Tag Archives: space

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.)

We are not alone

I love this quote by Arthur C. Clarke:

“Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.”

When I comprehend the size and scale of the universe, it is inconceivable to me that humans are the only intelligent life that seeks to understand and explore the stars and worlds beyond our own. It just seems staggeringly beyond possible that we could be alone in the universe.

I also think about Arthur C. Clarke’s 3 Laws. From Wikipedia:

British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke formulated three adages that are known as Clarke’s three laws, of which the third law is the best known and most widely cited. They are part of his ideas in his extensive writings about the future.

These so-called laws are:

  1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

  2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

  3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

His most famous of these is the 3rd one. Imagine being born 2000, 1000, 500, or even 150 years ago and being shown an iPhone or a self-driving Tesla. It would surely seem like magic or witchcraft.

I truly doubt that we will have any significant technology leap in my lifetime to see any meaningful human space travel beyond revisiting our moon. Our technology won’t get that magical so quickly. Therefore, if we were to meet aliens in my lifetime, it would be because they poses technology that seems magical to us.

So, at least in the short term, if we are visited, it will be from highly advanced aliens. I wonder what they would think of our divided, polluted planet? Would they see a primitive species? Which, if any, of our cultures would they look at and say, “I think they are on the right track”?

When I think of the idea that we are not alone, and that if we are visited, the visitors will be highly advanced compared to us, what would they say about how we treat each other? How we treat other species? And, how we treat our world?

How long is a year? It’s all relative

We recently celebrated my wife’s birthday, and it made me think about what that meant in our solar system: One year means that our earth has circled the sun and is in the *same* position that it was a year ago. What that really means is the same position relative only to the sun.

Not only is every other planet in a different position than the year before, but the sun itself isn’t anywhere near where it used to be.

Watch this video: Skylight: How Does Our Solar System Move Around the Milky Way?

“As our spinning planet revolves around the sun, we’re also speeding through the galaxy at 230 kilometres per second.”

So, while here on earth we are in the same relative position to the sun that we were a year ago, the sun itself has travelled:

230km/second x 60 seconds in a minute x 60 minutes in an hour x 24 hours in a day x 365 days in a year: The sun and earth are approximately 7,253,280,000 Kilometres away from where they were a year ago. We are quite literally only in the same place we were a year ago relative to the position of the sun.

Happy birthday = Happy single rotation around the sun… while the sun is racing through the galaxy, taking us 7+ billion kilometres away from where we we a year ago!

Oh, and by the way, this just factors in the way our sun moves within the galaxy. Our galaxy is also moving through the universe… all this movement is relative.

As a final thought on the relative length of a year, a year of fighting cancer is significantly different than a year of sabbatical on a tropical island… no matter how far we may travel through the cosmos in that time.

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This video shows us the actual travel path of the sun and planets through the galaxy: The helical model – our solar system is a vortex