No, Aliens Have Not Been To Earth

We're still not sure about these facts, but our Milky Way Galaxy contains around a trillion stars, and there are estimated to be a trillion galaxies in our Universe. Doing a bit of math, there are a trillion trillion stars in our Universe.

Astrophysicists seem to find more and more evidence that intelligent life is rare, but with that many solar systems, there certainly could be intelligent life out there.

'Out there' is meant literally, because they ain't (sp?) here. Why?

Our galaxy is about 100,000 light-years across, so any star within 100 light-years of Earth is very close to us.

(As a refresher, a light year is the distance light can travel in one year. Light travels at about 180,000 miles per second, so a light year is about 6 trillion miles).

Einstein famously said that the speed of light in a vacuum is the fastest possible speed. One hundred years later, we've confirmed this in many ways. (Yes, Star Trek and Star Wars have variations of a warp drive enabling them to travel much faster than light, but you might know these are fictional shows). 

It took us about three days to get to the Moon, traveling about 6 miles per second. At this speed, it would take us over one million years to travel 100 light years.

No spaceship traveling with people or aliens is going to do this. Heck, it will take us 6 months to get to Mars. Sending robots is no problem. Sending people will likely result in death. Elon Musk, who wants to send people to Mars, said that he would not want to go because he doesn't want to die.

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Let's move on to other reasons. A number of scientists and others have said that they've seen alien body parts and/or alien spaceship parts on Earth, but the government has kept this from us. This can't be true because someone would have sneaked them out or taken pictures of them. After all, it's not like this is a big national security issue. Ben Franklin said, "Three can keep a secret if two are dead". There's no way that we have physical evidence of aliens on Earth without someone bringing it forth. Yes, Congress has had hearings about aliens coming to Earth, but I'll bet my right arm that no evidence will be provided.

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Furthermore, if aliens had the incredible technology to get to Earth, wouldn't they be able to land here without crashing?

And why come to Earth? Certainly not for our resources as the aliens did in the excellent movie, Independence Day. An advanced civilization would have recycling down so they would not run out of resources. Even if they did, they could find them somewhere in their solar system, without trying to destroy a populated planet.

They would only come to make contact with us. They'd stay in orbit and communicate with us, and ask if they could land. Sure, we'd say. How cool would that be?

The only realistic hope is that aliens would try to communicate with us. SETI's purpose is to look for such things. Their message would take 100 years to get here, and our response would take 100 years to get back. Getting such a message would be the event of the millennium.

But you know what they say about long distance relationships.

 

PS: We'd love to have Yoda in Texas.

Shall We Colonize Mars or Planets in other Star Systems?

Colonizing Mars may sound like a good idea, but it would be a nightmare. Very little atmosphere, no protection from radiation, no natural food, no infrastructure, too little gravity, too cold, no grass, no plants, no lakes, no animal, no skinny-dipping, and almost no way to deal with big problems that will absolutely happen. And you’d have to live underground.

Our bodies are adapted to the Earth’s environment in thousands of ways. Colonizing Mars or anywhere else in our solar system would be disastrous.

What about the concern that some disaster could happen to the Earth that would destroy humanity?

I think that within 100 years or so, we’ll have the technology to avoid large asteroid collisions, devastating diseases, super-volcanoes, etc. So after a century or so, I think it’s highly unlikely that any disaster would destroy humanity. (Astrophysicists think the Sun will serve us well for at least a billion years).

World population is expected to top out at less than 10 billion people, and with proper recycling, there are plenty of resources for all. After all, our natural resources do not get used up. (The exceptions are the fossil fuels, but we won’t need them after this century). There is the same amount of iron, aluminum, chromium, and all the other elements, that there were millennia ago.

As far as extra-solar planets, keep dreaming. The planet, Proxima Centauri, is in the nearest star system to our own solar system. And it’s over 4 light years away. At the current speeds of our spacecraft, it would take tens of thousands of years to get there. It would be a miracle if, next century, we could get there in a thousand years.

It would be more of a miracle if we could get there with anyone alive.

What about small, robotic spacecraft? By next century, it's possible but not likely, that we’ll probably be able to send out a bunch of these to various star systems. Once one gets to a planet that it can land on, it could send a transmission back to Earth about what it has found. It can then duplicate itself, and send out more small spaceships. I’ve seen some estimates that we could have these essentially visit every part of our galaxy in 100,000 to 1,000,000 years. A million years seems like a long time, but hominids were around a million years ago. And the dinosaurs died off over 60 million years ago. So it really isn’t as long as it sounds. And we’d know for sure which planets, if any, have intelligent life.

But human colonization of extra-solar planets? We’d need a spaceship to house hundreds of mostly young couples, that can support them for many generations. If you think that’s going to work, you’ve been watching way too many Star Trek and Star Wars’ movies. I know I have.

 
Our only hope is that Elon Musk develops a huge Tesla spacecraft that can travel at ‘ludicrous speed’. Hopefully, we wouldn’t run into a bunch of Klingons.
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Tim Farage is a Senior Lecturer in the Computer Science Department at The University of Texas at Dallas, and a former Professor of Mathematics. The views expressed herein are those of the author. Some of his main interests are in online education, and the reconciliation between science and spirituality. You are welcome to comment upon this blog entry and/or to contact him at tfarage@hotmail.com.