• Question: What would you do if you bumped into a UFO whilst whizzing about in space?

    Asked by Mia is super cool to Tom, Jon, COLFlight, Beth, Anne on 7 Oct 2015.
    • Photo: Columbus Flight Directors

      Columbus Flight Directors answered on 7 Oct 2015:

      Sergio:
      Hi Mia!
      to stay in orbit and don’t fall back to Earth, you need to fly very fast. I mean very very fast! The Space Station travels at 20 thousands miles per hour. That means that it travels 5 miles in one second. One second you are here, the next second you are 5 miles away.

      If we didn’t bump into each other but we just passed by, we would not even have time to say “Hi” and we’d already be 10 miles away, that would not be a very interesting conversation. 😀

      And if we really bumped into each other, well, I would not be very happy to bump into someone at that high speed, that must be painful. I’m quite sure we both wouldn’t like it! 😉

      Simon:
      Hi Mia,

      This is my take on your question: I guess it depends what you mean by UFO. If you really mean Unidentified Flying Object I would use all the means that I have available to study it to try to understand better what it is: Photos, Videos, scanning it in all the bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. I would be hesitant to have direct contact with it until I knew more about what it was in case it is toxic or contains life which might be harmful to life on earth. I would also want to avoid risking contaminating it (may we be harmful to it). All the data I had collected I would then send to Earth to have processed by experts to understand what to do next.

      If you mean “Aliens” I think I would pretty much follow the same procedure as above except that if I already had indications that the aliens were intelligent I would try to communicate with them using radio waves, lights/sounds etc!

      A lot of very clever people have already thought about this. Please follow the link below to see what the SETI have developed for a first encounter with Aliens:

      http://www.seti.org/post-detection.html

      Some of my favourite sci fi moves are also about this very topic:

      E.T., Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind, Contact, The Day the Earth stood still (both the Keanu Reeves version and the 1950s version!)

    • Photo: Beth Healey

      Beth Healey answered on 7 Oct 2015:

      I would complain to the Flight Director team 😉

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