“All of my life I have wondered about the possibility of life elsewhere. What would it be like? Of what would it be made?”—Carl Sagan.
Science never played a prominent role in my upbringing and educational progress, especially astronomy. When I looked up at the sky, what knowledge I had was informed by my Catholic faith. Religion taught us that God created everything here on earth in six days and on the seventh day He rested. The Earth was the centre of everything and in the heavens above, God would bring up only those human beings whom He judged worthy of His love. The rest would rot in hell (which was thought to be below the deepest and darkest recesses of the Earth)!
In the early seventeenth century, an Italian astronomer named Galileo championed the Copernican theory that the earth revolved around the sun (heliocentrism). That idea ran counter to the prevailing belief of the Catholic Church that the sun revolved around the earth (geocentrism). For his view, Galileo was tried by the Inquisition, found to be guilty of heresy and was forced to recant. Modern science repudiated geoncentrism and confirmed Galileo’s concept to be correct. But only in 1992 did the Catholic Church acknowledge its error in condemning Galileo.
Since I immigrated to Canada in 1977, my eyes were opened up to a wider perspective about earth and beyond. I learned that there are more planets out there, more stars than we can imagine, vast dark space that continues to expand; mystery upon mystery that science cannot adequately explain. One of them is the possibility of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligences.
Fiction writers are way ahead of the scientists. They have envisioned alien beings more powerful and advanced from us roaming around the intergalactic space. Then by accident they would discover Earth and intend to conquer and civilize us. We would fight them with our sheer determination and courage, giving everything we got to defeat them. At the end, we would survive. Hurray for the good people of Earth!
Our favourite enemies from outer space are the Martians, those space aliens, as you guess it, from the planet Mars, the fourth planet from the sun. There are films of Martians invading the Earth, such as: Flash Gordon: Mars Attacks The World (1938), The Day Mars Invaded Earth (1963), Invaders from Mars (1986), Mars Attacks! (1996), and War of the Worlds (2005). But there are several films when we invade Mars instead, the best ones are: Red Planet (2000), Mission to Mars (2000), Ghosts of Mars (2001), John Carter (2012), and The Martian (2015). But not all Martians are the enemies. For 107 episodes from September 29, 1963 to May 1, 1996, we were treated with an American comedy sitcom aired on CBS entitled My Favorite Martian. We couldn’t get enough of a friendly alien among us, so more TV series and films were produced, such as, Mork and Mindy, ALF, ET, and Resident Alien.
Then there is the huge American science fiction media franchise Star Trek. The franchise produces various films, television series, video games, novels, and comic books and is estimated to gross around $10.6 billion in revenue. Gene Roddenberry, the originator of the show, intended to depict the progressive and good side of humanity. Thus we see the humans getting along well with aliens and together they set sail in space for adventures, riding in a space ship called Starfleet and looking to bring peace whenever there are conflicts that may arise among the planets.
Carl Sagan, an astronomer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, published a science book in 1980 entitled Cosmos. In his book, he explored the growth and evolution of the universe. He wrote: “Today we have discovered a powerful and elegant way to understand the universe, a method called science; it has revealed to us a universe so ancient and so vast that human affairs seem at first sight to be of little consequence…But science has found not only that the universe has a reeling and ecstatic grandeur, not only that the universe is accessible to human understanding, but also that we are, in a very real and profound sense, a part of that Cosmos, born from it, our fate deeply connected with it.”
He also mused about the possibility of extraterrestrial life form. “Perhaps when we look up at the sky at night,” he wrote, “near one of those faint pinpoints of light is a world on which someone quite different from us is then glancing idly at a star we call the Sun and entertaining, for just a moment, an outrageous speculation.” His basis for extraterrestrial life is that the universe is so vast that other alien civilizations are possible; otherwise it is just a waste of space. Yet, after Sagan had explored 15 billion years of cosmic evolution and the development of science and civilization, still there was no credible proof that an alien life ever visited the earth. He died on December 20, 1996 and so we lost forever a well-respected advocate of extraterrestial life form.
But there is no stopping in the belief of other alien civilization. Lately, we were inundated with news about the sightings of UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects), or also known as UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena). It was reported that the US government was tracking more than 650 potential UFOs. Sean Kirkpatrick, a director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, appeared before the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on April 19, 2023 and reported the number of sightings increased from the referenced point of 350 cases.
There is also a website called The Debrief that claims to specialize in “frontier science”. At one time it reported that the US government spent decades of secretly recovering “intact vehicles” and “partial fragments” of non-humans. Alien sightings have become a “cultural sensation” that anybody with military or government experience can come forward, without hard evidence, of strange encounter.
With the revived attention to space explorations and the renewed possible journeys to the moon and Mars, the focus on alien life cannot be timed more appropriately. Jamie Green, a science writer, essayist, editor, and teacher, wrote a book entitled The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in The Cosmos (2023). In her book she reintroduces the equation that calculates the odds of alien life. It is called the Drake Equation, after Frank Drake who is the pioneer in the field of SETI (the Search for ExtraTerrestial Intelligence). The Drake Equation goes this way:
N = R* x fp x ne x fI x fi x fc x L where
N The number of civilizations in the galaxy whose transmissions we could currently and conceivably find.
R* The rate at which stars form.
fp The fraction of stars that have planets.
ne The average number of planets per star that could support life.
fI The fraction of those planets that develop life.
fi The fraction of planets with life where life develops intelligence.
fc The fraction of intelligent civilizations that develop detectable technology.
L The average life span of a signaling civilization—how long they produce signals that we could detect.
More people believe now that the universe is so vast and how insignificant we become. Others can still continue to insist in their strong connection with God, and after their earthly lives end, they will be with Him forever. But if in the future, when the proof of alien life form could be solidly established, what then?
For now, though, we can only imagine. “Through it all,” Green writes, “our visions of alien worlds are reflections of ourselves, arising from our research, our dreams, and our subconscious like mist from a field of dawn. When we imagine a dozen ways for an alien to be, we’re imagining a dozen different kinds of people. When we invent alien languages, we learn more about the human brain. When we dream of a benevolent visitation, we’re telling a story of what we think we need…Imagining extraterrestial life is a way of figuring out what it means to be a conscious animal, what it means to be matter and alive. Our visions of space are a reflection of ourselves and of our humanity—like the building blocks of a telescope mirror and a lens.”
The young man has become old. But when he looks up at the sky above, he sees differently. He believes more in science than religion. Heaven is gone and beyond the clear, blue sky is a vision of dark space, vast and scary. He has still little understanding of what it all means. He will never get the chance to know more, just like the brilliant scientists who figured out, in spite of less advanced scientific tools, that the Earth was just a tiny piece in the realm of cosmic perspective. But curiosity and imagination will drive humans to continue to search for other worlds and life forms. Meanwhile, the old man is smiling to himself, for he is picturing a scene where he meets a space alien. He is thinking of words to greet the intergalactic creature. But all he can come up with is to say: “Na-Nu-Na-Nu”.
18 April 2024