Are we Alone In The Universe?
- 10 Aug 2004But I'm enthusiastic about these searches, because of the import of any manifestly artificial signal. Even if we couldn't make much sense of it, we'd have learnt that 'intelligence' wasn't unique and had emerged elsewhere. Our cosmos would seem far more interesting; we would look at a distant star with renewed interest if we knew it was another Sun, shining on a world as intricate and complex as our own.
![]() NASA Galaxies, stars and planets, a cosmic structure we share with any aliens |
If we ever established contact with aliens, what could we discuss with them? I've argued in a new book that we're assured one common interest. We'd belong to the same universe of stars and planets, all made of similar atoms and governed by universal laws. We'd all trace our origins back to a single 'genesis event' -- the so-called 'big bang', which happened about 12 billion years ago.
To firm up the odds on alien life, we need to understand how life begins and evolves. An extraordinary precession of species (almost all now extinct) have swum, crawled and flown during the Earth’s 4.5 billion year history. For a billion years, primitive 'bugs' exhaled oxygen, transforming the young Earth's poisonous atmosphere and clearing the way for our eventual emergence. We know from fossils that a cornucopia of swimming and creeping things evolved during the Cambrian era 550 million years ago. The next 200 million years saw the greening of the land, offering a habitat for exotic creatures ---dragonflies as big as seagulls, millipedes a yard long, giant scorpions and squid-like sea-monsters. Then came the dinosaurs. Their sudden demise opened the way to mammals -- to the evolution of apes and us. We are the outcome of time and chance: if evolution was 're-run', there would be no humans, and we can't predict whether any other species would achieve our dominant role. So we can't lay firm odds on whether 'intelligence' would emerge on another Earth-like planet.




Posted by: theoreticperson - 2008-05-27 - 17:16 GMT
I don't know if we are alone or not, but I know there is a vast space out there. I hate to think that only we are using it - what a waste if we are the only ones.
Posted by: guest - 2008-05-12 - 12:05 GMT
My own theory is this:
There is something bigger than us but we are too small to see it. Take a good example: from the invention of the microscope we are able to see microscopic life. We are part of another microscopic life of ag reater magnitude such as the Universe. We are trying do decipher something so big that we still have a lot of questions.
Jaime F. Navarro
Posted by: Fernixx - 2008-05-12 - 12:05 GMT


Please copy the 5 symbols from this security code image into the box below to submit comment.













