Are aliens living among us? Do aliens exist? Are ufos real?
If you are a Star Trek fan like I am, then you know what the prime directive is.
The prime directive is a law that a humans visiting alien planets must follow.
And the law states that humans are prohibited from interfering with the internal and natural development of alien civilizations.
This seems like a very noble and reasonable law that highly intelligent beings would follow. It may even be something that ALL highly evolved an intelligent beings would follow.
If this is the case, then a super intelligent being that might visit earth to study its inhabitants, could be here utterly without anyone’s knowledge, because they may be prohibited to interfere with our natural development.
We could be in a fishbowl and not even know it.
The technology of these beings could be so advanced that we could be going on with our daily lives, with no interference, and have no idea that we are being watched and studied.
We may even be taking part in their experiments and not know it.
Is this possible? Could the earth be infested with aliens from another planet, and we are completely blind to it?
The Shocking answer, coming up right now…
Let’s look at some of the possibilities.
Could a large alien ship be “hiding” somewhere in outer space, undetected by us.
Let’s say they had some kind of cloaking technology, such that they could not be seen.
This is not that difficult. Astronomers can only see things in the sky that either reflect light, or emit X-rays, infrared, radio signals some other kind of electromagnetic radiation. An advanced race could probably easily disguise these signatures.
It would not be all that difficult for aliens to examine us from an orbit around earth. For example, it wouldn’t be that difficult to create an object that is completely non reflective, that looks black against the background of black space. Even we humans could create something like this with current technology.
But then you have to think, how would such a ship of aliens get here. They could not have come from our own solar system, we know the planets in our system well enough to know that there are no advanced civilizations on the other planets here.
They would have had to come from another star system. But even the closest star system is 4.5 light year away. So to make such a trip they would need to travel very fast, something that is close to or a large fraction of the speed of light.
But anything that travels even close to the speed of light would need to expend a lot of energy. For example to accelerate a motorcycle to 1/10 the speed of light would take the energy equivalent of 10 hydrogen bombs. We humans would have detected this kind of energy signature and would see such a ship coming.
You might say, well maybe they have warp technology, or faster than light technology, where they can bend space. But this would require even more energy – several hundred hydrogen bombs worth. We would have detected this with our telescopes. So this likely did not happen either. So the idea of large alien ships orbiting the earth or hiding behind the sun, or the dark side of the moon is unlikely.
One of the presumptions we may be making is that these alien creatures are a lot like us. Most aliens you see in the movies and on TV, look a lot like humans, with 2 arms, 2 legs, 2 eyes, a mouth, but just with a bigger head.
This is just a projection of our human point of view. We have no other reference point. It is highly unlikely that this is how aliens would actually look. Alien creatures would have evolved in a completely different manner, in a completely different environment, that may be nothing like earth’s. In fact, they may look so different from us that we may not even recognize them as life forms.
What if these intelligent aliens are on a different size scale? What if these aliens are drastically smaller than us. Bacteria and viruses are life forms so small that we can’t detect them except with the most powerful microscopes.
What if the aliens were 1000 times bigger than bacteria, that would still be about the size of a grain of sand. We could probably not even see them, even if a 100 of them were in our house.
But can intelligent beings really be so small? Well, if the beings were based on DNA and similar biology as earth, then the answer is no because the amount of processing power needed and the number of brains cells needed to be highly intelligent would not fit on something the size of a dust particle.
But alien life could be completely different, maybe based on silicon for example and using quantum computing-like technology. If that’s the case, then it is conceivable that the brain power of a human brain or even higher intelligence could fit on a grain of sand.
In that case, their ships might be so small and with such a small heat signature, that we might not detect them at all.
The other thing that we presume about aliens is that that time passes for them, like it does for us. One second for us is a very short time, but if you think about it, our sense of time and our time frame has evolved based on the rotation of the earth.
Our animal ancestors evolved to find food and mate during the daylight hours determined by one rotation of the earth on its axis. That is the time we had in one day. It is possible that on an alien planet that revolves much faster than earth, the living beings may be operating on a completely different time scale. For example, one second could be the equivalent of one minute for them.
What if one second was like a day for them. What we consider a short period of time may very long for them. They could observe us, study us, maybe even probe us and be on their merry way, in a timescale so short, that we would not even know that anything hit us.
Could such aliens be in our midst? If they were here, what clues would they be leaving behind. Everything leaves a signature of some sort. Could find such a signatures if we knew where to look?
If the aliens really were that small, they would still need to be mobile, and moving from one place to the next to examine people and the rest of earth. This movement would require some kind of energy expenditure. These things probably would not travel like dust particles undetected. To be efficient, they would need to move fairly fast. Such a movement would probably leave a light or heat signature, but being so small it would be visible only if we were paying attention to it, or if we were using some kind of detectors.
The one inescapable truth is that these tiny aliens would have to get here from very far way. And if their ships travelled very fast, at close to the speed of light, even something the size of a grain of sand travelling at such speeds would leave an electromagnetic signature of some sort in outer space that we could detect.
But if the craft was travelling at slower speeds, something like 1/10 the speed of light, the only signature could be microwave radiation. This is something we would not detect unless we were specifically looking for it. But at these slower speeds, it would take them 50-100 years to reach us from the closest stars.
To give you an idea, At the fastest speed our space crafts have ever travelled, it would take 60,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri, the nearest star. At 1/10 the speed of light, it would take 45 years to reach us.
So what’s the bottom line. Are aliens here. The most feasible scenario is not aliens but alien probes that are small enough to go undetected and not fast enough to leave a sizable energy or gravity signature in space. This makes sense because this is the kind of thing that we ourselves are likely to do if we ever wanted to reach out to other star systems like proxima centauri, the closest star to the Sun.
If we were serious about reaching other stars, we would not send one ship with humans to an unknown destination. We would most likely send out hundreds of small probes in all directions, in order to cover as many nearby stars as possible looking for other life. And these probes would likely be very small to keep costs down and also, so that they could go at really high speeds without using too much energy.
Using ion drive technology for example, our probes could reach speeds of 90KM/second, which is 3X faster than the fastest vehicle ever created by man – the voyager 1 spacecraft. This would take 20,000 years to reach the nearest star. But NASA also has an experimental new drive called EM electromagnetic drive which has the potential to reach much higher speeds about 1/10 the speed of light, and may be able to reach Alpha Centauri in 50-100 years. And the smaller the probes, the lower the amount of fuel that would be required.
So if we extrapolate this to our alien neighbors, it is quite conceivable that small probes using this kind of EM or similar technology could be headed our way, or already be here. They would leave only microwave signatures that could go undetected.
But the big thing to understand is it would likely not be biological creatures that come here, or any kind of creatures that look anything like what you see in the movies. It would more likely be AI or artificial probes – but these probes with AI could be just as intelligent and conscious as biological creatures.
Within 40 years, we will likely be able to build artificial life forms that have the brain power and even consciousness of human beings. These would be ideal for space travel over long periods of time because they would be immune to aging, wear and tear, and other effects of space. They could probably just put themselves in sleep mode, like you put your computer in sleep mode, and simply wait until they reach their destination.
Is it possible that these things are here now? – I have to say, from a science perspective, yes it is possible.
What would be the purpose of such an exploration. You have to think, would we do such a thing? And if so, why?
I think we would do such a thing, if we had the technology and resources to do it. Why? Because we are curious explorers. Because we want to see what else is out there. And we want to know if there are others like us, or superior to us, or inferior to us. It would not be to conquer them or use their resources. That is just silly. It would be to know more about the universe we live in.
It would be the idea of learning more about our own evolution, and how it compares with the rest of the universe. It would be to find a friend among the stars, and perhaps say hello.
We live on a tiny insignificant pale dot, that can barely be seen from our own distant planets. To know that we found another such dot in the universe, may give our own existence some significance, some hope.
We may find a purpose for the seemingly meaningless, yet awesome power of human intelligence that has evolved on our planet.
We would do it if we had the means, motivation, and resources to do it. And so would our alien neighbors.
