PART I: ALIENS
by Anthony Forwood (2011)
http://www.lulu.com/shop/anthony-k-forwood/they-would-be-gods/paperback/product-15534669.html
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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