Research shows the “Truth is Out There”
According to research, one in two people living in the UK believe in aliens (source 1), that being the extra-terrestrial kind, not the “I’m in your country illegally” kind. Another poll (source 2) states that only 36% of people within the UK belief in extra-terrestrial life, with 35% being “undecided.”
This is still relatively low considering that our shiny, aquamarine marble is just a tiny, inconsequential part of the universe.
Our Solar System itself is 36 billion times larger than the Earth (source 3). I know that spouting huge numbers is like speaking German to a tiger, but think of it this way:
Think of every place you have been to, every city or village that you have explored small parts of. That does not even comprise the Earth itself. In just the Milky Way, our galaxy, there are estimates that there are AT LEAST 400,000,000,000 (400 billion) planets (source 4). And our galaxy is only one of the fifty-one galaxies in our “Local Group” which constitutes the galaxies closest to us. If we take the idea that every one of those galaxies is similar to ours, that is 20,000,000,000,000 (or 20 trillion) planets in just the galaxies closest to us. To think that WE, overgrown, relatively hyper-intelligent monkeys are the only ones in this endless sea of stars and cosmos is madness.
Personally, I have not had an extra-terrestrial (or simply a UFO) experience, but I know people who swear they have seen otherworldly things. However, ‘Fresh-Student Living’ covers the releasing of previously classified RAF documents from a specialised “wing” of the military organization. In these documents, which covered up until 2009 when the wing was disbanded, the year of 2009 had over 591 reported sightings of unidentified-flying-objects (image 1).
Now, I ask you: how many times have you seen lights or shapes in the sky and have just dismissed it as satellites or air-plane lights?
Still impartial to the idea of potential extra-terrestrial life? So be it.
This video here (above) documents the US Navy’s recently declassified infrared scanners capturing footage of unidentified air-crafts darting through the sky.
And this video (above again) captured something unidentified flying “against the wind.” The wind itself was stated as going “120 knots” which roughly equates to 138.09 miles per hour. The amazement in the pilot’s voice displays it all. These videos were only released by the U.S Government after they were previously leaked by outside sources years before. If they only released these because of that, what other videos of “unidentified aerial phenomena” do the governments of the world have on hand?
If you are not the kind to believe that little green-grey men with bulbous heads and flying saucers visit us, then do you believe that life of any kind exists out there other than us?
How about microbial lifeforms then? Just recently, 26th October 2020, scientists discovered more liquid water than was previously thought and expected. If we do not know every nook and cranny of our nearest celestial neighbour or even the very planet we live on, then the odds of potential amoebic life is ridiculously close to 100%.
When talking about alien life on distant planets orbiting even more distant stars, you have to mention that when we look into the deep cosmos with our most powerful telescopes, we are seeing a delay in time. Light takes time to travel. In fact it travels at 186,282 miles per second (670,616,629 miles per hour.) It takes roughly 490–507 seconds (depending on where the Earth is on its cycle) for light to reach Earth from the Sun. Now for something so close, yet so far, it still takes roughly 8 minutes for light to reach us. Alpha Centauri, our closest star system, is 4 light years away, which means it takes light 4 years to reach us through a vacuum. If it takes that long to simply see the nearest star system, then the more distant ones can take hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of years to reach us. We are essentially seeing into the past of the universe whenever we try to observe far enough away from us (which is, interestingly, how scientists understand the universe’s timeline.)
More importantly, if life does exist out there, they could be observing us at a much earlier stage. To them, we could still be just venturing out of our caves or mud huts. Hell, they could even be seeing giant reptiles still stomping and stampeding across Pangaea, the continent conglomerate that existed before it gradually broke apart into the world we know now. Imagine the surprise of aliens if they travel all this way to see our planet, thinking that giant dinosaurs and bugs still lived here only to be met with a society of primates.
So, even if you are not entirely convinced that aliens exist in any form, I hope that I have at least enlightened you with some information about the near-infinite cosmos that surrounds us. If this post goes down, then I guess the Men In Black have come after me.
