(This was written 2019-10-25)

FTL spaceflight? That old killjoy Albert Einstein casts cold water on that idea with his Theory of Special Relativity. That’s the one that says light travels at an absolute speed (not relative to the emitter) and time slows down as you approach lightspeed and there’s probably no way to accelerate a physical object to anywhere near lightspeed. And these effects have been measured.

Generation starships are certainly possible; it’s a simple matter of resources, infrastructure, political will, and keeping the crew and their descendants focused on their mission for 100 to 1000 years. Robert Enzmann created a proposal in the 1960s for ships capable of supporting 2000 to 200,000 people, powered by deuterium fusion pulse engines and cruising at up to 9% of lightspeed.

Smaller faster ships would work if we could put the crew into hibernation or extend their lifespan with genetic engineering, pharmaceutical treatments, or cellular repair nanobots. Upon arrival they could populate the new world with babies grown in artificial wombs from frozen embryos. All of this is within the realm of scientific possibility today.

Was Noah’s Ark a generation ship carrying humans – or aliens passing as human – from a distant planet?

Or was it literally a ship ferrying Great Flood refugees from Atlantis to higher ground? There is a theory a giant meteorite smashed into the Earth, causing worldwide fires and rapid global warming followed by the last Ice Age… and a candidate impact crater has been found under the Greenland ice sheet. It’s huge, but we can’t be sure it’s the one until scientists narrow down the time of impact.

If Noah’s Ark was in fact a starship, it’s unlikely that it ‘seeded’ the Earth with humans. It was an interesting theory until researchers filled in the ‘missing link’ with fossil and DNA evidence for human evolution here on Earth. Nonetheless, there are some weird fossils, like the Boskop Skulls found in South Africa, Israel, and Europe; some of them have bigger braincases than Neanderthals and look suspiciously like the ‘grey aliens’ in UFO lore. Probably they were just mutants or an evolutionary dead end, and these early-1900s fossil finds probably inspired the ‘alien sightings’ which were probably hoaxes.

If Earth was visited by true aliens, how alien would they be? Current theories suggest that carbon-based lifeforms with RNA and DNA and amino acids could evolve independently from the primordial soup on any Earth-like planet. The DNA codings for amino acids would probably be all different, but if the amino acids are mostly the same, we might be able to eat them – or vice versa. They’d probably be more alien to us than trilobites, though. Unless, that is, a primordial alien civilization seeded the galaxy with life for terraforming purposes.

If this is all too realistic, we have a trump card… The Grand Conspiracy Theory. What if all science is riddled with disinformation to keep us confined and subservient? If you were God Emperor of a galactic civilization, would you want your peasants to know they’re even part of it? I don’t think so. They’d all want to waste scarce resources lollygagging around the stars. Why let them want what they can’t have? You’d keep them in the dark, except for the ruling elite class. And if they lose control of a planet, you just hit the reset button.

That’s our segue to Exterminatus.

Part 2: Planet Killer Weapons

TBD