If an alien from another planet managed to sneak into our country should he/she/it/them be eligible to receive federal benefits, get a drivers license, vote and have any offspring automatically become citizens? It seems this is a question Hillary Clinton may have pondered prior to her response to a reporter that when she gets elected she promises to find out for sure if there ever were aliens at Area 51 (or as Hillary originally responded, "Area 54". Maybe she does know something we don't.)
Before we get too excited there are a few things about space travel that make it, um, how do I want to say it?, very, very, VERY unlikely that aliens could have made it to Earth from another planet in a space ship.
The first problem is distance. The closest stars are Proxima Centarius, which is 4.22 light years away from Earth and Alpha Centarius which is 4.37 light years away from Earth. The best choice for a planet having the right size and distance from a proper star to enable life as we understand it to be possible right now is Kepler 452-b which is 1,400 light years away from Earth. It is not ideal, having 5 times Earth's mass and receiving 10% more energy from it's sun (hopefully the increased mass will keep the atmosphere from burning off) but it will have to do.
The second problem is the physics of moving mass at great speeds and physics govern alien travel as much as it does us. Moving mass requires energy and the greater the mass and the greater the speed the more energy is required. Energy requires fuel and some type of engine to burn the fuel and that also combines to increase the mass for a space ship.
We have sent out space probes using ion drive propulsion and although that is a very efficient way to travel to get from planet to planet requires speed. It would take an ion drive craft 81,000 years to make it to Proxima Centarius, our closest star.
Using improved current technology and sending our craft at 150,000 miles per hour it would only take us 19,000 years to reach Proxima Centarius,
Theoretically the fastest we could go would be using a Nuclear Pulse Propulsion (NPP) craft which if actually possible would get the trip to the nearest star done in 85 years. At that speed our trip to Kepler 452-b, the nearest possible inhabited planet would only take 28,000 years.
If we could somehow propel a craft at half the speed of light the trip could be brought to a comfortable 2,800 years. Just to be aware of the math the energy needed to propel 1 lb mass to half the speed of light would require the energy of 98 atomic bombs. Multiply that by the weight of a space ship, crew, engine, food and fuel and to get just to half the speed of light one goes way beyond the outer limits of energy we produce on our planet for domestic use. And that is to just get going. Braking the ship would require an equal amount of energy.
In other recent news you probably are quite delighted to hear that in the latest budget compromise there was quite an expansion of funds allocated to NASA. Not that a budget really matters per say because we always spend more than what we take in. But concerning NASA I'm sure they must still do quite a few wonderful things that don't get much press and so maybe their continued existence is justified.
To me it appears that NASA is driven by two major goals. The first is to create computer climate models that are politically correct enough to garner massive funding. I would have said they have been brilliant at this but lately the house of cards is starting to fall. Honored leaders like rats have started jumping ship and more and more honest scientists have begun to notice and identify publicly the massive data manipulation.
The second objective which is framed in every press reference that comes from NASA, whether it's mapping space or sending space probes is the golden grail of finding other life in the universe. What stars have planets? What planets have water? What star systems can support life as we know it? Could that life have somehow made it to Earth?
Personally I am all for finding out any of that. Theologically I do not have the least problem with there being material life outside our planet. I know that the Lord who made Heaven and Earth also made all that exists, has a plan for all of it and will have integrated it perfectly with our world as well.
The big catch though is that most scientists are atheists and so the existence of life by chance, evolution from random base elements to complexity, is to them both necessary and confounding. It is necessary because the other option is a creative intelligence and if that is so then logically the created might have an obligation to the creator. That's a scary thought. But it is confounding because spontaneous generation of life as of now has neither been observed nor understood.
So the main focus is to take the original theory, that life began on Earth in the primordial ooze hundreds of millions of years ago, and then look to find other places where there might be a similar primordial ooze. Maybe we can find there the clues we are missing here. That is why NASA wants to spend billions of dollars to look at planets like Mars because there is evidence of it having water, the universal solvent, a possible primordial ooze.
Now we all should understand that is not a matter of combining the right ingredients at the necessary levels under the proper temperatures, all mixed in a universal solvent like water, although that is what we are led to believe. To be considered alive even the most basic life forms require a massive amount of information placed just so to accomplish the multitude of functions required to come into being, survive and then reproduce. But if life has to have begun by chance against odds so great that there are a million zeros before them, and if we are up against a brick wall understanding how it could have been possible here on Earth, then the next logical step is to search for other sites which may better help us understand what has happened here.
OR - perhaps aliens seeded Earth. The least we can do is pick up their radio signals.
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