Tag Archives: intelligence

Deep space

A year and a half ago I wrote, ‘Limits of time, space, and intelligence‘ where I stated,

We are not alone in the universe. Our insignificant planet, in an insignificant solar system, in an insignificant galaxy, in an insignificant part of the universe, can’t be the only place intelligent life exists. So where are the aliens? Why haven’t we discovered them or why haven’t they discovered us?

Yesterday breathtakingly beautiful images were released from the James Webb Space Telescope.

The 6-pointed, flared stars are just that: stars. They develop those flares as a byproduct of glare and the design of the telescope. But every other glowing ball or disc is a galaxy. A galaxy with billions of stars inside of it. That’s so hard to fathom. Furthermore, the first of the 3 images above is a section of the sky that, if you held a single grain of rice at arm’s length away, the rice would cover the area of sky that image is looking at.

Some of the distant blurs are actually galaxies that formed near the start of the universe. The light we see is not just millions, but billions of years old… almost 10 billion years before our solar system was even formed. Many of these really distant sources of light might no longer exist, but it would take another billion plus years for us to even know, because the light from the catastrophic end of the galaxy won’t reach our planet until then.

I’m convinced that if so many galaxies exist in one tiny part of the sky, each with billions of stars, some of them must contain intelligent life. Our Milky Way galaxy alone has somewhere between 100 billion and 400 billion stars. Even if intelligent life is so rare that we are the only ones in our galaxy, the odds that we are the only ones in the universe would be greater than someone winning a lottery daily for 20 days. (I’m making this figure up, I didn’t do the actual math, but I think that’s a low estimate.)

I still don’t think we will learn of intelligent aliens in the next hundred years, but with new high definition images coming from the James Web telescope, we can peer further into our universe. We can marvel at the vastness of space, the variety of galaxies, and even find out more about possible life-sustaining planets. We might not be able to find intelligent life, even knowing it’s likely out there… but we will be able to look deeper into space, and farther into to past of our universe… and that is both beautiful and exciting!

Alien life over eons of time

I’m listening to a book where the earth is invaded then the aliens that defended earth start recruiting our troops to fight in low level intergalactic wars. This book got me thinking about the chances of meeting aliens and I thought about how time is the major factor preventing this.

I’m not just thinking about how any intelligent life form would likely be hundreds or thousands of light years away. I’m thinking about time since the universe began. The universe is about 13.5 billion years old. Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. The earth has missed 2/3rds of all existence. Even then Homo Sapiens have only been around for 200,000 years or 0.0044% of the earth’s existence. And we’ve had just over 100 years of radio transmissions, that’s about 0.0000022% of the earth’s existence. (That’s 0.00000074% of the existence of the universe,)

Now when you look at 100 years over the span of the life of the universe, it becomes evident that entire civilizations could have survived for 5 thousands years and could have died off 5,000 or 50,000 or 500,000 or 5 million, or 50 million, or 500 million, or 5 billion years ago, great distances from us, and we’d never know.

Let’s say intelligent life is abundant in the universe, giving us a great opportunity to meet aliens. And let’s say that life didn’t start for the first 3.5 billion years of universe development. That still leaves 10 billion years of inelegant life. There could be 1,000 civilizations that existed and died and each one could have missed the birth of another civilization by a million years.

Let’s face it, we are developing technologies that make it unlikely that we will survive another 2,000 years. In less than 100 years high school students will have the technological know how, and the tools, to build a deadly virus or a deadly bomb that could set our civilization back hundreds of years. I give humanity a 50/50 chance of getting through the next 200 years.

I’m willing to bet that even if there were thousands of intelligent civilizations across the universe most space travel ready civilizations wouldn’t make it to 2,000 years. So forgetting the vast expanse of the Milky Way and the universe beyond that, it’s highly unlikely that any close enough for contact aliens are even around now… They are probably either long destroyed, or they are in their version of the dinosaur age, still millions of years from developing to where we are, much less to the point of light speed travel.

So following this train of thought, it’s likely that intelligent life is/has been abundant in the universe, and yet we are very much alone.

Limits of time, space, and intelligence

“The Fermi paradox, named after Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations and various high estimates for their probability.” Wikipedia

We are not alone in the universe. Our insignificant planet, in an insignificant solar system, in an insignificant galaxy, in an insignificant part of the universe, can’t be the only place intelligent life exists. So where are the aliens? Why haven’t we discovered them or why haven’t they discovered us?

The universe is incredibly large to a scale we can’t really comprehend. Beyond our galaxy, stars that we see are so far away that it takes hundreds of thousands to millions to billions of light years for light from them to reach us. Think about that… that means that any of those stars that have planets with intelligent life, who might be looking at the light from our sun, is seeing that light from a time when humans were prehistoric or non-existent. They can’t look through a telescope and see our human satellite encircled earth, they can only see a planet that might have water, in the Goldilocks zone where life as we know it might exist.

It is hard to conceive of the distance and relationships between time and space that make our discovery of other life so unlikely, even if their existence is very likely. Our earth is 4.5 billion years old and the first satellite, Sputnik 1, was only launched 64 years ago.

What I also wonder about is the limits of intelligence. None of our great civilizations lasted very long. Maybe the intellect and intelligence of our species, and any intelligent alien species, has a very small window of time to find other intelligent life. Maybe the same holds true for all other intelligent life that might be looking for us.

In the short time that we have been able to leave the gravitational pull of earth, we have gone through a Cold War where we were on the brink of destroying ourselves, and we have harmed our environment to a level where we have altered the climate. Maybe from the time we can look to the stars through telescopes until we destroy ourselves, will only span a time of a few hundred years?

Think about this: in less than a hundred years a high school aged kid could have the technology and access to resources to create a weapon that involves splitting atoms… or create a deadly virus that’s 1,000 times as deadly as Covid-19. That’s in their basement, with easily acquired resources, and no university degree. With the advancement of science and knowledge, comes easy access to dangerous knowledge.

Maybe there are hundreds or thousands of intelligent species out in the universe but from the time they are intelligent enough to look beyond their universe for life, until they destroy themselves, is so small that most of them are already extinct. Or they exist now, but the light we see from their solar system is coming from so far away, we are literally only able to see their prehistoric past.

It’s a bit of a depressing thought, but maybe we will never find aliens and they will never find us, because as intelligent as we and they may become, a world-ending knowledge will undermine our/their abilities to keep searching long enough.

(And I didn’t even factor in Artificial Intelligence taking over and not having the same inquisitive nature to explore the heavens.)