Everybody? What do I mean by that?
Not your friends, not those boring relatives, and definitely not your loud neighbors, even though this ‘everybody’ is technically all those terms. I’m talking about our System… Solar system and outer space and beyond.
With movies like E.T, Arrival, and The Independence day, Our Mankind has been searching and questioning our universe and interstellar space for signs of ‘the others’.
‘Where are they?’
‘Which part of the universe do they live in?’
‘Who are they?’
‘What kinds of powers do they harness?’
Somewhere out there in that vast universe, there must surely be countless other planets or parallel universes teeming with life, but why don’t we see any evidence of it?
Conspiracy theorists claim that UFOs are visiting all the time and are being covered up:
There have been numerous cases about alien findings, mainly in the US — their military base ‘Area 51’, they may sound very intriguing but honestly, they aren’t too convincing.
In the past years, the Kepler space observatory has found hundreds of planets just around nearby stars, and if you extrapolate that data, it looks like there could be half a trillion planets just in our own galaxy.
So here’s the riddle: Our Earth didn’t form until about 9 billion years after the Big Bang. Countless other planets in our galaxy should have formed earlier and given life a chance to get underway billions or certainly many millions of years earlier than happened on Earth. If just a few of them had spawned intelligent life and started creating technologies, those technologies would have had millions of years to grow in complexity and power. On Earth, we’ve seen how dramatically technology can accelerate in just 100 years. In millions of years, an intelligent alien civilization could easily have spread out across the galaxy, perhaps creating giant energy-harvesting artifacts, or fleets of colonizing spaceships that could be taking over our galaxy while we’re here, listening to me talk about it, what are the odds of that happening huh?
At the very least, you’d think they’d be revealing their presence, deliberately or otherwise, through electromagnetic signals. And yet we see no convincing evidence of any of it.
Why?
Well, there are various possible answers, some of them quite dark. Maybe a single, superintelligent civilization has indeed taken over the galaxy, and has imposed strict silence through our milky way because it’s paranoid of any rivalries, just sitting there ready to obliterate anything that becomes a threat, and who knows, maybe we’re next? Perhaps we could call the guardians of the galaxy. Ask Peter Quill to bring his troop with rocket raccoon’s machine guns and destroy them and Groot just there…dancing. Or maybe they’re not that intelligent. Or perhaps, the evolution of an intelligence capable of creating sophisticated technology is far rarer than we’ve assumed. Maybe even that was incredibly lucky, maybe we are the first such civilization in our galaxy.
But there are countless other positive answers.
For starters, we’re not looking that hard. Only a tiny fraction of the stars in our galaxy have been studied for indications of a fascinating life. And perhaps, we’re not examing the right path. Maybe as civilizations develop, they quickly discover communication technologies far more sophisticated and useful than electromagnetic waves. Maybe all the action takes place inside the mysterious recently discovered dark matter, that appears to account for most of the universe’s mass.
Perhaps intelligent civilizations come to realize that life is ultimately just multiplex of patterns of information, which could take place more efficiently on a small scale. And just as on Earth, clunky stereo systems have shrunk to beautiful, tiny iPods, maybe intelligent life itself, to reduce its footprint on the environment, has turned itself microscopic, so the Solar System might be teeming with aliens, and we’re just not able to observe or notice them. Maybe the very ideas in our heads are a form of alien life.
Well, okay, that’s a crazy thought. The aliens made me say it.
But it is cool that ideas do seem to have a life all of their own, and that they outlive their creators. Maybe biological life is just a passing phase. Well, within the next 15 years, we could start seeing real information from nearby planets that will reveal facts unknown about them.
You may have heard the not-so-recent news from the US department of defense — Pentagon, finally releasing three videos of what they call ‘’Unidentified aerial phenomena’’, the footage was taken by the US navy pilots, who were shockingly excited to see it (which lately they’ve taken up the initiative to build a force for UFO sightings). In the meantime The former US senator comments, ‘’I’m glad the Pentagon is finally releasing this footage, but it only scratches the surface of research and materials available’’.
What he’s trying to say is that we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg when there’s something significant and much colossal waiting for us underneath.
- You can now check out the official video through the link below!
And meanwhile, SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence,
is now releasing its data to the public so that millions of citizen scientists, maybe including you, can bring the power of the crowd to join the search. All of this will help us understand whether the universe is teeming with life or whether indeed, it’s just us. Either answer, in its own way, is awe-inspiring, because even if we are alone, the fact that we think and dream, and ask these questions might yet turn out to be one of the most important facts about the universe. The quest for knowledge and understanding never gets dull. It really doesn’t. It’s actually the opposite. The more you know, the more interesting the world seems. And it’s the crazy possibilities, the unanswered questions, that pull us forward, like something out of a mystery novel.
Meanwhile here’s a little article to keep your eye out for our ‘neighbors’
One key thing before you leave: Never ever stop questioning and stay curious.
