UFOs are really real

 

ME viewed from space. (I can't do hands!)

I believe in UFOs (unidentified flying objects). I also believe in UCOs (unidentified crawling objects), USOs (unidentified swimming objects) and those other UFOs you sometimes get in greasy-spoon restaurants (unidentifiable frying objects). And from my balcony, I often see UWOs (unidentified walking objects), people (probably) whom I don’t recognize coming to the post office to get their mail … humans, or perhaps aliens in human disguise.

                The UFO phenomenon took a leap many years ago into assuming that if we didn’t know what that thing was in the sky, it had to be extraterrestrial (not of this earth) and then took a further leap to the assumption that if it was flying and was not of this earth, sentient beings that weren’t us must be flying these unidentified things. Obviously, they had to live somewhere and have created their spaceships somewhere and aimed them at earth. The assumption that these “beings” must have sinister intentions has predominated; that they might be looking for love, companionship or new and better recipes for btfspljk didn’t seem to occur to us.

                I could enjoy sitting down with a sentient being from another solar system despite its twelve eyes and wheels-instead-of-legs to compare political systems. Trouble is, I’m with astronomer Chris Hadfield on the realization that the thought is absurd, and here’s one good reason:

The nearest star (sun) to us in our galaxy is Proxima Centauri, which is 40 trillion kilometres away. The fastest speed theoretically that even an electromagnetic current can travel is the speed of light, or 300,000 kilometres per second. For a spaceship to travel from one of Proxima Centauri’s two planets even at that speed—which is most certainly impossible—it wouldn’t reach earth for 4.25 EARTH YEARS. And if it was traveling at the fastest speed that a man-made object has ever traveled in space (360,000 kilometres per hour), that spaceship wouldn’t arrive until 12,749.8 EARTH YEARS had passed. A space vehicle setting out for earth would have to be massive in order to support life upon it for all those years. Generation after generation would have to pass on the journey. Food would have to be produced, their preferred atmosphere stored or manufactured, hospitals and recreation facilities, etc., etc. would have to be part of the project. As it approached our earth so many years after launching, it would likely look more like the moon in size; no one would miss seeing it.

                Anyway, here’s the math; prove me wrong.

 *Cruising Speed of the space probe to Mars                                    40,000 kph[1]

*Or, in kilometres per year                                                                  350,400,000 kpy

*Distance to the nearest star in our galaxy (Proxima Centauri)  40,208,000,000,000 km

*Time required to reach the nearest other “solar system”

     at the Mars probe cruising speed                                                    114,748.8 years

*Highest speed ever obtained by a space ship^[2]                                 360,000 kph[3]

*Or, expressed as kilometers per year                                                3,153,600,000 kpy

*Time required to reach the nearest other solar system                 12,749.8 years

*Speed of

 light                                                                                              1,080,000,000 kph

Time needed for light from Proxima Centauri to reach us            4.25 years

                In the USA, UFO sightings are investigated by the military. The possibility of threat from space works nicely against cutting, and toward increasing, the military budget. I expect that the sighting by a Delta Airlines Pilot over Hudson Bay, Saskatchewan this spring will be followed up by more such stories; shades of Reagan’s and Trump’s “Star Wars” campaigns.

                We know enough about all the planets in our solar system to conclude that life as we know it exists on none of them. Given speeds and distances in space, no “Cinderella planets” like ours exist in reach by any of the standards we know. So what are people seeing? Hard to tell these days:

·         -Earth’s low orbit is crawling with “space junk,” spent communications satellites etc.;

·         -free-floating rocks pass through space and occasionally enter earth’s atmosphere as meteorites;

·         -weather balloons;

·         -the inevitability of pranksters creating crop circles and doctored photos and videos because they can, and because that’s what humans sometimes do when craving attention;

·         -the suggestibility of the human mind that can easily be made to see things that aren’t there;

·         -you name it!  

                Back in the 70s, I experimented with black and white photography; I built a darkroom in our basement. I saw somewhat blurry photos then of saucer-like objects and on a whim, created “photos” in the darkroom that were dead ringers for these “evidences of extra-terrestrial life.” It wasn’t hard.

                We do have threats we might well be afraid of. They’re all earth-made, however. If there is conscious, space-travel-savvy life somewhere out there, we’ll never know it, because the distance to them is exactly the same as the distance from them to us.

Our puny missions to Mars, the moon, Jupiter are the space-travel equivalent of tossing a tennis ball into the neighbour’s yard. Conjecture that if earth should become uninhabitable in future, we could always colonize another planet is as absurd as saying that if food supplies dry up, we’ll just eat rocks.

                 

 

---

[1] NASA

[2] This speed was achieved by the Jupiter probe as it entered that planet’s gravitational field.

[3] NASA