I'm glad everyone enjoyed the pics.
Bob,
I think it is conceiveable that there are other civilizations. The Cosmos is so enormous, it would have be considered a possibility just by sheer volume alone.
But I have never thought much about it, or worried about it, so I have no real insights into whether that would be true or not.
However...
I was struck with a thought awhile back...
What if they are not Aliens, per se.... but us?
Either our own species, traveling back in time, or merely a vision of our future.
Here is what struck me... Maybe it is possible that they are a next evolutionary step?
What is the process the human species has gone through physically over millions of years? We have lost our body hair more and more, because as we began to make shelters and dwelliings, we had less need to protect ourselves from the elements, and learned to craft the thicker animal skins into clothes for when we did need such protection. As we evolved, having hair cover the majority of our bodies has become unecessary, and so we have lost this trait for the most part, other than a few remnants left... our heads, our genitals, under our arms, etc... but we have lost that animal trait of complete covering as we have evolved and used tools and other means to build things to protect our bodies with.
If this trend continues... we live in air conditoned houses and drive in vehicles that can be set to the desired temperature, and they are even working on air conditioned clothes right now... maybe in a far distant time, we have no need for hair at all. If you follow this train of thought, the descriptions given of alien contact, possibly without exception, is that they don't have hair, just skin. If they are so advanced that they travel through universes, maybe hair itself becomes useless and so is discarded through evolutionary processes? It is already happening here, to us, maybe this is simply a continuation of that?
What are the other features of eye-witness accounts of these "aliens"?
Large heads. Why a large head, if not containing a large brain? And we know, that evolution has increased our brain size over millions of years. Maybe it is possible, again, that in the future, if this process has continued, why wouldn't our brains, and therefore our heads, become larger? Again, it seems possible this is an evolutionary step.
The other trait is large eyes. As we have become more and more dependent on computers, I could see this trait developing from our vision adapting to computer screens over long periods of time. How much time do we all spend now, staring at these screens? And the trend toward computers is growing not diminishing, so if we began to spend an inordinant amount of time, in front of computer screens, maybe our eyes would adapt to that?
In any event, it was just a fleeting thought I had.
There is no accepted scientific theory that we currently have, which would PREVENT time travel, so to the best of our scientific knowledge, time travel, IS a possibility.
Or it may very well be, that a civilization like ours, millions of light years away, began their history millions of years earlier than ours, and this is the evolutionary result, and an insight into our own potential future evolution.
.
:D:D