Making sense of recent UFO sightings
By Cory L. Higgs
So far in 2020, wildfires have engulfed entire continents, a global pandemic is wreaking havoc and now UFOs?
A video recently released from the U.S Department of Defense shows what the agency described as ‘unidentified flying objects’ or UFOs.
While the subject of the video is speculation, it does raise the question, “are we truly alone?” We can’t prove or discredit the videos from the DoD, but we can theorize and review data and statistics to gain a better grasp on whether there are other sentient beings or other forms of life in this universe.
Corrie Ann Delgado, the area’s Solar System Ambassador said, “the Milky Way Galaxy is really, really big. The Milky Way Galaxy is an island of stars, sitting somewhere in the universe amongst many, many other galaxies, and we call that galaxy home.”
To give some perspective, Delgado suggests a hypothetical image to help you gain your bearings. She said that to take a picture of our own galaxy, we would need a selfie stick about 181 trillion miles long, so any image we have of our own galaxy is based on what we can observe from others.
“The galaxy is roughly 125,000 light-years across. (A light-year is a unit of astronomical distance equivalent to the distance that light travels in one year, which is nearly 6 trillion miles.) If I were on one side of the galaxy and you were on the other, and I flashed my super strong flashlight in your direction, you would begin to see it in about 125,000 years (in the year 127,020 AD). Being that big, odds are that it is likely that somewhere in the galaxy, there is intelligent life,” she said.
With an area so vast, and endless statistics leads one to believe there must be life to some extent in the vastness of the universe. Delgado said that while those stars are exciting for finding potential life in the stars, we have made a large enough ripple to be noticed by any other form of life.
She said that the first radio wave sent from our planet has gone barely anywhere; in fact, our radio waves have only reached out .01 percent into our galaxy, leaving the other 99.99 percent of our galaxy wave-free.
We can establish that statistically, there is a good chance there is life elsewhere; however, it is so far away that it would take hundreds of thousands of years for a communication signal to be received. We may not find beings anytime soon, but what about habitable worlds closer to home? Delgado has the answers.
“A neighboring star system may have a planet capable of hosting life. Scientists have looked at a few closer stars and found that out of the 20 closest stars, only six potentially habitable planets have been discovered. The closest star with a potentially habitable planet is Proxima Centauri, which is about 4 light-years away. It is unlikely that it is habitable, even though it is in a very good location for life to exist because its host star is very volatile and likely ‘blows’ away any atmosphere the planet may have,” she said.
To give perspective on how Proxima Centuri is, Delgado says that the distance between Earth and Pluto took the fastest spacecraft ever built, new Horizons, more than nine years to make the journey, traveling at a speed of 60,000 km/h. She said at that speed; it would only take 78,000 years for the ship to travel between Earth and Proxima Centuri.
Back to the video, is it real? Are aliens here to pay a visit?
“While I do believe that there is life out there, and one day we may meet, I do not have much faith in the videos that surfaced. If these videos were supposed to be significant proof of extraterrestrial visitors, they would have been released with additional commentary and study by scientists and the DoD, and not just the videos, with unsupported speculation,“ she said.
For those interested in learning more about the solar system, space, and maybe some extraterrestrial life, check out a previous article on Delgado and her ongoing mission to educate to spark interest in NASA’s newest missions. https://theenterprise.net/delgado-on-mission-to-inspire-a-generation/.
