UFOs
exist!
They
are weather balloons, kids' balloons, Venus at sunrise and sunset, military experiments,
street lights in the fog, birds, Northern lights, reflections on clouds, clouds,
satellites, paragliders, planes, ultralights, parachute jumpers, meteors, wishful
thinking, and hallucinations, among other things.
Untold
billions of galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each certainly make
the liklihood of extraterrestial life plausible--indeed, probable. But advanced
civilizations that manage to survive and are capable of interstellar travel are
not quite the same as bacterial or viral-like chemical replicators. Interstellar
distances are truly beyond our imagination, and few people have taken the time
to ponder them. Proxima Centuri, our nearest star, is 4.3 light years away. That's
light travelling at 186,000 miles per second for 4.3 years. It's a hundred million
times farther than the moon, 25,000 years, one way, by our fastest space ship.
Even if you got there, you'd be in the middle of nowhere. The next star, Sirius,
would be another 4.6 light years of travel. Just getting to the center of our
aimlessly wandering Milky Way would take longer than we've existed as beings. A
quote here from Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything, page 17 [START
BRYSON QUOTE]: Space,
let me repeat, is enormous. The average distance between stars out there is 20
million million miles. Even at speeds approaching those of light, these are fantastically
challenging distances for any traveling individual. Of course, it is possible
that alien beings travel billions of miles to amuse themselves by planting crop
circles in Wiltshire or frightening the daylights out of some poor guy in a pickup
truck on a lonely road in Arizona (they must have teenagers, after all), but does
seem unlikely. Still,
statistically the probability that there are other thinking beings out there is
good. Nobody knows how many stars there are in the Mikly Way--estimates range
from 100 billion [one with 11 zeros] or so to perhaps 400 billion--and the Milky
Way is just one of 140 billion or so other galaxies, many of them even larger
than ours.... [E]ven
with the most conservative inputs the number of advanced civilizations just in
the Milky Way always works out to be somewhere in the millions. [From what I've
read, I don't think all scientists agree on this.]
What
an interesting and exciting thought. We may be only one of millions of advanced
civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between
any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light years,
which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound. It means for
a start that even if these beings know we are here and are somehow able to see
us in their telescopes, they're watching light that left Earth two hundred years
ago. So they're not seeing you and me. They're watching the French Revolution
and Thomas Jefferson and people in silk stockings and powdered wigs--people who
don't know what an atom is, or a gene, and who make their electricity by rubbing
a rod of amber with a piece of fur and think that's quite a trick. Any message
we receive from them is likely to begin "Dear Sire," and congratulate
us on the handsomeness of our horses and our mastery of whale oil. Two hundred
light years is a distance so far beyond us as to be, well, just beyond us....
"If
we were randomly inserted into the universe," Sagan wrote, "the chances
that you would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion
trillion." (That's 10 to the 33rd, or a one followed by thirty-three zeroes.)
[END BRYSON QUOTE] Anyone
who's bothered to crack a book on evolution also understands that the chances
of human-like creatures evolving are virtually negligible, even with the large
numbers of potentially habitable planets (what is "habitable" and by
what, is a whole issue in itself). What
we mean by intelligence is yet another field of study we are barely scratching
the surface of; I'm still waiting for signs of intelligence here on earth--for
example, our species as a whole recognizing that we are one species, and treating
each other accordingly--and though I consider myself an optimist, I rather expect
that human extinction will preempt those signs (much as I hope I'm wrong). Meanwhile,
I do happen to make UFOs for a living. Not only that, but I'd be happy to sell
you one. Problem is, when word gets out a little more, they will be I(dentified)FOs
rather than UFOs. Buy
a UFO P.S. The
importance of understanding the uniqueness of our place in space and time is,
in my opinion, absolutely imperative for our survival. Without an appreciation
of this specialness, we ignorantly go about trashing and destroying the only planet
we'll ever have, and acting as if our economic system or social status or various
other superstitions are more important than our survival. Yes, creating some genuine
intelligence here on Earth would be a wonderful idea, for ourselves, our children,
and other living things. |
