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Brazilian artist Henrique Alvim Corrêa’s depiction of the Martian invaders in a 1906 French release of The War of the Worlds.

Recently Donald Trump satisfied the curiosity of Epstein conspiracists by releasing truck loads of information about old UFO sightings. I still believe in Jeffery Epstein.

Light travels 186,282.4 miles per second. Paired with humans’ short lifetimes, that is a daunting obstacle for travel between the stars

In 1977 humans launched Voyager 1. It reached the end of our solar wind in 2012, 35 years later.  If it was aimed at our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, it would arrive in 75,000 years. At this speed Voyageur 1 could cross the Milky way in 1.76 billion years.

But maybe future developments in rocketry will speed things up.

One planet spit out by a black hole is shooting across our galaxy at 3.7 million MPH far faster than Voyager. Even so, this rock is traveling 181.25 times slower than a photon.

So far, the only people to achieve the speed of light were incandesced into photons by atomic bombs from which they failed to resume human form.

Science fiction offers wormholes but they are easier to find on the written page than in telescopes.
It might be quicker to build a turbine around the sun to power light speed.  That will be harder than tearing down the East Wing or building the world’s tallest triumphal arch. We need more Einsteins for that.

BTW. I just read about President Donald Trump’s uncle in the president’s favorite target for lawsuits, the New York Times.

It’s true.  Dr. John G. Trump of MIT was a genius. He fine-tuned the radar at the Normandy Invasion, allowing boats to land and air transport to fly where needed.

In civilian life he pioneered radio therapies to treat deep-seated cancers. His work on food preservation was critically important.

President Harry Truman and England’s King George VI honored him. In 1983 Dr. Trump was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Reagan.

It’s too bad Uncle John isn’t with us to throw some shade on space travel. The good doctor knew something about light waves.

Our voices travel fast as light in radio waves. We have been sending and receiving them for more than a century. That’s a little longer than the oldest human.

What space messages have reached us? Zip, but maybe we just need bigger ears.

Or, maybe we are the first critters in the Milky Way whose soapy foam evolved into Albert Einsteins.

As we learned from Star Wars, life on other planets is precarious. Today’s Dr. Trumps theorize that Earth was formed after smashing into another proto planet. Life was made possible by the accumulation of water from a hail of meteors. Then Earth’s soapy foam had four billion “goldilocks” years to evolve through frozen oceans and volcanoes.

I believe in life on other planets. I suspect Elon Musk will find it on Mars after he recruits scientists willing to endure flesh-killing radiation on a year-long voyage. If found, it will surely be microbial.

And if Musk brings Martian life to Earth, it may not be its first appearance. Like Earth, through eons Mars was pummeled by millions of meteors. Each strike could have lofted chemistry-filled debris that later fell on Earth. We may already have a little Martian in us.

A lifetime of science fiction has prepared me to welcome alien life.

I vividly recall episode 26 of Men in Space when I was 8. It was 1959. I was glued to my TV watching black and white Astronauts scouring Mars in a desperate search for signs of life. But time ran out. They had to return to Earth. As their rocket lifted off the camera panned across a forbidding landscape and focused on what they had failed to find – a fossil. It looked just like a flying archeopteryx.

Is it any wonder that after a decade filled with copious UFO sightings and the fear of nuclear annihilation America was primed for Star Trek and the Beatles?

I loved every minute of warp drives, transporters and the Yellow Submarine. But it also came with L. Ron Hubbard.

Like Donald Trump, Hubbard’s Scientologists counted on credulous people. His religion was pitched to Hollywood stars and people with large inheritances. His initiates learned that the warrior alien Xenu brought captives to Earth 75 million years ago. He “stacked” his captives around volcanoes and blasted them with hydrogen bombs. Xenu then captured their souls and “brainwashed” them.

Today, 75 million years later, these brainwashed “thetans” waft through the air searching for unwary Republicans to infect. Once attached they cause mental and physical stress that only the purchase of Scientology merch can cure.

This is not a new phenomenon. The Book of Revelation tells of Cheribim and Seraphim.

Jules Verne launched a rocket to the Moon, charmingly reenacted in the 1902 silent film Le Voyage dans la Lune, directed by fellow Frenchman Georges Méliès.

A 1938 Orson Welles’ Halloween broadcast of The War of the Worlds convinced an astonishing number of Americans that murderous Martians had landed in “Grovers Mill.”

President Trump desperately needs an Uncle John to advise him. He’s slashed funding for science research. He’s fired hundreds of climatologists monitoring Earth weather. He’s yanking out four hundred million dollars’ worth of deep-sea monitors as the most massive known plume of hot water makes its way across the Pacific.

And his Republican Congress? They are tied to volcanoes reading reports on UFOs.

Yes, I still believe in Jeffery Epstein.