• Question: do you belive in aliens

    Asked by aaronbrennan to Adam on 11 Nov 2013. This question was also asked by cathalbrady, eoghanfurey.
    • Photo: Adam Murphy

      Adam Murphy answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      Hey Aaron.

      My degree in a astronomy taught me one huge, really important thing: The universe is so massive, and so crazy.

      It’s so massive that I believe out there, somewhere, there has to be other kinds of life! It could look like nothing we recognise, it might be intelligent or it might not. But I do think with all the new planets out there we keep on discovering, and the much bigger number of many many planets we haven’t seen, there has to be life somewhere.

      What I don’t believe is that they’ve been here. If they’re intelligent enough to fly here, they probably don’t need to abduct people to figure us out.

      But hey, if they do start abducting people, we can always call the Doctor. He’s an alien!

Comments

  • Photo: Eleanor

    Eleanor commented on :

    Hey Aaron,

    Adam is right. The Universe is crazy big and it’s reasonable to believe that anything that can happen, has happened in it somewhere.

    But in being so big it is also so isolated. There is a universal limiter – the speed of light, nothing can go faster than it and no-one can go even nearly as fast as it. All the sci-fi shows that have aliens travelling to far off galaxies have written something in to the show like a warp drive or hyperspace that allows them to get passed the speed of light limitation, but we don’t have those things. We are trying but we may never have them.

    Other than our Sun the next nearest star to us is 50 light years away. That means the AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT it would still take 50 years to get there. For us it would be significantly longer, thousands of years.

    So there almost certainly are aliens out there. And we will almost certainly never meet them. Sorry.