On the topic of UFOs.

It seems like the world, or at least the part that follows this topic, has moved on to a new term “UAP”. This new term stands for “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon”. I personally hate this term since its that many syllables away from simply saying “Unidentified Flying Object”. This is something that has been instilled upon me by George Carlin, a famous American stand-up comedian. He coined the term "soft language" to describe euphemistic expressions that "conceal reality" and "take the life out of life."

The new term, at least to me, takes “life” and meaning away from the original term “Unidentified Flying Object”. The original term, is EXACTLY what it means. An unidentified flying object could simply mean anything from an out-of-the-world (read alien) craft or simply a piece of garbage that one can’t identify at first glance. That’s all it should ever mean. Nothing more, nothing less.

With that out of that the way, let me make it very clear that I approach the subject of UFOs from a sceptical perspective.

I do not believe they are aliens. They are not time travelers. These are not “advanced flying machines capable of defying gravity” kept secret from the whole world.

Why UFOs aren’t aliens:

There are two kinds of people. Those who believe UFOs are aliens from other worlds and those who understand relativity.

Yes, we are talking about Einstein’s relativity. And to understand why UFOs are not aliens, we must go there. If you recall, Einstein wrote two eponymous papers on the subject. The first one, published in 1905, was called on special relativity. It was titled “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”. His next paper on the was on Special Relativity and included gravity in to the relativity equation. This paper was title “The Field Equations of Gravitation”.

For the purposes of our discussion, we are ONLY going to focus on Special Relativity since that is more than enough to understand why UFOs are not alien.

Now I am no physicist. I have no formal training in physics. My knowledge of mathematics is very limited; as in I’ll struggle with anything more advanced than basic algebra. But that’s the beauty of Special Relativity. You really don’t have to go beyond basic mathematics to understand it.

Instead of delving into the original paper, we are only going to look at the implications of the paper. What the paper theorises, and proved later by experiments, is that we do not inhabit space and time separately. Space is defined by the three dimensions that you can physically move in. I can move in space either left or right, forward or backward, or up and down. Now, I can move through space, let’s say on my car at 30kmph. You could be stationery at your home, reading this very sentence, at 0kmph. Our speed through space is subjective and is different for different people.

Time, can be a bit more complex. There is enough literature out there on the internet that can make it seem that time is not real. But make no mistake, time is a very real part of the universe you inhabit. The biggest proof of that is in entropy. Now, that’s a topic for another day, but getting back to the point we all traverse through time at the same rate. Which is one second per second (or minute per minute... so on and so forth). This is a natural part of our experience so we don’t even have to think about it.

We have now understood how we traverse through space and time separately. What Einstein’s Special Relativity implies is that we don’t inhabit (or experience) space and time separately. We instead occupy something called “space-time”. And it doesn’t matter who you are, where you are, how fast you are travelling, whether you are in Earth orbit travelling at 26000kmph or at rest at home. We all move through space-time at C. Seems familiar right? Yes, C, here represents the speed of light through vacuum. This is the same C that Einstein meant when he derived the famous E = MC2 formula. But that’s a misunderstanding. In very simple words, C is the sum of your speed through space and the speed through time. To put it in very basic math,

(Speed through space) + (Speed through Time) = C

That’s it. That’s the basic gist of space-time. What special relativity implies is that C is the speed limit of the universe and that EVERYTHING in the universe is moving at C through space-time. Everything MUST move through space-time at C. C is a constant, and it CANNOT be changed whatsoever.

So, what happens if you start moving through space, say, on a Concorde? C must be maintained, but since you are moving at high speed through space, something in the equation must give. The universe will adjust your speed through time so that C is maintained at all times. This slowdown of time is imperceptibly small, but it exists. How the universe does this is beyond the scope of this article. But for now, keep in mind that this is real. We know this through experiments. Accurate atomic clocks on board an aircraft were used to measure time difference between clocks on the aircraft and one on the ground. GPS systems, as you know, depend on timing signals to calculate your location. Without accounting for special relativity, our GPS systems will start giving incorrect results within a few hours. The closer you get to the speed of light, the slower you time will pass for you.

And this is where the term Relativity will start to make sense. You see, time is relative. Time will flow differently for different people depending on how fast you are moving through space.

If you move through space at a significant percentage of the speed of light, you will experience time slower. However, nothing will change from your perspective. Time will still seem to go at 1 second per second. You will realize that time slowed only when you compare it with a clock that was stationery.

This is what Einstein meant to demonstrate by the famous twins experiment. One twin goes off on a journey through space at a tremendous speed, lets say a 99% the speed of light. Let’s assume that from teh The other remains on Earth. So what happens when the space faring twin returns back? Since C MUST be the same for both of them, time has passed slowly

There is a very famous quote by author Douglas Adams, the author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The quote goes like this.

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

This is a very true statement, and it's the only thing you need to believe that aliens are NOT coming.