You know...aliens...intelligent beings visting Earth from somewhere out among the stars. What should the Christian make of the current hoopla about UAPs (formerly known as UFOs)?
Trappist-1 is a Milky Way star of the dwarf class. It was first discovered in A.D. 1999 and is named for a brand of beer! Trappist monks brew that brand, and the group of astronomers who later studied the star wanted to honor their favorite libation.
Trappist-1 has satellites. They are called exoplanets and evidently are close to the Earth in size. There is speculation that they might already be hosting life and possibly be habitable by humans, should we ever be able to conquer the unimaginably great distance from Earth to a Trappist-1 exoplanet. What would that conquest take, time-wise?
Light travels at about 186,000 miles per second. It would take 40 years for light to travel from Earth to the Trappist-1 system. A launching rocket travels less than 5 miles per second. So it would take the rocket 1,490,256 years to get there. Even if we imagine the speed of our imaginary futuristic interstellar starship to be 50 miles per second instead of 5, it would arrive at the Trappist-1 system over 149.000 years after take off from Earth.
That impossible travel time of course brings on a host of related problems. The spaceship would have to be a self-sustaining world unto itself, an entire civilization which would have to endure over 33 times longer than all of human history since the Great Flood!
The point is, little green men or intelligent lobsters from a Trappist-1 exoplanet or from someplace even further from Earth would face the same inconceivably great distance and insurmountable problems. "Warp speed," "folding space" and long term human hibernation as in Star Trek, Dune, and elsewhere in sci-fi is just that, pure fiction.
Nevertheless, the media is once again abuzz with the question, "do non-human intelligent beings exist?" This writer confidently answers YES. But that answer might not mean what you might thnk it means! Tune in next week for part two…