‘No little green men here: My theory on space travel and aliens’

Little green men, flying saucers, extra-terrestrials, unidentified flying objects, mysterious sites situated somewhere in America, crop circles … The tales of visitors coming to us from some far away planet have been going on since time immemorial, from all over the world, usually, though not always, involving some disc or sausage-shaped craft, all of them giving off flashing lights and making funny sounds, so it seems. We are told, by reasonably sane people, from all walks of life, that these are visitors who have come here to find out what we are up to, how developed we are and to assess whether we, as a race, are suitable to be allowed into the world of intergalactic travel!

What worries me about this theory is the distance to our nearest star, that is supposed to possibly harbour life, and not just life, but life that is far in advance of us! If memory serves me right that distance is something like three light years, though there are other, closer stars, but they’re not reckoned to be of a type that life could survive on. Now that means, as most people know, that travellers moving at the speed of light would take three about years to get here, and our scientists say there is no way anything could travel at that speed, because they would cease to exist as objects and be converted into pure energy if they did.

No, any space travellers would take many, many years to get here, even at speeds far in excess of what we are capable of on Earth. When they get here, they hang about over some spot on Earth for perhaps 10 minutes, before shooting off again, supposedly back to their home planet, a journey of many, many more years. Seems a lot of effort for very little result doesn’t it! In fact, it sounds like a daft idea to me!

Now, here is another idea, perhaps even dafter than the space travel theory, with a few points to consider. What if, in 300 or 400 years’ time our descendants were to discover the secret of time travel? This may seem like an impossible idea at present, but even Stephen Hawking, one of the world’s greatest scientific thinkers, thought time travel would soon be possible, so perhaps it’s not quite as daft as it seems!

What if (you’ll find this idea is full of what if statements!), travel is only possible back through time and what if it is only possible in specially constructed machines (that happen to be disc-shaped) and what if once the machine gets to a selected time, it can only stay there for about 10 minutes before it has to go back into the future, and what if the passenger will die instantly if he opens the machine and gets out? That would cover most of the stories attached to UFOs, except perhaps, the crazier ones of little green men landing and getting out of their craft. Yet, the criteria I’ve created would at least cover most of the sightings reported at various times now.

Then there is the puzzle of why these craft tend to appear, more often than not, over all sorts of odd parts of the Earth, but rarely over large cities or places of military importance. Could this be because the passenger inside has set his navigation controls to take him to the part of the world where his ancestors lived or where some other important part of his family’s history took place? That seems fairly logical to me — I’d love to be able to go back and see how my ancestors lived, especially if, as I would expect by then, these craft had ‘telescopes’ and other sensing equipment that could take the time traveller into close proximity of their ancestors, without actually needing to land. Yes, all crazy ideas I know, but any crazier than little green men taking maybe hundreds of years to get here, to only study us for 10 minutes?

I’m sorry, dear reader, for putting this idea on the table, but my brain comes up with things like this occasionally, and I think, “well, it’s an interesting point of view, I might as well write it down, just for the fun of it” — please forgive me!

Do you believe there are other life forms in space? What are your thoughts on time and space travel?

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