Confused Aliens in War
.....as quantum physics agrees to this concept of time dilution, it brings us to an amusing conclusion. But before reaching to that conclusion – to make this thought experiment interesting – we have to assume that there are many alien races spread across the universe, and that we are at war with some bad aliens. If we agree on these, then we can proceed to the amusing part.
We feel that time flows constantly. Well, that is not true. Albert Einstein proposed his Theory of Relativity, where he said that if a person travels at the speed of light, the flow of time slows down. It has been thereafter established that time doesn’t flow at the same speed, but depends upon the speed at which an object travels. This also points to another interesting hypothesis called time travel. If time flows at various speeds, than it would be possible to travel at various points in time, just like we can travel to any point in the three dimensional world of length, breadth and height.
Explaining this theory a bit further, this means, if a person goes to space and travels in his spacecraft at close to the speed of light, then the time he will experience would be slower than what his mission control people on earth would be experiencing. It might be just an hour inside his spacecraft, but it could be many days on earth already lapsed by then!
As quantum physics agrees to this concept of time dilution, it brings us to an amusing conclusion. But before reaching to that conclusion – to make this thought experiment interesting – we have to assume that there are many alien races spread across the universe, and that we are at war with some bad aliens. If we agree on these, then we can proceed to the amusing part.
There are billions of galaxies in the universe. A galaxy is a big bunch of billions of stars, arranged in cluster forms, spiral forms or just irregular forms. Our solar system dwells near the penultimate band of a spiral galaxy called the Milky Way. Now, if we earthlings have been at war with some alien races – as many ‘conspiracy theorists’ believe – then, the war is certainly being fought in the space near earth.
Why in the space near earth?
We are yet to develop spacecraft that could travel to Mars in a few days than the ones we send that takes months together; how could we fight a war with the aliens far away from earth?
So, the poor aliens would've no other choice but to travel the deep interstellar space to come to the solar system, and fight a war with us, earthlings. And while they'd have to cover vast expanse of cosmic distance made up of many millions of light years, their spacecraft have to travel at or near the speed of light (even assuming that they use wormholes—the hypothetical space expressways that cut the interstellar space to a great extent). Now, when they travel at that speed, naturally the time inside their spaceships will slow down, as per Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. This creates problem for them as they have to communicate with their base station on their home planet, and because time flows slowly inside their spaceships, they remain young, while the aliens at their command center on their home planet might've died, and replaced by another generation of crew, who'd have to co-ordinate their battle plans with the assault force nearing earth. That’s one problem!
After reaching the outer limit of earth, they'd wage a war with the earthlings. The earthlings who’d fight the aliens are an exclusive group of people (like Special Space Force) who know everything about the existence of aliens and their threats, while they keep the existence of aliens a secret from the common people due to the fear that it might trigger mass panic. Nobody would like to hear that we are fighting wars with aliens. That would be scary, right? The first man-made thing has just crossed the boundary of the solar system a few years ago (so, we are technologically poor), and then to know that we are fighting technologically advanced aliens who have traversed the vast and unimaginable interstellar space would be too terrifying!
But, let’s say, the earthlings could defeat the aliens and they had to retreat to their home planet. Let’s assume that we, earthlings, had ‘home advantage’!
The second problem for the aliens would be the difference in life-spans between the humans and them. The life-span depends upon the number of revolution we made around our star (the sun). Eighty to ninety revolutions around the sun is enough time for the oxygen (free radicals) to kill us! However, the same might not be the case for the aliens. Their home planet might take more duration of time to revolve around their own star and hence, the aliens could live many times more than our natural life-span. So, what would happen is that, if the aliens come back a second time to attack us, after they have been driven away from the solar system during the last battle, they would see different technologies being invented by humans. The second attack team might be the same aliens who had attacked us the last time (and also being experienced war veterans), because they are yet to die their natural death, while many generations might’ve passed here on earth. As humans have a tendency to invent far superior technologies in every successive generation, the aliens would find their weapons obsolete in the face of newer weapons being invented by the earthlings. Last time, the earthlings had used V2 missiles (a deadly Nazi weapon), and the aliens come prepared to counter this weapon, only to find to their great dismay, that now the earthlings are using high energy pulse beam gun, that vaporizes their spaceships in an instant!
In a scenario like this, I don’t see any alien race winning a war against the earthlings. No wonder, why people talk about home advantage!