The UFO Phenomenon

Look what happened in our world when explorers discovered races of people that were considerably less advanced.

As far as our space exploration is concerned, if there is no possibility of discovering something like warp speed sometime in the future then we are destined to stay in our own backyard, so to speak.

I think the key to deep space travel may be in worm holes that connect to other parts of the universe.

(but, then again, I've been awake since 3:00 am this morning so I may say anything).

If there was such a place as Area 51 and if there were three alien bodies discovered at a crash site the government would almost have to keep it a secret for reasons stated above.

In a situation like that people cannot be trusted to act reasonably or responsibly. I'm sorry, they just can't.

By the way Walton Street, my favorite tennis shoes are my Chuck Taylor All Stars high tops in camouflage. 

 

 

that could be on my tombstone

At subluminal speeds the only viable methods of travel are multi-generation ark-ships, which sound great in theory, but would not be viable in practice due to the time these vessels will take to cross the vast distances between solar systems. They would simply wear out before they had completed the journey and anything needed to maintain, repair and/or rebuild these ships would have to be brought with them since there is nowhere to stop along the way to gather raw materials or make repairs. If you are travelling the 37,842,113,600,000km (i.e., 4ly) from a planet in one solar system to a planet in the neighbouring solar system then there is nothing in the space between them to stop at. 

If the ship is travelling at say 1 million km per hour then that is a 4,320 year journey - in this time on earth we have gone from building pyramids to sending probes to the outer solar system.

So another thing to consider is whether the lifeform that arrived at the destination would bear any resemblance to the one that embarked on the voyage. Not just sociologically, but if the speeds are slower than 1 million km/hr (which is quite probably) then also biologically. After a hundred thousand years in space, the species of "alien" that reached Earth would not be representative of the technologically-advanced lifeform that built and launched the arc-ships. There is also their psychological state to think about - after living for generations in a confined environment within a limited gene-pool they'd be quite insane by any standard you care to apply.

All that aside, if they found Earth to be habitable to their physiology then you can pretty much guarantee that their only thought would be of colonisation because for them it was a one-way trip and the home-world would be a distant mythological legend. They would not see us as the native population but as a planet-wide infestation in much the same way we regard roaches and termites in domestic dwellings. 

FTL travel, whether by wormhole or warping spacetime, is a science fiction "get-out-of-jail" free card that tends to collapse under even moderate scientific scrutiny, nothing would survive the energies involved. The vessel is part of the space being warped or bent or distorted so it too will be warped or bent or distorted so the concept of travelling through it is as much a fictional fantasy as travelling to another world through a looking glass or the back of a wardrobe. You can travel through a black hole, wormhole or space warp in much the same way as a camel can pass through the eye of a needle - you just need a giant blender and a huge syringe, and then a lot of time, patience and luck in piecing together what arrived on the other side as a fully functional camel.

Without any major discoveries in alternative forms of travel (like worm holes, time warps or even warp drive) we're not going anywhere.

Why are we going anyway? What do we hope to find? 

Our galaxy has a few hundred billion stars and planets and who knows how many galaxies there are in the universe?

What were we thinking when we decided to explore space?

We cannot discover what is not there to be discovered. 

If interstellar travel is measured in thousands of years then inter-galaxy travel is measured in millions of years. The nearest galaxy to our own is 28,000ly away, (i.e., 264,900,000,000,000,000km), so even at light-speed it would take 28,000 years to get there (at 1x light-speed it would take 2.1 million years to reach Andromeda) so once we start talking about visiting other galaxies in the Universe then even FTL travel becomes problematic to a short-lived species such as ourselves.

What we can investigate and explore is our local neighbourhood, and there are enough unknowns contained within that to keep us occupied for many years to come.