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Little Green Men
by paul1917 at 3/25/2008 5:42:38 AM


Have you ever thought about the possibility that Earth has been visited by aliens?

I was recently watching a box set of Cosmos that my father gave me a couple of years ago and it is like having my mind expended without the use of drugs. Have you ever seen Cosmos? It is the grand daddy of all science documentaries, it originally aired on PBS in the late 70s and it was written and narrated by a scientist and astronomer named Carl Sagan. I am dating myself, but I remember watching it on TV when it came out. I was just a kid and even though I didn't understand even a fraction of what Carl was talking about it still fascinated me. The production quality, music, and the overall presentation beats anything you will see today on the Discovery channel. The only thing that is outdated about the series is Carl Sagan's wardrobe. If I watch any more of the series I am going to rush out and buy some brown turtlenecks and a corduroy sport coat.

Some of the basic facts about this universe of ours just astound me. Carl was rattling off statistics in order to explain how big the universe is and I confess that my mind just can't fathom the immensity of these concepts. For instance: There are more stars in the sky than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the whole world. I don't know how many grains of sand that is, but it is a bunch…

Carl (rest his soul) and I agree that with that there must be planets orbiting many if not all of those stars, so the possibility of life on other planets has to approach certainty. Just think about it statistically and you will have to agree. It stands to reason that with a vast amount of stars (billions and billions!) there must be a profusion of planets out there that can support life. Some of that life could be intelligent and advanced.

That does not mean that we have been visited by little green men though. I am not ruling out the possibility because I am willing to believe almost anything, it just seems unlikely to me. Space is really big and it takes a long time to travel around in it by any method we know of yet.

The speed of light is 670,616,629.2 miles per hour, which supposedly is as fast as anything can go. A light year is the distance light can travel going that fast in a whole year. From the center of our own Milky Way galaxy to the Earth is 30,000 light years. So that means that the light we see in the sky tonight (if we were looking at the center of the galaxy) started traveling 30,000 years ago and is just getting to us now. From our galaxy to the next-nearest spiral galaxy (called M-31) it is over 2 million light years. When light from M-31 started traveling toward the Earth there were not even human beings around, just our primate ancestors.

If you could go almost as fast as the speed of light there would be a dilation effect and time would slow down for you. You could travel very far indeed and it would seem like you had not aged much. The catch is that to everyone else who was not going near the speed of light time would keep ticking at the same steady pace it always does. That means that everyone you know would be dead and gone by the time you got back from a long trip at near light speed. Even if you could go that fast it doesn't seem like a very practical mode of travel.

The fastest vehicles mankind has ever made are the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes that were launched in the late 70s. Even though they are going at the fastest speed any man-made object has ever gone they are still going 10,000 times slower than the speed of light. Assuming they were heading for the closest star to us (they are not) they would not reach the star for 40,000 years.

So if the aliens were using any technology that is even remotely like ours they would have to have very, very long life spans to make the trip here and back.

As much as I would like to believe otherwise it seems highly unlikely that we have been visited by intelligent life from another world. I am a lifelong Star Trek and Star Wars fan and I would love to think that we have been visited, that crop circles are real, that aliens built the pyramids etc. But unless the aliens know of a completely different technology for travelling the stars I just can't believe it. Now if they have invented hyper-dimensional travel or have mastered the use of worm holes in time-space that could be a whole other story…