Essay Sample About Aliens

There are several different meanings to the word “alien.” An alien could be a resident born or belonging to a different country, a foreigner, a person who has been excluded from something, or a creature from outer space (extraterrestrial). For this argument, a creature from outer space would be the appropriate definition. Many believe extraterrestrials do exist. Many even claim to have seen aircrafts belonging to these extraterrestrials. There have been thousands of “sightings” of unidentified flying objects in which many believe do not look like or belong to anything Earthly. A lot of these sightings have not and can not be explained. Major governments around the globe will not come out and tell the public what they know or if they know anything about these UFO sightings. All of these things have heated up the long debate on whether or not aliens exist, but the debate need not go on any longer because aliens do not exist for three main reasons; interplanetary travel faster than the speed of light is just simply not possible, the closest planets that may possibly contain life are many light years away, and if aliens were really here on Earth, we would have seen them in person by now.

A habitable planet is one capable of supporting life. For a planet to be considered habitable, life on it would have to be carbon-based and would have to use liquid water (Lissauer C11). Here on Earth, carbon cycles between the atmosphere, the oceans, living organisms, fossil fuels, and carbonate rocks. Scientists have been searching for Earth-like planets for a long time. According to an article called Are We Alone by Gregg Easterbrook, Frank Drake held a conference of physicists and astronomers in the year 1960. There he proposed his mathematical equation for predicting whether aliens exist. The result based on the equation was that there are about a million extraterrestrial civilizations scattered across our galaxy. Many of the scientists in attendance supported this result. “A critical variable in the equation is the number of other planets. In 1960 it was assumed that planets would be prevalent throughout the galaxy. But so far no planet outside this solar system has been detected.” James Trefil, a physicist at George Mason University, ran through Drake’s equation and estimated that there was only one intelligent civilization in the Milky Way -- us. There have been many cases in which scientists have believed they found habitable planets, but they have not been able to officially confirm whether life is possible on them. For example, astronomers have found a potentially habitable planet, 55 Cancri F, with two suns. This planet adds to the huge speculation list of potential habitable planets. They estimated that it is about 40 light years away. “While 40 light years is pretty close, it’s still over 150,000 years away (Roel 1).” That is about 1,875 times longer than an average life of eighty years old for a human being! Even if aliens did exist, they would have to have a pretty good reason for traveling that far. One would think that aliens would want to make contact with us by sending out radio waves before going to all of the trouble of traveling that far. “…any early communication technology like radio waves would be floating around and traveling to other stars for those same thousands and hundreds of years. They should have reached earth by now even before the aliens had (SIX Reasons Why UFOs Don’t Exist 1).”

Earth’s antennas have not picked up any radio waves from any extraterrestrial life. If aliens existed, then that would mean they got here before the radio waves did and would have had to travel faster than the speed of light to get here. As far as scientists know, that kind of technology is not possible. Faster-than-light travel is impossible because it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate to the speed of light. An experiment by a team of Hong Kong