Mankind has since the Beginning been fascinated with the discovery
of new things, yet surprisingly reluctant to accept that there is something that they
don't know. Most discoveries have been made long before they where publicly accepted,
solely due to traditionalists desperately grasping for the tiny hair of an ancient
science. For example the notion of the Earth being round was supressed for several
hundreds of years, and people claiming that was the case where treated as loonies. The
very same thing happened to people who claimed that the Earth revolved around the Sun and
not the other way around. Copernicus himself was forced by the church to withdraw his
notion that this was the case. So it was before and so it is still, though lately it has
become more subtle. Now, I won't say that this is entirely bad, no doubt our view of the
world would have been a strange one indeed, should every new idea have been accepted
without discussion and proof of its truth, but one has to draw the line somewhere. The
question of alien activity on Earth can easily be divided into two sub-categories. #1. Do
alien life even exist? #2. If they do, are they really here?
Let's deal with number one first. Are there aliens Out There? What
facts do we have? Well, let's begin within our own galaxy. Our galaxy contains some 300 to
500 billion stars. There was long a discussion whiter our solarsystem was a naturally
occurring phenomena and therefor common amongst the star of the Universe, or the result of
some extremely unusual event, like another star passing so close by that matter was torn
from the Sun. This matter would then have made up the planets of our solarsystem. Recent
discoveries of planets orbiting our closest stellar neighbours, seem to indicate that
planets probably is a usual phenomenon, occurring naturally when stars form. In addition
astronomers have found, after observing areas where stars are born, like the horsehead
nebulae for example, discs of dust surrounding new-born stars. Discs that could be the
beginning of a planetary system. With this in mind, let's say that 70% of the stars in our
galaxy have planetary systems. That makes 210 to 350 billion stars with planets orbiting
them. Now, this is controversial. Theoretically life should be able to exist anywhere.
Theories of intelligent clouds of interstellar dust have been put forward and seriously
discussed. You may laugh at this but really, who can say what life really is? Is the
thought of life breathing nitrogen or carbondioxide on far-away planets, or beings living
in extreme heat or cold, maybe inside stars, or on meteors travelling through space,
really more strange than fishes breathing under water? Ok, maybe you think it is, but that
is just because you are used to fishes, and not aliens. We all started as beings living
under water, and if life could adapt from breathing water through gills to using lungs and
breathing air, could it not adapt to other conditions too? But let's concentrate on life
that is similar to what we know. For that to be created a planet must orbit a star similar
to our own and at about the same distance. This of course narrows it down a bit. Let's say
that some 30% of the stars of our galaxy are similar to our Sun, and that 0,5% of those
have a planet of orbiting at one AU (the distance between the Sun and the Earth), that
leaves 315 to 525 million planetary systems that could be inhabited by life as we know it.
The chance remains that life doesn't appear everywhere where the climate is right, thus
decreasing the number of planetary systems actually containing life even further. It
deserves to be said though, that experiments have been made, using only the materials that
where available on the Earth at the time that life first arose, like the same mixtures of
gases as the primordial atmosphere consisted of. When exposed to lightning the experiment
generated aminoacids, considered to be the building blocks of life, thus implicating that
life do arise naturally when given the opportunity, thus not said that everywhere where
life arises, INTELLIGENT life develops.
Now on to question number two: Are they here? When claiming that the
UFO phenomena is real, people often look rather sceptically at you (at best). The main
problem when discussing alien presence on Earth is the vast distances of our Universe.
Even light, which travels so fast its hard to accept that it travels at all, takes it's
time to travel trough space. It takes around eight minutes for the light to travel form
our sun and to us, it takes four years to travel to us from our nearest stellar neighbour,
Proxima Centauri which is part of the triple star Alpha Centauri. The light which we see
from our nearest galactic neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy, started its journey through
space when our ancestors had just discovered the value of a nice rock to throw at something
or someone, some 2,2 million years ago. At the same time we can consider the fact that our
spaceshuttles travels at a speed around 10 km/sec, one 30th the speed of light. This means
that a journey to our closest stellar neighbour would take 120 years using conventional
technology. With this in mind, it's not hard to be a sceptic. This is however not the
entire truth. To start with, our Sun is one of this galaxy's younger stars, being 'only' 5
billion years old. The implications of this is obviously that most of our potential alien
neighbours are bound to be much older (as a race) than we are. The second think to take
into consideration is the fact that science on Earth is progressing with tremendous speed
at the moment. We double humanity's scientific knowledge every ten years, the scientific
discoveries of one day would take a normal person a hundred years to read, if he read day
and night! Just imagine the science of a civilization just a couple of thousands of years
older than ours, and such a civilization would, on the stellar scale be considered to be
just about as old as ours. Most alien civilization would probably be several millions of
years older. And to even further remove the impossibility of travelling space, even with
today's science scientists may have found a way to travel vast distances in space quickly,
by using so called wormholes in space. And if we have figured one way out, you can be sure
They'll have several more.
The question isn't whether or not they exist. Let's face it, they do!
The questions are; "Are they here?" and; "If they are, what do we do about
it?". I admit it's not certain that an alien civilization would want to harm us, and
if they do it's not likely we'd be able stop them anyway, but that really shouldn't
matter. If aliens try to invade us, we'll stand up and fight! It may be one of the
shortest wars this planet has ever seen, but at least we'll have tried, we didn't just let
it happen. So join the Alien Resistance Movement, just in case...
