Author: Agata

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 and methane 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, might take weeks  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, much less than Mars, 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.

Social scientists have long noted that cultural values in a given society are , to some extent, shaped by economic factors, Karl Marx being only one of them. By the time of the American Revolution, slavery had become a political issue, and after 1800 it was legal in the “slave states,” illegal in the ”free states”. The the acceptance of slavery in the south and its refutation in the north were not without economic factors. The northerners claimed slavery was contrary to the Bill of Rights . But the warmer climate in the south, with a long growing season, was conducive to large scale production of plantation crops, first rice and indigo, then king cotton. Slavery enabled a vastly greater crop production. The mass cognitive dissonance (in this case guilt) created by slavery in the south - was successfully relieved by the preaching that slavery was endorsed by Christianity, because whites were  acting to save the souls of the African captives by teaching them Christianity. Of course only a small percentage of Southerners ever owned slaves
because of the high cost, but the wealthy, who controlled the economy, also controlled cultural values. Just as the extensive wealth of the gun lobby, supported by 130,000 dues-paying gun dealers controls the distorted views about teenagers legally buying assault weapons.

In the second half of the 20th century a cultural and economic revolution took place. In the 1950’s highways were built, creating a vastly more mobile society. The fast food industry was born, reducing the time families ate together, but increasing the leisure time of millions. The economy was up, many could afford college, bringing more people together to broaden personal experience. And the sexual revolution.

Sex went from being a discreet means of reproduction to a means of recreation. The green light was given. And Madison Avenue and Hollywood made the most of it. Extra marrital sex was normalized to the point that it became de rigueur in some circles. A resulting phenomena was the increasing unwanted-pregnancy rate. And this presented the economic problem: the economy of time, money, unwanted motherhood, ‘illegitimate’ children, the social stigma. Abortion solved this sizable problem of cultural economics.  Before 1960, the illegal abortionist, as well as the woman, was considered a miscreant. But as more women were having the procedure, and it was increasingly viewed as preventing a disastrous fate, it became more and more accepted until it became mainstream by the Roe vs Wade decision of 1973.

Those who were against abortion slowly became the antagonist in the eyes of many.  An aquaintance of mine expressed that those opposed to abortion ”don’t need to push their religion on me.” Also laws against abortion were condemned as created by men with little input from women. Laws and religion – opponents of abortion.

But there’s more to consider. If a man runs down the street, knocks over and old woman, breaking her arm and runs away with her purse the most common reaction is NOT -”I think what that man did is against the law!! ”. The most common reaction is NOT – ”What that man did is against my religion.” No, the most common reaction is, that it is SIMPLY NOT RIGHT - forget religious rules and governing laws. My heart tells me – what the man did is simply not right. Humans cannot do that to other humans if any social contract is working among our species.

After the Roe vs Wade decision in 1973, two divided camps started to grow. The two sides of the abortion debate fashioned dictums to express their theses. The pro-abortion side says ”My body, my choice”. The anti-abortion side says ”Thou shall not kill”. It appears to me the only antagonists in the debate are those that don’t respect the others deep felt points of view. We must respect and understand both. The changing ‘economic’ factors in the American society have changed social norms and values and “Roe v Wade abortion” (That is, as Row v Wade stipulated- first trimester abortions) is accepted by many. Their response to ‘Thou shall not kill’ is that abortion is not killing, a fetus is not a human in the first trimester, and in humanitarian terms, it doesn’t cause pain. But I see no reason to refuse tolerance to those who still believe that abortion is SIMPLY NOT RIGHT, as the vast majority of the population did before 1960. And the vast majority still do in other countries.  Their response to My Body, My Choice is that life isn’t that simple, and they ask what about responsibility to human rights, and the responsibility of childbirth that will always burden womanhood.

Frontline presented a well-balanced show on the abortion issues in America, underlining what a deep and long-lived rift it has caused in this country. It presented impassioned opinions from both sides, but remained neutral in its attitude. And this is good instruction for we Americans. We must accept that we must respect the others’ right to opinion, even as we legally, peacefully work to change it.

A conundrum. Rachel Maddow condemned a law that “forced women” to carry a fetus to term after 24 weeks. (ie proscribed abortion).  lt can also be viewed as forcing a woman to make a decision – by 6 months into her pregnancy. But Kermit Gosner in his abortion clinic, terminated the lives of at least 3 fetuses/newborns after being born viable after 24 weeks from artificially induced labor. He was sentenced in 2011 to life in prison for murder. So it seems that if a fetus is aborted in the womb, it may be seen as ethical by some, but if labor is artificially induced, and the viable fetus is terminated outside the womb, it is murder. This idea should give pause. To some, this may be
an acceptable framework for law ; for others, not.

One more factor that must be included is the psychological effects from an abortion that some women, and maybe men suffer. It should be included in all abortion counseling and included for consideration in post-operant care.