Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon

by Michael P. Masters

Physicist Stephen Hawking was among those who focused extensively on this Fermiesque question, as it relates to the possibility of time travel among members of the future human race. However, while Fermi was open to the possibility of intelligent life on other planets, Hawking took a much more critical approach to this time-tourist dilemma. Most notably, he was fond of saying that because we are not overrun by future human time tourists coming back to observe events of their past, this should be taken as evidence that backward time travel will never be possible, at any point in the human future.8 Contrary to Hawking’s objections, Paul Davies—another well-known physicist and fellow time guru—takes a more judicious position. In his book About Time: Einstein’s unfinished revolution, Davies states: A shaky argument that is often used against time travel is that if our descendants ever discover how to do it they will come back and visit us. As we don’t see these temponauts, we can conclude that they will never come to exist.9 More specifically, Davies counters Hawking’s time-tourist dilemma argument by pointing out that some of the time machines that have been modeled to date do not allow for backward travel beyond any point in time prior to when the first time machine was invented. He argues that unless our distant descendants use an element of nature to return to the past, such as a wormhole for example, then we wouldn’t expect to see visitors from the future, at least until ...