Direct Contact with Extraterrestrial Beings Is Not Impossible
This article was originally published on June 23, 2001; my old writings are being moved to my blog.
One argument often uttered against the idea that extraterrestrial beings could visit us physically is that would be impossible for them to travel to Earth. The distances in space are enormous, and it would take a very long time to reach Earth even from the nearest star, let alone from a galaxy far away in the universe.
Granted, this argument is appealing and seems to rule out any visits to Earth by extraterrestrial beings. Nevertheless, I'm not convinced by the argument and I will tell you why in this article. One thing worth noting is that regardless of my belief expressed here I have a skeptical approach to UFOs being spaceships controlled by extraterrestrial beings, and hence I don't see them as definite evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.
When we say something such as the argument mentioned in the first paragraph, we do it with support of our current knowledge and experience. We know what it means to travel in space, or at least in our nearest proximity. We know the costs, efforts, problems, and limitations involved in space traveling. For the moment we are mainly concerned with exploring our own solar system which contains objects that can be reached or at least studied without too much of a hassle.
When it comes to long-distant space travels with people on board, that does not seem feasible today, and maybe we will never be able to do such traveling. However, I am of a different opinion.
I don't believe that long-distant space traveling is impossible if you have sufficient knowledge and technology, or possibly some feature that we humans lack. Just because we don't have the knowledge and technology that are required to make long-distant space travels, who is to say that other civilizations in the universe don't meet those requirements? A civilization umpteenth times more advanced and intelligent than ours could quite possibly have discovered a way to travel in space and perhaps in time as well. Such traveling could be shaped in a number of ways; for example:
- Spaceships that can travel much faster than the speed of light, or in whatever speed needed to move around in the universe. Even if we currently think of it as impossible to construct such spaceships, a much more developed civilization could have succeeded in creating them.
- Portals which allow things that enter them to almost instantaneously appear at another place in the universe where a similar portal connected to the one used for departure exists. Maybe a huge artificial or natural network of connection points exists, and the portals use this network. These connection points are somehow linked to the portals in order to enable space traveling via the network. That same network could possibly be used for time traveling as well. Alternatively, the portals could use either natural or artificial wormholes, or a natural phenomenon unknown to us.
- The extraterrestrial beings can move through space and time without any kind of technology or aid at all. Their bodies could be so disposed as to allow space and time traveling as part of their nature. Our bodies are not constructed like that, but does that necessarily mean that the bodies of extraterrestrial beings couldn't be like that?
We have incredibly much left to learn, and I'm positive that we will gain more knowledge related to what is being discussed in this article as time goes on. An advanced extraterrestrial civilization may have existed for a very long time, perhaps hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. Imagine the knowledge they would possess when considering what we know today after a relatively short period of development.
In conclusion, saying that extraterrestrial beings cannot visit Earth because we don't believe we could do any extensive space traveling does not provide a good argument against such visits being possible. This is because it's based on the knowledge we currently possess, and that knowledge should not be regarded as the true knowledge or even near it. With today's knowledge the argument is valid, but in the long run I believe it will be proved otherwise.
