Balloon Wars

     The UFOs that have lately appeared over Alaska and Canada and been shot down by American fighters have revived those tired old fringe speculations about possible visitation by alien creatures—that whole Area 51-with-its-persistent-aura-of-nefarious-secrecy nonsense.

     Let’s think for a minute about the likelihood of such stuff happening.

     From even a relatively short distance away from our planet, let’s say another one of our solar system’s inner group of planets, Mars, we appear as no more than an insignificant faintly bluish speck, just as Mars is no more than a faintly reddish speck from our point of view. From any cosmic perspective farther away, let’s say from the nearest star outside our system, Proxima Centauri, which is 4.3 light years distant (24 thousand billion miles). From there, our entire solar system is but a tiny white spec among trillions of other specs strewn across the Universe in every direction. This means that any alien species would first have to single out our system from that almost unimaginable multitude of specs as somehow extra special, then would have to travel for 4.3 years at the speed of light, which moves at 186,000 miles per second, to get here. But achieving lightspeed is virtually impossible. At some much more likely fraction of lightspeed, the journey would take at least hundreds of our years. This would constitute a stupendous technical achievement, making such a journey intuitively unlikely. It would be further unlikely to think that such a species would accomplish that journey only to then keep it a tantalizing semi-secret from us. Why?

     It is intuitively likely that there is other life in the Universe in other systems, simply because we see the exact same electromagnetic spectrum and the exact same list of chemical elements everywhere we look, and we see a proliferation of other solar systems and their attendant planets everywhere, as well, many in that zone from their suns that allows liquid water.

     Only our arrogance would make us think there is no other sentient life out there. Such life is even logically prolific, given the possibility statistics.

     But would aliens, who would be clearly vastly superior to us in technology, travel some vast distance here, then hang back, perhaps lurking behind Jupiter, and start floating observation balloons in our skies?

     You think what you want.

     I think not.

Phil

www.philbowie.com