If E.T. is out there, why
doesn't he visit us?
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The radius of the universe is
inversely proportional to the magnitude of this variable. Accordingly
the universe is expanding by a factor of 100 per century.
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Halton Arp
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We cock our radio dishes and listen to
the skies and nobody out there seems to be interested to let us know of
his
existence. Seems, we are the only noisemakers in the Universe. Some
scientists
have even suggested a "cosmic censorship," some kind of quarantine,
imposed on our planet until the human race is mature enough to learn
the truth.
Perhaps. But then again, given time
and distance, E.T. may have visited our planet already, when the
dinosaurs
still walked the earth, or, more likely, a billion years earlier when
life
lingered on in slimy deposits of microorganisms. Life on our planet
could have
gone extinct some 800 million years ago, before the evolution of higher
organisms, and there would still be a long history of life: the history
of
microbes, going back for more than three billion years. Another reason
for our
cosmic solitude could be a matter of simple – well not quite so simple
– physics; I am referring to Einstein’s
famous equation E=mv2 (energy
equals mass by the
square power of light
velocity). Which means, a
spacecraft traveling at near light velocity, whether crossing the
denser
regions of the Milky Way, or traversing the thin interstellar dust in
the voids
between the galaxies, is constantly colliding with stellar emissions
and
particles of which even the smallest carries a mass approaching
infinity. How
do you shield a spacecraft against such bombardment? It is like
traveling
through solid concrete. And let’s not forget, there is also the time
dilatation
effect.
An astronaut, traveling almost at
light velocity through deep space, is ageing much slower than his twin
brother
back home; not in terms of the total number of heart-beats, but in
terms of
time it takes for the two hearts separately to accomplish the
countdown.
There seems to be a “magic number,”
and it is for all mammals the same. For humans it is 59 years worth of heartbeats –
2,482,478,336 to
be exact – then Granny Nature’s warranty is up. A mouse
will live somewhere between twelve and eighteen months, while the total
of its
heartbeats – get this – averages ours. In the past this number of
heartbeats often coincided with actual death – I did an extensive
survey
– and even now it draws an invisible line on our hospital charts.
Although we live much longer now, once you have crossed over into the
twilight
past 59, the confident recovery from the knocks and blows of living has
turned
into the anxious fragility of exposed age.
So, after taking into account all
the relativistic shenanigans of traveling close to the speed of light,
this
means that on the spacecraft – in terms of heartbeats – only twelve
years have passed when our astronaut is leaving the outer reaches of
the Milky
Way. After fifteen years of on board time, he is going to arrive at the
Andromeda Galaxy. Here on Earth, however, time has moved on for some
1.6 million
years. By then the astronaut’s twin, in fact the entire human race has
disappeared from the face of the Earth, and the astronaut is the last
survivor
of the human race. If he carries on, he is scheduled to reach the
thousands of
Galaxies in the Virgo cluster after only eighteen years of travel time,
and
after 26 years he arrives at the end of the observed Universe, fourteen
billion
light-years away. Meanwhile our solar system has reached the end of its
lifespan. The “twin-paradox” is the effect of a combination of
relativistic
time dilatation and the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction of space. Of all
that techno-babble
in Star Trek, “warp speed” doesn't violate physical
laws.
In 1994, the Mexican physicist Miguel
Alcubierre proposed a method of causing a ripple in space, which ahead
of the spacecraft would cause the fabric of space-time to contract,
while space-time in the wake of the craft would expand. In other words:
it might be possible to go within a lifetime to a place very, very far
away; but the further away it is, the less likely is the prospect of
returning to a world we would still recognize as “home.” Exploring deep
space will be more like the venture of the Polynesian seafarers, who’d
set sail in the hope of a habitable island beyond the horizon, and with
no prospect of return. Yet unlike the manning of such an outrigger
vessel and loading it with a cargo of seeds and domestic animals at virtually no costs, the travel in deep space is a big and
expensive enterprise.
If such expedition is going where even
radio waves
take centuries to bridge the distance, if at all, who on Earth would be
willing
to foot the bill for such investment with no possible return?
There is of
course a cheaper option; something a non-profit foundation might be
willing to
finance. Instead of sending people in large spacecrafts with costly
life
support systems, we send just their frozen embryos, together with seeds
and the
embryos of domestic animals. Such a vessel would be very much smaller,
and on
arrival, an on board artificial intelligence – let’s call it “mentor”
– would scout the region for a suitable planet, land the craft and
initiate the in vitro breeding of the cargo, later even teach the
toddlers the
first basics of survival. The rest they would have to find out
themselves. The
adults of this ark’s first generation may have forgotten mentor’s real
name
– “HAL 9000” – and simply call it “God.” It’s possible. The
Sumerian kings in their cuneiform genealogies say their ancestors
landed on
Earth from the sky. Who knows!
Nothing in the
Sumerian civilization would suggest the degree of technology needed to
travel
deep space, but that does not mean they couldn’t have crawled out from
an
incubator and then be left to their own devices – a lack of ingenuity
was
not the problem: “And Noah began to be an
husbandman, and he planted a vineyard” says the Good Book (Genesis
9: 20). We
certainly owe the old sailor a debt of gratitude; not only for our
existence,
but that he was no prohibitionist and teetotaler (Genesis 9: 21).
Then again, it would be
written all over our gene.
Our genome makes us the member of a very
extended family – we are related to every living being on Earth. 600
million years ago the
ancestor of the humble cauliflower was our closest cousin. Which begs
the
question whether this universality of DNA and RNA here on Earth could
extend to
the voids of deep space? Do the creatures in the Sloan Nebula have the
same
genetic code as we do? If so, every landing on a foreign planet will
risk the
encounter with nasty bacteria, ending the mission before it begins. If,
on the
other hand, the indigenous gene has evolved from a very different
chemistry,
the new arrivals are safe, except for the big ugly smelliphant with
foot long
serrated teeth, bad breath and armor-plated scales all over the body.
In other
words by now, we, as the descendants of a cosmic Noah, should notice a
fundamental difference in the genetic makeup, between “us,” and life on
Earth
from before the “landing.” And indeed if I look at the birds chirping
in the
trees, at the sleek and neat appearance of most of our mammalian
companions,
domestic and wild, I can’t help noticing a marked improvement over the
ugliness
of the Jurassic. The Bible doesn’t know of such difference, but even so
Noah is asked to
take on board of his craft pairs of
“every clean beast by sevens” while
of the “unclean” animals he was to
take just one pair (Genesis
7: 2). Between these two
categories,
this inevitably should lead to a numerical difference not only in the
rate of
reproduction, but in the number of mutations. Among the clean animals
there
should occur seven times more mutations than among the unclean, while
the
unclean beasts, due to inbreeding, should be plagued by a substantially
larger
ratio of genetic diseases and deformities. There is an example.
12,000
years ago, the cheetah fell victim to an epidemic – perhaps a kind of
cat-flu or the feline version of AIDS – that reduced the entire species
to just two individuals in the Kalahari, who had been living there in
separation from the rest of their species. Since then all the cheetahs
in the
world suffer from the effects of inbreeding. But this is just them; for
the
rest of the world this never happened. (What "Great Flood" are we
talking about anyway? The rising sea level after the last Ice Age? The sediments on the ocean
floor indicate the occurrence of eight ice ages over the last 700,000
years; a
veritable engine of evolution, pumping out improvements of the
mammalian type
in quick succession.)
And what if there is a way around
the obstacles? What if interstellar travel is as instant as walking
through a
door, a door that remains open for a safe return? Why should we think
that
advanced intelligence out there is inevitable? Look at life on Earth.
Next to
us, we know only of two other groups of species with comparable
intelligence:
the apes and the whales, maybe the elephants too. Although able to
comprehend
and remember, neither of these has shown any interest to communicate to
anybody
else but their own kind, at least not without our coaching and coaxing.
At some
point, not too far in the future, we may even enhance the intelligence
of our
pets, yet numerous species “out there” survive without any brain at
all,
although some of these, like the octopi, are able to display
intelligent
behavior. The animal's whole body seems to double as its brain. But
since it is
lacking in any form of long-term memory, there is no tradition and no
civilization for octopi even possible, at least not beyond what can be
learned
and relearned in a day. After the next sleep, everything is forgotten.
(Then
again, can there actually be such a thing as “sleep” without a brain?)
So, even
if one octopus were able to invent writing – within a day, mind you
– and manages to leave a record of his new skills, the next day he
would
obliviously swim by the artifact and notice nothing out of the
ordinary. Should
he, however, be able to teach other octopi how to write and read before
going
to sleep, this of course could be the beginning of a whole new
ballgame, but
only if the entire colony is sleeping in shifts, with sentinels and
minders staying
awake to help the others relearn forgotten skills.
The arrangement looks
fragile, but it may just work. And yet, why should an extraterrestrial
intelligence even want to develop
science and an advanced technology? Apart from the odd
parlor-trick, the
scientific method was neither discovered nor welcomed by the indigenous
cultures of Africa, Asia and America. In Europe, too, science was
received in
the face of organized hostility. We like to think that a free market
and
democracy are the pediments of scientific progress. The records are
ambiguous.
Without the Cold War no man would have gone to the moon yet, and at
present the
most ambitious nation in space, it seems, is communist China.
So all things considered, our Milky
Way may produce a technological civilization once in a million years,
not
counting the far greater number of civilizations without sophisticated
technology. The lifespan for advanced civilizations is just a few
millennia.
So, how likely is it that two of such cultures not only meet at the
right time
for each, but also are located near enough for making contact?
The universe out there could be
teeming with life, but for all practical purposes we are alone.
©
– 3/14/2009 – by michael sympson, 2,000 words, all rights reserved