Aliens and Interstellar Travel

People all over the world are fascinated by the idea that aliens visit our planet with some regularity. UFO experts point to ancient texts describing strange encounters or point to Egyptian hieroglyphs showing strange crafts in the sky above. The question is, what would it take for another species to travel across space to visit our planet?

The Distance of Space

To travel across space, an enormous amount of energy would need to power any spacecraft. Alpha Centauri, our closest star sits 266,000 times farther away than our sun. As a matter of fact, light, the fastest thing known, takes only eight minutes to travel to the Earth from the sun. Meanwhile, it requires moran than four years to get to the nearest star. To reach the black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, the light would take 30,000 years.The fastest object ever launched into space is the Voyager 1 probe, and it would take nearly 75,000 years to make the trip to Alpha Centauri. The debris in space would also create a problem. Filled with dust and gas, space contains debris that would damage a fast-moving spacecraft.

“Collisions in space are by no means rare: by the end of the Space Shuttle program, for example, more than 100 shuttle windows had been replaced after impacts with space debris, some objects being as small as the fleck of paint that cracked the front window of STS-7 (the second Challenger mission) in 1983.” (Ed Regis, Scientific America Oct 3, 2015)

Any alien spacecraft able to travel the distance would also have to withstand the impact of space debris. With the vastness of space, how would an alien ship harness enough power to travel to Earth?

Rocket Technology

Scientists conclude that advanced technology would be necessary to reach the speeds needed to travel across space to reach our planet. In the first place, the energy required would have to come from something other than rocket fuel. Rockets using nuclear fusion or antimatter propulsion could do the job. Aside from the fact that huge amounts of fuel would have to store aboard the ship, a spacecraft would need an oxidizer to create thrust. Theories exist that allow spacecraft to collect fuel using the energy from the sun, but it would slow travel time. Could aliens use wormholes to travel through the universe?

Wormholes

If they exist, wormholes could permit travel faster than light. A wormhole is a tunnel with open ends that use negative energy to stay open. Scientists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen first proposed the wormhole, or “Einstein-Rosen Bridge” in 1935. All things considered, they believed that a person traveling between the two ends might arrive before a beam of light could make the trip on the “outside.”

Although credible eyewitnesses like US Navy pilots and airline pilots claim to see  “aircraft with capabilities far beyond what is currently considered aerodynamically possible,” no one has come forth with concrete evidence of aliens visiting Earth. Recently the United States government admitted to looking into alien spacecraft claims. The government wanted to see if another country developed advanced technology that could potentially fall under military control.

We may never truly know if aliens exist. The probability of another species traveling through space to reach our planet seems quite impossible. They may have harnessed advanced technologies. Someday we may develop the technology needed for interstellar space travel, but for now, we can enjoy the movies that make us believe all of that is possible.