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UFOs: Where Would They Come From and How Did They Get here; What Do They Want?


Since the late 1940s there has been almost an obsession with the existence of UFOs. For the purpose of this paper, I am going to assume they do exist. That done they must be explained as to where they came from and how they got here. Neither is at all easy.

I must establish certain basics for this conversation to continue. First, distance in the universe is measured in light years. A light year is not a measurement of time but of distance, 5,878,499,810,000 mile to be exact.  That is 5,878 billion miles.  To put that in some sort of context, Pluto is 3.67 billion miles from the Sun or 3.65 billion miles from Earth.  Regardless, it took the New Horizons space craft almost 10 years to travel that short distance, relative to the whole universe or even our own galaxy.  At the speed of light, that trip would have taken about 5 hours.  The closest star to us is Proxima Centauri at 4.24 light years.  The closest galaxy, Andromeda, is 2.537 million light years away.  The edge of the known universe is some 13.5 billion light years away.

Now, Einstein postulated, and physicists have since proven, at least to some degree, that the faster you need to go the more energy you need.  That part seems obvious however when you talk about going the speed of light they speculate you would need an infinite amount of energy, an impossibility.  All right, so let us say our visitors figured out how to travel half the speed of light, highly unlikely, but even so, if they were from Proxima Centauri, their journey here, one way, would take almost 9 years.  And if they could only manage one tenth the speed of light, the journey takes 42 years.  Light travels at 670.6 million miles an hour.  The New Horizons spacecraft traveled at 36,300 miles per hour.  And somehow we need to get to 67 million miles an hour to have any sort of reasonable chance of visiting our nearest neighbor.  We have not a clue how to do that but that does not mean distant civilizations have not resolved that problem.

In his general theory of relativity, Einstein defined space and time.  We hold fast to that principle today.  But physicists have noted that the space/time continuum can be bent as evidenced in the existence of black holes.  Our own Sun causes and bending of that as well, just not to the degree a black hole does.  From this, scientists speculate that through this bending process large distances in space can be conquered through this bending process.  For example, imagine a sheet of 8 ½ by 11 paper and that is space/time.  Take one edge and fold it towards the other.  Now if you are sitting on the one edge the trick becomes jumping to the other because of the bend.  If a very advanced civilization has resolved that problem then the crossing of great distances become a much easier thing.  Gene Roddenbury’s imaginative Star Trek may have inadvertently supplied us the answer is his use of “warp speed.”  That warping is of the space in front of the space craft and this is how physicists imagine it might be accomplished.

The how to get here resolved, more or less, we are left with the questions of who and where?  It is good to note that 100 years ago humans believed they were the only intelligent life forms in the universe.  This, of course, is a very arrogant belief.  Today’s astronomers are discovering planets outside our own solar system all the time.  They have discovered nearly 2000 planets, exoplanets they call them for their existence outside our solar system.  These planets have been attached to 1225 stars with a number of stars having multiple planets orbiting them.  As we continue to gaze skyward that number will and is climbing.  But even more importantly, these same brilliant scientists have calculated the possibility of the existence of intelligent life form existing anywhere in the universe.  They have decided that it is a certainty.  We are just now discovering life on other planets and moons in our own solar system which, by extension, leaves us with the almost absolute certainty of life existing in every galaxy in the universe.  And how many galaxies are there?  At latest count, over 100 billion!

I suspect that we have been visited by extraterrestrial life forms who find our planet a curiosity and nothing more.  The most likely scenario is that they, like us, are on scientific fact finding missions.  At some point they may want to contact us but thus far have not found any good reason.  We just are not that interesting.  Such scientists have likely encountered a thousand other civilizations at various points in their existence, and having studied them categorized us as being just like one or more of those thousands of other civilizations.  We simply do not warrant greater consideration.  But if they do decide to contact us, I suspect we will have to prove ourselves as being a lot more worthy than we are now.  We as a race love war and violence far too much for an extraterrestrial scientific expedition to take a chance on us as we now exist.

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The Face of God


universe

The above is a picture taken by the Hubble Deep Space telescope.  Every one of those points of light is a galaxy.

For some time now I have been trying to come to grips with a question I have had, is God and the universe one and the same?   I have come to the conclusion that the answer is a resounding YES!

Yesterday I heard a noted English scientist who is also a priest in the church of England say that science is all about figuring out what things are and religion is all about why things are.  In essence he said that science and religion complement each other.  Problematic to such a belief is the fact that many noted scientists contend God does not exist, while many religions say large amounts of scientific data is wrong.

Jinx 003

The above is a picture of my cat Jinxie.  She has no knowledge of there being a God and as long as I feed her and give her a place to sleep, she does not care a wit about science.  But in her, as in all creatures, is the hand of God.  But her ancestors looked more like the picture below.  This is a scientific fact, but it does not discount “intelligent design.”

cats

Man is famous for coming up with answers and solutions to things and problems he does not understand.  Until Copernicus, everyone believed the Earth to be the center of the universe.  To suggest otherwise was considered heresy which is exactly why Copernicus did not publish until just before he died.  Copernicus only moved the center of the universe to the sun but that was a huge step, and one most people of his day could not accept.  Now, we not only know that the sun is not the center of the universe, but that our sun is no where near the center of our own galaxy, and that is a good thing!  No one with a lick of sense argues this fact any more either.  Why?  We improved our knowledge of all things around us.  But all good scientists accept that every answer gives birth to at least two more questions we had not previously considered.

A Roman Catholic priest, of all people, George Lemaitre, came up with a theory in the 1920s that we all know as “The Big Bang Theory” today.  After Edwin Hubble figured out earlier that decade that the universe was expanding, Lemaitre came to the logical conclusion that as you went back in time the universe must have been smaller until it was a single tiny point of energy.  The two question that answer brought forth are, “What triggered the big bang” and “Where did that point of energy come from?”  To this the physicist, Steven Hawking, said that to know that answer is to understand the mind of God.  Not bad for a guy who is seemingly an atheist!  But in Hawking’s statement we find the perfect answer to science’s most thought provoking question.

Even more, in a funny way, the Bible’s book of Genesis is proven true, at least in its first instance, the declaration that prior to anything there was darkness, and the first creation was light.  This is 100% in line with the Big Bang theory.

For some time now quantum physicists have been looking for the every elusive “Higg’s boson.”  This particle is also known as the God particle.  This is important because it is believed that this tiny particle is the most basic part of “mass.”  Mass is what gives everything weight, or for that matter, existence.  They think they’ve found it, but are still discussing the fact.  It is called the “God particle” because they believe it was the first most basic particle at the time of the Big Bang.  They are saying, “here’s what God started with and went on to make everything else.”

Another group of scientists, astro-physicists, figured out what the chances are that we human beings came into being at all.  What they came up with was the odds are so slight that under any other circumstance, in consideration of anything else, we would entirely discount to possibility.  At that point you can rightfully insert that when, 13.7 billion years ago God caused the Big Bang, He also created the absolute certainty that, at least here on Earth, we would come into existence.  Now, remember back to my original statement of how many stars are in our galaxy and how many galaxies exist?  The math states that there are at least 200 billion billion (200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) stars in the universe.  Given that intelligent life evolved once, why not twice, or ten times, or a million times?  Science cannot discount such a possibility and God has not.

Historical man goes back 7,000 years, more or less.  But it is only in the last 100 years that we have evolved enough to begin to understand our place in the universe, and for the most part, we really do not know very much.  But the fact is, God did not give us brains so we could sit on our hands!  It is only logic that intelligent design that built intelligent beings would want those beings to educate themselves.  It is a fact that every answer to every single question we have, God has placed in plain sight.  But it has always been up to us to see and understand what is right in front of us.  The only thing which keeps us from understanding God is our own prejudices and biases.  God certainly is not hiding anything, so why would anyone want to deny the possibility of anything, including God!

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How Big Is Big, and, What About You?


8 minutes — how long it takes light to move from the sun to the Earth

93,000,000 — distance from sun to the Earth

587,000,000,000,000 — distance light travels in one year (587 trillion)

35,000 — number of light years from earth to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy

20,545,000,000,000,000,000 — number of miles to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy or 20, 545 trillion miles

2,540,000 — number of light years to the nearest galaxy (Andrometer) to the Milky Way Galaxy.

The Andrometer Galaxy

13.5 billion — number of light years to the most distant galaxy

Our universe is a really big place!  Go outside and look up at the North Star (Ursa Major).  While you are looking at it consider that the light you are seeing left that star in the year 1582.

the North Star

Now look at the Cygnus constellation and its brightest star, Deneb.  That light left that star over 1400 years ago.  This means you are literally looking back in time depending upon which star you look at.  You are always seeing things as they were, not as they are.

Cygnus constellation

You all remember the first Star Trek movie?  If not, in that movie the Star Trek crew finds the Voyager 1 spacecraft deep in space.  That spacecraft was launched in 1977 and is just now leaving the outer-most part of our solar system.  It is about 11.25 billion miles from Earth and is just barely outside the solar system after 35 years!

Our sun is about 875,000 miles across.  The largest star is about 90,000,000 miles across, or about the distance from the earth to the sun.

Now here is a number for you.  Think about the sand on a beach, any beach.  Think of that sand as a collection of individual grains.  Now, consider taking every grain of sand on every beach on the earth and that is about how many stars there are in the universe.  And the distance between each and every one of those stars is always measured in light years.  The universe must be a really really huge place to hold that many stars and still have that much distance between them all.

My point, next time you think you are the center of the universe, think again.  And next time you think the universe is against you, try looking at an individual atom with your naked eye and know that is exactly how you are seen by the universe.