Is there life in outer space and does it matter

  The short answers to the questions above are yes and no. Yes there is extraterrestrial life and no, it means nothing to us. 

I typed research on extraterrestrial life into the google search engine and got 318,000 hits. That means there are an awfully lot of people working on something that is of no concern to us. The only thing I can add is I guess it’s a job, so what the heck. Our tax dollars have to be used for something. 

Having said that I guess I should explain why it’s of no concern to us. First of all anyone with even a little common sense would know that of course there’s life out there in the cosmos. Since the universe is infinite that means life is out there. But here’s the big thing. It’s such a vast universe there is no way we could ever make contact with another civilization. That would be an even longer shot than hitting a multi-state lottery. In fact you would probably hit several multi-state lotteries before we ever make contact with any form of extraterrestrial life. 

Now that we have that out of the way I will speculate on what kind of extraterrestrial life might be able to travel the vast distances between the stars. First of all our physical body would never be able to make an intergalactic journey. We would die before we got there but the radiation and hardship of space travel would probably kill us off first. So the question becomes, if we can’t do it, even with a protective spaceship of some kind, what sort of being could? 

I believe that the possible answer to that question lies within the mysticism we’ve believed in all of these centuries. Communication with God and Angels and other mystical creatures could indeed be nothing more than communication with extraterrestrial beings that traveled vast distances and briefly visited our planet. Even today, these beings would seem to be supernatural entities. 

I can’t even begin to guess as to the technology that would have to be involved. But there’s one thing for sure, they wouldn’t have a physical body as we do because it wouldn’t stand the hardship of space travel. They could be Spiritual Beings, or at least that’s what we would think of them as. 

I would of course think they pick and choose whom they want to make contact with. Not everyone is suitable for contact. So it would seem they pick just a few and tell them how we can make a better life for ourselves here. But since they are much more advanced than we are the information they attempt to give us falls on deaf ears.

Of course that’s only my imagination running a little wild and I’ll be the first to admit there is no scientific way of validating my statement. 

In the end here’s what it amounts to. To believe that beings similar in appearance to us are going to travel vast galactic distances and make contact with us for whatever purpose is not reasonable. 

For a start I can’t imagine what the purpose would be. Here on earth we barely communicate with each other. Even those of us who live in relative peace with each other speak different languages and communication is often difficult at best. Many of us are actively engaged in war and spend our time killing each other. We don’t communicate with the other species on this planet at all. In fact we often spend a lot of time and energy exterminating them. 

In light of this there is no reason at all to think that contact with an extraterrestrial race would be of any benefit what so ever. In fact they might well exterminate us for no reason at all. 

I grew up watching Star Trek and enjoyed the shows very much. But in the end that’s all it was, science fiction. The technology to travel to the stars does not exist. If in fact it ever does exist, which is unlikely, it’s at least centuries if not thousands of years away. It’s also absurd to think they would look anything like us at all, as Mr. Spock, or even the Klingons did. In the end that’s what it was, very enjoyable science fiction. I saw every Star Trek episode and all of the Star Trek movies and enjoyed them very much. But they were only fiction, fairy tales for adults.

In the end what we are left with is this. Despite past reported sightings of UFO’s and alien abductions and the front page reports of the National Enquirer, if there were any truth or validity to these reports at all I wouldn’t be writing this chapter and people wouldn’t be debating this issue. They would land on the White House lawn about twelve p.m. and everyone would know about it. 

RR-ESM