"Aliens exist, there's no two ways about it." Helen Sharman, Britain’s first person in space (in 1992), offered these confident words just weeks ago. She went on to offer, "It's possible they're here right now and we simply can't see them."
What do you think?
Many people have claimed to see aliens. Some even claim to have been abducted by them. Yes, many of these have been exposed as hoaxes or weather balloons or a meteorological event or birds or some other natural explanation, but a handful remain unexplainable by any natural account. And some of these claims have been made by reputable people (like Ms. Sharman).
And, if you were to look back through history, you’d see that people have been reporting unknown lights and objects in the skies for thousands of years – people from India to England, from the Americas to China. The Ancient Greeks and Romans have stories about “fiery globes” and “flaming chariots” that flew through the skies. The American Indians told stories about “flying canoes” and “great silvery airships.”
What are we to make out of it all? Are aliens real?
Let’s take a few moments to think it through. Before we conclude our planet has been visited by beings from other planets, let’s first ask if beings even exist on other planets. If life only exists on earth, the whole question of extraterrestrials must be reconsidered.
So, is there life “out there”? Let’s start with Scripture. God’s Word tells us that God created the sun and the moon and all the stars “to govern the day and night and to separate light from darkness” (Gen. 1:18). In other words, the moon and the sun, the stars and all the planets, were given for Earth – for us. The universe was made for us!
This is a significant and surprising truth, one that moves believers to wonder and awe. King David marveled:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him? (Psalm 8:3-4)
The majesties of space were created for us, for our enjoyment and to mark seasons and time for us. This doesn’t necessarily prove there isn’t life “out there,” but it is strongly suggestive. Space was created for earth (and science is showing us how precisely positioned we are for space observation and discovery!).
Darwinian evolutionists struggle to accept this, seeing the universe as a vast waste of space if life only exists on earth. Carl Sagan, the famous evolutionist, expressed this sentiment when he offered, “The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”
In fact, many evolutionists, having acknowledged the insurmountable odds to spontaneously generating life on earth, are increasingly looking to space to account for life’s origin on earth. The theory is called
panspermia. It a nutshell, it purports that aliens seeded life on earth, which then evolved.
[1]
But this assumes other planets are capable of supporting life (and then developing technology to get it here!). Ms. Sharman (quoted above) offers, "There are so many billions of stars out there in the universe that there must be all sorts of different forms of life…"
That seems reasonable until you consider something called “habitable zones.” A habitable zone is a condition that has to be just right for life to exist on a planet. So, think Goldilocks. There are currently 13 known habitable zones that have to be met before Goldilocks will be happy, before Goldilocks is even able to sample the bears’ porridge. These include things like the existence of liquid water, the level of ultraviolet radiation, the planetary rotation rate, the tilt of the planet, the atmospheric eletric field, the levels of carobn dioxide and monoxide, and many more.
Jay Richards and Guillermo Gonzelez were astounded by these realities and wrote the book The Privileged Planet to communicate how unlikely our planet is and to suggest it just might be favored in the cosmos (it was made into a documentary, which is well worth watching!). They wrote, “Precious few plots of galactic real estate are as amenable to complex life as ours…” As scientific knowledge advances, the number of habitable zones continues to decrease as the number of potential planetary candidates for supporting life continues to dwindle.
But let’s just assume space is teeming with aliens. Where are they? Voyager 1, NASA’s space probe launched in 1977, has long ago passed Pluto without a hint of alien life detected. But maybe they’re farther out. If so, how did they get to earth?
Consider a few stark realities. Light travels at an astonishing 186,000 miles per second. If we could achieve this speed (a feat we will discuss below), it would take 4.2 years to reach the next closest star after the sun. To traverse our galaxy, it would take 100,000 years. To reach the next galaxy like our own (and, therefore, the one with the greatest chance of supporting life) would take 2.3 million years (and the one after that is 20 million light years away!).
[2]
Are we to assume these little ETs hopped in their spacecraft, dropped it into warp drive, and zipped along for millions of years to flit around in our skies? Radar has picked up unidentified flying objects, but it has never deteced one leaving our atmosophere. Where do they go? They’re certainly not going home and back! Are they able to make physical structures disappear?
Further, when you consider the physical realities of traveling at the speed of light, you quickly realize how hopeless such space travel is. Consider this: to propel an object that weighs one pound to a velocity 50% the speed of light would require an energy source equal to the energy of 98 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. To get something the size of a space shuttle to 50% the speed of light would require 23 million atomic bombs. It would require the same amount of energy to stop the craft!
And, lest you think this might somehow be achievable, these little aliens would also have to figure out how to avoid planets and stars. Worse, they’ve have to figure out how to avoid the dust in space! Hitting a piece of dust at a mere 10% the speed of light would be like hitting 10 tons of TNT. At 50% it would be like slamming into 2.2 atomic bombs! Because of this, these little green dudes would need to develop a dust detection system that would be capable of traveling faster than the speed of light to detect the dust light years ahead so as to perform evasive maneuvers. But this would put such gravitational pressure on them that it would kill them. Anything over 9 Gs kills people and destroys ships. Imagine the impact of millions of Gs!
These are the hard realities standing between us an alien visitation. And, to be as charitable as possible, even assuming evolutionary ages, there hasn’t been enough time for such advanced life to evolve somewhere out there and get here. Reality has a way of asserting itself.
But what about people who claim to have been abducted? Did they make it up? Some may have. Many, however, probably had a genuine experience, not with extraterrestrial beings, though. What they likely experienced was extradimensional beings. And the Bible has a word for them: demons.
Why, for instance, do “alien” abductees often report that their abductors disparaged Jesus and His Word? Why would aliens from distant galaxies travel here to ridicule Jesus and His Word? And why is there such a lack of committed, confessing, practicing Christians reporting abductions? And why do abductees report being released immediately upon the invocation of Jesus’ name? Why would aliens submit to Jesus? Aren’t these realities a bit suggestive?
Gary Bates, author of Alien Intrusion, and source for much of the information in this article, offers this conclusion to his extensively documented study:
These entities are not real physical ETs from other planets. They are from another dimension… So, to find their source, one needs to wear ‘spiritual glasses.’ Unfortunately, most of these modern-day researchers have embraced a humanistic-based view of the world, with the theory of evolution serving as the creator of both them and the aliens. This opens them up to spiritual deception and, in turn, has blinded them to the claims of the Bible, which makes God the Creator. I suggest the answers they have been looking for but do not want to hear may be – ‘God is real, and the Bible is true.’
Ms. Sharman (quoted at the beginning of this article) is partially right. “Aliens” exist and they are among us, but they are not, in fact, extraterrestrial; they are extradimensional. They are demons. Scripture speaks openly of them even as it declares Jesus’ decisive victory over them. And there are no two ways about this: Jesus lives and Jesus reigns! Want to visit more on this or discover helpful resources for further study? Let’s talk! – Pastor Conner
[1] Space prevents detailing the challenges to evolving life from simple to complex. In brief, evolutionists propose two mechanisms to move evolution upward: natural selection and genetic mutations. Natural selection enables an organism to adapt to its environment, but it never creates any new genetic information. Genetic mutations do a fine job of deleting, duplicating, or damaging existing genetic information, but they, likewise, never create any new genetic information. In other words, these proposed mechanisms can account for variation within an organism kind (think variation in the dog kind), but they cannot create new kinds (like a green haired dog or moving a dog to a horse).
[2] Why are we assuming the speed of light? Here’s why: if we assume normal space travel speed (38,000 miles per hour), it would take over 11 million years to reach earth from the next comparable galaxy. Those poor little aliens would starve!
