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i doubt 'religious nutbars' would stop believing in their recycled mythology even if aliens came to visit- they'd simply spin it and adapt, as they always have.

spend any amount of time studying astronomy, and you quickly get one sinking feeling: distance, and the impossible distances between things in space. it's also one of many reasons why alien visitation is make-believe.

imagine being shipwrecked on an island, and the nearest island you see in a telescope is billions of trillions of miles away. to get there you need a boat that travels the speed of light, and it will take hundreds of millions of years to get there, plus there's constant debris in the travel path which would destroy the boat at the speed being travelled, and then once you got to the distant island it's either moved or no longer exists.

it sounds a bit depressing at first but can also be empowering to grow more aware of the grandness of it all.


Einstein's theories (never mind that they have checked out in reality) are incredible and can explain how space travel is actually very possible: space is curved; the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line; the universe is finite but unbounded; parallel lines eventually meet; light rays are curved; time is relative and cannot be measured in exactly the same way everywhere; measurements of length vary with speed; the universe is cylindrical instead of spherical in shape; a body in motion will contract in size but increase in mass; and a fourth dimension - time - is added to the familiar three of height, length, and width.I don't think we have come very far from the days of Christopher Columbus when they thought you could sail off the edge of the earth.End of rant, thank you.
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Being Canadian is not a disease. It just feels like one. TUP