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The balloons aren’t alien, but what about the ‘Tic Tacs’?
What I learned from someone working on classified military drone technology
Are we alone in the universe? I have always thought it incredibly unlikely. The universe is so incomprehensibly big, has been around for so incredibly long, and has so many habitable zone planets, that the conditions for life as we know it on Earth are so commonplace it would be astonishing if the universe wasn’t positively teeming with life.
But because the universe is so big, I’ve never held out much hope that we would encounter extraterrestrial life beyond microbes in our solar system. That’s because while travel within our solar system is possible, the distance between stars is astronomical.
Our closest neighbouring star system is Proxima Centauri. It is more than 40 trillion kilometres, or 4.24 light years away. This means it would take that many Earth years to get there if one were travelling at the speed of light (299,792,458 m/s). But with our current rocket technology a one way voyage would take 70,000 years. That’s one hell of a road trip.
So on the question of Earth being visited by extraterrestrial life, I’ve always thought it the product of wishful thinking, or in the case of those who claim to have been abducted and probed, attention…
