Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Are They Amongst Us?
You are walking down an empty alley one wet evening having just been through a tiring day at work. All that is on your mind is how warm the water is gonna be on your body when you have your bath. How large the sandwich would look like and the depth your teeth can sink in a single bite. You are so engrossed in these pleasant thoughts that you do not notice the queer-looking silhouette some few feet away. Your hands are buried deep in your pockets as you zip through the gravel eager to get home until---oops! You bump into ‘someone’. You look up in askance only to gawk at what is before you. Your eyes wide with fright, you stammer your apologies and bolt the rest of the way. You reach your house panting and try to convince yourself that what you saw was not real. An illusion at most. Maybe some of the drugs Dr. X gave you are causing hallucinations ... Or so you think. Well, my friend, you might be right but I am certain what you just came across was an extraterrestrial life form.
For those of us unfamiliar with the term ‘extraterrestrial intelligence’, no stress. It’s just a lengthier way to say ‘Aliens!’. Or at least that is what our English experts tell us anyway.
Nowadays, the existence of extraterrestrial life seems to have been considered inconsequential… But is it? In the past, there have been several scientific kinds of research and even theories all in a bid to answer the obvious yet looming question,' Do aliens exist?’.
You haven’t told me anything, but I’m sure we all have thought about this issue at one point or the other in our lives. We have seen several movies depicting the occurrence of such. But in reality, what do we really make out of all these?
Most of us do see it as an irrelevant issue. After all, what matters if they do exist anyway? Even if they’ve actually been on the earth all this while, they haven’t caused us any trouble meaning they’re harmless…right? That was my line of thought until I came across one of the most bizarre sights of my life. Now, I won’t go into details but I would want us to retrospect this phenomenon,’ What if they really do thrive on our planet?’, ‘What if they have been just waiting for the right time to surprise us?’ Any answers?
When I earlier mentioned there were theories on this matter, I wasn’t bluffing. Perhaps I would have included ‘tons of theories' because of the myriad of postulates I’ve encountered on this issue. One of such and perhaps the most famous of all is given by no other than our man, Enrico Fermi, a renowned physicist.
This famous theory, called Fermi’s Paradox, began with a simple and impulsive three-word question ‘Where is everyone?’ It was at a lunch gathering of different scientists in 1950 so of course, as geeky as they were, you wouldn’t expect them to discuss how tasty the food was, right? As Edward Teller, a fellow theoretical physicist popularly known as the father of the hydrogen bomb later recalled-
‘The result of his question was general laughter because of the strange fact that in spite of Fermi’s question coming out of the clear blue, everybody seemed to understand at once what he was talking about.’
Another scientist and physicist, Herbert York, who was also present at that time wrote this in a letter-
‘Somehow and perhaps it was connected to the prior conversation (in the way you describe, even though I do not remember that) we all knew he meant extraterrestrials.’
To better explain the Fermi Paradox, we know that our planet earth is just one of many in the solar system. Now let’s imagine the earth is a small spherical ball. This ball is revolving with about eight other balls each of slightly different sizes around a larger ball of greater mass. These are just a small part of a huge system of revolving balls. Taking our imagination a teeny-weeny further, let’s picture a scenario of about 700 quintillion balls. Can you? Well, for those of us who can, kudos! For most like me who find it difficult to fathom such an image, don’t stress it. It’s just one of those things.
According to Fermi’s paradox, since there is a large number of planets, the probability for life existing on one or some of them is extremely high…but there isn’t any evidence of such.
…Or is there?…
Let’s dive a little deep into astronomy. No worries, we won’t go into the boring stuff.
It is generally known that our all-time sun is a star. There are about 70 septillion stars in the observable universe. That’s 7 followed by 23 zeros! There is also what is called the ‘circumstellar habitable zone' or CHZ. This kinda oversized term is just what scientists use to refer to a region around a star that can support life. The CHZ can also be termed the ‘Goldilocks zone’. And yes, it is gotten from our lovely fairy tale ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’. Why it is so-called is because the CHZ is the ‘just right' zone. Not too hot. Never too cold. Just right.
The earth is in the CHZ of our solar system. Between the raging hot Venus and the relatively cool Mars. Now, according to research, there are few of these planets in the ‘just right' zone of other systems. Hence these planets have the ability to support life.
…So why can’t they?…
Scientists have been left baffled for years on these issues. There was even an occurrence about 44 years ago called the Wow! signal discovered by Astronomer Jerry Ehman at Ohio University on a radio signal device which was used then to detect frequencies from space called the Big Ear…(obviously)…
As Ehman later wrote-
‘I came across the strangest signal I had ever seen, and immediately scribbled Wow! next to it. At first, I thought it was an earth signal reflected from space debris, but after I studied it further, I found that couldn’t be the case’.
All these still lead to an unanswered question ‘Do extraterrestrial life exist?’
Moving on, …or rewind 50 years…we see that an Astrophysicist(can someone tell me why most of them are physicists?), Frank Drake, proposed the Drake Equation. This was done to determine the number of civilizations, N, we might be able to communicate with. I’ll leave the link to the calculator so our math nerds can fiddle around with-
https://www.spacecentre.nz/resources/tools/drake-equation-calculator.html
So why have they not communicated with us?…or we, them?…
Could it be because of the ‘zoo hypothesis?’- a wonky term to counter Fermi’s Paradox, stressing the fact that the extraterrestrials do not want to have anything to do with us. Could it be because of that?
I feel the big question we should really be thinking about and asking ourselves is ‘Are they not already amongst us?’
I would love to know what you think about this in the comments.
If you liked this article, you can hit me up on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/onwunaru-onisotoyin-0a240b200
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https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/users/~01f050aee0ba493120/
Looking forward to hearing from you all.
