 |
|
Dr Michio Kaku on alien contact
The following news article from an Indian news source borrows unabashedly from the content of the Peter Jennings television special which aired recently. For those who missed the special, this is worth a read.
Kerala Next - India
02-26-05
If Aliens Can Visit, How Did They Get Here?
Space Travel Defies Human Lifespans, But There May Be Loopholes
There have been countless accounts of alien visitations around
the world, but one of the things that prompts skepticism is how
they would get here in the first place.
If aliens are from another world, they must have some
extraordinary means of travel - nothing like what is available
anywhere on Earth. It is hard to underestimate the difficulty of
going from star to star.
"The distances are so vast, the energy requirements are so
extreme, it would be very, very difficult to travel between the
stars," said James McGaha, a retired Air Force pilot.
A law of science, determined by Albert Einstein, says nothing can
travel faster than the speed of light - 186,000 miles per second.
The fastest object made by man, the Voyager spacecraft is
travelling along at 11 miles per second. At that rate, the
scientific probe Voyager, launched in 1977, would take 73,000
years to reach the nearest star.
As a result, some scientists think that sort of space travel is a
waste of time.
"Scientifically, we have a rule: you want to be alive at the end
of your experiment, not dead," said Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson,
director of the Rose Center's Hayden Planetarium at the American
Museum of Natural History in New York.
Einstein's Wormhole Loophole
If humans can't travel to the stars, many scientists say
extraterrestrial life can't come here either.
However, Michio Kaku, one of the leading theoretical physicists
in the world, says many scientists are too quick to dismiss the
idea of other civilizations visiting Earth.
Einstein may have said nothing can go faster than the speed of
light, but he also left a loophole, said Kaku, a professor at the
City University of New York. In Einstein's theory, space and time
is a fabric.
Kaku explained: "In school we learned that a straight line is the
shortest distance between two points. But actually that's not
true. You see, if you fold the sheet of paper and punch a hole
through it, you begin to realize that a wormhole is the shortest
distance between two points."
A civilization that could harness the power of stars might be
able to use that shortcut through space and time, and perhaps
bridge the vast distances of space to reach Earth, he said.
"The fundamental mistake people make when thinking about
extraterrestrial intelligence is to assume that they're just like
us except a few hundred years more advanced. I say open your
mind, open your consciousness to the possibility that they are a
million years ahead," he said.
Kaku believes that only this type of civilization - millions of
years more advanced that us and capable of using wormholes as
shortcuts - could reach Earth and might be one explanation for
UFOs.
"When you look at this handful of [UFO] cases that cannot be
easily dismissed, this is worthy of scientific investigation," he
said. "Maybe there's nothing there. However, on that off chance
that there is something there, that could literally change the
course of human history. So I say let this investigation begin."
|
|
|
|
