WASHINGTON, DC, June 6 — University of British Columbia astronomer Jaymie Matthews says that “Our Milky Way has as many as 400 billion stars, with seven per cent of them being G-type. That means there are as many as six billion stars in our galaxy may have Earth-like planets.” In fact, data collected by NASA’s Kepler space telescope found that there are as many as “300 million potentially habitable planets in our galaxy.” And now, a Spanish researcher, Alberto Caballero, warns that among them are four, and possibly more, planets with “malicious extraterrestrial civilizations.”
Caballero paper has not yet been peer reviewed and though he is not an astrophysicist, he’s given credit for a level of expertise in the field of extraterrestrial intelligence based on a paper published by the University of Cambridge’s peer reviewed International Journal of Astrobiology.
The notion that there may exist spacemen with evil intentions just waiting for the right time to invade Mother Earth is whimsical, at best, but it gives us food for thought. In fact, in an interview with the Canadian-American magazine, Vice, reporter Jason Koebler kicked off his article by quoting the late English theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Stephen Hawking who warned: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”
His point: the practice of what is known as Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence [METI] in search of alien life might be somewhat dangerous in that it reveals our presence. It might be more prudent to remain an undetected presence among those millions and millions of habitable planets in the Milky Way.
Caballero told Koebler during the interview that he wrote “the paper [is] based only on life as we know it. We don’t know the mind of extraterrestrials. An extraterrestrial civilization may have a brain with a different chemical composition and they might not have our empathy or they might have more psychopathological behaviors. I found this way to do [the study], which has limitations, because we don’t know the mind of what aliens would be like…I think unfortunately it’s still quite a secret topic, no one seems to be willing to talk about it. There’s this fear of being afraid to send messages out there, but there’s very little research on whether it’s actually dangerous to do [so].”
In the end, the notion of extraterrestrials and spaceships that can reach speeds at least one-tenth the speed of light — 186,282 miles per second — is the stuff of science fiction. “The truth is that interstellar travel and exploration is technically possible. There’s no law of physics that outright forbids it. But that doesn’t necessarily make it easy, and it certainly doesn’t mean we’ll achieve it in our lifetimes, let alone [in] this century,” says astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter. In fact, he wrote in an article, “we’ve already achieved interstellar exploration status. We have several spacecraft on escape trajectories, meaning they’re leaving the solar system and they are never coming back.”
Some might say the ability to successfully launch interstellar space probes currently is a step in the right direction. “Except,” says Sutter, “the problem is that they’re going nowhere really fast. Each one of these intrepid interstellar explorers is traveling at tens of thousands of miles per hour, which sounds pretty fast. They’re not headed in the direction of any particular star, because their missions were designed to explore planets inside the solar system. But if any of these spacecraft were headed to our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, just barely four light-years away, they would reach it in about 80,000 years.”