Life outside of our solar system has become so commonly considered that the whole concept seems to be tarred with the broad brush of “sci-fi.” Nobody can talk about extra-terrestrial life without conjuring up a myriad of ideas from comics, movies, novels, Dr Who and so on.
It has got to a point where merely suggesting that life might exist anywhere other than Earth can provoke sniggers from whoever you happened to be with at the time. Then Stephen Hawking announced that he believed in aliens. That ought to shut the sceptics up. Now, I’m not one of these over-credulous people whose belief in aliens has become more like a superstition – you won’t find me saying, “Yeah, I was abducted by aliens once.” Because I haven’t been, and I doubt I ever will be. I doubt that they have even been to this planet. It seems a bit unlikely to me that a civilisation sufficiently advanced to be able to get here would see much point in actually turning up. Anyway, intergalactic travel just seems exceptionally difficult, so I don’t think that it will ever be considered a viable or even a useful occupation. Well, not until the “home planet” (I sound like a Dr Who buff – shoot me!) has gone totally pear-shaped. I really doubt that aliens would travel the many light-years to our planets for the sake of poking us in strange places, messing up a few of our crops and dissecting some cows, then leaving everything on Earth and, presumably, going home. That’s another thing, these aliens seem to go to pretty extreme lengths not to be found, and yet they leave witnesses and evidence all over the place. It doesn’t seem all that likely to me. For these reasons, among others, I don’t think that we have had, or are about to have, any alien encounters.
But look up. Consider the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image, where they found, in a piece of sky chosen because it contains nothing, and that could be covered up by a grain of sand on the end of your finger, and held at arm’s length, 10,000 galaxies. So how many galaxies must there be out there, in total? Now tell me, how could there not be life out there? The universe is so ridiculously, incomprehensively vast that it must be almost a statistical certainty that there is something else sharing that enormous emptiness with us here on Earth. We might never find them, but they’ve got to be there, surely. There is a theory regarding monkeys and typewriters - basically, leave the two together for long enough, and eventually, by sheer chance, you'll get the whole works of Shakespeare typed out backwards. Likewise, the universe is so huge, so bordering on the infinity that makes everything a certainty, that there must be some angle you can look at some galaxy from and see a perfect map of Outer Mongolia. So there must, somewhere else, be other forms of life. Even if we do find them, though, we might not realise that they're there.
At the moment, we are looking for planets like ours – planets that could have liquid water, in other words, because we assume that liquid water must be one of the prerequisites for life. The thing is, it is only a prerequisite for life according to our current understanding of biology. And that could be ever so wrong. After all, once we thought that all swans would have to be white. Then we found some black ones. What if we found something that, instead of basing itself around water, based itself around alcohol of some kind, actually using that as a solvent? (We could start a research facility in Russia and call it the Charlie Sheen Institute.) Then they could live on much colder planets, or they could base themselves on liquid tellurium, in which case they could live on planets where temperatures reach over 1000K. We have absolutely no idea. For now, then, our aliens are going to live in our imaginations. There, they can take any form at all. In fact, the only thing that could create creatures as mad as our imagination can is reality.
ET must be out there. The odds of us finding him (and of “him” having gender) are phenomenally slim, but it seems virtually impossible for there not to be another form of life in the universe. We might not understand it if we find it, and it will almost certainly turn out to be something beyond our wildest imagination, like a fish that lives on liquid nitrogen, or something, but it’s far more likely that there are other planets harbouring life there than that the rest of the universe is totally dead.
No comments:
Post a Comment