Thursday, September 15, 2011

Are we alone? Have we been visited by aliens or alien spacecraft?

I heard Dr. Seth  Shostak of SETI speak at the Science Center in my hometown a few years ago and I was fascinated by his presentation, particularly the part about the Drake Equation. It wasn't the actual equation that fascinated me...I am the farthest thing from a mathematician that you could imagine, it was what the equation revealed that fascinated me. It is almost a mathematical impossibility that we are alone in the universe. We need not be theoretical physicists to know that mathematics is the language of the universe, whether we personally can understand the complicated equations or not. This blog is not a blog about UFO sitings or Alien encounters, frankly I doubt that we have been visited by extraterrestrials. If there is any validity to UFO sightings, I believe what people are seeing are unmanned crafts. In 1977 NASA launched two unmanned space probes,Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Originally designated to study Jupiter and Saturn, the probes continued their missions into the outer solar system and in June of this year they left our solar system. NASA still has contact with both probes. The two  probes continue to operate, with some loss in subsystem redundancy, but retain the capability of returning scientific data. Both probes  have adequate electrical power to continue operating until around 2025, after which there may not be available electrical power to support science instrument operation. At that time, science data return and spacecraft operations will cease.  Both probes carry  a golden record that contains pictures and sounds of Earth, along with symbolic directions for playing the record and data detailing the location of Earth. The record is intended as a combination time-capsule and interstellar message to any civilization, alien or far-future human, that recovers either of the probes. The contents of this record were selected by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan. So one day this time-capsule of sorts could be discovered by a civilization elsewhere in our galaxy. If such civilizations exist and are at least as advanced technologically as we are, there could be similar unmanned probes out there waiting to be discovered. This could explain UFO's that have been sighted by NASA in space, as well as here on earth.

0 comments: