Hail to the Extraterrestrials

It’s getting awfully crowded and lonely here on Earth

I have said it before. The universe is impossibly vast.

“Our Galaxy is just a single galaxy part of a local galaxy cluster. Our nearest neighbouring galaxy is Andromeda at 2 500 000 light years away. It contains around 1 trillion (1 000 000 000 000) stars.

There are more galaxies in the universe than there are stars in the Milky Way.

If there were 200 000 000 000 stars in as many galaxies, that would mean there were around 40 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 stars in the known universe. And that’s probably an underestimate.”

Many stars probably won’t have planets in their orbits. Others most certainly will. Lets just say that it evens out to around 1 planet for every 2 stars. That would say that there are roughly 20 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 planets. Life has roughly a 1 in a trillion chance of evolving… so that’s still 20 billion planets which could harbour life. Then, not every planet may be capable of supporting some kind of life; we must remember that given the time, life could probably evolve in any environment. It may not be the kind of life that inhabits Earth, but it could be some sort of system that exhibits all of the characteristics that defines it as living. It will maintain negative entropy, obtain energy from its environment, be able to release energy for homeostatic usage and will react to change to avoid falling into equilibrium. Let’s round it down to around a potential 6 billion life supporting planets that are out there.

All of a sudden, it doesn’t seem like a bad idea, this idea of life on other planets. We must remember that extraterrestrial life doesn’t necessarily refer to little green men, or any bipedal organism. It could probably be microbial life, not too different from our bacteria in terms of shape and size. However, we are exploring new dimensions of life. All life harbouring planets may not be like Earth. They may be cold, they may be hot. What a planet essentially needs is the correct diversity of chemicals with which to build complex organisms. Extraterrestrial life may not require water or breathe oxygen like us. It may not even be carbon based. Given the time, life has the capability to obtain any form. It could be beyond our current imaginations.
Many of us assume that life lives by our perception of time. This is perfectly understandable, but is a common misnomer. Even on Earth, many organisms have long life-spans which are out of sync with the human sense of time. Plants, a different kingdom of life, are exemplary of this fact. Many tree species are capable of living for thousands of years. A giant redwood may be 200 years and still be relatively young as far as redwoods are concerned. The oldest multicellular organisms are the bristlecone pines of North America. They have been known to live for up to 10, 000 years. Other organisms from a different domain of life altogether, i.e. bacteria, can live for many thousands of years also. Some bacteria from colder environments are also reported to have life-spans as long as bristlecone pines, if not even longer.

This being said, life which may have evolved on other planets may also live for many thousands of years. Perhaps even millions of years. Cold planets, or indeed cold moons, may harbour small life forms which have ridiculously long life-spans. Our whole ‘a year is a long time’ thing is just ape perception.

However, intelligence isn’t quite as absurd as it sounds. If we refer back to the large numbers from before, detailing the sheer number of planets capable of theoretically harbouring life, and then couple it with the fact that the universe is over 13 billion years old, we could feel a glimmer of hope that somewhere out there is some kind of intelligent life. It may be more advanced than us, it may be less advanced than us, it may look like us, and it may not look like us. Life on Earth has existed for around 4 billion years. This is mainly due to the age of the Earth itself, and the period of the suns life cycle it happened to evolve in. Older planets than Earth may well have had longer to evolve life, and reach some kind of intelligence; perhaps life which has learned to utilise tools. We really don’t know, but the statistics and numbers do indicate that life should exist somewhere else, other than Earth.

This is all pure speculation, and many of the numbers I used were merely educated guesses, but what is undisputable is the sheer size of the universe and there are countless opportunities out there for some kind of life to exist. In the grand story of life itself, the Homo sapiens are a fledgling species. Other dominant groups, although they did not seem to achieve the intelligence necessary to extend their phenotype, dominated the Earth for millions of years. The dinosaurs, the insects, now it is the mammals. Though rather than a family of dominant animals, it is a single species of dominant animals. That is what intelligence gives us; exclusive dominion. We don’t necessarily need to share it with our mammal cousins (yeah, screw you Elephants). As far as human survival is concerned, this is a double edged sword. It allows us to survive, but then our populations get so large that we need to expand our territories. We seem to have got to the point where space is running out, and our bloated population is causing problems for the balance of life on Earth, and indeed the balance of Earths other systems. Other organisms are normally kept in check by predators or the availability of food. Well, we’ve forcibly inserted ourselves at the top of the food chain and we can cultivate our own food. Biologically speaking, controlling these two factors should allow us to reproduce until we run out of space, and that seems to be happening. When the population reaches a breaking point, what will we do? The only major threats to us now are viruses, other humans and ourselves.

Viruses are yet to be defeated by any real cure, and spread and mutate so fast that it nigh on impossible to halt a virus pandemic. We are indeed our own worst enemy, we the scourge of the animal kingdom. We kill each other out of cold blood, wage annihilating wars and poison each other in the name of big business. Finally, we wind up killing ourselves through gross unhealthy living, neglect and general laziness. When it comes down to it, a population crash is unlikely in the near future, the population of humans on Earth is rising at a faster rate each and every year, and technology to sustain life for even longer being developed at an alarming rate. I think it is wonderful that scientists are innovating such inventions, as death of a fellow human is genuinely tragic. Population must be controlled by prevention, as opposed to cure (which would unethical to the point of absurdity). The question is, how on Earth do you limit the population of the planet? To stop families from bearing children is most definitely a violation of their human rights. If people want children, then they are at perfect liberty to have children. Continuation of the species is a basic life process. So what must be done? ‘Education’, or rather brainwashing to change the minds of people so they do not want to have children. It sounds horrible and extreme, but the truth has a habit of being mean and sneery. The truth isn’t always good. Yet a fact of sentient life that we must deal with. The population could continue expanding as it is, and it will take its toll on the environment, very heavily. I am not saying this as a ‘tree hugger’ but as somebody concerned for the welfare of life on Planet Earth. An increasing population will mean moving into forest lands, and generating more energy and producing food, all which require space and fuel. Emissions will rise higher than ever, average global temperatures will rise, ice caps will continue to melt, there will be an increased concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, all of the freshwater being poured into the sea from the melting ice will disrupt the salinity in parts of the ocean thus disrupting delicate but life giving ocean currents. Weather systems and the distribution of heat around the world will change. Sea levels could rise, species could be wiped out, cities sunk and so on. It sounds like a horror story, or ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, yet it is just another example of chaos theory. Increases people could lead to a scenario like this, unless greener technologies are used globally (not likely given the current situation) or we humans colonise other worlds. Currently, the latter would be logistical nightmare, not to mention a scientific endeavour that would stretch the minds of scientists and empty the banks of nations – not something governments could do with currently. Verily, we are stuck in a rut. Perhaps if there were some kind of intelligent extraterrestrials out there, we could learn from them? If we moved to other planets, we would be kind of extraterrestrials, especially any children born on another planet.

Another point worth mentioning is that we wish to communicate with aliens; if they are out there, and we wish to communicate with them in peace… perhaps we should remember that we can’t even get along with each other over simple matters such as money. What could happen with aliens with the prospect of invaluable technology on the line? Well, given the distance they would probably live at, nothing. Our technologies wouldn’t enable us to do much to them except send them a nasty message which they wouldn’t receive until we changed our mind about being so mean to them – especially if they did have the technology to colonise other planets. Offence could lead our planet to be the next to be ‘colonised’… this sounds like something out of science fiction, and I think I am getting ahead of myself here. I shall stick with more plausible science and remain with the notion that any life nearby is probably not sentient, not advanced enough to communicate with us simply or doesn’t want to talk to us if they are sentient, and to be honest were that the case, given the current state of world affairs, I wouldn’t blame them.