universe

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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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A Few Questions For My Creationist Friends


From what I can find most creationists believe the Earth to be between 5700 and 10,000 years old.  I think the most important questions they need to answer is:  “Why would God create a universe, and the science that goes with it, and play a trick on us?”  The trick is that the very science He had to create allows us to date the Earth at approximately 4.5 billion years of age.  Another question which needs answering is: “Why would God create an entire species, dinosaurs, and then destroy them?”  He also makes us believe them to have died out about 250 million years ago.  Does this mean that He loves being the trickster, the magician, who relies on sleight of hand?  Even more importantly, why not keep the entire human race at a relatively low level of intelligence so we would not confuse ourselves with what appears to be facts?  The creationist credo says God does not make mistakes and that all human are created in His image.  How does that explain human beings who are born so developmentally impaired that they not only can never care for themselves, there is good reason to believe that it is impossible for them to comprehend the existence of their maker?

Creationist hate Darwin and his theories of evolution.  I can understand how the concept can be difficult to comprehend but that does not make it fantasy.  If there is not constant evolution, how does the creationist explain that the average height of a man during the time of Jesus was about 5 feet 1 inch but today it is 5 feet 9 inches.  That is close in evolution pure and simple.

Here’s a mind blower.  Our nearest neighbor in the universe, to our Milky Way Galaxy, is the Andromeda Galaxy.  It is 2.5 million light years away.  Why would God bother to create other galaxies in the first place and then place the nearest one 2.5 million light years away, about 13,540,372,670,807,453,416.15 miles away. And that is just the closest one.  There are other galaxies which are billions of light years away.

pillars

The above picture was taken by the Hubble telescope.  Astronomers have named it “the Pillars of Creation.”  But the creation they are talking about is of stars.  It is a star nursery, if you will.  They are 7,000 light years away.  The height of each of the pillars is measured in the 100s of light years.  But the laws of physics, created by God of course, tells us that what we are looking at is at least 7,000 years old but even more, took millions of years to create in the first place.  But even more, those “stars” you see in the background are actually more galaxies so far distant that they look like tiny specs of light.

I believe that God is sitting, where ever He sits, and is mumbling to himself, “I created all this, gave you high intelligence, and the best you can come up with is that it has all only been around a few thousand years?  I also gave you an imagination, try using it to consider that I actually created this a very long time before that!”

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God’s Universe vs. Science’s Universe


For as long as man has been able to consider his existence, he has been trying to explain it.  But for most of man’s existence he has been almost entirely reliant upon the religious beliefs of his local area for that explanation.  The Judeo-Christian explanation can be found in the Bible.  It is a remarkably succinct accounting for the formation of the universe, and for all of recorded history, until the 20th century, was generally regarded as the only explanation.  This was largely due, however, to man’s inability to see either outward in the vastness of the intergalactic universe, or inward, towards the bits and pieces of the sub-atomic universe.  Albert Einstein is largely responsible for the beginning of our shifting attitudes towards understand our creation, and our creator, if there is one.

Since the time of Galileo it seems science and religion have been at each other’s throats.  The one denying the other’s ascertations.  For most of the history of man religions have feared scientists as being a threat to their tenants.  And to some extent, that was true.  But in the latter portion of the 20th century, and continuing into the 21st century, many of the larger religions have included scientists within their ranks.   This is particularly true of the Roman Catholic Church where the Jesuits seem to be leading the way, although though they are certainly not the only group within that church.  What they now espouse, and I find particularly inviting, is the idea that science actually explains God’s existence rather than dispel it.

The renown physicist Stephen Hawking states that science does not need God to explain the big bang.  Hawking is of a group of physicists who believe that the big bang, the beginning of the universe, came from nothing.  He has even made a theory of a multi-dimensional universe, 11 in all, that exists.  He theorizes that at the time of the big bang a single, but unseeable, dimension existed, and from this our physical universe came into being.  My personal problem with this is that Hawking, and his peers, are desperately trying to make 0 = 1.  This, of course, is an absolute impossibility.  But Hawking will use a combination of theoretical mathematics with quantum physics to explain how it actually can be true.  To be fair, mathematics uses two symbols that have limitless possibilities, i is the symbol for imaginary numbers, and of course ∞ which is the symbol for infinity.  For my purposes infinity is the only relevant symbol.  Mathematics can actually prove that infinity exists but its very nature says that it is without bounds.  The joke is, what does infinity plus one equal?  It is a concept human beings are incapable of understanding.  And yet most physicists will argue the concept of an infinite number of possibilities when they consider the “multi-verse” theory.  That is the theory that our universe is but one of an infinite number of other existing universes.  To understand this you need only consider a mug of beer with its bubbles floating within.  Each bubble is separate and of exactly the same size, and each representing a universe unto itself.

It is impossible for any human being to fully comprehend even numbers much smaller than infinity.  The number 1 trillion is actually a rather common number in terms of our universe.  Consider the size of the Eagle Nebula shown below.

nebula

This cloud of gas is 70 light years long.  A single light year equals 5.865 trillion miles.  Now multiply that by 70.  Now look at the picture below.

nebula

In the circle above is that same Eagle Nebula.  See all the gas around it?  It of course is immense.   If the length of the clouds within that circle are 70 light years, what of the distance invovled in the gas surrounding it.  Beyong our grasp.  And this is just a single example of billions and billions of more nebulae just like this scattered all through our universe.

What does any of this have to do with the existence of God?  It comes from the fact physicists universally agree that there is an extremely precise mechanism behind the existence of our universe and that the tiniest of variation at its beginning, one part in one trillion, and our universe does not come into existence.  Statistics tells us the our flashing into existence as the universe did, given the odds, was unlikely to the extreme.  And yet here we are.

But even that happening, the same mathematics, statistics, show the unlikelihood to the extreme that not just intelligent beings should come into being, but that a platform for their existence, the earth in our solar system, also required extremely exacting and unlikely to the extreme.  Earth had to be formed at the distance from the sun it is, have a megnetic core, and have water just to sustain the meagerest of life forms.  And yet again, here we are.

There is a large group of scientists today who believe in a theory called transcendence.  This term simply means the ability to rise above and go beyond the normal and usual human and physical constraints.   Hawking will tell you that time did not exist prior to the big bang, that another unknown dimension did.  To be fair, time is a human invention to describe our movement from what came before to now to what comes next.  But it none-the-less is a standing contradiction to Hawking’s belief.  But an even more salient contradiction to the something from nothing idea of the Hawking group is the maxim in physics that states matter can neither be created nor destroyed.  What Hawking is suggesting is even though that is true now, it was not true in the beginning.  To that I respond, what a bunch of crap!  Either the laws of physics are immutable or they are not.  You cannot have it both ways as Hawking suggests.

We are truly in the infancy of our scientific knowledge.  I firmly believe that science in no way contradicts theology, nor theology science.  In the long run, science will confirm the existence of God, and even more, that there is some true to the first chapter in the book of Genesis in the Bible.  We actually have already have done that.  The Bible states that in the beginning there was darkness and that God created light.  Modern physics states that is exactly what happened in the beginning.  Prior to the big bang there was absolute darkness.  But at the moment of the big bang when huge amounts of energy were released, there of course was the accompanying light.  This was day one according to the Bible.  And if we consider that the concept of time is an entirely manmade concept that day was actually some 400,000 of our years long before the creation of atoms, stars, planets, etc. started.  And there we have day two.

I do not, nor have I ever, considered the book of Genesis to be an accurate description of the beginnings of the universe and then of man, but it sufficed until we could fathom a more God-like rationale of its creation.  The men who wrote the Bible were incapable of conceiving the universe as we now know it.  Their divine inspiration was to put into words concepts that the people of the day could understand, and even more importantly, accept.  We are now moving beyond that.  Remember the possibility of the universe as we know it existing is of the smallest of possible odds.  And yet, here we are.

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Has the Earth Been Visited By Alien Life Forms?


Personally, I think it entirely likely.  I am not going to point to UFO sightings or any such thing but rather just a little bit of logic.  But first we need to establish our place in the universe.  By that I mean, exactly where are we in this great big universe?

It is believed that we sit on one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way Galaxy.  It is only a belief because, of course, we simply do not have a good vantage point to see our entire galaxy.  In reality, the shape of our galaxy is mostly an educated guess, but probably a pretty good one.  Our galaxy is between 100 and 120,000 light years across.  Light travels 5.87849981 × 1012 miles in one year, or about 6,000 trillion miles.  And it gets better.  Within our galaxy there exist a least 1 billion stars.  Now if you consider the chance of life just within our galaxy to be a million to one against that any single star has life in its proximity, that means life is almost a sure thing within our galaxy alone.

Astronomers know that there are at least a billion galaxies each with a billion stars in our universe.  With such numbers the chance of life is not only a sure thing, but is more a case of how many instances does it exist.

The Andromeda Galaxy is our closest galactic neighbor.  It sits a mere 200 million light years away.  That means that any life form that set out from Andromeda at a speed just slightly less than the speed of light had to have left long before dinosaurs existed on Earth just to arrive here in present day.  I think it reasonable to conclude that travel from there is unlikely using all light speed based scenarios.

The closest star to us in Proxima Centauri which is a mere 4.2 light years away, or 20,000 trillion miles away.  Right now about the only theories of how to travel such distances exist mainly in science fiction.  While physicists speculate how we might build a space ship to accommodate such speed, the energy required is greater than all known sources.  And yet I say other beings have likely resolved such problems.  How?

Astro-phycisists speculate that the way to traverse such a distance is through the distortion of space-time.  Scientists have been able to minutely affect the shape of space-time which allows for far greater distortions even though we do not have the means at present.

Our solar system has existed for the last third of the time the universe has existed.  That means another “solar system” could have been in existence during the 4 billion years prior to ours, have given rise to intelligent life forms who in turn have resolved many of the problems of long distance travel.  It is possible they have existed for billions of years where mankind has existed for only 1 to 2 million years.  That would give them a pretty good leg up on us in all respects.  So much so that they could have foreseen the demise of the star where they originally existed and have moved on to another.   That being the case, their traveling to our solar system would be old hat.

How does this bending of space work?  Let’s consider we decide we want to travel from New York City to Sydney Australia.  We get on an airplane and travel over 10,000 miles to get there.  At 500 MPH that would take about 20 hours of flying time.  But, if we could go straight through the earth to Sydney the distance is reduced to a little over 3000 miles, or 6 hours of time at 500 MPH.   That is the “bending” that physicists suggest we do with space-time to reduce travel time.

We earthlings are right now devising theories to tackle to problems of traveling great distances.  It is not unreasonable to expect that a society a mere 1,000 years advanced from us may well have such problems at least partially resolved.  And when you allow for an alien society to have existed even more than that you by extension increase the probability that they have also done interstellar travel and possibly intergalactic travel.

All things considered, I think it most likely that we have been visited and studied by E.T.  I suspect that contact has not been made simply because we are viewed as far too primitive, and also probable communications problems.  How do you tell a primitive society, us, that you come in peace?  Considering how warlike humans are that is no easy task.

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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.