Most stars are billions of years older than the sun. If aliens exist, they likely have a head start on us by billions of years. It takes only 1 million years to cross the galaxy with a fusion drive. If aliens exist, then they are likely already here. Aliens would be indistinguishable from gods.
|
|---|
In physics, a hypothesis must fit the data, and it must have a plausible mechanism. The hypothesis "god exists" is plausible, because it's plausible that aliens exist, and if they do, they would be here.
 |
|---|
The sun will explode as a nova in 5 billion years.
In 10 billion years, dark energy will accelerate the expansion of the universe and all distant galaxies will be gone. We will be left with only the local galaxies that are gravitationally bound. The local galaxies will merge and form a supergalaxy, which will be an island in a cosmic vacuum.
The last stars will die 1 trillion year from now.
Matter is impermanent. Protons and neutrons will someday decay, on the order of 1050 years from now. After that the universse will be nothing but photons.
Black holes will explode in the distant future, on the order of 10120 years from now. Nothing is permanent. Even black hole are impermanent.
 |
|---|
Kirk's interpretation of the Prime Directive is often overly-liberal. You could say that he considers it to be the "Prime Suggestion". If aliens exist it's reasonable to suppose that they may have something like a Prime Directive because as yet, no evidence for them has been found.
 |
|---|
One could imagine the aliens creating a "doomsday machine" with orders to replicate itself and travel to every star in the galaxy, and upon arriving, exterminate all life present. If this had happened then we wouldn't be here now. The non-existence of a doomsday machine is one of the few solid assertions that we can make about the aliens.
The matrix hypthesis is that we live in a computer simulation. It's not unreasonable because humans like to create their own computer simulations.
 |
|---|
The human brain contains 1011 neurons and 1014 synapses. It would be an easy thing for an advanced civilization to scan the neural state of a brain and reproduce it on a computer. Such a scenario is equivalent to an afterlife.
 |
|---|