It’s Life, Jim, But Not as We Know It

The universe is infinite, expanding at a constant rate and spitting out in infinite amount of galaxies. Contained within these galaxies are hundreds upon thousands of stars, and, potentially, those stars are homes to solar systems, with a decent number of planets swinging around them.

Universe: Not to scale

In our solar system, there’s Earth. Earth is rich with life, intelligent life especially, with seven billion humans at least and a good number of our predecessors still hanging around and millions of other species crawling around us, including some that haven’t even been discovered yet.

Why, then, do so many people consider it implausible that intelligent life exists on other planets? After all, we’ve discovered some where the conditions are ripe (“Terrestrial Planets”)—where by “ripe” I mean similar to ours. And we have no way of knowing whether or not cells growing and evolving on other planets need to be like ours. Knowing anything about extraterrestrial life is, as of this moment, guesswork.

Perhaps that’s why so few people are willing to examine the possibility. It’s like how some atheists are with God—we have no evidence for it, so why should we believe it exists? And that is, or at least can be construed as, a perfectly valid school of thought.

And that’s why I’m not asking anyone to believe that extraterrestrials exist. That would be silly. I’m only asking you to open your mind to the possibility that they could exist, or at least the possibility that the possibility exists. Because here’s the important thing: we can’t predict what aliens will look like, or how their bodies work, or how their society functions or how their language works.

If you can read this, it may be the past. Check your sundial.

Hell, we can barely sort out when it comes to other human beings—scientists are still largely baffled as to the exact workings of the brain, or the specifics of many ancient languages.

Now, I mentioned earlier that it’s seemingly reasonable to be put off by the lack of cold, hard facts. But there’s no good reason to assume that aliens have any way of contacting us or visiting us when we haven’t been able to visit or contact them. Any excuse we have for not succeeding yet is equally applicable to our interstellar neighbors.

So, having established that we can neither expect nor really need any sort of evidence that aliens exist, what other reasons might people have to be skeptical of life on other planets?

How about the fact that we’ve been looking for a really, really, really long time?

Seriously. For at least as long as the space program has been a thing, we’ve been looking for life on other planets. That’s a good half-century where all we’ve found is planets that may or may not be habitable, and most of that progress has been made in the past decade or so.  Why keep looking? At what point do we just throw our hands up, recall the probes and call it a night?

Well, the thing is, technology keeps improving. And these space-age technologies, scaled against hundreds of thousands of years of the history of civilization, are brand new. If human history was the human body the past hundred years would be a single hair, not even. And we’ve had rockets and satellites and probes and rovers for roughly half that. 

And we have people working, every single day, to improve on that—to bring us sharper images from further away than ever before. In the 1960s we wouldn’t have found any of the possibly-habitable planets we now know of, and we know this because we didn’t. Those discoveries were made in the past decade because, in the past decade, we have the technology to find them.

Now, it’d be nice if the aliens would beat us to the punch, and who knows, maybe there are planets out there who have. Hell, we could be receiving transmissions right now and never know it. Why?

Well, it all comes back to probability. Just like it’s statistically unlikely that Earth was the only planet to evolve life, it’s equally statistically unlikely that life on other planets evolved exactly the same way.

This brings us back to skepticism, if only briefly—we are, by our very nature, a generation of cynics about what we see in media. And, for longer than we’ve actually been looking for aliens, we’ve been told by fiction that they exist, and, in most scenarios, they look and talk and behave almost exactly like us. Sure, their societies have slight quirks, and there might be different-colored skin involved, but they’re basically humans. And when they’re not humans, they look suspiciously like giant versions of stuff we know and want to kill us.

And as I mentioned, it’s kind of silly. But the problem that arises is that we as a society have gotten so used to what we see in entertainment being completely divorced from reality that aliens—any aliens—are implausible because they’re science-fiction junk.

But the thing is, just as you can’t take entertainment as completely wrong, you can’t take it as completely right, either. Entertainment is largely completely detached from reality, for better or for worse.

Pictured: a man making a Jewish hand gesture with silly ears. Not pictured: an alien.

There are, as mentioned, plenty of reasons to believe in aliens. They might be out there, they might not be. But I think that expecting us to have a definitive answer is pretty silly at this stage in the game. I, personally, tend towards optimism.