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Nov. 9, 2010 One of the most useless ideas that still has some currency in the world is the idea that interstellar voyages are in the offing, that human beings will soon fly to distant stars and galaxies and meet representatives of highly sophisticated civilizations. But this simply is not going to happen--not in the foreseeable future and perhaps never. Light travels about 4269 times as fast as the fastest spaceships yet built, Helios I and II. So it follows that a voyage to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, at a distance of 4.365 light-years, would take either of these ships 18,634 years. A round trip would take 37,268 years. Even if spaceship technology allowed the multiplication of top speed by a factor of 10, it would take 3,727 years to make the round trip. Furthermore, the likelihood that this single star, or any of the seven stars within 10 light-years of earth, is the homeland of one of those supercivilizations is very slight, virtually nil. The probability that magnificent empires exist somewhere in the wider universe, in our own or in another galaxy, is doubtless nearly 100%. But what good can it ever do us if such an empire is ten thousand, ten million or ten billion light-years away? Closely associated with the notion that we're going to the stars is SETI, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. To listen to the cosmos hoping that messages will come in from distant galaxies now that there is a chance we could decrypt them has to be one of the most ridiculous notions that the brains of scientists and science-fiction writers, often the same people, have cooked up. There is no real chance that this kind of fishing will catch fish, so to speak. Similarly fruitless is the effort to transmit messages, hoping that distant planets' scientific communities will decode them and get back to us. Only if such messages could be received and answered at distances of less than, say, 20 light-years would it make sense. But the scientists good enough to decipher them may be a million light years away. The University of Glamorgan, in Glamorgan County, in Wales, in the UK, now offers an undergraduate degree in astrobiology or exobiology, which is the study of life on other planets. Doubtless one can draw some general rules and make general inferences about the nature of life on other planets, if there is life on other planets. I personally do not doubt that there is life elsewhere in the universe, on distant planets. But the problem is that we will probably never get there to test the theories. What if the closest planet that has life is a thousand light-years away? What do we do then? To expect life to exist in a solar system about one of those 7 stars within 10 light-years would be awfully naïve, and even so, the likelihood that we will get there is still very slim. How would you like to out looking for a job with no better credentials than a BS in astrobiology? One practically worthless idea that has come up in the last few years is an old sci-fi scam now wearing the apparel of legitimate scientific study. This is the idea of the multiverse. According to this notion, what we now call the universe, nearly 28 billion light years in diameter, is but one cell in a whole body of such universes called the multiverse. It is one BB in a boxcar full of BB's, so to speak. Even if this idea is true, we will never, never see these other universes, or have any experience of them whatsoever. The most we can ever expect is to read about some scientist who insists that there is “hard evidence” that the multiverse exists. But this “hard evidence” is not a rock, a weapon or a piece of equipment. It is some unexplained movement of a galaxy 13 billion light-years away, and we all know that that means a galaxy that was there 13 billion years ago, for whatever good that does us. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written five books: ELEMENTS OF GRAMMAR and A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction); A TALE OF UNG, THE ENNUNMENT and GVAGMA (fiction). I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Visit my website here. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com
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