Anyone who has been watching the excellent 'Wonders of the Universe' would have heard Professor Brian Cox explain how our own galaxy contains billions of stars, and there are billions of other galaxies swirling around. That's an extraordinary amount of planets orbiting those billions and billions of stars and potential homes of other forms of life.
I have always maintained the odds of their not being other life out there on other planets must be minuscule, it happened here so why not on any of those billions and billions of other solar systems?
Stories of little green men visiting us and inserting probes in unspeakable places has always generated rolling eyes and sniggering and probably the most debated extra-terrestrial event happened in 1947 when either a UFO or a weather balloon crash-landed on a farm near Roswell Air Base.
A press release put out by the Military Authorities at the time stated that they had recovered a UFO only for it to then be retracted 24 hours later.
Lieutenant Walter Haut, who was the PR man at the base in 1947, and who issued both the press releases after the crash, died and left a sworn affidavit to be opened only after his death which explained that the weather balloon claim was a cover story, and described seeing not just the crashed craft, but alien bodies.
Local undertaker Glenn Dennis has claimed that he was contacted by authorities at Roswell shortly after the crash and asked to provide a number of child-sized coffins.
Now documents released by the FBI make the story even more intriguing.
One document dated 22 March 1950, special agent Guy Hottel, head of the FBI's Washington field office, wrote to Hoover with information on three "so-called flying saucers" that had crash-landed in New Mexico.
According to the memo above (click to enlarge), an air force investigator stated that three flying saucers had been recovered in the area, along with the bodies of the alien crews. The memo goes on to add: "Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only three feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed flyers and test pilots."
More Marvin the Martian than Ming the Merciless i agree but there seems to be something out there visiting us.
I just hope they left the probes at home.
7 comments:
It always amazes me that humans, when they aren't inventing Gods, are inventing space visitors. Their imagination seems infinite.
What's wrong with being the only living things in the universe anyway?
And given what we are, it's a bonus for the universe that we haven't spread like a plague to other heavenly bodies.
Billions of universes and each one of those universes containing billions of stars with billions and trillions of planets rotating around them and out of all them, only 1 planet has life on it? I would say the people who DON'T think there is something else out there are the ones who are amazing.
lucy,
i find it hard to believe that there isnt life out there somewhere. like you say, the odds. still using your logic and recognizing that the universe is trillions of years old in addition to having trillions of planets, it is also logical that:
1. there should be multiple races that have god like knowledge and ability
2. there should also be multiple races that are mere amino acids or the equivalent
3. there should also be many races that are at every stage between amino acid and god like.
4. therefore - we should have had multiple interactions with multiple races that cannot be hidden from the public.
there is a fly in the oinment... one or both of us have flawed logic... can't be me...
q
I didn't quite understand that 4 should necessarily follow from the first 3, Q... How so?
PS: I think the current thinking about the universe is that it's something around 13 and a half billion years old. Still pretty old, but a very long way short of 'trillions'.
I thought it was a bit of a leap from 3 to 4 but the reason we are not swamped with multiple interactions could be most just don't know we are here or as David hinted at, they know and keep their distance from us or maybe it is just too far to travel, Andromeda is over (wikipedia check) 2 million light years away or they are not as advanced to have space travel or we are boring or they are here but we just don't know. We could be the galactic version of Papua New Guinea, we know it's there but nobody ever seems to go there or much care about what happens there.
cheezy
the latest data says 13.4 billion years. but not that long ago people thought everthing was a few thousand years old. and we thought that a lot of dark matter was missing, and we thought atoms were the smallest things, and we thought gravity affected the subatomic level, etc. etc. etc.
lucy,
the "leap" as you call it is based on this: if there are trillions of planets then shouldnt there be thousands of races? some at the single cell level, some at the human level, some at the star trek level, some at the god level.
therefore: there would be some that can barely get to us - but i find it hard to beleive that their technology would allow them to come from another galaxy and then be susceptible to a "crash" in the desert... isn't it logical that in the same time we've gone from the wright flyer to the international space station they could go from barely getting here to easily getting here? why not come back?
q
Q- Point taken, I accept that information about this is at the very edge of our current knowledge. It seems likely that 13.5 billions years ago was the time of the big bang anyway.
As a ostensibly flippant but actually quite serious aside, for about 3 weeks in a row now I've read different information about coffee. One week they say it's generally bad for you, then it's good for you, and now it's apparently bad again. So, that's science for you: if they can't agree about coffee, we're right not to trust them implicitly about milennial time and the origins of the universe (not that I'm saying we should listen to priests and mullahs about the same thing, mind you... absolutely not...)
Anyway, screw 'em, I'm not giving up my morning coffee. Or my afternoon one. I just won't drink about 10 of them a day like I used to... (my shrink concurs).
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