Life in space
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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.