East Tennessee’s Tim Burchett, a Republican, said he believes that aliens must have the technological capacity to “turn us into a charcoal briquette”.
East Tennessee’s Tim Burchett, a Republican, said he believes that aliens must have the technological capacity to “turn us into a charcoal briquette”.
It’s all tinfoil-hat-talk until someone demonstrates the technology live and with reputable scientists present.
It’s really not that hard.
Edit: To clarify, any species advanced enough to come here from another star is going to be advanced enough to understand basic chemistry- chemistry, that we’ve been using for for more than 2000 years (at the very least.)
Such a hypothetical species would almost certainly also have the capability of doing spectral analysis to detect elemental composition in our atmosphere (JWST can do this,) and detect the radioactive fallout from our nuking ourselves- multiple times.
They would almost certainly be extremely careful in coming here. To be clear, the energy contained in a ship capable of reaching earth in any meaningful time frame, would be capable of wiping life out on Earth- far more powerful than any nuke ever detonated here. More importantly to them, such a space craft could conceivably be reverse engineered with enough capacity to attack them.
For comparison, the fastest moving space craft made by humans- the Parker solar probe- is traveling at 150 kilometers per second- the probe was designed to fall very close to the sun…it’ll be going about 190 km/s- it’s orbit was crafted to fly between the sun and Venus. It’s in its sixteenth of 24 planned passes.
190 km/s is about .04% the speed of light- or .0004 c. At those speeds it’ll take more than 10 thousand years to reach the nearest star (proxima centauri at 4.2 light years.)
And that’s assuming we don’t care about slowing down.
Any species to get here is going to be technologically advanced enough there’s no economic reason to come here. That leaves curiosity- specifically us. And we’re fucking psychotic enough to nuke ourselves.
Do i believe aliens exist? It’s probable.
Do i believe they come here? Not likely.