UFO's and Extraterrestrial Aliens: Why Earth Has Never Been Visited
by Rich Deem
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You people just simply amaze me with your well meaning, but totally absurd
postulations.

By far the largest group of people supporting the "We are the only ones in
the entire Universe" are the same people who also believe in God, Allah,
Buddha etc. and their entire scientific education and knowledge consist of
the phrase: "Because it says so in the (fill in your favorite religious
tome)".  It is the same gang who burned Bruno at the stake for suggesting
that the Earth is not the center of the Universe. The same group of fanatics
ex-communicated Galileo, and would have burned him as well, hadn't he
hot-footed it to safer and saner territory,  for suggesting that the Earth
revolves around the Sun.  Throw in the "Flat Earth" lunatics, and for good
measure all those to stupid to grasp the fundamentals of Evolution, and one
can see why there is really no good reason for extra-solar intelligence to
visit us:  There is very little intelligent life here on Earth.

If someone had told Columbus that the same voyage he made from Spain to the
New World can be made today by an SR-70 in approximately an hour, he would
have declared that is as totally impossible, just as today's pundits claim
that aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy could never visit us.

Why is it so hard to swallow that all single star systems (at least 50 % of
them are) in the Milky Way Galaxy have planets ?  Our Solar System has 9 of
them, 4 gaseous and 4 rocky. the verdict on Pluto still being out, if indeed
it is a planet, rather than a captured Kuiper Belt object. The two largest
planets, Jupiter and Saturn have to date about 60 moons, many of them larger
than Pluto and one or two larger than Mercury.  This would indicate to me
that "rarity" of planet/moon formation is the rule, rather than the
exception.  Either way, when we develop the means of detection, we will find
out for sure.  Until then, all this guessing just fills up empty space,
pretty much the literary equivalent of elevator music.

Is there life out there ??  The most primitive single call life has been on
Earth for about 4.2 billion years. Fossils of hard-shell single call life
have been found in Australia and dated to be about 3.8 billion years old.
Did they form here or were they brought here by comets ?? that question may
not be answered, until we find life elsewhere in our Solar System (shouldn't
be too far in the future) or in other Solar Systems (some time in the
distant future, if we manage survive that long).  But judging from the
diversity of life here on Earth, life throughout the Universe is the rule
and not the exception.

Why haven't we heard from them ??  First of all, we've only been
transmitting radio signals for about 90 years.  The present trend is away
from radio and TV transmitters to cable and/or fiber optics.  Uplinks to
Satellites consist of very narrow uni-directional signal beams, as are the
return signals, not lending themselves to easy detection by aliens looking
for our signals.  Within another 100 years, the world will almost become
silent again, as far as signals are concerned.  It is often suggested that
advanced civilizations would send out easily decipherable radio beacons to
others know they exist.  Well, we don't do it, probably for the same reason
they don't: who would want a bunch of destructive, shoot-first-ask-
questions-later,  humans pounding on their front door, ruining their day.
Unless we are extremely lucky and catch them in that 200 year span of
technological development, we will never find a signal; that, however, in no
way demonstrates that intelligent life is not abundant in the Galaxy.

At the rate we are going at it, our planet will be worn out before we even
come close to developing the technical know-how of interstellar travel.
Perhaps so-called "Intelligent Civilizations" only have a 5 million year
life span before they fade into cosmic oblivion by destroying their
habitats.  Even if they were to escape before that point and by accident
find Earth, as an inhabitable alternative, our collective goose would be
cooked.

As far as dreams about fast interstellar travel are concerned, science in
all likelihood won't be the obstacle. I am sure we could develop propulsion
systems which could achieve 10% of the speed of light.  However, a collision
with a single molecule at that speed would have the same effect as setting
off a nuclear bomb on board, with the predictable results of annihilation of
the space conveyance.

Has the Earth been visited in the past ??  Even though I believe we have
been visited, there is absolutely no physical evidence.  There are numerous
detailed pictures and cameos depicting flying machines long before those
machines were invented.  Is that proof ?? There are photographs, which are
mostly blurry affairs, enough eye witness reports to fill a stadium, but not
even one single artifact, which can be positively identified to be of
extraterrestrial origin.  Even if these objects exist, and they well may,
religious zealots would keep them under lock and key, lest they become
public knowledge and discredit their tale of the "Creator".  No one has ever
satisfactorily explained the relative sudden transformation from ape to
upright walking humans, including the several, fairly evenly spaced
transformations within that genre, the sudden ending of the Stone Age to
cities and agriculture in Mesopotamia, on to the Bronze Age and the building
of the pyramids, an accomplishment we couldn't even duplicate today. There
is but one answer: we had some external help.  At first DNA manipulations,
until they thought they had it right, then the infusion of knowledge, one
step at a time.  To me, that makes logical sense, even though there is no
direct proof.  However, as a subscriber to Evolution, I can live with an
incomplete picture ... the blanks are being filled in every day at an
increasing pace.  I may ultimately have to make some major revisions, but
the overall picture will remain the same.  Creationists, on the other hand,
can't deal with incompletes, so they'd rather fill in the gaps with "facts"
as they interpret them from their book.  Because of that, they think they
see the complete picture and therefore are adamantly opposed to any
scientific developments and findings, which may upset their credo: "Because
it says so in the (blank)".