Drury Professor Talks Aliens

Transcript

and I was just reading about this I'm not I'm not an expert in UFOs and and I don't really want to be considered one it's sort of an academic suicide serve thing you know you say oh I believe in UFOs and then all of a sudden you're you know it's it's a it's a very questionable field and most of this the apparent UFO sightings can be you know deke involved to find that they were just ordinary things but there is a small handful of them that that can't be explained well but you know UFOs are it's it's a interesting field it's kind of like Bigfoot you know in a way you know there's a lot of kind of quackery you know out there and to filter through all that is that is is a challenge to find what what what's really there you know what what real evidence we have I mean it's possible we could be being observed by by beings from other worlds that seems quite plausible to me but you know the arguments against that or that it's just the distance between stars is insanely huge it's just depressing leaf are two stars and and what's the likelihood that they're really visiting us and then what comes into play is this Occam's razor which says that the most likely explanation is is the simplest one and the simplest explanation is no it's not you know beings from insanely distant places there's probably a simple simpler explanation what I find intriguing is that is that numerous incredible pilots have seen these things they've identified them on radar they they have these visual encounters and they say it's a it's a vehicle so and it's something that moves way faster than and you know then any technology that's even close to what people have right now so you know Occam's razor that says the simplest explanation you might say is not aliens but if there is incredibly amazing technology and these things like go from zero to Mach whatever in in no time they turn on on a dime sorts of accelerations that would kill humans instantly if that kind of technology is really being observed then to me Occam's razor seems to indicate you know well maybe it's not that unlikely that it's because you know if the technology exists and and they're really observing these things and they're way beyond what people have currently on the earth then you have to two questions and one of them is well is there some sort of mysterious organization that has insanely advanced technology that we don't know about that seems rather unlikely or is it the very unlikely you know possibility that we're being visited by aliens so I think if the technology really exists then Occam's razor almost makes you go well maybe we are being visited how would they find us well I mean if there are aliens that are able to that have mastered you know interstellar flight they would they would have to as we understand with physics as we understand that they would have to travel for you know with an incredible amount of energy something beyond that what we're what we're able to do to reach to approach the speed of light and then they would be their time would be distorted and they would be you know it would be conceivable that we could be visited by beings from all the way across the galaxy but they're there time according to Einstein would be would be distorted relative to ours but how do they get to the incredible speeds necessary for time distortion and you know approaching the speed of light that's completely you know completely unknown at this point some years ago I was like five or six or seven years ago or something the astronomy club invited me to come talk to them because there was a there was a pilot of a Learjet for AG headquarters that was that was flying from the west coast toward the east and and he described his just you know what happened he like he was cleared that he had to go up to 40,000 feet and then he and he saw this thing this very bright thing in the distance and it was it was it was moving kind of drifting and and then some other pilots saw it also and they were like Northwest Airlines proud pilots I think so he and his co-pilot and these other pilots saw it they saw it moving and it was it was definitely something something moving through space relative to them and then it suddenly just shot off to the horizon faster than any human made thing could conceivably travel and and I and so that was fascinating what my PhD advisor at Caltech said when I told him about that he goes well that's exactly the sort of thing that optical effects do I mean things that seem to move really fast like the glare in your car window you know sometimes it'll just depending on the on the orientation relative to the source of light some some optical phenomenon that looks like an object but actually is just is just a trick played by the light if they're visiting us I don't think they're going to land on the White House lawn you know we're like a zoo you know like show up but you know be careful see that here's here's where mainstream science mostly agrees we now know that that there are planets around virtually every star and there are earth-like planets orbiting orbiting these stars and when I was in college we used we didn't even know if there were planets around stars commonly we suspected it probably but but nobody knew and it was there very hard to detect but in recent years in the last two decades or so we've begun to detect planets orbiting other stars and now we know that most plant most stars have planets and that there are a lot of earth-like planets so that seems to bring up you know in increase one of the factors that we didn't know about before which is you know how many how many intelligent civilizations would there be in a galaxy and there there's a an equation called the Drake Equation that you multiply all these factors together and then it predicts how many intelligent civilizations there are in the galaxy one of the factors is how many stars have planets that are earth-like and now we know they're very common in fact the very closest star Proxima Centauri the very closest star has an earth-like planet which is really cool so so yeah most people most scientists at at least someone's I know would say chances are are enormous that there are that there's life on other on other worlds because there's countless countless worlds just immense number of worlds why would our world be the only one that has anything on it but it might be because we don't understand how life began and you know I'm both a person of faith and of science and I and I don't think that we understand we don't understand how how it all really began that's a you know natural processes bringing about life I think that that's also can be the hand of God I don't see those as conflicting but you know there's so much that could be said if there's all these stars and all these planets out there and we're the only one with with life on it seems like an awful waste of space