Discovery Channel Magazine: watching an A380 come together
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4 July, 2013Discovery Channel Magazine, July 2013
Last year I interviewed Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon. We were talking about his experiences on Apollo 14, and the extraordinary effect the voyage had on him and his beliefs. And, out of nowhere, he started talking about “ET visitors”.
“You believe we have had ET visitors?” I asked.
He looked at me as if I was asking if he thought the Earth was round. “Definitely,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any question that we have had ET visitors.”
One doesn’t have to look too hard to find people who believe we are visited by aliens, but it’s quite something to hear it from an American national hero who is also a respected scientist. As one of the tiny handful of people who have seen the earth as a sphere, hanging along in the unthinkable vastness of space, it is perhaps no surprise that he should have reached the conclusion that we are not alone.
So why should we care about aliens? Because, whether or not you share Mitchell’s view that they come to visit us on earth, they’re unquestionably out there somewhere. How could they not be? NASA’s Kepler mission, billed as “a search for habitable planets”, has so far found over 11,000 stars which have at least one planet, and 18,000 potential planets around them, and that’s just within a viewable portion of our galaxy – one of, probably, at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe. So we’re the only life in all that space? Of course not. The very idea is absurd.
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