ePinions

Tiny. Really, really tiny.

If you’re like me, you sometimes find yourself wondering “what’s out there?”, in the cosmic sense. I like thinking about things like that, because it really gives the imagination free reign. One of the main reasons I like science-fiction so much is that I find it fascinating to see what other people have imagined existing out there. It’s especially interesting when people imagine things that are quite a bit “outside the box”, like aliens who communicate not through speech, but through the projection of light at various frequencies, for example.

I find it odd that there are people who don’t believe in extra-terrestial intelligent life. Don’t they realize how mind-bogglingly tiny we are compared to the entire universe? It’s virtually impossible for anyone (except maybe for Stephen Hawking) to imagine how tiny we are without some kind of visual aide (like this). It’s completely impossible to calculate the probability of intelligent life existing elsewhere in the universe, but that doesn’t stop people from trying. That article says there’s a 0.01% probability of intelligent life evolving on any given earth-like planet. However, given the sheer amount of earth-like planets that most likely exist, the addition rule of probability would make the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe a virtual certainty.

How many earth-like planets exist? No one has the faintest idea, of course - but we know of about 418 exoplanets (as I write this), and it seems that approximately one third of those are likely to be earth-like. It’s not too far fetched to think that this statistic holds true for the rest of the universe, that is, if we keep to the usual practice of assuming things out there work like they do in “our neighborhood” - which is natural since it’s the only thing we have to go on.

Another thing I find strange is that most of the people talking about extra-terrestial intelligent life assume it can only exist on earth-like planets and that it must be similar to life on earth. I’ve always found the idea of intelligent life with sulfuric acid for “blood” (for example), breathing carbon monoxide (for example), to be quite intuitive. I mean, scientists have known about extremophiles for quite some time now, and still most people automatically assume intelligent extra-terrestial life must be similar to life on earth. People ARE writing about extremophiles and their extra-terrestial potential though, so lets hope more people discover this line of thought and take their blinders off when conducting research into these matters.

So, the universe is big. Really big. And thus intelligent life somewhere out there is actually probable.

The above mentioned visual aide does a darn good job of showing us how incredibly tiny we are, but if we assume the universe is infinite our mind just blacks out. First, try to imagine that our universe is not infinite. OK, so it has clearly defined boundaries. Now imagine that what we call our universe is the equivalent of an atom in a much bigger universe, and that an atom in our universe is an entire universe in itself. And so on and so forth in both directions… Add infinite parallel universes to that and you’re well on your way to conceptualizing an infinite universe. The Big Bang could simply be a reaction to something in this “super universe” that ours could be a part of.

I do realize that all this has really accomplished is moving the “where did we come from” pseudo-answer from one place to another. It is, sadly, a question that will never ever be answered - unless, of course, there is a God and he tells us at some point. In some ways though, I kind of prefer not knowing everything about all of existence since I like imagining how it all fits together. It gives us the option of imagining cool stuff like there being 10 dimensions.