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Extra-terrestrials?

Posted By: Daniel Murphy
Date: Wednesday, 6 August 2008, at 11:19 p.m.

In Response To: Extra-terrestrials? (Stick)

Stanley writes: These ET's really do not matter that much. They have very little influence on mankind and practically zero impact on my life.

That's reassuring and, after some thought (for the notion of ET's taking an interest in us is initially disconcerting) even reasonable. Although "tens of thousands of reliable witnesses" of extraterrestials seems like a lot -- 25,000 sightings since 1947 would come to about one a day -- there are about 6.7 billion humans on Earth, and so even if all witnesses of extraterrestrials and all accounts by "abductees" are reliable, true and not contradictory and so forth, I figure that the probability of my being abducted, taken to a spaceship, having needles stuck in my brain and probes up my anus by benevolent extraterrestrial travellers, remembering the experience and writing a bestselling book that is turned into a movie with Christopher Walken starring as me, must be statistically remote.

Stick writes: If you try to comprehend how large the universe is, if you can wrap your head around that, you'll find it hard to believe someone is visiting us I think.

According to best estimates, the age of the universe is about 13.73 ± 0.12 billion years. The visible universe is a sphere with a diameter of about 92 billion light-years (870,387,203,424,000,000,000 kilometers) and volume of about 3×1080 cubic meters. There are about 100 billion galaxies in the visible universe and one of them is ours. The Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light years (587,862,537,318,400,000 miles) in diameter and 1,000 light years thick, and has between 200 and 400 billion stars. The nearest star to us is Proxima Centauri, 39.9 trillion kilometres or 4.2 light-years away. The nearest galaxy is Andromeda, about 2.5 million light years away but getting closer by the minute.

Personally, I have a little trouble envisioning a universe with perhaps

20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars

in a volume of

300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic meters

but if some intergalactic travellers from Andromeda journeyed

15,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles

to reach our tiny part of the universe, then intrepid doesn't being to describe them and we ought to be flattered and it's a darn shame if after coming that immense distance their Niña, Pinta or Santa Maria crashlanded near Roswell, New Mexico. Maybe the airport in Albuquerque was fogged in.

Stanley writes: But, the post does not demand all believers to stand up and be counted.

Nor, if they remain sitting and uncounted, need they agree with Richard Feynman who said about UFOs that

It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. To define what I mean, I might have said to him, "Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence." It is just more likely. That is all.

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