Roswell vs. Physics
Apparently the public relations officer at the Roswell base just died. He left behind him a sworn affidavit regarding the very strange events at the Roswell AFB. From the Daily Mail:
Last week, the text was released and asserts that the weather balloon claim was a cover story, and that the real object had been recovered by the military and stored in a hangar. He described seeing not just the craft, but alien bodies.
And finally this:Haut then tells how Colonel Blanchard took him to 'Building 84' - one of the hangars at Roswell - and showed him the craft itself. He describes a metallic egg-shaped object around 12-15ft in length and around 6ft wide. He said he saw no windows, wings, tail, landing gear or any other feature.
He saw two bodies on the floor, partially covered by a tarpaulin. They are described in his statement as about 4ft tall, with disproportionately large heads. Towards the end of the affidavit, Haut concludes: "I am convinced that what I personally observed was some kind of craft and its crew from outer space."
Another military witness who claimed to know that the Roswell incident involved the crash of an alien spacecraft is Colonel Philip J. Corso, a former Pentagon official who claimed his job was to pass technology from the craft recovered at Roswell to American companies.
He claims that discoveries such as Kevlar body armour, stealth technology, night vision goggles, lasers and the integrated circuit chip all have their roots in alien technology from the Roswell crash.
Hmmm. Let's forget about Kevlar and lasers for a moment and let's try to concentrate on basic physics. And this is where the following post by Charles Stross comes in handy - read the whole post, it kind of puts the whole 'boldly go where no one has gone before' routine into stark perspective...
Now, let's say we want to deliver our canned monkey to Proxima Centauri within its own lifetime. We're sending them on a one-way trip, so a 42 year flight time isn't unreasonable. (Their job is to supervise the machinery as it unpacks itself and begins to brew up a bunch of new colonists using an artificial uterus. Okay?) This means they need to achieve a mean cruise speed of 10% of the speed of light. They then need to decelerate at the other end. At 10% of c relativistic effects are minor — there's going to be time dilation, but it'll be on the order of hours or days over the duration of the 42-year voyage. So we need to accelerate our astronaut to 30,000,000 metres per second, and decelerate them at the other end. Cheating and using Newton's laws of motion, the kinetic energy acquired by acceleration is 9 x 101718 Joules in round numbers for the entire trip. NB: This assumes that the propulsion system in use is 100% efficient at converting energy into momentum, that there are no losses from friction with the interstellar medium, and that the propulsion source is external — that is, there's no need to take reaction mass along en route. So this is a lower bound on the energy cost of transporting our Mercury-capsule sized expedition to Proxima Centauri in less than a lifetime. Joules, so we can call it 2 x 10
To put this figure in perspective, the total conversion of one kilogram of mass into energy yields 9 x 1016 Joules. (Which one of my sources informs me, is about equivalent to 21.6 megatons in thermonuclear explosive yield). So we require the equivalent energy output to 400 megatons of nuclear armageddon in order to move a capsule of about the gross weight of a fully loaded Volvo V70 automobile to Proxima Centauri in less than a human lifetime. That's the same as the yield of the entire US Minuteman III ICBM force.
I guess that is why I seriously doubt there are aliens out there who can actually visit us. Remember the Fermi paradox - if they exist, where are they? - well, here's a possible answer, they do exist and very much like us, they are stuck on their own little piece of rock.
