Here’s a bit of light relief from the relentless, 24/7 news cycle about Covid and Ukraine. 

I’m quite interested in space, the universe and the vast, unimaginable scale of it all. I have zero qualifications in anything to do with space, I simply enjoy learning about the cosmos. I’m looking forward to seeing what that new telescope has in store for us. I also enjoy a science fiction movie from time to time, about space aliens invading earth, or star fighters blazing around the galaxies. 

But it does get you thinking and I’m going to chuck some of the stuff I think about, usually when I’m driving, so you can also enjoy a thought process that is never ending, just for fun.

Firstly, I don’t reckon there really are any space aliens that have visited earth. There are bound to be billions of them out there in the universe, but I don’t believe that they can come here. I’ll tell you why.

Another thought before I move on to that, is why are the space aliens in science fiction movies almost always malignant, never beneficial? Well except ET of course. Interestingly a common theme among space aliens is that they are often on the hunt for new planets to harvest or colonize because they’ve ruined theirs; or need more food, or energy or something. I’m sure I’ve heard that somewhere else, in the news recently. Oh yes, that’s us, isn’t it Mr. Musk? Imagine a situation in the future where Elon Musk masters viable space travel and steps off a rocket in a few million years time offering the locals on the new planet a great deal on building a Tesla factory? I digress.

Back to the space aliens and why they can’t come here, in my humble and unresearched or peer reviewed opinion, is as follows. 

The current science believes that the universe began with a bang at a single point, a really big one, so big, the scientists named it, ‘The Big Bang’. They must have dwelt on that for ages before settling on the name. From this big bang, came everything that exists now, hurtling out from a single point, filling the void of whatever was there before. Currently we don’t know what was there before, if anything, but there can’t have just been nothing. Anyway, as things stand, we had the big bang and about 13 billion years later, here we are, in the present.

The present, is how far the universe has expanded so far, everything now is behind the present right? Yes, because the future hasn’t happened yet, so the space aliens haven’t come from there. They’ve come from the past, like us. Evolved somewhere else in the universe, which is the same age everywhere. Some planets and stars and galaxies have developed differently, but if you take away travelling at the speed of light, everything else is today, or history.

Our telescopes look back in time, billions of years, we see things from there when the light gets here, at the speed of light. But that’s just seeing them. Just because we can’t see them yet, doesn’t make it any less of today there, than it is here on earth. So…Those distant worlds are doing the same thing our solar system and galaxy is, just somewhere else. So, any evolution would be along the same lines surely? How could one planet, a billion light years away, evolving in the same way earth has, somehow harbor species millions of years more evolved than ours?

What are we doing wrong? Well, one thing we did have, was organized religion thrust upon us back in about 600AD and science got a new name, heresy, where it languished for a thousand years until the enlightenment and subsequent industrial revolution. I’ve talked about this before in another post. I don’t think just a thousand years matters on this scale though. That’s just our hard luck. Imagine the great advances in medicine, astronomy and engineering we could have had if old men in robes weren’t nailing creative and scientific people to a tree or burning them at the stake in the name of superstition and dogma? It doesn’t bear too much thinking about. Religion has a lot to answer to answer for, hopefully one day it will be held to account for its myriad crimes against humanity.

So, back to the space aliens, so advanced they can build city sized spaceships that can travel at the speed of light across millennia to come and make Will Smith crack some gags while saving the world, would have to have come across space, not from the past, but there’s the rub. In order to set off from somewhere inconceivably far away, to get here, they’d have to have left millions of years ago, but how would they have got so evolved, so fast, having millions, billions of years head start on earth, when everything started at the same time from the big bang? This is fun, isn’t it?

Now, let’s imagine there are highly advanced civilizations, building city sized space craft to cruise the galaxies looking for planets to visit. What do they do for a day job back home? Who builds the ships? Where do they mine the materials? Who makes the tea? How do they build the spaceships? What happened to the prototypes? Where do they test the propulsion system? How do they pay for the stupendous amounts of materials and lighting to make such vast vessels? Because there’s never just one, there’s thousands of landers and pods and fighters carried inside them. Never mind even thinking about a Death Star and how that got financed and made.

Where do they get all the hydraulic oil from? What do they eat? Who taught them how to make city sized spaceships? What happens to the space alien families back home while the star fighter types are away for millions of years looking for new planets to harvest. Do they have a plan when they leave or do they just blast off and hope for the best? Do they have pets? Are there wild animals on their planet? Do they go shopping and out to pubs? What other lesser species on the planet are they racist, or speciesist about? How do they get their news? Do they play games. What do they do to relax when not building city sized spaceships? Do they have a navy, or travel agents?

It’s never covered off in the movies, or literature. The space aliens just arrive here and start causing trouble for our trusty Americans, before they inevitably save the day using comparatively ancient technology, or a virus.

It would be a bit like the Vikings fighting off a modern American military invasion using just swords and shields and winning. Mind you, that’s probably not a great example as the Vietnamese and the Taliban both proved it’s possible to give the world’s largest military a beating with relatively primitive weapons if you’re motivated enough.

So, there we are? Food for thought. A universe 93 billion lightyears across, and everywhere in it, it’s today, or the past, which is where any space aliens would have to come from. Clearly, there was epic stuff going on before the big bang. It’s obviously another dimension science hasn’t discovered yet. We’re probably actually all in round bowl on a giant alien species coffee table, or a cat’s collar. Mind how you go.