My God, It’s Full of Stars…
To those who maybe haven’t picked up on some of them yet, I’m a fan of the discreet pop-culture reference. The title of this week’s article isn’t just a quote from 2001: A Space Odyssey — it’s also a thought that many people have when gazing up into the void of night.
When we look up at the night sky, it’s impossible not to feel small and insignificant. Each one of those tiny dots illuminating the dark canvas that extends over our heads in the fleeting light of day is a star much like our own sun. Some are bigger. Some are smaller. Some are closer, and some are farther away by orders of magnitude. Some of the stars emitting those bits of light that travel through space, completely unobstructed, for hundreds of millions of miles, have burned out long ago, and what we’re seeing now is just the remnant of what they once were.
The celestial bodies and the wonderment they inspire even played a huge role in the development of the earliest human civilizations. The Druids, the Mayans, the Incas, the Egyptians and many others all had advanced methods of tracking the movement of the stars. These methods were often incorporated into the architecture of their temples and monuments, and the stars naturally inspired stories about who, or what, could be out there. This fascination is something that modern humans still share with all of those ancient civilizations that came before us.
“Up there, up there in the vastness of space, in the void that is sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars waiting, waiting with the patience of eons, forever waiting … in the Twilight Zone.” — Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone, Season 1, Episode 1: “Where Is Everybody?”
One of the most common questions that people come up with while staring into the abyss of the night sky is, “Are we alone?” Some believe, despite having evidence that ranges from non-existent to dubious at best, that we have already been visited by other civilizations from the stars. (Interestingly enough, according to many “abductees”, most extraterrestrials seem to be particularly … anally fixated. How does a species get to be advanced enough to traverse space and time and yet not know what that orifice does without abducting another species, from another planet, and probing it?!) Others believe that we are privileged; that we are — and could only be — the sole form of intelligent life that exists anywhere in the universe. While it’s certainly possible, is it really likely? People much smarter than myself say no.
First of all, it is not an “impossibility” for intelligent life to exist in the universe (here we are!). In fact, many scientists already embrace the possibility. Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, and Stephen Hawking are all quite outspoken on the matter. Frank Drake, astrophysicist and astronomer, developed what is known as the Drake Equation to predict the number of intelligent alien civilizations that may exist in the universe. The scale of the universe and the laws of probability tell us that alien life could in fact be quite common.
When Frank Drake first proposed his equation in 1961, we had yet to even locate the first planet that didn’t orbit our own sun. It wasn’t until 1995 that scientists were able to confirm the existence of the very first exoplanet that orbited another sun-like star. First, we were able to confirm one planet (51 Pegasi b) — then, dozens and hundreds followed not far behind.
There may be as many as half a trillion (500,000,000,000) planets in our own Milky Way Galaxy. Just think … If only one in ten thousand of those planets contains the proper parameters required to support life, that still leaves about 50 million possible life-harboring planets. What about one planet in every million planets? That’s still 500,000 planets that could possibly contain life. Furthermore, the required conditions that we look for in a planet that may contain life are only the parameters that we are accustomed to seeing, based on what we know from the life that has evolved on Earth. It is possible that elsewhere in the universe, organisms have evolved under very different and very alien conditions. We only think that life can arise on planets that are similar to our own. Could it not be possible that life on other planets evolved to suit their environments just as we evolved to suit ours? Silicon biochemistry? Methane-based life? Something even more alien? Regardless, any life that may have arisen in other parts of the universe would undoubtedly be very different from anything we see on earth. Sadly, the remarkably human-looking aliens we see in the likes of Star Trek are not very likely.
Anyways…
If the existence of alien civilizations is possible, or even likely, why haven’t we heard from any of them yet? Why haven’t we been paid a visit from them? This question is known as the Fermi Paradox, named after Enrico Fermi. This paradox expresses the contradiction between the lack of evidence and simultaneously high probability of the existence of extraterrestrial life in the universe. Given the vastness of the universe, it remains a scientific (or technological) impossibility for us to travel to, or to attempt to send and receive communications with, distant lifeforms in a timely fashion. After all, it would take 100,000 years of light-speed travel to traverse the diameter of The Milky Way alone. And that’s only one of the estimated 100 billion galaxies in the universe. (In case you want to see that number in print, thats 100,000,000,000.)
And it’s also possible that there have already been advanced, intelligent civilizations throughout the universe. Perhaps, as we’re beginning to see in just our own lonely corner of the universe, there’s something inherently self-destructive about a species that achieves intelligence by adapting, evolving, and learning how to best overcome and dominate all other life with which it was once in competition. When you think about it, humans are alive today only because we were able to kill and destroy literally every other thing that once posed a danger to us. We are the best at dominating every other living thing on Earth. How can we expect anything but our own demise after our meteoric rise to the top of the food chain due to our inventive, yet destructive, nature? This, too, is a bit of a digression.
Why does any of this matter though? We may never really know if there’s life out there, so who really cares? We should. Human arrogance and “exceptionalism” are probably best embodied by the assumption that we are alone in the universe, that we are somehow — and by someone or something — chosen. The moment we believe that, the search for truth about the universe in which we live screeches to a halt. Progress and technological advancements come to a halt. I am tempted to try my hand here at explaining just what it is that I’m trying to say, but, fortunately for me, astrophysicist, cosmologist, and author Neil deGrass Tyson has said it with much more grace and aplomb (and I also have to give a nod to the great Avenged Sevenfold for bringing this quote to the mainstream):
“We have one collective hope: the Earth. And yet, uncounted people remain hopeless; famine and calamity abound. Sufferers hurl themselves into the arms of war; people kill and get killed in the name of someone else’s concept of God. Do we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us? Each fabricated conflict, self-murdering bomb, vanished airplane, every fictionalized dictator, biased or partisan, and wayward son, are part of the curtains of society’s racial, ethnic, religious, national, and cultural conflicts, and you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers. When I track the orbits of asteroids, comets, and planets, each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet, choreographed by the forces of gravity, I see beyond the plight of humans. I see a universe ever-expanding, with its galaxies embedded within the ever-stretching four-dimensional fabric of space and time. However big our world is, our hearts, our minds, our outsized atlases, the universe is even bigger. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on the world’s beaches, more stars in the universe than seconds of time that have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived. The day we cease the exploration of the cosmos is the day we threaten the continuing of our species. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their low-contracted prejudices, and would have seen the last gasp of human enlightenment until the rise of a visionary new culture that once again embraces the cosmic perspective; a perspective in which we are one, fitting neither above nor below, but within.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson
