UFOs and aliens

First things first yes I believe in UFOs (iv seen one myself) and aliens, however there's a catch here. UFO stands for unidentified flying object, therefore any object in the sky the observer can't identify is by definition a UFO. Further since most observers are average people and less than familiar with weather balloons, unusual clouds, secret military aircraft, meteorites and who knows what else, combined with the fact that the sky, especially at night, has no reference points so even familiar objects at an odd angle may be unrecognisable means anyone who jumps from "I saw a UFO the other night" to "the spaceship was X big and moving at Y speed" is very likely mistaken. I say this in part because there has never been a sighting where experts could distinctly say yes that is a space ship, its always mistaken identity, a hoax or such crappy quality no-one can tell, and also getting between solar systems is really hard and takes bloody ages(yes that is the "technical term" for the time frames involved).

As discussed in my last post the speed of light in a vacuum is 300 000Km a second, this is also the universes absolute speed limit, nothing can travel through space faster, even stuff like magnetic fields and gravity are restricted to this limit. Star systems are also really far apart, our nearest is 4.24 light years away so a round trip would take a minimum 8.5 Earth years. Even if aliens are common they are still unlikely to live that close by and this speed is incredibly difficult to even approach so a more realistic time-frame would be anything from 50 years upwards with 100s certainly not being unreasonable. After that much effort any species with sense would either make its arrival well known and get friendly with the natives or actually be competent at staying hidden.

On a related point claims of direct contact always involve aliens that are basically human in appearance, this is laughably improbably The body shape has only evolved once on this planet so in our environment there are plenty of other designs that allow life to get along just fine, on any other planet there will be dozens of working body shapes and as many as you like that would have worked but never evolved.

So that's the UFO bit out the way, they are non alien objects people fail to recognise but I also said I believe in aliens and that's because as mentioned in my last post there are absolute shitloads(another "technical" term) of stars, roughly in the region of 10^21. Even if the chances of life developing around a star chosen at random are a billion to one that gives hundreds of inhabited planets in our galaxy alone, and a number in the trillions across the whole universe. To think that the only planet in the entire universe hosting any sort of life is our own is the most incredibly arrogant thing I can imagine.

Think mistaking clouds for spaceships is silly, think again

Next time SETI and the Drake Equation, then the space stuff gets a break.