Before I begin this let me say that I have no scientific credentials whatsoever, and you should take this entire entry with a grain of... sugar. But if you know me, you can trust that I've read enough to feel pretty confident with what I'm saying here.

So here's my question: if the universe is so huge and teeming with stars and planets... where are the UFO visitors?

Some would say "they're visiting us right now, what about the UFO sightings?"

Okay here's where the grain of sugar comes in, and with it, my answer: Whatever they are they're not from another planet. They are something else, maybe. But not from another planet. No way.

Here is why I think so. It's not anything new, but I defy you to brush it off.

If you go to http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/solar_system/ you'll find a really interesting calculator. It lets you pretend to scale down the solar system... like if you wanted to pretend the sun was the diameter of a mandarine orange, let's say. (about three inches). The program scales the rest of the planet sizes, distances, etc. and also scales down the speed of light, and the distances to all the other nearby stars, including the closest one, which is Alpha Centauri.

In real life, this star (actually a group of three stars orbiting each other, the closest of which is actually called Prima Centauri) is about four and a half light years away.

That's really hard to picture in your head. I can't even convert it to miles without that annoyng +E thingy on the calculator. (I never did understand what that +E thingy is supposed to mean.) After some web searching I found the answer in real numbers. It's approximately 24,792,710,570,269,624 miles away. Yes that's almost twenty five quadrillion miles.

But try to picture that.

You can't. So keep reading.

The sun in real life is 862,400 miles across, or about 2.7 million miles around if you wanted to drive your melting car around it. So that's the sun.

The earth is 7901 miles in diameter. Or about 24,901 miles in circumference. It'd be some kind of cool, James Bond boat car.

The Sun and Earth are at least 91 million miles from each other. (This distance increases during the year, but who cares.)

Okay, so got that pictured in your head? Of course you don't. I don't either. So let's use the calculator...

If I made a model of the solar sytem and used a mandarine orange as the sun, the earth would be very teeny. Half a millimeter. Maybe the size of a grain of sugar. Then the distance from us to the sun would be 26 feet. That's easier to picture. An orange, a grain of sugar, and the length of your house. (pluto, by the way, would be 1062 feet away from the orange, and would be practically invisible to the naked eye, that's if it were still a planet. Poor Pluto.)

Okay, got that? I do. Next we want to figure out how far away the nearest star would be. Perhaps there's a chance this star has planets, maybe one with life. Not likely, since there are a hundred billion other, vastly more distant stars in our galaxy alone. (A galaxy, by the way, is one of those disk things that looks like a hurricane cloud. We live in one called the Milky Way. Galaxies look fuzzy like smoke. The fuzzy smokey stuff is stars. There are hundreds of billions of other galaxies in the rest of space that we can detect; the universe.)

Got that? Ok. A very large disk thing (the Milky way, about 12 million miles across even at this scale, where in a teeny corner there exists...), an orange (the sun), and a grain of sugar (our planet Earth) circling it about 26 feet away.

Now just take a moment and try to imagine spotting this grain of sugar even from a few feet away. Maybe pretend you're planet hunting. Okay, now let's move on.

So one would think that given the huge number of stars in our disk thing (galaxy) we would be bumping into stars all the time... or at least running into UFO's from all the jillions of planets that must be out there. But here's the thing:

I was talking earlier about that closest star from us (actually 3 orbiting each other) Alpha Centauri, and how far away it is, right? The closest star. The one that you'd try first if you were flying around looking for more sugar planets.

It's really far away. Remember? Twenty five quadrillion miles. But how far away is it when you scale things down?

Much closer. If the Earth were the size of a grain of sugar, the nearest star would be only 1374.1 miles away. Piece of cake. Like from Toronto to Miami. (actually Toronto to Miami is 1237 miles, but close enough) I can imagine doing that trip in a few days in the car.

So here's the rub. Now we have to consider how fast you can fly. What's the fastest possible speed according to physics? It's the speed of light. That's not a rumour, it's a fact. (actually a theory, but a theory isn't merely a guess like most people commonly use the word in everyday English. Not when it comes to science. Not even close. The speed of light as a universal speed limit is part of the General Theory of Relativity, which has been tested and proved correct by experiments, and in fact GPS locators count on this theory or you'd never find your way to Miami)

The Speed of light. That's it. Nothing can travel faster than that. (Well you could in a sense, but let's put it this way, if you travelled that fast, time outside the space ship would speed (or put another way, time inside the ship would slow down) up to such a point that you would greet infinity and probably witness the end of the universe. Not only that, your ship would become as flat as a CD, though you and it would still function perfectly. Einstein understood it, I don't really, but go read about it if you like. It's amazing and strains the edges of your brain. And that's without the math, which I understand none of, as you probably believe when you think about me and calculators.) So you can't fly that fast without disappearing into the ends of time and turning into a pancake. Nothing can.

But even if you could...

The speed of light isn't really all that fast when you scale things down. If the Sun were the size of an orange, a beam of light would radiate outward from it at only 1/2 an inch per second. Do that with your finger. Try flying from one end of your computer keyboard to the other end at 1/2 an inch per second. On my little laptop keyboard it took about 23 seconds. (try counting one one thousand... two one thousand... as your finger crosses about an inch) Now how far is it from the Sun to the Earth at this scale again? Oh yeah, about 26 feet. The length of your house. Do you have to patience to try that? I don't but I know how long it would take you. It would take you the same amount of time it takes in real life for light to reach us from the sun. It's about 8 minutes. Try it with the finger test, I dare you. Remember your finger is travelling at the speed of light. Which isn't possible. You have an amazing finger. (and if you think that's odd, how about the fact that when you look at the sun you're seeing 8 minutes into the past)

Okay. So the next thing is this: How far away is the nearest star? How far would you have to drag your finger to get there? Oh yeah... I remember. Miami. You'd have to drag your finger to miami at 1/2 inch per second.

It would take you 4.2 years.

That's If you could travel at the speed of light, which you can't, without a bunch of weird Einstein stuff happening. End of the universe and all that.

But even if we pulled it off...

we would be looking for grains of sugar. In the dark. Without a map or GPS. And when you found a grain of sugar there would be no life there, so you'd move on to the next star which is...

in Hawaii. Or Australia...

And those are the close ones. There aren't very many. Most are hundreds or thousands or millions of times farther away. So that's the thing. A lot of work to find another Orange and maybe a grain of sugar.

So if you are a betting person, the best chance is that are our little blue grain of sugar will remain unnoticed, circling our little yellow orange for the rest of its days, until, finally, one day, billions of years from now, it will expand to the size of a house, and swallow us up, and you can call me Sunny D.

Sweet.