THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

According to a very conservative estimate there are one billion known galaxies in this seemingly infinite universe. “Milky way” our galaxy is one of the very small galaxies in the universe. Every galaxy has billions of stars. Our Sun is just one of those billions of stars in a corner of the Milky Way with a bunch of insignificant rocks orbiting around it.

It is scientifically untenable to assume that our earth is the only place in this infinite universe with life forms. We do not have any reason to believe that only our earth has some special qualities to evolve life. If favorable conditions exist and enough time was given, the universe would be teeming with life.

Well-known scientist and nuclear physicist, Enrico Fermi, famously asked in the year 1950 in a scientific gathering in Los Alamos “So where is everybody?”

Mankind was always obsessed scientifically and philosophically with the question whether we are alone in this vast universe. This question was addressed and popularized by some leading modern-day astronomers including Dr.Carl Sagan, who had contributed significantly to the research of extra-terrestrial life. He has also written some great books on the subject. I firmly believe “We are not alone”.

  

The Fact, Fiction and Fantasies

The stories of visitors coming from their heavenly abodes to earth could be seen in abundance in ancient traditions and mythologies of various countries. In ancient civilizations like India, Egypt, China and Latin America there are mythological references about the heavenly visitors landing in our earth using flying machines and performing many miracles. In the year 1968, Erich von Daniken, a Swiss, wrote a hugely successful book called “Chariots of Gods”. In that book he had proposed a theory that the earth was visited several times by ancient astronauts from other galaxies. He had cited many ancient structures like pyramids of Egypt and Mayan temples, astronaut-like figures and flying machines in the ancient paintings, stone carvings and other artifacts as proof of his theory. The book was quite entertaining and an instant hit. The fact that it was a bestseller for many months was a clear indication of people’s interest in the topic of alien visitors. In the wake of the success of this book many others followed suit with many crackpot theories of ancient astronauts.

Another phenomenon connected to the mankind’s obsession with extraterrestrial intelligence, was the UFO and Flying Saucers. In the year 1953, George Adamski, a self-proclaimed “ufologist” published a book called “Flying saucers have landed”. He claimed that he had witnessed the landing of a spacecraft with the shape of a flying saucer. According to Adamski an alien visitor from the planet Venus had emerged from the spacecraft, wearing a golden space suit, and communicated telepathically with him. Suddenly he became a very popular figure with a huge cult following. He had published a few more books, in which he claimed the he had been taken for space travel to other planets by the alien visitors. With these wild claims he had started loosing his credibility.

The subject of UFO (Unidentified Flying Objects) still continues to excite people all over the world. Hardly a day is passed without a report on UFO citing or abduction of people by the extraterrestrial visitors. The Web is full of stories about UFO visits, photographs of mysterious flying objects and alleged crashing of alien spacecrafts on earth etc. The word UFO is one of the most popular search keywords in Web search engines.

Even though most of the UFO citing could be explained as optical illusions or having natural causes, we cannot deny the fact that some of the UFO events remain mysterious without any possible scientific explanations. Some serious investigations have started taking place in many parts of the world about the UFO phenomena and the reported cases of abduction of people by aliens.

In addition to the popular books, there is some serious writing also on the topic of extraterrestrial intelligence. The list of authors includes eminent intellectuals like Carl Sagan, Arthur C.Clarke, Arthur Koestler and Colin Wilson. Dr.Carl Sagan was instrumental in setting up an institution called SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence). Sir Arthur C.Clarke had theorized a strong possibility of presence of life in two places in our immediate neighborhood - in Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter and Titan, one of the moons of Saturn.

One of the all-time great movies “2001, a space odyssey” written by Sir Clarke, presented a scientific and philosophical approach to the theme of alien intelligence.  Other important movies with this theme are “The War of the Worlds” (based on the classic novel written by H.G.Wells), “ET, the Extraterrestrial” and “Close Encounters of the third kind” by the Oscar winning director Steven Spielberg. Of the above four movies “The War of the Worlds” provided a frightening scenario of Martians invading and attacking Earth. This novel had four movie versions (the latest one was made by Spielberg). The “Star wars” movies made by George Lucas approached this theme as scientific fantasy in the backdrop of a futuristic fictional universe.

“Star Trek” and “X-Files” are the two most popular TV serials, which dealt with this subject - the first one being exclusively about inter-galactic adventure. Both of them were phenomenal hits and have left indelible mark in the history of Television entertainment.

“The Truth is out there” is a very famous and popular slogan shown with every episode of “X-Files”. This was selected as one of the 100 greatest TV catchphrases along with “Space, the Final Frontier”, the slogan of “Star Trek” series.

Are we from other planets?

Dr.Fred Hoyle and Dr.Chandra Wickramasinghe two great astronomers of modern times had proposed a revolutionary theory called “Panspermia”. The hypothesis of Panspermia says that the “seeds” of life is already present in the universe and they are carried by interstellar cloud, interstellar travelers such as comets, meteors etc and delivered to other destinations. Then the life had started thriving in favourable environment like our earth. One of the arguments, for this assumption, was based on the comparative study of the time of the appearance of earliest signs of life on the earth and the estimated time of origin of earth itself. The result has shown that only a very narrow window of time was available between these two events and the time was not sufficient for the complex life forms to evolve. They speculated that new life forms continue to enter our atmosphere and this may be the reason for epidemic outbreaks and new diseases caused by previously unknown causes. This theory still remains untested. Fred Hoyle had written a science fiction novel called “Life Cloud” based on this idea.

Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, who had discovered the structure of DNA, was the proponent of a much bolder theory of “Directed Panspermia”. Dr.Crick with Dr.Leslie Orgel, another eminent scientist had proposed that the fertilization of life on earth might have been done with deliberate seeding by a technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilization. They argued, “If life on earth sprang from some “primeval soup”, as many biologists believe, why various organisms with a number of different genetic codes don’t exist? Why there is only a single code for all terrestrial life?”

The Search 

The earnest and a systematic attempt to search, for extraterrestrial life and intelligence, were started with the establishment of SETI in 1960 at Cornell University. Later it was expanded in 1971 with the funding by NASA. In the year 1984 SETI institute was set up in California. “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” and “Life in the Universe” are the two areas of research undertaken in SETI institute.

Dr.Carl Sagan warns us about the possible gap in the level of intelligence and evolution between an advanced alien civilization and us. In the CETI conference of 1971 Dr.Sagan summed up this situation as follows: 

“Advanced extraterrestrial civilizations will be inconceivably in advance of our own. We have only to consider the changes in mankind in the last 10,000 years and the potential difficulties, which our Pleistocene ancestors would have in accommodating to our present society to realize what an unfathomable gap 100 million to 1 billion years represents. Such societies will have discovered laws of nature and invented technologies whose applications will appear to us indistinguishable from magic. There is a serious question about whether such societies are concerned with communicating with us, any more than we are concerned with communicating with our protozoan or bacterial forebears. We may study microorganisms, but we do not actually communicate with them”.

To design a foolproof experiment, we need to have a clear understanding about the nature of life and the definition of intelligence. What is life? How do we define life? How do we detect intelligence, even if we encounter an alien life form? - These are the important fundamental questions we have to address. Unfortunately we still do not have an absolute understanding about the concept of life and the signs of intelligence. Our understanding is quite inadequate and limited within the framework of earth. We try to detect life or intelligence in alien environments based on our limited earth-bound definitions. 

We tend to make a lot of assumptions when we plan our experiments to communicate with the extraterrestrial intelligence. We believe since mathematics is a direct reflection of the structure of the universe, it would be safe to assume that other advanced civilizations also would have the same understanding. We cannot be sure about this. We rely too much on mathematics as a means of communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. This belief may be misplaced. We perceive the world with our primary senses and locate objects in a three dimensional space. This need not be universally same.

In 1972, Carl Sagan together with Frank Drake had designed a plaque to be placed on the Pioneer 10 space-craft. The plaque was intended as a message for any extraterrestrial intelligence who might intercept the space-craft in future in a far off region of space. Pioneer spacecraft left the solar system in the year 1983. This year another spacecraft, the Voyager 1, had become the first manmade object to enter the interstellar space, continuing its journey into the unknown expanse of the inter-galactic frontiers.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke in one of his scientific articles raised this very pertinent question: “Is there intelligent life on earth?”