Despite Hollywood’s obsession with super intelligent little green men hell bent on destroying the earth, the millions of conspiracy theorists who swear to have been abducted and millions of dollars being spent on a search for signals of extraterrestrial life, there exists no evidence that aliens exist. Could it be possible that..,gasp.. ,we are actually alone. Science seems to effectively prove that earth is the only planet with an intelligent life form.
It is estimated that there are around 500 billion sun like stars and 100 billion earth like planets in the universe so where is everybody? The largest space scan ever, lasted 12 years and came up with absolutely nothing.
The original argument for the existence of extra-terrestrial life was simple...; with all these potentially life bearing planets and the sheer size of the universe there must be life. Enrico Fermi on the other hand asked the question “If the universe is riddled with life, then – where is everybody?” The Femi Paradox assumes that here’s some stage in that long evolutionary process that is extremely unlikely or impossible for life to get beyond. That stage is The Great Filter. Proponents of the Femi Paradox are broken up into three schools of thought:
- We are rare, special and the only ones to have survived the Great Filter.
- We are the first and other super intelligent creatures will follow.
- The Great Filter must be in our future meaning humankind is about to be extinct (Hollywood, there’s hope for you yet).
Apart from the Femi Paradox several other compelling arguments exist:
The human being is made up of atoms that have been in in different stars way before our sun was formed and in our own sun.
Only 5% of Sun like stars are big enough to support life. Any smaller sun would mean the planet would be in a permanent gravitational lock where only one side of the planet faces the sun in the same way our moon is locked to the earth. Additionally the universe is extremely volatile and our sun and earth extremely stable unlike others which constantly change energy output. A meteorite that can destroy earth only comes near every 100 billion years thanks to the gravitational pull of Jupiter (another planet with orbiting stability caused by moons) which stops objects from coming close to earth. Planets the size of Jupiter with irregular orbits rather tear solar systems apart. In fact a meteorite strike may just have given birth to life by creating the moon.
The gravitational pull of the moon is what stops the earth from rotating sideways and upside down and provides stability by controlling the climate, earth’s waters.
Many other such coincidences exist and are covered in scientific publications such as those by David Waltham and Peter Ward.
The probability of all these chance life giving happenings occurring twice in the universe is extremely low so we may indeed be alone in the universe.
Other schools will take this as proof that the earth was a planned occurrence by a greater being and will one day be destroyed in a day of judgment. The bible states that the heavens were created to help man in distinguishing seasons, time and to bring glory to God.
Hi again. I was thinking about your post. Whenever there is a discussion about extraterrestrial life, I can't shake the thought that our conception of life is way too narrow-minded. It's certainly natural since we have only one exemplary of life, but we are looking for very anthropomorphized life, when in reality we don't really know what makes matter alive. For us, life is organic, carbon-based. We could conceive a silicon-based life because it's very close to our organic one, but is there really a reason life outside earth should be similar.
The arguments you present are actually showing that this is highly improbable, but different conditions could have created a very different form of life, not just green humans. All the researchers for life forms are based on detections of amino-acids or proteins. Maybe we should review and widen our definition of life form.
Hi there.Extra terrestrial life probably does exist as simple, microbial-type life which thrive in extremely inhospitable environments such as the extremophiles deep in the earths interior. Intelligent or even a more advanced form is extremely unlikely.
The silicon based life from hypothesis faces two main problems:
On the other hand maybe we just don't understand the science well enough to understand how Silicon based life would work.
Very interesting article! keep up the good work. I love to read about science, so I will follow you and hope to see more content in the future.
Congratulations @topgeek! You have completed some achievement on Steemit and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
Click on any badge to view your own Board of Honor on SteemitBoard.
For more information about SteemitBoard, click here
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPCongratulations @topgeek! You have completed some achievement on Steemit and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
Click on any badge to view your own Board of Honor on SteemitBoard.
For more information about SteemitBoard, click here
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOP