Any of you living with the hope that you will one day be able to travel back in time to high school to beat up the bully who picked on you and date the prom queen or that aliens will touch down in your backyard and beg you to save their home world with your awesome video game skills can now all die a little spiritual death. Because according to two recently released reports from scientist eggheads, the existence of both time travel and extraterrestrial life are highly improbable, if not downright impossible.

Let’s first look at the possibility of life on other planets. In the past, the Drake Equation has been used by scientists to estimate that there may be as many as 10,000 advanced civilizations in our galaxy attempting to contact us at any given time. The basic reasoning for this says that since the fundamental laws that govern our planet also govern the entire universe, what applies here must apply elsewhere. So if the conditions existed to spawn intelligent life on earth, the same must be true everywhere else.

But now Princeton University astrophysicist David Spiegel and Tokyo University physicist Edwin Turner say all that’s bullshit. Using a statistical method called the Bayesian reasoning, they have mathematically concluded that yes, there exists the possibility that the way life developed on earth is indeed a common phenomenon that could be replicated on other worlds BUT we could also just as well be the rare exception and be the only intelligent beings in the galaxy.

So this doesn’t necessarily preclude the possibility of super hot aliens who look like this visiting our planet to learn first-hand about human sexuality:

But now there’s also just as good a chance that may never happen as well.

And when it comes to the feasibility of time travel, the news is even bleaker. A group of physicists at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have debunked a previous study that seemed to find that photon particles appeared to be able to move faster than light thus allowing for the possibility of time travel.

However, this recent experiment concludes that Einstein was indeed right by showing that those particles actually can’t and don’t move faster than light. Which basically means that time travel is impossible (unless a “natural” wormhole were to open up connecting two different points in time and space but good luck waiting for that).

So the good news is that you don’t have to worry about that Terminator coming from the future to kill you. But the bad news is you can’t travel back in time to have sex with your mom and give birth to yourself.

Leave it to science to once again ruin all the fun. 

And now we return you to your regularly scheduled boring as fuck/time travel/alien free life a.k.a. reality.