UFO's. Do you believe?

Of course there is no reason why we cannot be the most advanced civilisation, after all, someone has to be. Which is probably not the most comforting thought in the Universe given how uncivilised we can be at times. The other sobering thought is that the genetic material we are currently seeding the solar system with is not our own, but bacteriological and/or viral - we haven't spread our DNA, but we have given the Universe a nasty cold.

 

The Milky Way Galaxy is 100,000 lightyears in diameter and about 1,000 lightyears thick at the core, so it would take millions of years to cross it at sub-light speed, and billions of years to completely explore it. Since the self-replicating robot idea is effectively Brownian motion, these timescales can be increased by several magnitudes, (ie 10s or 100s of millions to cross it and 10s or 100s of billions to explore it)

 

Given that the Milky Way is probably only 6 billion years old, any advanced civilisation that possess interstellar travel has not been around long enough to explore anything other than their immediate neighbourhood, which makes them finding our Solar System out here in the cul-de-sac of the inner rim of the Orion Arm highly unlikely.

 

 

Some of it will be more advanced than us, some of it less so, most of it could be equally as advanced as we are, but never invented Tippex™ so they have never been able to correct the errors in their theories of semiconductor physics and therefore never entered the silicon age, not discovered radio-waves, split the atom or built the Toyota Prius, yet alone a space craft of any description. I say "most" for one simple reason - the only example we have suggests it takes life 4.5 billion years to "evolve" to our current level - and it took the Universe 9 billion years to create stars that were stable enough to support the creation of life, therefore all the Sun-like stars in the Universe that could start the life-cycle started at the same time ours did, so the majority of life in the Universe is at our level of evolution (give or take a few million years ).

 

The distance to the nearest stellar neighbour is 4 light-years away (24 trillion miles or 40 trillion km). The fastest vehicle we have is the Space Shuttle, which can travel at 18,000 mph (28,000kph). It would take the space shuttle 157,222 years to get there - this is long before we start worrying about how many Texaco service stations there are along the way to re-fuel it or how we would maintain and service a mechanical system to survive such a journey when bits fall off even the most reliable of systems at alarming regularity.

 

Even if the extraterrestrial life forms have invented a different propulsion system, Newtons laws still apply even if their civilisation doesn't possess apples and thus never had a Newton - energy is required to move a mass and to move it over a vast distance, a vast amount of energy is required.

 

Faster than light travel is simply impossible. Not improbable, impossible. This is not bad maths or selfish physics on our part, it's not the result of our scientists inventing "rules" that stop this from happening or them not thinking "outside the box" or simply "getting it wrong" - it is an absolute limit of the Universe and even extraterrestrial are governed by those same rules and laws, even if their maths is base-3, their physics is written in iambic-pentameter and their Einstein was a hotel clerk. Not believing in this limit is simply not enough to make it go away. (Neither would reading Science Fiction - the keyword there is the second one )

 

Also, there is no magic system of trapdoors and wormholes that would enable matter to travel through them and arrive intact. Entering a singularity would convert all mass into energy, this energy could travel through a wormhole (if such things exist) and be expelled out of another singularity lightyears distant, where it may be converted back to mass - but without the coding-imprint of what that mass looked like when it first entered: you re-enter the Universe as radiation, then sub-atomic particles and then hydrogen - 4.5 billion years later you may have coalesced into a recognisable life-form, but you wouldn't be you anymore and 4.5 billion years hardly qualifies as "faster-than-light".

 

So in answer to the original question: No I don't believe in UFOs - where UFOs are vehicles for extraterrestrial lifeforms. A non-belief that is supported by the observation that the only reasons that these extraterrestrials appear to traverse the trillions of miles of empty space at enormous cost in energy and time is to abduct simpletons, goose cattle and make pretty patterns in wheat-fields.