Is ET already in the neighborhood? | GARY COSBY JR.
Three former military officers appeared before a congressional committee recently to talk about, of all things, UFOs. Now there is a conspiracy theory I can sink my teeth into. According to testimony, not only has the government known about extraterrestrial activity, but they have covered it up and have in possession not only alien craft but also alien remains.
Independence Day, anyone?
But seriously, this time I don’t doubt that the government has been lying to us and has plenty of evidence of ET’s activity around our planet. Which, if you really think about it, is actually good news. If ET had bad intentions regarding mankind, we’d already be dead or enslaved or whatever.
So, let’s step back and take a more or less serious look at the probability of extraterrestrial life.
First, there are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy in an area that is more or less 100,000 light years across. Sounds like a crowded neighborhood, but the nearest star to us us about four light years away, that’s four years for light to travel at a speed of about 186,000 miles per second. Since matter, as far as we know, can’t travel even at the speed of light, much less faster, aliens would have a long, long trip even from our closest neighboring star.
To date, mankind’s best speed was attained by a probe that reached 332,433.588 miles per hour. That’s a snail’s pace next to the speed of light. Now, assuming ET has come here, he, she, or it, would have to have come up with vastly superior tech to what we have, and would have had to overcome the overwhelmingly vast distances and the time required to travel them. As far as we know, light speed is an absolute boundary for anything with mass, so the barest minimum would have taken years of travel — if not lifetimes.
Considering mankind has only been producing electromagnetic radiation in the form of radio waves for less than a hundred years, for us to be “found” by an alien race would mean they had a happy accident and a spaceship very close when we began sending out radio signals. In the vastness of the universe, that seems pretty random.
Still, the Milky Way has all those stars and at least as many planets, so the likelihood of life existing on at least one other of them is extremely high. In fact, I would go so far as to say it is almost one hundred percent certain that sentient life exists in abundance throughout the universe.
To take this one step further, scientists estimate there are likely two trillion galaxies in the known universe. Two trillion! And all those universes would be full of stars of their own with planets orbiting many of the stars and very likely teeming with life. Not that any of them could have come to visit unless the tech they possess is off the charts amazing. The distance to our nearest large spiral neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light years. Just stunning.
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In fact, the size of the Milky Way alone seems to be the best argument that we have not been found by aliens; however, those UFOs are out there. The Navy released camera footage recorded by fighters of what they term UAPs, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, just a couple of years ago, so something we can’t explain is definitely out there.
While it seems almost unrealistic to think aliens have come here due to the technological boundaries, several factors work in favor of alien visitations. First, think of the tech we have developed since the Wright Brothers first took to the skies, every so briefly, in 1903. Germans were firing rockets at England during World War II, a scant 40 years later. Both the U.S. and the Soviets used some of those same German scientists to help us develop our space programs.
Werner von Braun, a former German, led our Apollo program and we had a man on the moon in 1969 for crying out loud. While the space programs didn’t exactly go static after that, we haven’t yet launched a manned mission to Mars, our nearest neighboring planet that we think might have harbored life — but that will happen before too many years are out.
Each challenge creates the need for new technology, and new technology builds on itself until one day you realize you can warp space-time or some other thing that was so fanciful it had been purely science fiction just a few years earlier. Perhaps we will be able to create wormholes and travel through them to distant places almost instantly. Who knows?
The point is, alien races who might have visited Earth would have already overcome those hurdles. If, as the former military officers state, we have not only alien craft but also alien biological remains, we might be figuring this out more quickly than would otherwise be possible.
I just wish I were young enough to be part of that future wave of exploration. But unless we manage to reverse the calendar, that will be a mission for another generation to undertake.
Gary Cosby Jr. is the photo editor of The Tuscaloosa News. Readers can email him at gary.cosby@tuscaloosanews.com.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Is ET already in the neighborhood? | GARY COSBY JR.
