The Question of Extra-Terrestrial Life

Humans are very arrogant animals. We have always thought of ourselves as superior, as special, as one of a kind and divinely designed, and thus unsurmountable in complexity and purpose. Well, there are certain problems with that notion.

Most obvious of the problems with that attitude is of course the purpose of our existence. What is it exactly? To some, it is a mere phase before an afterlife, others think it is a cycle where we keep manifesting ourselves in different forms through reincarnation… The theories to avoid admitting that humans, like everything else, simply cease to exist, are plentiful, but they are not the subject of this post.

Physics has been exploring the boundaries of our Universe like never before since the beginning of the 20th Century. What was once a geocentric universe theory (Earth was the center of the universe, that was strongly and brutally advocated by the Church), was replaced by a heliocentric theory (the Sun as the center of the universe after overwhelming evidence against the geocentric one). Today, we know our solar system is but a microscopic component of our larger galaxy, which itself is an insignificant part of hundreds of billions of other galaxies.

That was the first blow to humanity’s ego: we are not the center of the universe.

Well, even though we’ve discovered hundreds of billions of star systems, we did not discover any planets or solar systems, at least none which are remotely similar to our Earth. Nope, sorry proud human supremacists, we’ve now identified over 500 Earth-like planets orbiting nearby stars.

The probability that life may exist is 1 over a 1,000,000,000 you might say, well, luckily we have many 100,000,000,000s of galaxies, with 1,000,000,000s of stars each, with an incomprehensibly large number of planets. So, 1 in a billion is in fact a pretty high probability in a Universe like ours.

We’ve established now that within the realms of Mathematics and Physics, there is enough evidence to reasonably consider life does exist beyond our planet’s atmosphere.

The Earth

A Galaxy with Hundreds of Billions of Stars

In This Depiction, Each Speck of Light is a Galaxy

What people often overlook, is that life is not Physics or Mathematics’ turf, but Biology’s.

Before we go into orbit and start wondering about life elsewhere, we should take examples of life here on Earth. We see life as a fragile balance of physical factors that allow organisms to persist and reproduce. So, life can only originate from another living thing, right? So far, science has not been able to fully explain the ‘spontaneous’ emergence of life (by spontaneous I don’t mean fast and miraculous, I mean its beginning from non-living things) However, we are getting closer every year with only a few gaps remaining to fill. In fact, chemists have already successfully recreated conditions similar to Earth’s some 2 billion years ago, where building blocks of cells were successfully assembled (polypeptides) from inorganic elements in super-heated conditions in an electric field.

In other words, life from non-living materials is not so far-fetched after all. As for the delicate status quo in the physical world to allow for life to flourish, we have found organisms that inhabit and flourish in environments that disobey this equilibrium. These ‘extremophiles’ inhabit places that are too hot, too cold, too salty, too acidic, etc. for any other organism to survive. In fact, these conditions are similar to those found on other planets in our very own solar system, and probably in planets farther away.

As you can see, it is very hard for me to put my thoughts on the matter into a coherent manner in such a short post. Stephen Hawking needed a 500+ page book, so, don’t be critical of little old me.

However, as a believer in the possibility of life existing elsewhere in the universe, the explanations and theories are infinite. Maybe they’re way too primitive to make contact. Maybe we’re way too primitive to pick up their signals, or we’re just too insignificant to them (like ants in your garden, you know they exist, you just don’t bother communicating with them, unless you’re ‘special’ in the mind). Maybe they’re not carbon-based organisms like us, or maybe their technology is not silicon-based like ours. Maybe they simply do not exist (which I seriously doubt). Maybe they come and abduct farmers from remote areas of the world (which I find sad to believe, or even consider for a moment, given its obvious cult-like following which generates the affiliated ‘evidence’ and ‘testimonies’ like UFOs and Area 51)

So, don’t believe in little green men with laser rays, nor in flying saucers. Don’t believe in anything. But, wouldn’t you think keeping an open mind regarding the matter of ETs would be wiser than considering us the sole inhabitants of all this universe? Shouldn’t we spare ourselves the shame of our ancestors who thought we could fall off the Earth’s flat surface? Or that the whole Universe revolves around our tiny rock?