Do aliens from other parts of the galaxy or universe visit New Jersey? Spend an hour studying the cosmic distance scale and you’ll conclude that the lights in the skies over New Jersey are almost certainly not otherworldly. Credit: University of Oxford
The recent furor over drones, planes, helicopters, aliens, or anything centered around aerial sightings in New Jersey is causing a shift. Given the huge number of sightings and the alarm among many, the Federal Aviation Administration issued 22 temporary flight restrictions along the approach paths to Newark International Airport and some other locations such as major utility sites.
The buzz about this is very dramatic for many ordinary people, fodder for near-constant local news, and makes those who are skilled astronomers simply shake their heads. An unspoken – or even spoken – solution to this puzzle is that aliens are visiting New Jersey from other star systems. Those who quickly jump to this type of thinking have never been subjected to a detailed analysis of what astronomers call the cosmic distance scale. The distances to even the nearest stars are so vast and the energy required to move beings of such great mass that even if every star system closest to us were filled with aliens equipped with spacecraft, the odds of them traveling between stars are practically null.
So this will be a topic of mystery and entertainment to many, but it is virtually certainly the result of flying craft, however small or large, originating from humans right here on Earth.
The cosmic distance scale
To illustrate this point, let me elaborate a little on the cosmic distance scale.
The universe, if nothing else, is REALLY BIG. If we imagine the Earth-Sun distance, 1 astronomical unit, as 1 centimeter, then imagine how much of that distance we have traveled. The furthest human journey we have made so far was to the Moon, an infinitesimal fraction of 1 cm. Now imagine that on that scale, Pluto is on average 40cm away, and the inner edge of the Oort Cloud, the physical limits of our solar system, 10 football fields away. The closest star? Four times further.
We know that the building blocks of life are common throughout the cosmos. This is clear from spectroscopy, from the compounds we have found in our solar system and from studying the galaxy. But even the closest stars are incredibly far away. Photons can travel incredibly long distances because they are massless. But anything with mass, including humans and spacecraft, requires enormous amounts of energy to move long distances. Physicists are against the idea of traveling to other star systems because it would require large amounts of energy, almost beyond the limits of possibility.
So remember that the scale of cosmic distances, if anything, is incredibly huge. Drones or no drones, if you’re waiting for aliens to land and dine with you, you might be waiting a long time.
