where is everybody?
Where is everybody? (in the universe)
The question about the existence of extra-terrestrial life has puzzled the scientists for centuries. we often find ourselves asking the question “are we alone in the universe?”
Well, if you ask me, I think that life is thriving in our universe and even in our own galaxy! If there is such an abundance of life in our universe, why haven’t we found any, or contacted even one of the alien species?
Well, to contact any alien civilization and for them to detect our signals, the aliens we are contacting must be an intelligent civilization. There is a difference between the presence of life and intelligent life. Intelligent life is very rare in the universe for in around 3.5 billion years of life on earth, it has occurred only once with humans.
So, contacting aliens require the aliens to be smart. Or it can be the other way round, the aliens could be sending signals to us, but we are just not technically capable of detecting them. A famous scientist called Drake gave a famous equation which predicted the number of detectable intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. With his calculation he found that there could be around 50,000 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy alone! So, it’s pretty clear that there are many intelligent civilizations out there. Then why are they not responding to our signals?
Well maybe they are. We have been sending signal for about a hundred years, and as radio waves travel at the speed of light, so they would have reached about a hundred light years by now. And if a civilization at a distance of hundred light years from us has received it, it would take another hundred years for their reply to reach us. So maybe, we should just wait for their reply.
In the 20th century, a famous scientist known as Enrico Fermi devised that, “there are approximately 100 billion stars in the solar system and most of them have planets revolving them, and if we think that few of the billions of them are earth like and have life on them. As milky way is around ten billion years old some of these alien civilizations had had enough time to develop interstellar travel, even if it’s slow, the aliens would have explored the entire galaxy by now. So according to this hypothesis Fermi asked, “WHERE IS EVERYBODY?”
What I believe as a solution to the Fermi paradox is that most of the civilizations die out even before they reach the phase of interstellar travel. Think of a planet as an island in the middle of a Pacific Ocean. And the people of the planet as the residents of our island. The people evolve, developed, did farming, built infrastructure on their small country. Formed small tribes. But as hundreds of years passed the did small exploration in about a 100 km radius of their island and didn’t found any other human except them. They believed that the entire planet is uninhabited and died on that island because they had depleted all their natural resources even before building a ship to explore the entire earth.
This the same with a civilization, most of them die out even before leaving their planet. And think that they are alone in the universe. This is one of the many solutions to the Fermi paradox. This can also be the case of earth, as all it takes to wipe out our civilization is a creative virus, a nuclear war, an asteroid impact or even the eruption of a super volcano on the planet can kill us even before exploring the whole solar system.
Another solution to the paradox is that maybe the universe had not been favorable to life before around 5 billion years ago, the same time earth was formed, and we are one of the first intelligent life in the universe. And will be the first to explore milky way.
Or maybe it is true, we are in fact alone in this whole universe. The chances of this is quite low, and there is in fact no real way of determining this. And if this is true it would mean that there are two possibilities- either we are the first life in the universe or the last.
Either way if we are alone in the universe or not both are equally terrifying but humanity should never loose the hope of finding life beyond our small blue dot drifting endlessly into the darkness of space!
Thank you guys reading this. And also check out my previous article on medium by clicking on this link https://medium.com/@jainsidharth100/in-search-for-a-new-home-39d72490263f, if you liked this article don’t forget to follow me.
