Thursday, December 17, 2015

They Would Be Gods - 6 - Alien Space Migration

THEY WOULD BE GODS: OUR PAST RECONSIDERED, OUR FUTURE FOREWARNED

PART I: ALIENS

by Anthony Forwood (2011)

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6: Alien Space Migration



An alien migration to our planet from a near-distant star is not as inconceivable or impractical as some might think. The only factors weighing against such a possibility are those of time and speed: a journey from another star system to our own would take years, even at the speed of light, and millions or even billions of years at the more conceivable speeds that we’re familiar with. The speed of light is approximately 186,000 miles per second, and the distance to other star systems is measured in light-years, which is how many years light must travel to reach us from that star. Consider the number of seconds in a year (31,536,000) and multiply that by 186,000, and that’s how many miles a single light year is (5,865,696,000,000). That’s a very large number, almost six trillion miles, and it only covers one light-year. Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to our own, is just over four light-years away. So, we can see that a journey between our solar system and another would require incredibly fast speeds and/or an incredibly long time to get here.

The main limitation to deep-space travel is the ability to maintain accelerative force until an adequate speed is reached, and acceleration requires some sort of propulsive force, which in turn requires fuel for energy, which involves adding greater weight, which requires more accelerative power to move it. The farther you want to go, the more weight in fuel you need to move, and at some point the energies expended become to much to make it practical. It seems that the methods of propulsion that we are familiar with are too primitive to get us very far out into space. Nuclear power has given us a great reduction in the amount of weight in the fuel source, but it doesn’t seem to have convinced many scientists that it will be able to overcome the time and speed problems involved to make interstellar travel practical.

The German/American solar probe Helios B is the fastest unmanned spacecraft on record, having reached a speed of 220 ‘mikes’. A ‘mike’ is equal to one millionth of the speed of light, or 0.186 miles per second, so Helios B was cruising at about forty-one miles per second, or 147,600 miles per hour, which is comparable to the speed of Halley’s Comet the last time it approached near our Sun. Although this is still extremely slow for interstellar travel, scientists have estimated that nuclear powered rockets could conceivably attain cruising speeds as high as one tenth that of light. That means that a star system that’s ten light years away would only take one hundred years to reach. This makes interstellar space travel much more conceivable. However, there is a difference between sending an unmanned probe that weighs only a few hundred pounds at the most, and a large manned space vehicle that can fully support a small colony of travelers for entire life spans, weighing in the thousands of tons. So far, we’ve only sent manned missions as far as the moon (as far as the public is aware), and that was a struggle. Unmanned probes are much easier to send off, and can withstand conditions that the human body can’t handle, allowing them to be sent further at faster speeds and with less effort. The real problem is in getting all that weight beyond Earth’s gravitational pull, which requires a great deal of energy. At the launching of the Apollo moon rockets, the fuel accounted for the majority of the weight being lifted. After the fuel was expended and its stage dropped, the rocket had much less weight and was much less hindered by gravity. If we were able to launch our interstellar space vehicles from outside of Earth’s gravity, we’d overcome the greatest difficulty currently confronting us in space exploration, but even if we did, we still have the problem of attaining the incredible speeds required to make it feasible.

There is a method that a space craft can use to reach greater and greater speeds, by taking advantage of the gravitational pull of a nearby planet or star and using it’s gravity to ‘slingshot’ the craft around it and thrust it back out into space at a higher speed. We use this method with our own space probes to increase their propulsion and send them out to the further reaches of our solar system and beyond. Any other space-faring creatures could apply the same method, and although the early part of the journey would be relatively slow going, with each slingshot around a celestial body, the speed would be increased further. We humans have only used this method to a very limited degree within our own solar system, but there’s no reason that it couldn’t be applied to a much larger degree to go much greater distances.

One drawback that would have to be taken into consideration is the strain on the ship and crew under the duress of acceleration. However, a slow but steady acceleration of a craft can be achieved by circling a celestial body a number of times and building up speed slowly enough to handle before shooting out into space towards the next celestial body on its course, since it is the acceleration, and not the rate of speed, that causes the strain.

Because there is nothing in the open expanses of space besides the gravity of nearby planets and stars to slow a moving craft once it’s set in motion, any further propulsion of the craft will increase its acceleration, so that with steady propulsion, its speed will continue to accelerate. This means that even a gradual continuous acceleration will eventually amount to incredible speeds over time, and it would only be a matter of having an energy source available to use as a propulsive force.

Of course, any space craft that’s moving at such incredible speeds would also have to be able to slow down again before it reached its destination, and this would require the gravitational pull of a celestial body that was strong enough to affect the craft as it soared past. Not that this is any more problematic than it would be to increase the speed, but the fact that safely raising the speed and reducing it again would take a great deal of time still makes this method of interstellar travel seem inconceivable from our human perspective. Whole lifetimes would come and go before ever reaching top traveling speeds, and again before ever slowing down again.

But even if this makes interstellar travel possible, why would anybody want to undertake such a journey? What might drive them to want to travel such distances with all the inherent risks and effort involved? And where would they be planning to go?

Consider an advanced civilization that has developed on a planet similar to Earth but in another nearby solar system. Such a civilization may have reached a level of technological capability that makes space colonization and long-term space travel possible. Perhaps this civilization has outgrown its planet of origin, or otherwise made it uninhabitable, or some sort of disaster has forced them to leave it, and the population has begun to move into space. Provided that space habitation had reached a point where fully self-sustaining living environments had been developed, and some form of energy was easy to produce out of materials commonly found throughout the galaxy, long-term or even permanent space migrations would not be out of the question.

As any civilization outgrows its planet, it has two choices: reduce the population to a manageable level, or extend the population to off-planet locations. In considering our own situation here on Earth, it’s entirely conceivable that such an eventuality would arise for any civilization that was able to develop for a long enough time. Our own civilization has been developing for less than ten thousand years, and we’re almost at the point where we’ll soon have to make such a choice ourselves. A similar civilization on a similar planet that’s been around for only a few thousand years longer than us would already be far ahead of us in their technological development. They would have the capacity to achieve much more than we can currently conceive as even being possible, so it’s quite possible that this situation has already occurred elsewhere in our galaxy where they’ve had to make this choice in their direction of development.

Our scientists have calculated that the universe is only about fourteen billion years old, and that our Earth is only about four and a half billion years old. According to their theories, it takes billions of years for a planet to develop to the point where it can support even the most elementary forms of life, and it takes millions of years more for those life forms to reach a point in their evolution that’s equivalent to our own. Scientists also believe that planets like Earth that are capable of bearing life have only begun to develop in the universe relatively recently, and that they are probably not that common. Given all this, scientists have a hard time trying to conceive how an intelligent species in a distant star system could have developed early enough to undertake such a lengthy journey and be able to arrive here on our planet this early. Of course, our understandings about the development of the universe and the creation and evolution of life forms in it are based almost exclusively on theories, and they’re only able to assume that things are going to be more or less the same for life developing in other star systems as they have been for us. But it may very well be that things are not the same, and that intelligent life might have developed much more quickly on certain other planets. We must also realize that we humans have wasted an incredible amount of our time and efforts in the course of our history fighting and competing amongst ourselves when we could have been truly moving forward as a civilization. There’s no reason why another civilization couldn’t have avoided such a waste of time and energies as we have and instead worked in a cooperative fashion to achieve great things. Therefore, it might very well be that other technologies that we aren’t yet capable of have been developed by an extraterrestrial civilization that would assist them in overcoming the speed and distance limitations we currently find ourselves faced with when considering interstellar space travel. Given another thousand years of our own development, provided we don’t annihilate ourselves first, it’s quite conceivable that we’ll eventually understand gravity well enough to be able to develop technologies that will allow us to completely circumvent it. Such technologies would suddenly make interstellar space travel very conceivable to any scientist.

Apparently, antigravity technology already exists, although it’s being heavily suppressed. It came to the public’s attention for a short time not too many years ago when a Canadian man named John Hutchison accidentally discovered a powerful anti-gravitational effect while tinkering with the electronics components from surplus military equipment he had acquired. He was eventually forced into silence about his discovery and had all of his equipment confiscated by the authorities, but not before being featured demonstrating his discovery in at least one documentary program that was aired on national television. But nevertheless, the public quickly forgets.

With or without antigravity technology, a colony that migrated to space might be inclined to permanently leave their home planet behind and to undertake long distance space travel out of necessity. Perhaps they had used up all the resources available to them in their own solar system, and interstellar space travel to another solar system was the only way they could hope to survive. Such a colony might travel at relatively low speeds and not expect to reach other solar systems for millennia at a time. They might even exist in a space environment for millions of years, and during that time their genetics might change, through either natural or unnatural causes.

It should be noted at this point that the commonly known ‘gray’ alien that’s become popularly depicted in movies and television shows, and which was apparently seen in the Alien Autopsy film, has a number of characteristics that suggest the long-term effects of living in space. Of particular note is the degenerated muscle size, which would be expected after many generations of living in a near-zero gravity environment. Elongation of the arms might be the result of living and working in an environment where use of the arms was increased while use of the legs was greatly diminished, such as in the confined environment of a spaceship, and from working and living in a non-gravitational environment. The lack of a digestive system also makes sense. Living permanently in a space environment would require a huge change in diet, since normal food sources would be very limited. Switching over time from eating food to taking nutritional substitutes intravenously would undoubtedly cause a gradual atrophying of the digestive system. Reproduction through cloning would cause similar atrophying of the natural reproductive system. The large eyes would develop from living in deep space with little or no sunlight, and the artificial ‘hood’ covering the eyes that was seen being removed in the Alien Autopsy video might be an artificial cover used to protect their eyes from the intensity of our sun’s rays, which they may not be used to. The almost total lack of ears, and the reduced nose and mouth size might also be due to atrophying from lack of their necessity in an enclosed environment. The lack of hair and ashen skin color may also be effects of living in space for a prolonged period. The enlarged cranium could be the natural result of using the brain more and the body less. Genetic manipulation might also have been used in an attempt to modify the biological structure of the species in order to help it adapt to its unnatural environment.

If gravity can be circumvented, as it apparently can, then interstellar space travel becomes so much more possible. Although it may not immediately solve the problem of speed, it would eliminate the problem of strain when ‘slingshotting’ a craft to accelerated speeds. But this might not even be necessary. Antigravity technology could be used to propel a spacecraft.

According to a man named Robert Lazar, the US government already has antigravity technology in their possession. Lazar first came forward on national television a number of years ago to tell the world about his short-lived experiences working at the infamous Area 51, a top-secret military site in the middle of the Nevada desert. Lazar disclosed that he had been hired as a physicist to work on one of several captured saucer-shaped craft that the US government had acquired. According to Lazar, the one he worked on was believed to operate on gravitational forces. It was his job to assist in attempting to back-engineer it. In a very sincere and apparently knowledgeable manner, Lazar explained that the craft was powered by an anti-matter reactor, which in turn powered a series of gravity amplifiers on the bottom of the craft. The propulsion system, if it should even be called that, worked by essentially warping spacetime, focusing the gravity amplifiers at a distant point in space, to which the craft was then instantaneously pulled when the reactor was powered up.

This would make traveling interstellar – even intergalactic – distances just as quick and easy as any lesser distance. What Lazar describes sounds very plausible, and fits very well with what’s seen and described in documented UFO sightings. He has been interviewed a number of times over the years, and always maintains the same story with the same believability about him. Of course, there is a possibility that Lazar is a disinformation agent, but perhaps he’s not. UFO activity at Area 51 is quite common, having been routinely witnessed in that area by many people over the years.

The US military certainly has possession of some sort of craft that have the characteristic movements of UFOs, such as the sudden shifting of position or their sudden appearance and disappearance that Lazar’s descriptions explain the reason for quite well. So, if the US government has developed or otherwise acquired antigravity technology, it’s obviously possible for intelligent life in another star system to have acquired it as well, and there’s no reason, based on Lazar’s explanation, why its application in space travel couldn’t circumvent the time/distance limitations posed by interstellar distances.

So, having considered all of this, it’s not impossible or even impractical for an extraterrestrial race to have come to our planet from another star system, or even another galaxy.

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