Aliens. If they are so smart, why do they keep crashing?
Aliens, if they are so smart, why do they keep crashing? By Steve Douglass Science fiction loves the idea that a sufficiently advanced civilization can simply engineer its way around the laws of physics. Aliens cross thousands of light-years in a weekend. Their ships stop instantly, make right-angle turns at impossible speeds, become invisible, ignore gravity, communicate telepathically, and slip through wormholes as casually as we drive through a tunnel. The usual explanation is that they are millions of years ahead of us. But technological advancement is not magic. An advanced civilization may understand physics far better than we do. It may manipulate matter, energy and gravity in ways we cannot yet imagine. But it would still inhabit the same universe we do—and that universe appears to have absolutes. The most famous is the speed of light. According to special relativity, an object with mass cannot be accelerated to the speed of light. The faster it moves, the more energ...
