Why Haven’t We Made Contact With Other Life?
Life has emerged from nothing more than a mere composition of atoms under the right circumstances. With the vastness of space, this process should occur abundantly across the universe in one way or another. This begs the question of why no one has contacted us. Is there even other life out there? Whatever the answer may be, it always leads me to the following quote by Arthur C. Clarke.
Either we are alone in this universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
Why is everyone slightly obsessed with the idea of extraterrestrial life. What is it that drives us to think there are other lifeforms out there and why would we want to meet them? Why do we depict them as walking beings with the same shapes as we have? There are UFO sightings every day and top box office movies like Arrival are loved by the general public. Human beings have a lot of imaginary power but something tells me that we will have to wait for a very very long time before imagination becomes reality. If you consider the age of the universe and the sheer vastness of it, you can already begin to realise that it is not so strange that no alien encounter has happened yet.
Fermi Paradox
This brilliant physicist already asked this question a long time ago. Enrico Fermi was a theoretical physicist and contributed a lot to atomic and nuclear physics, along with the Manhattan project and building the first atomic bomb. Like some of you already did, he asked the question “where is everybody” and began his mathematical journey. He stumbled upon what he called the Fermi Paradox. Everything rests on the principles of probability theory. The probability is so small and a lot of factors must align so perfectly that it is near impossible to happen according to probability theory. There are so many stars with even more planets revolving around them and so many things that will need to be in our favour before we can establish extraterrestrial contact. Nevertheless, we will try and see where it leads us.
There are several theories out there which will clarify the Fermi Paradox and why we haven’t encountered other alien lifeforms yet. Instead of going through the potential theories, I challenge you to reason for yourself and follow this thought journey along with me. Let’s start with the assumption that there is in fact intelligent life somewhere in this universe besides on Earth. Where would they be?
Distance
The sheer vastness of the universe will make it very difficult to travel to each other. If you think that Voyager 1 only made it to the Heliopause just recently, the heliopause is the theoretical boundary where the solar winds are stopped by the interstellar medium, so where in essence our tiny solar system grinds to a halt. Voyager 1 has already been travelling since 1977, so you can begin to reason that our universe is immensely large and will make encounters with other life extremely difficult. Alright, let’s presume that another life form is capable of near light-speed travel. Nothing can travel faster than light, but our alien life form can get close. This means that they can go a hell of a lot faster than our Voyager 1. Our neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda is distanced at roughly 2.5 million light-years, meaning light will have to travel 2.5 million years. This does not look good for our alien life form if they were located on Andromeda and would want to come and visit our tiny planet Earth. You’d begin to wonder if it is even useful to consider lifeforms farther than this. But think about the vastness of space, it is roughly 93 billion light-years. Yes, you have read that correctly. And without going into too much detail, this only takes the observable universe into consideration. We cannot observe anything beyond that because light hasn’t even reached us from beyond what is called the Hubble sphere.
Time
This does not look good. But we’ll stay positive and hope that our alien life form knows how to create wormholes and jump to anywhere in space. This takes us to consider something else, the age of the universe. The universe is very very old, over 13.7 billion years and we have been here for only a few tens of thousands of years. Our alien life form could developed itself from anywhere when the universe was 700 million years old until now. It took 700 million years for stellar structures to begin to form, so in an extreme and unlikely case, life could have developed from that point. Alright, this leaves us with looking at the cosmic calendar to get a good insight into how small our presence in this universe has been so far. This again does not look good for our alien life form.
This calendar depicts the age of the universe compressed to something we can relate to, a year. At the first of January, the universe was created with a big bang and if you look closely to the right, our existence only came into being on the last day of December and thus also the entire year. Time is not on our side, our alien life form could have existed and died out countless times before Earth was even born roughly 4.5 billion years ago. But again, we stay positive and we already presumed it had discovered warp speeds and thus interplanetary travel, so it did not die out due to catastrophic cosmic events.
Probabilities are decreasing but our alien life form can reach us with warp speeds, wormholes and the intelligence to stay alive throughout billions of years.
Willingness
What will they think of us when they reach and see us? Maybe they have seen countless civilisations like ours and will consider us as a doomed one and a dumb one. Will we be interesting enough to contact? Let’s think about it, they already lived for thousands or millions of years and discovered warp speed and interplanetary travel. We will be nothing more than monkeys roaming a planet and thinking highly of themselves because they can launch a small craft into space. What benefits will they gain for establishing contact with us? This again does not look very good for us and our chances for an encounter, but let’s stay positive (again) and assume that we are, in fact, and interesting life form.
We will now have our first encounter with alien life forms. Hold up, not so fast, we already made the presumption that our alien life form discovered warp speeds and interplanetary travel. Those odds are very very slim already, so let’s increase the odds and we will assume that an alien encounter through electromagnetic waves is already sufficient to get our excitement up.
Intelligence
Our alien life form will have to be self-aware before they can even reach or contact us. Life could be abundant in space, but what are the chances that species become self-aware as we did? There might as well be planets covered in water and ice like Europa, a moon of Jupiter, which can harbour life close to its hot core. Planets which atmosphere is composed of methane which could lead to creatures swimming through the skies. Chances are slim for life to evolve let alone intelligent self-aware life forms like us.
This begs the question of what would have happened if the dinosaurs did not go extinct 60 million years ago by the meteorite impact in Chicxulub, would intelligent self-aware life have arisen? What exactly are the right ingredients for self-awareness and will all life eventually evolve a species which is self-aware? So many questions, so little answers. We will have to make the assumption that our alien life forms will have evolved to be self-aware in order to be able to contact us.
Communication
If intelligent self-aware extraterrestrial life is out there in the same time as us, is willing to talk to us and is not too far away, it will try to make contact through electromagnetic waves. But what happens if we are not listening closely enough and we are missing out on their messages. Maybe they have developed ways of communication far more advanced than us and we just don’t have the means to receive those messages. Maybe they just don’t want to communicate with us because they think it is too dangerous.
If everything aligns properly and all of the above requirements are met we will, at last, have something to talk about that is greater than humanity itself. To conclude this journey, let’s take a look at the ‘wow’ signal discovered in 1977 and was thought at that time to be evidence of extraterrestrial life trying to make contact. What an exciting discovery must that have been. Unfortunately, as with every UFO sighting or evidence of alien communication, there is a logical scientific explanation. It is until recently that we discovered that this signal originated from comets and their Hydrogen gas. Let’s hope we will again be amazed by signals from deep space which we can deem a ‘wow’ moment.
We will have to wait a little longer for our first contact but everyone will stay fascinated by the possibility, ever so slightly, that we are not alone in this universe. Which you know is terrifying according to Arthur C. Clarke.
