Those Crazy Cosmologists

First Paul Davies, and now Stephen Hawking.

Cosmologists have stated explicitly that extraterrestrial life exists, something that astronomers had speculated about years ago. It's a statistical probability; given that there are billions upon billions of stars out there, it's likely that some have spawned and nurtured life on planets in orbit around them. And at least a small percentage of those planets have advanced life. Hopefully, somewhat more advanced than us.

That's essentially what Hawking asserted. He suggested that aliens likely exist, but that contact with them would be detrimental to our existence. That's because contact between a voyaging race and indigenous entities has always favoured the visitors, at least historically.

What this implies, however, is that Hawking believes interstellar travel is possible, despite apparent limitations of distance and time. Skeptics sometimes argue that aliens could not visit Earth because space travel is prohibitively expensive in terms of time and energy. Therefore, UFOs cannot be spacecraft.

But Hawking, and actually many other scientists, believe that it is possible and practical to travel between the stars. It's an interesting paradox, however, that while they believe aliens exist and have likely developed space travel, few accept the possibility that some UFOs are alien spacecraft.

Davies also acknowledges that we might not recognize alien visitors or their technology because they would be so, well, alien. Yet if that was true, why is the possibility that some odd lights or other objects seen by some Earth observers might be alien visitors seem so ridiculous?

Of course, there is no incontrovertible proof that any UFO sightings were observations of alien spacecraft. But if scientists state that, ipso facto, UFOs are not worth bothering with, then studies of the phenomenon are left in the hands of laypeople.