Warp Speed Now

The year was 1969, and my buddy and I — a pair of newly-minted high school graduates, full of juice and looking for a bit of excitement — decided to head to the Mojave for the weekend. We could have guzzled purloined beer and driven around, which was a time-honored weekend pastime, but we decided to change things up. Sure, we still planned to drink the beer, but instead of aimless miles and miles, we decided to go to the “Giant Rock Outer Space Convention” north and west of Joshua Tree National Monument.

The G.R.O.S.C. was a yearly event held just north of Landers, California, and traditionally attracted several hundred to ultimately several thousand True Believers. If you had ever been abducted by a UFO, or had seen a UFO, or even simply wanted to believe that flying saucers existed, this was the gathering for you.

So that’s what we did, arriving Friday evening, and planning to stay through the weekend. I think I mentioned earlier that we were hoping to drink our fill and get our hearts pumping. Well, the drinking part was easy and quickly accomplished — practice does make perfect — but how can dedicated adrenaline seekers fulfill their need when surrounded by hot desert, cold-blooded Gila Monsters, cholla cactus, and a thousand rabid UFO fanatics.

A poser to be sure but we were determined, and since we were having such great success with the first requirement of the trip (I have since come to learn that malted beverages and testosterone can be a powerful mix), the second part came easy enough.

As fate would have it, my buddy had brought along his frisbee — one of the new-fangled models that would glow in the dark to make a nighttime game that much better. Hmmm… sounded like the beginnings of a plan — especially when our wits and imaginations had been copiously lubricated by the two cases of Old English 800 (tall cans, of course) that we had been diligently working through.

So, what we did was simplicity itself. Early Saturday evening, Charlie grabbed his G.I.T.D. frisbee, I grabbed my 3-cell flashlight, we climbed (stumbled) up the mountainside that looked down on Giant Rock itself (along with the thousand true believers), and waited for full dark.

When it got to the point where we couldn’t see very well, we juiced up Charlie’s frisbee until it was literally humming and sailed it out and over the valley. We were too far away to witness the reaction in real time, but the story of the “legitimate flying saucer sighting” by hundreds of adherents was the talk of the valley all Sunday morning and into the afternoon; morphing in the telling from the single saucer we had sailed into a squadron of UFOs that were going to vaporize the godless heathen and other pinko commie non-believers (remember: we were still stuck in the middle of the Cold War about this time).

Anyway, mission accomplished and dangerously short on beer — we had somehow managed to finish 704 of the 768 fluid ounces that we’d brought along — we packed up early Sunday afternoon and headed back to reality, hoping to beat the rush (truly an oxymoron) through Santa Ana Canyon along Hwy. 91 (the Riverside Freeway was usually a thirty-mile parking lot by early Sunday evening).

But none of that really matters, and you are probably wondering why I felt the need to wander down Memory Lane again. A good question, with an easy answer. No, it’s not only because I’m older than dirt and getting senile, nor is it as Gandalf the White said to Aragorn on the Plains of Rohan when the Heir of Gondor was having trouble keeping up with the wizard’s musings:

“In riddles?” said Gandalf. “No! For I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to; the long explanations needed by the young are wearying.”

Anyway, to the point of this ramble: I saw an Opinion piece (7/26/25) on the New York Times website titled “What if the Government Believes in U.F.O.s More Than You Do?” The  link is to both the 59:51 minute podcast, as well as a transcript of the episode. Feel free to read/listen as fills your need or interest.

The short version: There is growing evidence that some in the Seats of Power do not believe we are alone in the universe, and that there are extraterrestrials living among us. This is nothing new, and has been going on intermittently at least since the Roswell conspiracy started in the late 1940s. Well, a sexy conspiracy theory never dies, and the intrigue seems to be reaching a high point again.

So, what do you think about the existence of “Little Green Men,” as Dr. Eleanor Ann Arroway called them in the Hollywood version of Carl Sagan’s sci-fi book Contact? Are you a true believer? This is one of those questions/opinions that we all have to sort out within ourselves, and since I have no idea how far out there you allow your brain to go, I’m stuck with sharing my version.

To me, there are actually two questions here: both are deceptively easy but — like so many things that are based solely upon what we choose to have faith in — nearly impossible to answer with any degree of confidence.

Let’s take the first: Is there life elsewhere in the universe? Note that I say “universe” and not “solar system.” Again, I bow to Dr. Arroway and paraphrase her repeated conviction that “if it’s only us, it seems like an awful waste of space.”

Much of this hinges on an equally tricky question “How did life get here in the first place?” While I have a strong personal belief and faith that there is a “higher power” out there that is way beyond my wits to understand, I am forced to admit that I don’t necessarily hold to the strict biblical version of creation as told in Genesis (and yes, as the Prodigal Son of an ordained minister I have been exposed to what the Bible has to say — possibly all too much).

(Spoiler Alert: My evolving opinion is that we can forget about warm tropical seas (with lightning) or chemosynthesis in the abyss, and view life as a universal constant, carried and spread throughout all of creation in the water contained in snockballs (a.k.a. comets). Of course, maybe God designed the DNA molecule and put it into the snockballs in the first place. What a clever entity! More on this (hopefully) in a later post.)

The second question wrapped up in this is along the lines of “If there is intelligent life out there, why haven’t they contacted us?” Beyond the blatant hubris involved with this statement, I have to quote Bill Watterson, originator and talent behind the comic strip characters Calvin and Hobbes:

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.

But let’s pretend for the nonce that all of that is self-serving baloney, and fall back on what I always try to fall back upon: the science (always an easy way out — almost as easy as crediting/blaming God for anything we don’t understand… or like).

A discussion of a few accepted “givens” may help.

First, all evidence seems to point to the convenient interpretation that physics works pretty much the same everywhere. We’re talking about the basics here: things like mass and gravity, light and energy, matter and density. Yep, all the basics that define not just how our version of reality works, but apparently all versions of reality.

Universal reality doesn’t appear to be like some of those movies we see where the rivers run uphill, or atmospheric winds move from areas of low pressure to high, or huge chunks of land are suspended in the sky above the surface of the exoplanet. Density doesn’t suddenly float the heavier matter, and the light stuff doesn’t sink — rocks don’t bob about on the surface of the lake. If reality was as capricious as all that, how could we ever have “faith” in anything we see, either with our eyes or through our telescopes?

In short: we seem to be blessed with one series of natural laws (or one God of Creation, if that more fully aligns with your beliefs) that dictates all we see.

Secondly, Newton tells us that you have to apply a force to a mass if you want it to move (accelerate). This is all wrapped up in how fractions (and 3-variable equations) work. We covered the details of the math in an earlier post (All Lakes Are Temporary) so we don’t need to do it again. That post even refers to Newton’s equation relating acceleration to force and mass (a=f/m) so we’ve already covered that, too.

Goody! We already have all the scientific and mathematical support we need to get us through Newton’s part of this. We don’t need to re-litigate why Lake Powell is filling up with sediment, only why the Little Green Men from Alderaan haven’t paid us a visit. I’m sure they want to, but maybe they simply can’t get here ‘cuz they’re stuck with the same Rules of Reality that we are. Which brings us to:

Thanks to Einstein and others, we now realize that space, time, and mass work differently as we move faster. To keep this as simple as we can, let’s focus on the mass. It’s easy: as we move faster, mass increases, up until we reach the Speed of Light, when mass reaches infinity. (Having trouble with the concept? Me too, but I’ve learned that just because I don’t understand something doesn’t mean it can’t be true.)

Anyway, assuming Einstein is right (and I have no reason to doubt him), as a spaceship approaches the speed of light its mass continues to increase, and so, according to Newton, the force needed to accelerate the object further will also continue to increase. Maybe you’re smarter than me, but I have no idea how we will ever be able to pack enough fuel to supply the infinite force that would be required to accelerate the infinite mass of a spaceship to light speed.

So, in the absence of valid scientific support, Hollywood does what it always does: it cheats! Take Star Trek, Star Wars, or any of the other interstellar sci-fi efforts that try to be at least somewhat believable from a physics standpoint. None of their spacecraft accelerate to the speed of light (or beyond) in order to get from star to star before the final credits roll at the end of the show. They “jump” or “leap” or, as in the case of the Dune universe, they simply “fold space” and instantaneously travel across the galaxy. Must be fun, but we haven’t figured out how to do any of this yet.

And we like to think that we’re pretty smart.

Maybe there isn’t any work-around for this physical limit. We thought for years that the “sound barrier” was impenetrable until Chuck Yeager said “Oh well, what the hell,” held on tight (“tell Mom I love her”), and kept right on going. Sure, there was a big noise on the ground (he didn’t hear it ‘cuz he was going faster than the boom), but everyone below him sure knew something incredible had happened.

And maybe the light barrier is equally flexible… or maybe not. If it is the fixed physical obstruction which all evidence points to at this time, we may never be able to get to light speed, or beyond. And since it took Voyager I over twenty years just to get to Pluto at the fastest speed we could manage, any hope of interstellar travel is ludicrous (I’ll try to give more on the scale of the solar system and universe in a later post).

And if we can’t make it happen, it’s likely that the Little Green Men won’t be able to, either. So even if they do exist, they can’t get here any more than we can get to them. Not sure about you, but considering the mess we’re making all by ourselves here on earth, and assuming that the LGM aren’t doing much better on their planet, it might be for the best that none of us can spread it around. More of God’s plan, or just a happy side effect of nature’s?

As Aragorn son of Arathorn asked the King on the Paths of the Dead: “What say you?”

In closing, I guess this all leads to a third question: If some of the Powers That Be are convinced that we have aliens zooming across the skies above us in UFOs (or UAPs, to sound ever so modern and PC at the same time), what does the government know about The Rules of Reality that we don’t? To quote Ross Douthat, the author of the NY Times Opinion piece, and says it much better that I do (and has the added bona fide of being paid for his opinion):

I’m not persuaded that we’re actually being visited by E.T. However, this era has left me with a lot of weird unanswered questions. For instance, what do all of these government bureaucrats and whistle-blowers actually know — or think they know — about unidentified aerial phenomena? Does at least part of the U.S. government really, really want Americans to believe in U.F.O.s? And if so, why?