Extraterestrian intelligency ?!?

Question

We all know talks about "Martians"landings...I didn't use to give them much thought, but suddenly I heard that an astronaut and scientist ( Collins if my memory serves me ) actually believes in extraterestrians...It came to me as a shock, that someone of his capacity should believe such nonsense...We've been told at Phisical classes the speed of light can not be exceeded, nothing material can travel at the speed of light ?!?

Answer 1

intellegency?

good question.  extraterestrians and the speed of light. they just dont mix well... bunch of nonsense indeed.

your way too smart to believe in all that.

Answer 2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_parad...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equat...

If you thoroughly meditate and contemplate the above, the best and most reasonable solution is that we are the ONLY show in the town.

Sorry kid... the craft are just New World Order vehicles and what you call "aliens" are just  extradimensional beings or what some call "The Fallen" (Mr. Mitchell knows this):

http://youtube.com/watch?v=mn6HSNHzYZU

Just do NOT accept this:

http://www.verichipcorp.com/

Answer 3

I think you are talking about Dr Edgar Mitchell. He said the that the US government is covering up extraterrestrial life.

This is most likely bologna. You are right. To man's knowledge nothing massive can exceed the speed of light, therefore alien life being hear is unlikely.

In all likelihood this former astronaut is just trying to build up some publicity for his books. I believe he came out with this information on a radio station. I would think there would be better ways to uncover a government conspiracy and just casually mentioning it on air doesn't seem that logical to me... which is why either he is some idiot trying to sell his books like I said or there is something here I am missing.

Answer 4

It isn't Martians, it isn't nonsense, it isn't "intelligency", but intelligence, and the most recent Astronaut to talk about it is Edgar Mitchell.  Gordon Cooper has also talked about it.  You can see their interviews on YouTube.

Do you really think that in a Universe and a galaxy about 9 billion years older than the Solar System and having 73 sextillion stars. many with planets;  that no intelligent life would have developed long before we did?  It naturally follows that their technology would be vastly more advanced than ours (maybe by millions of years).  Just because we can't go there yet, it doesn't follow they can't come here.  We have already discovered close to 300 extrasolar planets and we are looking at ways to travel to the closest Earthlike one.  Some of the possibilities being explored are wormholes, light sails, Bussard Ramjets, and generation ships.

"A study by NASA in 1998 identified 3 potential propulsion technologies that might enable exploration beyond our solar system. Antimatter, fusion and light sails.

Light sails currently are the most technologically viable of the three. Robert L. Forward, scientist and science fiction writer first proposed them in 1984. The basic idea is to use huge lasers to push an object out of the solar system. Although it sounds strange to think of light pushing an object, photons do exert a very small force over objects they hit. Since the force it small, the object needs to be both large and lightweight – like a sail. It also needs to be reflective as only photons bouncing off an object impart velocity – absorbed photons generate heat. To prevent the heat from building up, the backside of the sail needs to be an effective radiator.



Image from: http://www.itsf.org/brochure/solarsail.h... Because photons exert a tiny force even over a large area, the sail must be large indeed. However, since space is virtually empty, there is very little drag. This means any imparted velocity is incremental – a tiny push over a long period equals one big push.

The sail material could be some form of Mylar – both thin and strong. Steering the sail and aiming the huge lasers, however, are not trivial problems. By huge lasers, think 10 gigawatts shining on a 1 kilometer in diameter sail just to send a 16 gram payload to the closest star. The laser must be precisely aimed on target for as long as possible to get the desired velocities. According to its inventor, this light-powered ship could make it to the next star in only ten years.

This technology also scales up to allow for larger payloads but laser power levels quickly become gargantuan. To send a 1,000 ton ship with a crew to the same destination would require a 1,000 kilometer sail driven by a 10 million gigawatt laser - ten thousand times more than the power used on all the Earth today.

These sails have been tested: On August 9, 2004 Japanese ISAS successfully deployed two prototype solar sails in low Earth orbit. A clover type sail was deployed at 122 km altitude and a fan type sail was deployed at 169 km altitude. Both sails used 7.5 micrometer thick film. They used the force of the sun’s photons as propulsion rather than a large laser.

Faster speed could be achieved by fusion motors. Unfortunately, unlike light sails, fusion has yet to be sufficiently well understood to use as a propulsion device. Not for want of billions of dollars in funding to study it, however. Someday soon we may have the ability to control the same reaction that drives our sun. Fusion liberates tremendous energy from a given mass making it ideal for long voyages when fuel weight becomes the critical factor.

One interesting idea is the Bussard ramjet first proposed in 1960 by the American physicist RW Bussard. Rather than bring fuel, why not get it from space?



Image from: http://www.itsf.org/brochure/ramscoop.ht... Although commonly perceived to be empty, interstellar space has a minuscule amount of hydrogen gas - at a density of about one or two atoms per cubic centimeter. Bussard’s idea is to scoop this gas up using electromagnetic force fields that extend outwards in front of the spacecraft. This field would need to be absolutely gigantic – upwards of 50,000 kilometers in diameter. Shipboard superconducting coils would steer interstellar gas towards the ship compressing it until the density was enough to produce usable fuel. In order to start this collection process the ship would already need substantial velocity – on the order of 3 to 4% light speed.

A Bussard ramjet could conceivably achieve a constant 1g acceleration that would allow the pilot to make very long journeys. To an Earthbound observer, such a ship would take hundreds of thousands of years to reach the center of the galaxy. But because of relativistic time dilation, only 20 years would pass for the crew on the ship. Imagine – just 20 years to the center of the galaxy! Of course, technical problems remain such as force field drag, shielding the crew from interstellar radiation and the ability to control fusion reactions."

"No current technology can propel a craft fast enough to reach other stars in under 50 years' time. Current theories of physics indicate that it is impossible to travel faster than light within a flat region of space-time, and suggest that if it were possible, it might also be possible to build a time machine using similar methods.

However, special relativity offers the possibility of shortening the travel time: if a starship with sufficiently advanced engines could reach velocities approaching the speed of light, relativistic time dilation would make the voyage much shorter for the traveller. However, it would still take many years of elapsed time as viewed by the people remaining on Earth, and upon returning to Earth, the travellers would find that far more time had elapsed on Earth than had for them. (This effect is referred to as the twin paradox.)

General relativity offers the theoretical possibility that faster than light travel may be possible without violating fundamental laws of physics, for example, via wormholes, although it is still debated whether this is possible in the real world. Proposed mechanisms for faster than light travel within the theory of General Relativity require the existence of exotic matter.

Proposed methods of interstellar travel

If a spaceship could average 10 percent of light speed, this would be enough to reach Proxima Centauri in forty years. Several propulsion systems are able to achieve this, but none of them is reasonably affordable.

Nuclear pulse propulsion

Fusion rockets

Interstellar ramjets

Antimatter rockets

Beamed propulsion

Faster than Light Travel

Interstellar travel via transmission

Warped spacetime

Wormholes"

Answer 5

As far as we know the speed of light cannot be exceeded.