In my previous post I told you all the reason that I believe in aliens, and today i will tell you the reason that you will never see one. Enjoy.
It seems every year brings around another batch of stories from people being abducted by green goblins floating around in UFOs with a penchant for anal intrusion. It frustrates me to no end how people lap this shit up, because from a scientific perspective, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. The stories coincide purely because people want to be in on the action, and apparently people in the American deep south just love to let the world know about that one time they were anally tortured by an alien.
The fact is that the laws of physics do not just apply on earth. The laws of physics are what we base our observations of the universe upon; we see the same phenomena on earth and in our own solar system as we do everywhere else in the universe. The same laws of physics that cause the northern lights are responsible for the bursts of radiowaves given off by pulsars. The same force that keeps your feet on the ground causes black holes and supernovae.
This is something that people who are not scientifically literate must understand - we wrote the rules of the universe based on what we see around us. Our theories are based on what we observe, they weren't provided to us on a stone tablet for us to try and figure out.
Unfortunately, these rules are about to destroy your dreams of space exploration, because I'm about to tell you that it's practically impossible.
To be able to explain this, I need to first go back to the mid-1800's. Two scientists, Maxwell and Faraday had successfully united the forces of Electricity and Magnetism, forming the idea of Electromagnetism and more importantly, electromagnetic fields.
A field is simply a flow, or tide of electromagnetic force that moves through an area of space. Sprinkle iron filings over a magnet and you can observe the lines of force that these fields create. It is a truly beautiful thing.
The mathematical framework of Maxwell's equations is astoundingly simple considering it's implications on physics. It remains one of the greatest discoveries in physics, and provided a firm basis for modern physics in the quantum realm.
I could go on for hours about these equations, but only one part is truly important in the context of this article. The equations prove that ALL light travels at one speed. In a specific medium, all light regardless of it's frequency always travels at one speed - we know this now as the speed of light, the speed limit of the universe, a speed that can never be reached.
Enter Einstein. Einstein noticed a rather large flaw in the theory; if you were to travel at close to the speed of light next to a beam of light, how fast would the beam be travelling? On the one hand, the light has to travel at the speed of light, but as you are travelling close behind, would it be travelling slower in comparison to you? On the other hand, if you were in a car travelling at 30 next to another car travelling at 31, it would be inconceivable to see the faster car fly away at the speed of light... how the hell can you explain this?
The answer is an amazing thing; time slows down or speeds up depending on how fast you travel. At the speeds we travel on a day to day basis, this is negligible. You could travel for years around the earth in an airliner and never see it's effects, but as we approach the speed of light, things are very different.
Imagine you are in a rocket orbiting the earth. The rocket is travelling at 99% of the speed of light, and the journey lasts for 14 years. Your intuition would tell you that when you return to earth after 10 years, everyone you left behind would greet you like a king! They wouldn't. They would be dead.
If you took that journey for 14 years, and returned to earth, you would find that the earth you left behind had aged 100 years. Let that soak in for a moment. By travelling ridiculously fast, you have (by all intents and purposes) travelled forward in time.
The reasoning behind this is utterly amazing, and it's not science fiction. GPS Satellites travel much faster than the earth spinning below them, and their clocks have to be set to tick at a slightly slower speed. Without this difference, their calculations would put them off by several miles every day.
Of course, you may have already guessed the problem. First of all, everything in the universe is incredibly far apart, usually on a scale of lightyears. That means the light between two objects 10 lightyears away will take 10 years to travel that distance. It stands to reason that if you were to travel at the speed of light to your destination it would also take 10 years.
Now let us look at it from the other side for a moment. The people on earth who aged 100 years in the 14 year journey you took saw time travelling at a much slower pace for you than you saw it yourself. To you, life on earth was ageing much faster, but to them, you were effectively aging slower.
This means that if you were to travel at the speed of light, time would effectively stop. For everyone watching you, you would cease to age at all. For you in your spacecraft, you would see the universe around you age at an infinite speed. Physics doesn't like infinites, they just don't exist in nature - it would break the laws of physics. It cannot be done.
Even if you were able to travel at 99% of the speed of light, you would still age differently to the world around you. The people on the planet you travel to would never live to see you arrive, and the people who you were trying to reach may be dead by the time you get there. Realistically, the laws of physics as we know them render any kind of space travel over great distance redundant.
Maybe wormholes are the answer? Well, not unless we find a way of stopping them from collapsing before we get through to the other side. Wormholes are essentially black holes until you reach the centre, and that means you would likely be crushed into oblivion before being spat out of the other side.
What about warp drives? Well, nothing in the laws of physics says they are impossible, which is probably why NASA have been looking into this idea for years. The basic idea is that instead of moving, you move the space around you by shrinking it in front and stretching it behind you. It's a great idea, but since our knowledge of how gravity works is so slim and the fact that gravity is the only thing we know of that is capable of bending space like that, it may simply stay a great idea.
The fact is, the laws above are universal. The same rules that apply to us apply to all alien life. Combine this with the fact that our planet is one of trillions in the universe, and the fact that aliens would have to be actively looking for us to find us, and the fact that they might not be all that bothered about visiting earth anyway... it looks like seeing aliens will not be for our lifetime.
Plus, if their economy is as bad as ours, how the fuck do they expect to get funding just to visit this shit hole of a planet?
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