Exobiology was the original term given to the sciences central to the question of life-in-the-Universe. It’s now been largely replaced by Astrobiology, but I’ll stick with the original. To investigate life-in-the-Universe one needs to look at what the most likely distribution of extraterrestrial life will be apart from Little Green Microbes. Assuming one or more extraterrestrial civilizations with advanced, interstellar spaceflight capability exists – then what?
Interstellar space travel is not only possible but probable. Intergalactic travel is another matter.
UFO sceptics would have you believe that interstellar space travel is at best highly improbable, and at worst impossible. Therefore, UFOs cannot represent the technology of a space-faring race of extraterrestrials (ET’s). Hogwash! Unfortunately for the sceptics, fact number one is that one doesn’t need any wormhole or theoretical ‘warp drive’ or other “Star Trek” type techno-babble to explore the galaxy and boldly go where no alien has gone before. Sure, space is really BIG! Planet Earth was really BIG to human society many centuries ago, but that didn’t stop the planet being explored from pole to pole, even if individual journeys took many years. Earth was really BIG as well to birds, and bacteria and ants and all other manner of associated critters, but they too managed to explore and colonize the BIG Earth. Terrestrial analogies aside, what if you have an alien race with life spans way, way surpassing ours? Recall that the polytheistic gods were as close to immortal beings as makes no odds; now what if those gods weren’t gods, but ‘gods’ – ‘ancient astronauts’? Then there’s a possible likely alternative, a bit of the old fashion genetic engineering to increase life expectancy. Or there’s the likelihood of enhanced bioengineering (part flesh; part machine) to accomplish the same goal. One step further, what if it wasn’t flesh-and-blood aliens but artificial intelligent aliens?
What if an exploring race were to adopt those old stand-by sci-fi concepts of suspended animation or a multi-generation interstellar spaceship?
But when crunch comes crunch, sure space is really BIG, but it is also very old. I’ll restrict ‘space’ here, confining it to just our own Milky Way Galaxy, which is a reasonably sized playground for my purposes. Pick a star, any star, with a solar system that contains a technologically advanced space-faring race. There’s lots of time available to first explore hence colonize starting a few light years outward at a time. Consolidate, and then expand some more. Repeat as often as required. The time it would take to explore and colonize the Milky Way Galaxy (that is, via interstellar travel) is but a small fraction of the age of that galaxy even if a race of ET’s never travelled at more that say 1% to 10% the speed of light. [Such velocities shouldn’t be prohibit-able to a technologically advanced race.] Consult any elementary astronomy text for the distances and volumes and ages and do the calculations for yourself if you doubt this. Now while such significant, but still sub-light velocities are beyond the human race today, what of 1000 years from now? And 1000 years is but a nanosecond in terms of cosmic and galactic time frames. [Note that intergalactic space travel (one galaxy to another galaxy) is quite another can of worms. The distance from one side of our galaxy to the other is tiny relative to the vast distances separating our neighbouring galaxies. Even “Star Trek” stayed within our own galaxy, and they had warp drive!]
And once here (within easy reach of, or in our solar system), having a nearby base of operations as it were, one can easily have a whole plethora of UFOs visiting Earth on a regular or routine basis. It’s not a case of one UFO taking ten thousand years to visit, then returning home taking another ten thousand years in the process, and having hundreds or thousands of such alien spacecraft doing the same. If you want to explore the South Pole over the long term, you don’t make a daily commute from New York or even Sydney
But what’s the seriously driving incentive to ‘boldly go…’? I mean scientific curiosity is all well and good, but it’s going to be expensive to satisfy that curiosity. There is another incentive, a far more powerful one, and that is survival. No star lasts forever. Sooner or later, our star, the Sun, is going to make our existence a misery. In fact, sooner or later, our Sun will be the death of us all, even if that’s projected to be some five billion years yet in our future. If humans are still around when that peril makes itself apparent, we’ll need to escape to another star system. Finding a suitable one is going to call for us to ‘boldly go…’! Of course other earlier disaster scenarios could force us to flee sooner – the threat of a swarm of killer comets dislodged from either the Oort Cloud and/or Kuiper Belt heading our way or the likelihood of a nearby star going supernova would give us incentive to get the hell out of here!
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