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 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?”
There is surely life somewhere else in the universe. Our experiments and observations should be directed to finding such life, which is similar to us, well within our framework of understanding. We will not be capable of communicating or even identifying life forms that are vastly different from humans.
ReplyDelete