Q&A
December AD
2010
Our Lady of the Rosary
Parish Bulletin
ON THIS PAGE:
Extraterrestrials?
Review: Denson, John V., A Century of War: Lincoln, Wilson & Roosevelt,
[ Q&A ARCHIVES ]
Extraterrestrials?
Question: According to the newspaper, the Vatican issued a pronouncement on baptizing extra-terrestrials (ETs). Do they know something, or is this just more foolishness? Does this relate to recent sightings in New York, Texas, and California?
Answer: The first such claim of which we know was made by the late Msgr. Coraldo Balducci, a theologian of the Curia and exorcist for the Archdiocese of Rome, in the mid-1990s. Balducci seemed to think of extra-terrestrials as beings somewhere between men and angels, more spiritual than material, and capable of guiding mankind.[1] He seems to think that there is adequate eye-witness testimony to support belief in human-alien contact.
More recently (May 2008), Rev. José Gabriel Funes, S.J., the director of the Vatican Observatory, holding a Ph.D. In astronomy, gave an interview to L'Osservatore Romano, addressing the question in more scientific terms.[2] Funes held that to deny the possibility of life on other planets would be to deny God's all-powerful abilities. He suggested the possibility—a la C.S. Lewis' Perelandra—that an extra-terrestrial Adam and Eve might not have sinned and that they and their descendents might not be in need of redemption. Further, he suggested that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ on Earth would be redemptive for all of God's intelligent creatures, and that they could be baptized and receive the Sacraments.
The October 2001 issue of The Angelus (Society of Saint Pius X) suggests that UFOs are demonic rather than extraterrestrial.[3] “...in the creation narrative, Sacred Scripture only speaks to us of two kinds of intellectual natures: the angelic and the human. There are no others.” Perhaps, but one has to wonder what sort of reaction the Jews of Moses' time would have had to a few verses in Genesis discussing people who lived near those points of light in the night sky! And, not everything is written the Bible. Yet, when we come to the technical issues of star travel, we will see that demons may be the most practical explanation of UFO sightings.
Perhaps more interesting is the secular interest in extra-terrestrials. The British Royal Society recently (October 4-5, 2010) held a conference “Towards a scientific and societal agenda on extra-terrestrial life”.[4] Both the UK Telegraph and Daily claimed that the UN has appointed a sort of “Ambassador for Aliens visiting the Earth.”[5] The UN denies that Dr. Mazlan Othman, the current head of the UN's Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), or anyone else, has been appointed ambassador. Some interpret Article IX of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty to requiring the signatories to protect the Earth from contamination by extra-terrestrial materials, to include contamination by extra-terrestrial beings, and would like a more enlightened world policy.[6]
The Vatican’s permanent representative to the UN, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, who made a speech on “Climate Change” to the UN on February 11, 2008 is said to have attended a secret meeting on the 13th and 14th to discuss UFOs.[7] It is further alleged that in November 2009 the Vatican conference on astrobiology spent considerable time discussing the Church's position on “the detection and implications of extraterrestrial life.” [8]
UNOOSA? Indeed! And an Outer Space Treaty to boot. Who would have figured?
For all of the hype, UFOs and extra-terrestrials seem to be the stuff of wishful thinking—some hoping that the do exist, and others hoping that they do not.
The SETI Institute has been around for half a century, aiming radio-telescopes into the sky, in hopes of receiving signals from ETs. The Institute banters about something called the “Drake equation,” which is said to predict “the number of civilizations in The Milky Way Galaxy whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable.”[9] While logical in principle, the equation requires the knowledge of seven variables, all of which can be known only by lucky guessing!
N = R* • fp • ne • fl • fi • fc • L
Where,
N = The number of civilizations in The Milky Way Galaxy whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable.
R* =The rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of intelligent life.
fp = The fraction of those stars with planetary systems.
ne = The number of planets, per solar system, with an environment suitable for life.
fl = The fraction of suitable planets on which life actually appears.
fi = The fraction of life bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges.
fc = The fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.
L = The length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.
SETI's Drake Equation
But at least the SETI people do no harm by their listening. Another class of wishful thinkers wants to send messages to the extra-terrestrials. In 1977, Voyager I and II carried
gold plated copper phonograph records.... The record begins with 118 pictures. These show the Earth's position in the galaxy; a key to the mathematical notation used in other pictures; the sun; other planets in the solar system.... The pictures are followed by greetings from Jimmy Carter, who was then president of the United States, and Kurt Waldheim, then Secretary General of the United Nations. Brief messages in 54 languages, ranging from ancient Sumerian to English, are included, as is a “song” of the humpback whales.[10]
Apparently Jimmy Carter and Kurt Waldheim didn't watch enough Star-trek—they seem to be expecting to find peaceful cultured philosophical types like Mr. Spok of Vulcan, while ignoring the possibility of a war-like Klingon Empire.
The renowned Professor Stephen Hawking, ever the realist, speaking of the aliens we might meet said:
We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.[11]
Why would Hawking expect the aliens that visit us to be so technologically superior and filled with contempt for humans? Probably because we humans have no idea how to make interstellar travel practical. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is roughly 4.22 light-years from the Earth—which is to say that if we could travel at the speed of light it would take 8.44 years to get there and back. But our science tells us that travel at the speed of light is impossible, for when one gets close to light speed, one's mass increases and requires even more energy to move faster—if one achieved light speed his mass would be infinite.
But even if there were no relativistic limit on one's velocity, it must be remembered that light travels at about 700 Million miles per hour—mankind has yet to produce vehicles that travel at any tiny percentage of that. Even at light speed the trip to Proxima Centauri would take nearly a decade off a man's life—at more realistic speeds it might be centuries. Remember that Proxima is the nearest star—all the rest are farther away.
And man himself is fragile. He is uncomfortable and may die if he is accelerated much above the acceleration due to gravity on earth (g=21.94 mph/sec). Jet pilots and astronauts experience several times the force of gravity, but rarely for more than seconds at a time, often while wearing pressure suits that squeeze them tight enough to keep the blood from leaving their brains. At one‑g acceleration, it would take nearly a year to get up to light speed (again, ignoring relativity), and nearly another year to decelerate when approaching one's destination!
It would require enormous amounts of fuel to keep a space vehicle constantly accelerating or decelerating even at one-g—the space vehicles currently in use burn fuel for a few minutes to achieve their desired velocity, and then turn their engines off until they need to make a course change or to decelerate. (In space, an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless something is done to counter its motion.)
Extraterrestrials capable of solving all of these problems would have to have science greatly superior to ours, and still might have to invest large sums in energy and time. Like us, they would have to consider the possibility that they might find nothing at the end of their journey. Given our experiences with the cultures of Earth, it is reasonable to expect that space-faring would be conducted only with an eye toward gaining something in exchange for all this effort. Conquest and plunder of our inferior race seem likely should any one go through all the trouble of finding us—even with the help of Jimmy Carter's star map.
So, we are back to the question: Do the Vatican and the UN know something that we do not? If Stephen Hawking is right, and if the UFO sightings of past decades were real, one would expect that we would have already experienced some hostility. And, while science is always a “work in progress,” we have some pretty good experimental evidence to suggest that travel at light speed is impossible—and certainly impractical. Is there any reason to believe that the world rulers would like to make us think that the threat of interplanetary invasion is real, even if it is not?
Modernist Catholics do seem to be in favor of a powerful world government, even at the risk of government imposed immorality. A world government “with teeth” to redistribute wealth, to reduce “climate change,” to socialize medicine … an invasion from space would make undocumented immigration of terrestrials pale into insignificance. The world government would benefit from fearful people demanding protection from aliens. It would be empowered to issue a global currency based on nothing of value, in order to finance the huge armies and high technology necessary to fight off the onslaught from the stars—the science fiction fantasy of bankers, bureaucrats, and arms merchants thus being fulfilled.
“Global warming” has been thoroughly de-bunked, hundreds of millions have seen the starvation caused by socialism, everyone holding debt-backed currency has seen the erosion of its value by central bank inflation, even the hedonistic cultures now realize that there has not been a “population explosion,” and many have felt the sting of socialist medical rationing. What could benefit the global ruling elite more than a powerful and distinguishable enemy whom Big Brother can demand that everyone hate.
If the UFO's are real, one might also question whether or not the “watermelon” world ruling “greens” have made an alliance with them. We are talking about terrestrial humans who clamor for a vast “die back” of human beings on the Earth, in order to bring about a “sustainable” human colony. Perhaps the “die-back” can be processed into a “Soylent green” agreeable to our “visitors,” so that Earth can get back to the job of living in the Stone Age. Be careful whenever you hear the word “sustainable,” a favorite word of the Marxists and Modernists, and a betrayal of human life trying to take its place on God's green Earth.
Live long and prosper!
Denson, John V., A Century of War: Lincoln, Wilson & Roosevelt, Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008.
215 pages , paperbound. $13.00 Available free on‑line at https://mises.org/books/century.pdf“The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant;
it's just that they know so much that isn't so.”
~ Ronald ReaganVirtually everyone who has graduated from an American public school, or from many of the private schools, can “explain” how the United States became involved in its various “great wars”—the so-called Civil War, World War I and World War II—the South fired on Fort Sumpter, the Germans sunk the Lusitania, and the Japanese launched a sneak attack against Pearl Harbor. “The problem ain’t what you know, but what you do know that ain’t so!” All of the things described above actually did take place, but none of them precisely in the way that American school children learned about them, and none of them in such a way as to cause the waging of a just war. Considering the enormous cost—in blood, in wealth, and in freedom—of these three wars, it is tragic that taxpaying, voting citizens have no basis for recognizing the ploys that brought us to war the next time those ploys are exercised.
No, Virginia, the war against the South was not fought to free the slaves, nor to preserve the Union as it was given to us by the Founding Fathers, nor did the South take the first military action.
No, Virginia, the Germans were not attacking cruise boats in hopes of killing Americans. No, Wilson did not keep us out of war, as his campaign boasted. Nor did his Fourteen Points bring about a just and honorable peace.
No, Virginia, the United States were not peacefully minding their own business in the Atlantic and Pacific until an unprovoked attack forced them into war. No, the Germans were not the first to begin the terror bombings of civilian populations.
Considering the worldwide suppression of freedom, and the terrible state of the domestic and world economies, and the role of the government-military-industrial-banking complex in making things the way they are, Christians have a moral obligation to understand how that complex works by learning how it worked in the past. A Century of War should be on everyone’s reading list.
[5] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8025832/UN-to-appoint-space-ambassador-to-greet-alien-visitors.html
