35. Extraterrestrials have landed in Idaho

Just kidding.
NASA recently held its first public conference on the recent sightings of UFOs. Except they are calling them UAP’s – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena – seemingly to tone down the sensation. But I’m sure the conference will jack up the hopes of the many co-conspirators who desperately want to believe that extraterrestrials from afar have intruded into our biosphere.

I never want to crush anyone’s raison d’etre, but the chances of aliens visiting our solar system is virtually 0.0. (The term ‘virtually’ keeps it scientific and covers me if little purple men call a meeting in Times Square tomorrow.) This is because of The Factor. The Factor keeps aliens from making it to our solar system and always will. But UFO buffs can take heart that my words will have far less reach than alien believers such as William Shattner, Chloe Kardashian, or Katy Perry. And to know you are a part of a grand tradition of sky watchers and alien searchers.

In the 1890’s, with the expanding reach of new telescopes, an Italian astronomer reported seeing a multitude of “canals” on the surface of Mars – in straight lines and parallel to each other. The sighting was repeated around the world and speculation that they were created by an intelligent civilization launched a tumult of sensational news and compulsive Mars watching. Although the the phenomena was soon found to be an optical illusion, the genie was out of the bottle. Like news of a fraudulent presidential election, many couldn’t let go, and doubtlessly some gained by not doing so. The sensation lasted into the 1920’s after decades of no new evidence of life on the red planet.

Later, eyes turned to Venus as the most likely place to find life. It was the most similar to Earth by size and distance from the sun. But as time passed, Venus too became a dead end for alien searchers and researchers. The increasing abilities of science to measure found that “daytime” surface temperatures on the planet went up to 900 F, it had 92 times greater atmospheric pressure than that of Earth on the surface, and clouds of sulphuric acid are constantly swirling through its atmosphere. Oof, I’d rather live in Hoboken.

After this, UFO people didn’t really have anywhere to search for UFOs’ homes. But this hardly mattered. Many UFO groups were satisfied to concentrate on the thousands of reported sightings every year. And their origin? Out there, of course. One group is called The Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. It’s founder had a project called the Rapid Mobilization Investigative Teams that were on the ready to quickly get to the site of a UFO landing. Another was a project to protect any and all whistleblowers working for the government, who surely know all about many alien landings, and want to come forward but are fearful.

Then in the 1990’s the first known exoplanets (planets outside of our solar system) were discovered orbiting distance stars. Now UFO fans had an unlimited source for purple people. Solid ground. Not burning stars or crushing neutron stars. It seemed a little more credible to claim that we surely aren’t alone if there are an unlimited number of planets.

Now to return to The Factor. The reason for my obstinate dismissal of visitors from space has to do with the understanding of distance. I may have attained a slight advantage here because from the time l was ten through high school l had a map of the solar system hanging on a wall in my bedroom. And like the words of the Lord’s Prayer
hanging next to it, I remember the words of the paragraph in the corner of the map almost verbatim. In part, it said, ‘An idea of the vastness of space may be better understood if we consider it to scale. If the sun were a globe 30 inches in diameter, the earth would be more than 100 yards away and smaller than the size of a pea. In this same scale the nearest star would be more than 14,000 miles away. ‘

So The Factor – super distance – is what precludes space travel for humans beyond our solar system and for extraterrestrials from intruding on us. Our space craft travel fast. Speeding through the void at 30,000 km/hr, 18,000 mph, or 6 miles per second, they reach Mars in a little over 9 months. This is doable for humans so inclined. But exoplanets are a fur piece. The closest one to Earth is called Proxima B, circling the closest star, in our home galaxy, The Milky Way. It is 4.2 light years from Earth. I told my friend Chat the speed and distance, and he calculated the time it would take for a brand new US spacecraft to reach it.

Chat told me it was 152,287 years. 150 thousand years!!!! One way!! Imagine how daunting just planning for the provisions would be. OK, 290 billion beef jerky sticks. Check. 870 billion chicken bouillon cubes. Check.

For those not yet convinced, there is the Second Factor, the ‘find me’ factor. Imagine you are standing at the center of a circle with a radius of 100 meters. You can’t find your dog Elvis, but you know he is sitting somewhere on the circumference of the circle.
So you take off between the houses and trees to get to the circumference. After running around for 15 minutes you find Elvis. Now imagine you are again at the center, but this time Elvis is on the circumference of a circle with a radius of ten miles. So now to travel completely around the circle you must travel 10 x 2 x pi = 62,8 miles. Now this is quite a walk and Elvis is a bit harder to find. Finally imagine a circle with the radius of the distance from Earth to Proxima B – 4,5 light years. Chat told me this is 23.54 trillion miles. This is how far away Elvis is, damn dog. But now Elvis isn’t located on a circumference this far away. (Which would be a 144 trillion mile walkaround). He is located anywhere on the surface of a sphere around your spot on the Earth – this far away – 23 trillion miles. Good-bye Elvis. And this is just the closest rock to our Earth. So the goal of this little vignette was to help convey that beings from Proxima B, or anywhere else, have but an infinitesimally small percentage of a chance – virtually zero – of finding their way to us here on Earth.

(Addendum. For those of you who are worried that the chance of Proxima B being able to sustain life is pretty much nill, the second closest exoplanet is only 30% further. So if the 150,000 years we spent going to Proxima was a royal waste of time, we can try for Barnard B which would take 190,000 years. Or third closest Ross B, 425,000 years. We should probably do all 3 on the same trip to save time)

Man is a romantic species. We have always been intrigued by the mysterious and scary – dinosaurs, ghosts, wars, UFO’s , the 9/11 conspiracy theories, the giant geoglyphs of the ancient South American Nazca visible by airplane, and who really built the pyramids. It would be unthinkable for a modern society not to ponder about UFO’s and aliens coming to Earth. We can’t deny the imagination. But neither can we deny science, objective truth, and rational thought. And rational thought, for those who want to embrace it, precludes the possibility, given our understanding of physics, of living things traveling between our solar system and anywhere else in our formidable universe.

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