Alien Expansion Fears
By tony leather, 24th Jul 2012 | Follow this author
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Posted in WikinutNewsOff Beat
Tt seems somehow unlikely that there are too many races out there which could be that far ahead of us, because we have all been on development for similar time scales.
Alien Expansion Fears
With the latest scientific speculation that life on earth may in fact be alien, in the sense that the earliest life forms arrived on the planet via comets colliding with it, then you have to suppose that space itself must actually be teeming with all kinds of life forms.
Science fiction writers talk of our encountering ETs with billions of years of history, but that is something that is true of humanity as well, since we are the end product of 3.%billion years of evolution, even if we have actually been around for only a million r so years, in one guise or another.
This begs the question, though, about the likelihood of alien races far in advance of ourselves technologically, based on the theory that the universe only actually came in being around 14billion years ago, and between 8 and 10 billion of those years would have been needed for stars to form, planets to be created and so on.
Aliens 2
This being the case, and evolution presumably happening at a similar pace everywhere in the universe, it seems somehow unlikely that there are too many races out there which could be that far ahead of us, because we have all been on development for similar time scales.
If this proved to be wrong, in that the universe is far older in reality, then naturally the law of averages tells us, as beautifully illustrated by both Isaac Asimov, and Carl Sagan – both noted physicists and science fiction authors – that even if only 1% of 1% of 1% of every planetary system in the universe supported life, and only 1% of that was life as evolved as ourselves, there would still be millions of civilizations dotted around the vastness of space.
Some of those would naturally have to be far older than our own, and possibly far ahead of us in every way, but the drawback for every race, no matter how advanced, is that celestial distances simply defy imagination, and that even at the speed of light – physically impossible to achieve – relatively short journeys between stars would take years to complete.
Aliens 3
Our own nearest neighbor star – and remember that the Milky Way galaxy, to which we belong, is but one minor galaxy among billions of others – is a 34 year journey removed, even at light speed, and such unimaginably large distances would have to make universal space travel both unlikely and impractical.
It seems perfectly feasible to assume that humanity will, in due course, start mining minerals from other planets within our own solar system, and even find new technologies to allow us to live on other planets, but expansion beyond that seems, with current knowledge of time and space, extremely unlikely indeed.
There are, undoubtedly many more layers of discovery waiting to be found when it comes to the quantum physics world, and therein may even lie secrets that would enable humans to travel further into the great void, one option being to send a vest space city out towards the distant stars, knowing that it will be descendants of the original crew that inlay reach other planets, perhaps hundreds of years into the future.
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It seems, because of the overwhelmingly massive obstacle that sheer distance creates, that even if there are untold numbers of other intelligent species throughout the universe, they are going to be very restricted in the areas of space that they can traverse, if technologically advanced enough to do so.
That any ET species might be unfriendly is a given, but then humanity itself is far from benign, but it seems pointless to fret about the potential threat, simply because the only realistic way that such danger could exist would be from fleets of enormous spacecraft that housed war-like races who lived in space itself, nomadic and greedy.
My personal opinion is that there have to be, even within the stars that we can see, many planetary systems that support life, some of it quite possibly as intelligent and resourceful as we are, but that the chances of our ever coming face to face with any of them are vanishingly small. Even if an advanced space-faring race were to stumble across voyager, so far out there, and manage to interpret the messages we left aboard the craft, it could take decades for them to get here, even if they had the will.
Star Trek always was fantasy, however fantastic, and though many new innovations today are emulating the technology displayed on that program, nobody will ever really get beamed from one place to another, or travel at multiples of light speed, not in the foreseeable future. As full of sentient life as the universe must logically be, for now earth and humanity are very much alone.
Comments
25th Jul 2012 (#)
Till we can live in peace, let us not have a face-off! We could have well be kept deliberately separate till that time by whosoever controls our destiny. As usual a great post, Tony - siva
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25th Jul 2012 (#)
I just don't feel we are alone and there must be other life forms. Great information. Congrats on the star page, it is well deserved. Thank you for sharing.:)
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