So you say you don’t believe in aliens and that those people walking around with T-shirts of triangular shaped heads, grey skin and huge eyes are a bunch of crazies? Well as it turns out, they were the ones that actually knew what they were talking about.
Ever seen the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (my personal favorite), or “Independence Day”, "Fire in the Sky", or possibly even the rare alien cult classic with Christopher Walken “Communion”? (look it up if you haven’t seen it). Well, the aliens haven’t quite landed on the White House lawn to announce themselves, but two scientists are now stating conclusively that aliens DO exist - and in our galaxy.
Astrophysics professor Adam Frank, of the University of Rochester, and astronomer Woodruff Sullivan are stating that math is now able to prove aliens once existed in our galaxy, and possibly even today. Why is coming to this conclusion now possible? The discovery of new stars and planets is constantly getting easier for astronomers and we have a much better understanding of galaxies than ever before.
Contrary to what used to be believed about stars, scientists now know that most stars likely host one or more planets. We know the rate at which new stars are “born” each year. It is believed that up to 25% of all planets can host some type of life. A theorem based on this data indicates Earth is definitely not the only planet in the Milky Way Galaxy to have hosted a technologically advanced civilization.
Ready to have your mind blown? The theorem not only states that Earth is not the only planet to have hosted advanced life, but over the course of the entire lifetime of the universe, it indicates over a TRILLION advanced forms of life have existed! It actually shouldn’t be that hard for people to believe when you consider the fact that Earth is just one tiny planet, and we have over one and a half MILLION species of animals living here.
Consider the following: In our own Milky Way Galaxy alone there are between 100 billion and 400 billion stars. But then when you factor in the entire universe has over 100 billion of those galaxies (that means 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 total stars OR 1 billion trillion), the chances of Earth being the ONLY planet out of those with life (and over a million species on that one planet), you start to see how the math proves we are NOT alone.
The challenge is really one of distance, not existence or non-existence. We know alien life is out there, we just can’t see or hear them because they are likely a distance so far from us that the common human brain can’t even realistically visualize that distance. Try to visualize it this way: Say you placed an ant in Southern California, and another ant in Tokyo, Japan. Now imagine that there were no oceans or rivers and the entire earth was made of sand. What are the odds that these two ants would ever encounter each other within their lifetimes? Even if they lived long enough to possibly encounter each other, the massive distance between them would make it extremely improbable that a meeting would ever take place.
But wait, you said advanced life! Ants are not advanced! True - but I was only using ants as a way to try to help visualize the distance challenges. However, even if life forms advanced as humans currently exist, (and I say that tongue in cheek because let’s face it, we’re not that civilized or advanced as a collective society), they would still have an extremely difficult time contacting us at all, let alone actually making a visit here.
Think about it, in terms of space travel, we humans have only gotten to the closest rock orbiting around our planet - the moon. We haven’t even been down to the end of our own block in terms of space travel! So what makes us think other aliens that are even a little more advanced than us could travel billions of miles across space to say hi?
In order to travel those extremely vast distances, the aliens would need to be tens of thousands of years more advanced than humans, and that’s assuming they would be able to avoid destroying themselves over the course of thousands of years (again - look at how humans treat our own kind), and they would have had to avoided a catastrophic disease or other major threat.
Let’s assume they are out there, and they have overcome these challenges (remember, the math says this is more likely than not). Next we have to imagine that of the thousands (or tens or hundreds of thousands or even millions) of other advanced life forms in the universe, they would need to choose Earth as a place to visit! It’s likely that they wouldn’t be able to visit EVERY life form they discover, and we probably wouldn’t be THE most interesting subjects out there. Lastly, how long have we “advanced” humans been around? A few hundred years in “modern”, recorded society? Think about it. That’s a blink in time in the context of billions of years of time that has passed in the universe.
So do aliens exist? You better believe they do. Are they currently and actively visiting Earth? Until they land and are live on the news, that question will continue to be speculated about, but I wouldn’t be too quick to scoff the next time someone tells you they saw a ufo. That one could just be the real thing. Keep your eyes on the skies.