UNI Blog - From the Washington Bureau

Stephen Hawking has a new TV show in the U.S. On it he speculated about aliens visiting us in their flying saucers. But what he ignored was the impossibility of interstellar travel. Distance is a huge problem. The nearest star to our star, the sun, is 25 trillion miles away. Even if that star were orbited by a planet,which it isn’t, it would take NASA’s fastest spacecraft 112,000 years to get there. That’s a bit long, even if we took turns driving and resting.

Radiation exposure for a fraction of that time would be deadly. Traveling at speeds approaching the velocity of light even if it was possible wouldn’t help. The faster an object travels through space, the greater the damage from collisions with tiny particles. Things like protons, neutrons, electrons, even photons, let along much larger space debris. Meteorites the size of dust particles have punched holes as big as a silver dollar in the Hubble Space Telescope’s solar panels. If the relatively slow-moving telescope had been traveling a thousand times faster, the damage would have been a million times worse. That’s because the damage increases by the square of the speed. No, there isn’t any way of using some electronic shield like the Starship Enterprise on TV or in the movies.

The only important visitor to our world from another place is Jesus Christ, the Son of God who came to earth on a mission to provide a way for sinful humans to be forgiven by the Creator of the universe. And that is far more awesome and important than visitors from another planet.

This is Carl Ramsey and that’s Another View of the News.

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