing that has stuck in my mind is the fear we had during grade school of the pending disaster of a coming man-made Ice Age in our lifetime.
