Anyone tempted to ascribe the nighttime sightings of aircraft to alien intelligence ought to be dissuaded by the vast scale of the universe.
Are aliens from other parts of the galaxy or universe visiting New Jersey? Spend an hour studying the cosmic distance scale and you’ll conclude that lights in New Jersey skies are almost certainly not otherworldly. Credit: University of Oxford
The recent furor over drones, planes, helicopters, aliens, or whatever centered on aerial sightings in New Jersey is causing a flap. Given the huge number of sightings and the tenor of alarm from many, the Federal Aviation Administration has issued 22 temporary flight restrictions along the approach paths to Newark International Airport and a few other locations such as the sites of important utilities.
The buzz over this is high drama for many ordinary folks, fodder for nearly constant local news reporting, and makes those who are adept astronomers simply shake their heads. One unspoken — or even spoken — solution to this puzzle is that aliens are visiting New Jersey from other star systems. Those folks who make a quick jump to that kind of thinking have never been subjected to a detailed analysis of what astronomers call the cosmic distance scale. The distances to even the nearest stars are so vast and the energy required to move beings with mass so great that even if every star system nearest to us were filled with spacecraft-equipped aliens, the odds of them traveling between stars are practically nil.
So this will be a subject of mystery and entertainment for many, but virtually certainly results from flying craft, however small or large, that originated from humans beings right here on Earth.
The cosmic distance scale
To illustrate this point, let me elaborate a bit on the cosmic distance scale.
The universe, if anything, is REALLY LARGE. If we imagine the Earth-Sun distance, 1 astronomical unit, as 1 centimeter, then imagine how much of that we have traveled. The most remote human journey we’ve had thus far is to the Moon, an infinitesimally small fraction of that 1 cm. Now imagine that on that scale, Pluto would be on average 40 cm away, and the inner edge of the Oort Cloud, the physical limits of our own solar system, 10 football fields away. The nearest star? Four times farther away yet.
We know that the building blocks of life are common throughout the cosmos. That much is clear from spectroscopy, from compounds we’ve found in our solar system, and from studying the galaxy. But even the closest stars are incredibly far away. Photons can travel incredibly long distances because they’re massless. But anything with mass, and that includes beings and spacecraft, requires enormous amounts of energy to move long distances. Physicists balk at the idea of traveling around to other star systems because it would require vast amounts of energy, almost beyond the limits of possibility.
So remember that the cosmic distance scale, if anything, is incredibly huge. Drones or no drones, if you’re waiting for aliens to land and have dinner with you, you may be waiting for a very long time.
