Aliens. Extraterrestrials. Little dudes zooming around in spaceships. No matter what you call them, you’ve definitely heard about them before. Some people casually believe that it’s impossible for them not to exist based on the universe’s gigantic size. Others think of them as nothing more than strange creatures seen frequently in pop culture. In this article, we—Michael Lehman and Brian Snow—are going to discuss both sides of the debate, so please keep an open mind and enjoy. Also, be warned—this rant might get a bit too technical.

Michael Lehman: I didn’t think much of aliens for most of my life. I honestly could’ve cared less about them and whether or not they were real. That changed the night of February 12 back in 2012. It was a normal Sunday evening. My family was watching the Grammy Awards on TV when my sister and I noticed something strange outside our kitchen window. We walked outside to get a closer look and were shocked to see a bizarre aircraft in the sky. With the aid of a pair of binoculars, we discovered that this “UFO” had a curved line of seven lights with the largest light in the center, suggesting that is was saucer-shaped. Some of the lights flickered and blinked in inconsistent flashes of different colors like red, blue, yellow, and green. To this day, it remains one of the strangest things I have ever laid eyes on.

But let’s be honest here. Do I really expect you to believe an unreliable story from some high school kid you probably don’t even know? Of course not, and I get that. This is why I won’t focus on my own experiences but will cut straight to the facts.

First let’s take a moment to consider some things about UFO sightings. You could go online and find website after website full of hundreds and thousands of reports about strange lights in the sky. You could also find dozens of videos of people claiming to have captured a UFO on film, but unfortunately most of these seem to be blatantly fake or suspiciously blurry or unclear. This is the side of the topic that really frustrates me. Now, you’ve grown up around people (and if you haven’t, you’re lying) and know what they’re like—some of them lie and make stuff up for the fun of it. I have absolutely no idea why anyone would want to take time out of his or her life to type up a false UFO sighting report or fabricate a poorly-edited video and stick it up online, but history has proven that these types of things happen quite frequently. I believe that the large amount of hoaxes and false claims about UFOs are to blame for making any UFO sighting at all seem ridiculous and unbelievable.

Now let’s think about the universe in general. Our planet is one of eight in our solar system (Sorry, Pluto!), and our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains more than 200 billion stars. That being said, astronomers have estimated at least 100 billion galaxies exist in the universe. Just think about how many planets could be out there! Now it suddenly makes sense why we’re always hearing about some new planet or moon that could “possibly contain life” according to scientists. Based on the numbers, it’s virtually impossible for other life forms not to exist somewhere in the cosmos.

Expanding on this idea, I’d like to mention a concept I heard about recently called Drake’s Equation (also known as Drake’s Formula). In a nutshell, the equation gives an estimate of the number of intelligent life forms that exist in the Milky Way that we earthlings could possibly be in radio contact with. Using Drake’s Equation, some people believe that anywhere from 1,000 to nearly one billion other races of intelligent life forms could be in reaching distance as far as radio waves are concerned in the Milky Way alone. It’s a very complicated theory, and I don’t know much about it, so I’d encourage you to look it up if you’d like more clarification. All in all, I think the existence of aliens is 100% factual.

Brian Snow: I cannot flat-out deny the existence of aliens, but in the sense of ‘Little Green Martians’ being the real deal I strongly disagree. I have heard many people justify the possibility of things like ‘Star Trek’ by throwing around things like “Drake’s Formula” and other statistics and theories used in the wrong context.

Speaking about Drake’s formula there is a nearly innumerable amount of habitable planets in the Milky Way alone, which makes it nearly statistically impossible for there not to be another planet without some sort of life present. HOWEVER that doesn’t mean that there are civilizations let alone other humanoid life forms running around the Galaxy as portrayed all across modern ‘space travel’ misconceptions and television shows.

Speaking of space travel misconceptions…

(Based off my grasp of Newtonian physics and the theory of Relativity, prepare for it to get technical.)

If you were to somehow manage to accelerate to 1% of the speed of light (the speed of light relative to an outside observer of course) you would be traveling at around 6.7 million miles an hour, but in these “sci-fi” shows and movies they manage speeds ranging between 2 and 5 times the speed of light! In English, if (theoretically) you accelerated a grape to the speed of light, it would become denser than a BLACK HOLE! Which would require infinite energy acting upon the grape. Even if you managed to accelerate something with a non-zero rest-mass to the speed of light, it would be traveling infinitely fast relative to itself! Yet another reason disproving the misconception of light speed would be that time does not pass for an observer traveling the speed of light. There! Now it is possible to bend space-time to form a sort of ‘jump drive’ for basically instantaneous travel.

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End rant. Congratulations if you’re actually still reading this article! We hope you liked it and formed some kind of opinion on aliens and the extent (if any) of their existence.