Is there extraterrestrial life? An India Today report on August 18, 2013 of the Indian Army seeing UFOs in Ladakh turned out to be a false trail. So too the Huffington Post’s March 12, 2014 reportage of a UFO sighting near the Taj Mahal. True, many “sightings” actually are meteors, asteroids, weather balloons, space junk — like the three-tonne Russian satellite that burned up on entering Earth’s atmosphere (February 16, 2014) — are just optical illusions.
Yet some cases still remain a mystery. The National Geographic in its May 1, 2010 edition narrates how thousands of people on March 13, 1997 witnessed a large variety of aircraft in the skies of Arizona. Engineers and scientists certain they weren’t made by humans.
Some Renaissance-period artworks apparently show UFOs. In “Scene di Vita eremitica” by Paolo Uccello, Ufologists have claimed the red object in the central grotto on the right side of the cross is a flying saucer. But this has also been interpreted as St. Jerome’s cardinal hat. Other paintings show globular “sputniks”, wands, even rays descending from abstract objects.
Stephen Hawking, the world famous astrophysicist, says it’s perfectly rational to assume intelligent life exists outside our planet. But he also cautions aliens might simply raid Earth for resources and move on: “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.”
“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually look like,” Hawking adds. He envisions two-legged herbivores and yellow lizard-like predators. However, Hawkins concludes that most life elsewhere in the universe probably consists of simple microbes.
Now, even if you don’t have a particularly mathematical brain, consider this: the Kepler Space Telescope (an orbiting observatory that studies 170,000 stars and their planets in a small patch of the Milky Way) has found that most of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way have an Earth-sized planet orbiting them. Kepler team member, Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, says, “It’s not just that most stars have Earth-sized planets, but some of them — many of them actually — are at a distance from their Suns that allow for lukewarm temperatures. They just might support life.”
Juxtapose that with this analogy that I recently came across to appreciate the vastness of the universe: Paul Davies of Arizona State University started out by comparing the size of the whole solar system to a grain of sand. Then the Milky Way would reach till the horizon — and the size of the known universe? Well, that would be the distance from the said grain of sand to Mars. So, we’ve hardly stepped out and we’ve already found several candidates that might fall in the habitable Goldilocks’ zone.
In a BBC series, Wonders of the Solar System, Brian Cox, a physicist from the University of Manchester, suggested life might exist elsewhere within our solar system. He talks of organisms that could be present under the icesheets of Europa, one of Jupiter’s Moons. Biochemistry based on a liquid other than water may be possible on Enceladus and Titan (Saturn’s moons).
Former Lib Dem MP, Lembit Opik, now lecturer at the Associate for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena, said it “beggars belief” that there is no life on other planets. The laws and concepts of physics and chemistry are generally accepted as applicable to the entire cosmos. So, could there be a general biology as well, with respect to creatures beyond Earth? A large number of molecules fundamental to Earth’s biochemistry have been found in the interstellar medium, planetary atmospheres and on the surfaces of comets, asteroids and meteorites. Carbonaceous compounds appear to be ubiquitous in the universe.
Since the 1950s, there has been an ongoing search for signs of extra-terrestrials. The year 2010 marked the 50th anniversary of the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. So far nothing has been found. Could it be as Will Wright, game designer, founder of “Spore”, “The Sims” and “SimCity”, postulated — that some ET super intelligent beings have trans-biological, gigantic throbbing mega brains, sending us messages we can’t pick up on because we are not smart enough to understand them?
Or could it be because as the grain of sand analogy suggests, the 200 light years of space we’ve probed isn’t nearly enough an experimental sample area, considering the distance to the centre of the Milky Way is 26,000 light years away. Even if there is no other intelligent life in the Milky Way, what about the remaining hundreds of billions of other galaxies?
Nicholas Wethington of Examiner (November 2009) reported that the Vatican held a study week of over 30 astronomers, biologists, geologists, and religious leaders to discuss questions of the existence of ET. The director of the Vatican Observatory said it’s possible that intelligent life exists on other planets and since aliens would be part of God’s creation, their existence would not contradict the Catholic faith. In an interview with the Vatican newspaper, Rev Jose Gabriel Funes discussed the Big Bang Theory, as well as creation and evolution.
For an institute considered Luddite by even many Catholics, this does seem rather extraordinary.
Finally, Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute to make her case for the existence of ET, theatrically held up a glass she’d just filled with water from the sea. Obviously it didn’t contain any large marine life we typically associate with oceans. But that was her point — just because we’d taken a small sample and found nothing substantial doesn’t mean there’s nothing out there.
All you detractors — if it’s only Island Earth blessed with a complex life —that would really be an immense waste of space, wouldn’t you agree?
