It’s a question of time and distance. The fact that the closest habitable planet (Proxima Centauri b) is four light-years from Earth, that the fastest ship—the Apollo 10 spacecraft—reached only 24,816 miles per hour, and that the average human life is 73 years long means getting to the nearest place worth getting to, with our current technology and physics, would take 812 lifetimes, or about 59,000 years.
That’s what makes the recent U.F.O. news so mind-blowing. If it’s true that the government is in possession of alien craft that arrived from light-years away, then just about every theory we’ve devised to explain the universe is wrong. Or, as my friend Todd told the cop who was arresting him for peeing on a sidewalk in New Orleans in 1988, “Those are your rules, not mine.”
