Aliens or not aliens?
From the moment we humans became self aware, one nagging question bugs us more than anything else: are we the only species to have developed self-awareness or there are others waiting to be discovered in the vast cosmos that surrounds our planet? For much of our history, religion toyed with the idea that we are indeed special, created by some all knowing, weird looking old being that decided that all those stupid animals out there were not entertaining enough or good looking enough to challenge him. So the decision was made to build a special animal that was self-aware but not advanced enough to ever challenge the creator. And to make it special, it will have to be unique, it will have to inhabit a special place, everything about it must be superior to what came before. Nice view of reality that fortunately doesn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny. We are not special among animals; we are not best in anything but self-awareness and the capability of making the environment work for us instead of the other way around. Man knew this from very early in his development, that’s why we started building tools and weapons, so bigger stronger animals won’t eat us for breakfast. In the last century it also came the realization that our planet is not special either, that our solar system is not special, our galaxy is also one of many. On one hand it make our place in the order of things more and more insignificant, on the other hand, an argument can be made that because of the vastness of space, the high number of galaxies, the even bigger number of stars very similar to ours and the amount of time passed from the moment our universe was born, the chances for life to develop somewhere else are very good.
The building block of life as we know it are found almost everywhere in space, from comets to asteroids, from gas clouds to regions of space where star formation is rampant. Which makes the case for life outside our planet even easier to make. Thing is, life is not equal to intelligence. Our planet is 4.2 billion years old and intelligent life has been around for about 150 millions years. Plus we are the only specie to have taken this route, and we are not even the most successful. The most successful life forms are not even aware of their own existence. Microscopic life, the most abundant, specialised and successful of all are just minute machines that eat and grow, divide and die without having any thought let alone intelligent ones. There could be billions of planets where life has started and continue to thrive but where the path to intelligence was never taken, where technology was never needed, where the only law is that of evolution. For life to thrive a planet must be stable, for evolution to make great leaps forwards however something dramatic must happen. If it wasn’t for regular mass extinctions we would be no more advanced than stromatolites and the question of how many different life forms can be out there would have never been asked. We probably are nothing more than an evolutionary mistake that manage to survive long enough to start manipulating the environment, once that happened there was nothing able to stop us from taking over.
Another question that the vastness of space lead to is this: why would any advanced civilization travel so far in search of another form of intelligent life and then never make contact? Space is so vast that the resources needed for exploring any habitable planet would be unimaginable, why bother to even start such a colossal project if the goal is anything less than contact and/or total domination? The idea that someone could be traveling from star system to star system, from galaxy to galaxy just because he’s bored with life doesn’t make much sense. The star trek hypothesis, that it’s not wise to interfere with a less advanced civilization, doesn’t make sense either. If history teaches us any lesson it is that the stronger civilization takes all and the weaker will disappear, that’s no reason why a star traveling specie would behave any different. It is true that we also developed cooperation among us but that realistically happens only if both parties gain something. A civilization so advanced that can easily jump from planet to planet would have nothing to learn from us but botany and zoology of our planet, both really useless if you are about to move one anyway. So what’s stopping them from taking whatever they need before moving on?
Really, what proof do we have that we are being visited by some intelligent species anyway? Blurry pictures? Moving lights? Some ancient sculpture or picture? Reports of alien abductions? Conspiracy theories? That’s great stuff for a movie but nothing more. There’s no trace of those aliens anywhere, no artifact left behind that could corroborate any of those stories. Given the difficulties involved in the rise of intelligence instead of adaptation to the environment, given the immense obstacles involved in interstellar travels, we should get more than just hearsay as corroboration for these stories. After all, there’s a very good reason no court of law will allow hearsay evidence, that reason is that people lie. We may or may not know the reasons behind those lies, but whatever the case, lies are nothing more than abstract imagination at work. And so far, there’s nothing more to the aliens visitation rights than that.
