Step Into The Alien World

Don’t forget the unseen, as more will always be revealed. Tell me where you want to go.
In alien folklore, it is said by believers that extraterrestrials are among us. They live here in secret, pulling the strings of the world government since the beginning of time.




While I sit here on my lazy ass and lament about all the unknown potentials, not much is known about our very own Earth. The deep oceans might as well be on another planet, and human instruments have never directly observed anything below a few miles of the crust. Jump beyond the Earth and our lousy satellites have only mapped five planets in the solar system in any sort of detail.
Forget about it, space is the final frontier; All 78 billion light years of it, and all of its 9 billion trillion stars. Remember the Drake Equation?



where:

:''N'' is the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;

and

:''R''^* is the average rate of star formation in Milky Way galaxy
:''f''_''p'' is the fraction of those stars that have planets
:''n''_''e'' is the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
:''f''_ℓ is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
:''f''_''i'' is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life
:''f''_''c'' is the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
:''L'' is the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.


Using educated guesses, astronomers can formulate reasonable answers for the number of civilizations in this galaxy. Inevitably, many of these values come down to conjecture. We just simply don’t know. Personally I consider this equation to be dependent on the Anthropic Principle, and therefore meaningless. All life as we know it is carbon based, but no physical law requires it to be.

Before I redirect my flow, any advanced civilization ought to have some form of stealth technology. Humans have been around for only a few hundred thousand years, and all that we have accomplished is radar stealth technology. It isn’t unreasonable to assume that more advanced civilizations could wonder our skies in secret and we wouldn’t even know it. Just visit your local zoo tomorrow and you might understand.

Before I go, we all know that spaceflight is expensive. One of the arguments against aliens is that a shear amount of energy is needed just to send a modest mass beyond our solar system, in a decade or two. Unfortunately, it is more complicated than that. At best, humans are a type .7 civilization. Our rockets are powered by fossil fuels. An advanced civilization would have much more energy at its disposal, perhaps even the energy of the observable universe.

In the end, this is all open conjecture. All the evidence for UFO’s is observational and absent any direct evidence. It can’t be proven, but it can't be disproven either. One thing that I do know is that not only is the universe stranger than we suppose, it is stranger than we can suppose. I want to believe.