A NICKLE AIN'T WORTH WHAT IT USE TO BE

We wake every morning into our mundane life worrying about finances, relationships and Donald Trump.   We move through this venn diagram of intersection relationships and concerns with the idea that if a tree falls in the forest and we don’t hear it – it doesn’t exist.

And then there is a moment of awakening where we realize how small and insignificant we actually are

Yesterday I was listening to Maine Public Radio in our car and the discussion was on the possibility of alien life in the universe.   Noted astronomers, including Stephen Hawkins, made the case that the chance there is not life scattered throughout the universe is so small as to be discounted.

Our Milky Way galaxy is believed to contain upward to one hundred billion stars, and with the discoveries of the Hubble and Kepler telescopes we have found that most stars have orbiting planets, which brings the estimate of planets in our Milky Way Galaxy into the trillions.   

It is also estimated that at least ten billion of those planets are located in what astronomers call the ‘sweet spot.’   This is a location relative to its star where the temperature and conditions could support life forms.    

Beyond our own galaxy there are hundreds of billions of other galaxies containing trillions of stars and uncountable planets, many with the possibility of supporting life.  

The soon to be launched James Webb telescope will expand our knowledge ever farther - to the first light of the universe - and the possibility of defining actual life habitable planets

The idea that only the earth, among the expanses of the cosmos, could develop life (and what in our egocentric idea is intelligent life) verges on the ridiculous. 

And that's jinga
the Ol'Buzzard

ALIENS – THE SPACE KIND

Today, two of the blogs that I follow made mention of aliens.   

The Brain Police posted a video about the Mormon religion and their belief that the human race was seeded by god/aliens from outer space. 

  

Then on Squatlo’s Rant, Squatlo  begged the question that if there are little grey (not green) men perhaps they are not an alien species, but the evolution of the human race many centuries into the future, traveling back in time to view their more primitive predecessors (being alien, male and human would account for their obsession for probing the sexual organs – vice cat scan.)

Just for the sake of the exercise there are scenarios that could fit this proposition. 

Einstein’s formula for light travel, posed that moving away from an object near the speed of light slows the time in the traveling object with respect to the relatively stationary object.

 

For physics nerds the formula is:  time change equals laps time on the traveling object (rocket,) divided by the square root of one minus the speed of the rocket (as percentage of the speed of light) squared, divided by the speed of light squared.

It works out that if a rocket were to travel from earth at eight tenths the speed of light, after thirty years aboard the rocket the earth and its people would have aged fifty years – the crew of the rocket returning to earth would have traveled twenty years into the future.

  

The closer to the speed of light traveled the more time slows aboard the rocket and speeds up on the earth.    This has been scientifically tested on a small scale and found to be correct.

So travel into the future is possible; but, not into the past – according to current theory.

  

However, who is to say that people of the future would not have found the key to time travel into the past… worm holes etc.

  

Now for the big headed, small bodied, large eyed aliens of science fiction

We can see a scenario where mankind of the present pushes the climate change past its tipping point – the ozone layer is depleted resulting in sun rays becoming deadly. 

Humans would have to become nocturnal and possibly subterranean dwellers.

Over the eons, through evolution, human bodies could become more fragile, eyes become larger and brain pans enlarge to house the advance brain functions necessary to devise technologies suited to the new environment.

If these humans traveled back in time to view us, their more primitive relatives, it could account for our obsession with ET and Paul.

Squatlo; I think you have a better argument than the Mormons.

I’m just saying

the Ol’Buzzard