In this week's blog post I’d like to focus on the possibility of being visited by extraterrestrials. I’ll focus on our current knowledge of science and based on that, see what the likelihood of aliens coming to our planet is. This blog is based on the following six assumptions:
The fastest thing in the universe is the speed of light.
The universe is about 93 billion light years across.
The distance to the end of the universe from planet Earth is about 43 billion light years.
Wormholes Exist—probably.
Multi-dimensions may exist—currently, only theoretically.
There are about 125 billion galaxies in the observable universe, there are about 200 billion trillion stars in the universe, there are 100 billion planets in the Milky way—Earth’s galaxy—and there are about 40 billion planets that are in the goldilocks zones—their distance from the sun is potentially suitable to sustain life like Earth.
Let’s tackle the first assumption. If aliens were or have visited earth and they took the most direct route to us, they would only be able to get to Earth—if light speed capabilities were achieved—at the speed of light. The challenges of visiting us at the speed of light depends from where they’re coming from. The closest planet in the goldilocks zone to Earth is Proxima b which is about 4.24 light years away, and it’s probably doubtful that there’s advanced intelligent life on a planet closest to us that can possibly sustain life. Chances are that if there are advanced civilizations out there that their locations would probably be closer to billions of light years away from us—assumptions 2 and 3—which would take them billions of years to get to earth. Would that make sense to them to travel that distance to us? If they traveled directly to us at the speed of light the star-ship would have to be a multi-generational ship or have technology that suspends the occupiers of the craft in suspended animation, like cryosleep—freezing one in time—or something that resembles this concept. I don’t know if traveling billions of light years would be worth it to them just to see us, especially if the universe is full of life and we are not that special.
The fourth assumption may be a more realistic way of space travel. Currently, our knowledge of wormholes is limited to theoretical theory, but other civilizations may have adapted it as a practical means of interstellar travel. A wormhole bridges to points in space-time—an example would be if we take a piece a paper with two points on opposite sides of the paper and fold it in half the two points are now very close to each other—such that travel across billions of light years maybe reduced to any amount time depending on the length of the wormhole—my assumption—and this may be the most practical way of space travel.
Lastly, we could be visited by beings from other dimensions, multiverses, or other parallel universes that we can’t comprehend yet. I think that this is the most unlikely possibility, but the universe may be more or less complex than we think.
I believe the most likely possibility is that our universe in this dimension is full of life, but because it is so vast that it seems that we are all alone. It’s hard for us to comprehend the sheer size of the universe, so we tend to think that if there are other intelligent life then they should have made contact with us already. The Drake equation—the probability of extraterrestrial civilizations in the milky way—established in 1961 stated that there are 1000 to 100,000,000 planets with civilizations just in the milky way; fast forward to the present that number increased dramatically with new discoveries of stars and habitable planets.
However, unfortunately we probably should not seek intelligent life by sending signals or other things out into space. The reason for this is that what if there is intelligent life but they’re not friendly or just their coexistence with us would exterminate us—how many species of animals have gone extinct just because humans decided to build an advance civilizations such as cities and wiped out the forests—and this would be the end of the human civilization. We need to develop ourselves first and become masters of our universe before we tug the strings of others that we know absolutely nothing about at all. We don’t even trust our fellow humans in this world and yet we want to send out beacons to the universe that can possibly be full of species on different spectrums of ethics—if that’s even a thing.
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