I scoff when I hear of ancient aliens, but maybe I am wrong? I know that it seems silly to imagine that aliens came across the universe in space ships then only gave us the very basics of the most basic forms of engineering, if that is the claim…

But… given the enormous span of time involved, it is perfectly feasible to think that a race of beings may have existed at some point in this enormous universe, that achieved a high level of technology, one that allowed them to send things into the distant universe (toward us), and since the time that they did they have long died out. Amused themselves to death, borrowing a phrase from a Roger Waters album. During the interim they may have achieved greatness, built civilisations, split the atom, gone to their own solar system planets, fought wars, and caused their own doom, all as the objects they launched into space hurtled on an almost impossible journey toward our, and many other, unremarkable corners of the Milky Way.

If this was true, and considering the span of time again, we could find no evidence of it for two reasons. First we have only been able to look for a short time, and we don’t quite know what we are looking at and in what direction we should. Second because, given enough time, all constructed things crumble and fall back into just their component parts, entropy. It would be difficult to recognise the machine once magnificent from just the the pile of rust that now remains.

We are lucky with our archaeology for the most part as the objects we study have retained much of what leads us to form theories on them. Let’s say for instance the pyramids, they are only (only ?) about 5000 to 2500 years old, and compared to the distance in time between the evolution of us humans and the death of the last dinosaur those structures have been there for less than a single heartbeat in a lifetime. Our time here is a drop in the ocean, we have an understanding of the events of the universe that is minuscule, but we watch Professor Cox et al and think they know it all, though I’m sure they would say there’s a lot more to be discovered.

Let’s imagine, just for fun, that a race of aliens sent probes out into the universe 10 million years ago. these probes travelled for half a million years at the speed of light meaning that they could be from a galaxy other than ours and get here in that time if earth is less that 500,000 light years from their launching planet, and let’s further imagine that the builders died out while the probes were on their way. So the light of that civilisation dimmed to us longer ago than we existed in the first place, we would never see it. The probe was here millions of years before we were here, and if we found it then it would be unrecognisable to us if it had suffered the ravages of millions of years of earth geology and the entropy of crumbling. Does that sound reasonable, it did in my head?

If I could launch a probe at the speed of light from earth, it would travel one light year in a year, so it would be one light year away, and in 20 years it would be 20 light years away. Simple really. But if in 20 years time I could launch a probe at 2x the speed of light it would catch and pass the first probe 20 years after that (when the first going at the speed of light had done 40 years of travelling). And if I Launched another one when the first two met, and it was twice the speed of the second one, it would pass probe one just after another 12.5 years (trust me on the rough math), and the second probe after 40 years. And so on it would go… So the first probe would be launched knowing it would be all but useless inevitably at the distances we are talking about. And still, in the grand scheme of things, they would all still be relatively close by.

Mind blowing…

Paul S Wilson