Food For Thought: Will We Ever Make Contact With Extraterrestrials?
Are we alone? This question has been haunting mankind since the time we started looking at the skies. It has been around 200,000 years since the early men first showed up. And since then, we have been searching frantically, as a thirsty man in a desert searches for water, for any signs of our cosmic neighbours. But till now, we have been unlucky.
We, as a species, are so desperate right now, that even an extra-terrestrial single-celled organism would be an exotic find for us, let alone intelligent life form. After all the efforts that we have put in, without any results to show for it, the question begs to ask itself, are we really a lone ship in this gigantic ocean of a universe? If not, why haven’t we found anyone or better still why hasn’t anybody found us?
Efforts To Find Life Elsewhere
Well, since early times, brilliant minds from all around the planet have been peering into the cosmos for any signs of any life that may be out there. They have been in the hunt for any anomaly that could nudge them in the right direction.
There have been so many projects in the past and even today that are continually shuffling through hundreds of thousands of planets and galaxies to find evidence of life elsewhere.
Kepler Mission
Researchers are continuously on the lookout for Earth like planets in the universe. The theory here is that, if they can find a planet with similar conditions to Earth, there is a high probability that life could have developed there too.
They are using the Kepler Space Telescope for this which has discovered 4000 exoplanets out of which 20 planets have been found to have similar characteristics to that of our Earth.
Now that this discovery has been made, each planet can be looked at more closely and further investigations can take place on whether or not life harbours on these planets. It will all be based on probabilities but it takes one exotic finding which can turn things around in an instant.
Curiosity Rover
The curiosity rover is a car sized robotic rover that is exploring the surface of Mars. It was launched in 2011 and has been scouring the Martian surface for any sign of microbial life.
Martians have always been a part of our pop culture and it is only fitting that we started to realistically look for life from there. So far evidence of water has been found on Mars and it is speculated that life may have once existed here.
It is also speculated that life was brought to Earth from Mars by an ancient asteroid.
Stephen Hawking’s $100 Million Project
The project is officially called the 'Breakthrough Project' and includes world’s leading experts and researchers in what will be the most intensive project to find life out there in the cosmos.
They will be scanning planets revolving around a million stars in the 100 nearest galaxies to earth. The telescopes used for the project are extra sensitive and will be used to scan even the centre of our own galaxy as well as the whole galactic plane.
This is exciting because for the first time many different brilliant researchers are coming together for a common cause and the whole thing is being done on a grand level.
Project Argus
This project uses 143 radio telescopes in 27 countries to achieve real-time coverage of the entire sky. Basically they are trying to look for any radio signals that maybe coming from outside the earth sent by an extraterrestrial intelligent civilisation to contact us.
Looking for Technosignature
Technosignature is any evidence of the operation of advanced technology used by an extraterrestrial civilisation. This excludes the radio messages which are searched for commonly, throughout the world.
Basically it is a different way of looking for an intelligent civilisation by looking for their technologically advanced structures or activities. It’s like trying to find a person by trying to find his house first.
Technosignatures may originate from various sources like megastructures such as Dyson spheres and space mirrors or the atmospheric contamination created by an industrial civilisation.
Up until now researchers have been unsuccessful in finding any signs of highly advanced civilisations that may be out there. They have already combed through 100,000 nearby large galaxies for this purpose.
Challenges
We face a lot of challenges on the hunt for alien life. There are a lot of roadblocks that have been cleared out of the way but each day new ones seem to be cropping up.
Some of these challenges are simply out of our hands and we will never be able to do anything about them. The human race has to advance at a blistering rate for us to ever be able to meet an ET civilisation.
The Universe’s Expansion
The universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. This means that all the galaxies are getting further away from each other every second of every minute. This means that one day every galaxy will be so far away from the other galaxies that it could be virtually impossible to travel such long distances.
In such a scenario we might never be able to make contact. Humanity would be doomed to loneliness for eternity. Even if we manage to technologically advance ourselves to travel at near light speeds, it would take thousands of years to reach the nearest galaxy.
And who knows where our alien neighbours reside. It will be a harsh reality but we may have to brace ourselves for the scenario that there is a real chance we might never make contact.
Technological Barriers
We have come a long way in just the last 100 years than the 1000 years before that. But even with all our super hi-tech toys, we are at the whims of the universe and its laws. We are still at the stage where we talk about going a certain amount faster than the speed of sound.
Travelling near or at the speed of light isn’t even being considered right now. The distances between planets and stars and galaxies are so huge that we can barely even imagine it in our heads. The number is simply too large for our tiny heads to fathom.
Only if we could travel at near light speeds could we possibly think about travelling to neighbouring stars and galaxies. The nearest star to earth is the Alpha Centauri and even at light speeds it would take 8.48 years for the journey to and from this star.
And this is the nearest star we are talking about. The nearest galaxy, Andromeda, is at a distance of 2.537 million light years! Even at light speeds, travelling such great distances is simply inconceivable.
Also, we might not even have the proper tools to be able to look for the ETs in the first place. Who knows if we have been receiving signals from them all along but we just didn’t have the means to decode them or even understand the communication for that matter.
It could be a whole different type of communication method that we simply can’t understand or even perceive with our biological bodies at our current stage of evolution.
Times We Really Thought We Made Contact
The Wow! Signal
In 1977, astronomer Jerry R. Ehman discovered a radio signal that appeared to be coming from the Sagittarius constellation. It had all the telltale signs that it had originated from an advanced civilisation and lasted for 72 seconds.
Ehman had discovered the signal while reviewing the recorded data and he was so impressed by the signal that he circled the reading on the computer printout and wrote “Wow!” on one side. Hence the name “wow! signal”. The signal could neither be discounted nor decoded at the time and the case went cold.
Alien Megastructure
So, this is not exactly contact but a potential one. Researchers discovered the star named KIC 8462852 back in 2009 during the ongoing Kepler mission. But recently the start has been the cause of interest for everybody searching for ET life.
There is a swarm of megastructures revolving around this sun which seems to dim the light coming from the star by as much as 22%. This is an anomaly as it doesn’t fit the usual pattern that we have become accustomed to studying hundreds of thousands of stars and galaxies.
Even a planet as large as Jupiter would be able to dim the light of it’s sun by only 1%. Researchers, who are mostly skeptical about any ET activities have actually said that this might in fact be something that highly advanced extraterrestrial civilisation would build. A swarm of megastructures around a star.
Experts have been totally baffled by it and still no viable explanation has come out. NASA, however, believes that it might soon be able to solve the mystery once and for all after launching it’s latest telescope which might be able to have clearer look.
Conspiracies
Have you ever stopped to consider that we may be looking in the wrong direction in our search for alien life? What if instead of looking out into the universe, we ought to look in. By that I mean, looking for evidence on earth itself.
Several different “conspiracy theories” have come forwards stating a variety of information on alien contacts. Some say that the US government works with them, some say they are our overlords, and some even believe they live among us as shape shifters. One theory even suggests that there is now a third species on earth which was created as a hybrid of earthlings and aliens.
If aliens have already contacted us or the powers that be rather, then the question is not about contact anymore. It becomes a question of disclosure.
And no matter how unrealistic some of these conspiracy theories may sound, others however make you want to think that something is in fact going on behind the scenes. Nobody knows for sure and everything is speculative.
So, will we ever make contact? Or have we already?
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Great post. :) The answer is most likely no. It's almost certain that life - intelligent life, even - exists outside of the Solar System. But it's also certain that the Universe is so impossibly vast that there's negligible chance of ever making contact. If our entire planet were a haystack, it would be like finding one tiny needle in it.
yes, that's what i fear too. Maybe we will develop some mind blowing technology like the hyper drive or something....then it might be possible ;)
Maybe! Like others have pointed out, due to the Fermi Paradox, such mind blowing technology may not exist. Other civilizations have had at least 10 billion years to develop it. If there was such a technology, we would have seen it by now.
(And no, the KIC is almost certainly not an alien mega-structure! Way too erratic to be so - probably some previously unseen cosmic phenomenon)
let's hope NASA is able to provide some answers to that.
And I don't think we should take the Fermi Paradox as lines in stone. A lot of smart people have been proven wrong throughout the history. so i'm holding on to the belief that everything is possible technology wise. :)
Fermi Paradox is not about being wrong though. It's just an observation, and one that cannot be refuted.
It doesn't say that there will be no aliens making contact, just that it is very, very unlikely based on the evidence. Can't argue with that.
If aliens do show up tomorrow, it doesn't invalidate Fermi Paradox, it only means that it's a miraculous event.
outer space is an imaginary idea, and not real, it's a religion created by deceptive humans to enslave humanity
#conspiracy ! :)
who knows what the truth is....every ideas seems to hold its own! :)
We will probably never know the truth. After all, science is not a matter of truth or beliefs. One can always design theories that can both explain what we observe and make predictions. Then it is up to what one observes to decide which theory can be refuted / improved.
PS: great post by the way!
Meanwhile on another galaxy, Dyson spheres and ringworlds have already been constructed lol. IMO even if we've been been or under watch of some alien race - i don't think they'll show themselves until when the time comes. I used to play some space colonization game and it seems like it's the only logical thing that an advanced lifeform would do. But maybe not as well, it's not like we really care about ants - the same could be true for humans in relation to some advanced alien race.
Yes, we consider ourselves "intelligent lifeforms" but for the highly advanced ETs, we could just be apes roaming around this earth with no purpose and no contribution towards the universe. Maybe they are waiting for us to evolve further into higher intelligent beings!
Thanks for the read! :)
Our current technology is extremely limited in the search for Intelligent life, considering the size of the observable universe . We have barely begun to search for planets in our own galaxy, the distances involved between star systems is too great to even think of exploration during our lifetimes unfortunately. I like the analogy that theoretical physicist Miciho Kaku made of different types of possible advanced alien civilizations that can exist and we would not even be aware of them."Imagine walking down a country road, and meeting an ant hill. Do we go down to the ants and say, 'I bring you trinkets. I bring you beads. I give you nuclear energy and biotechnology. Take me to your leader?' Or we have the urge to step on a few of them??" We might see ourselves as intelligent species but if advanced civilisations have been around since the first galaxies formed billions of years ago after the bigbang, we could verywell just be another ant hill under a supergalactic highway.
well put! totally agree! :)
@sauravrungta I think we're pretty close. You mentioned Tabby's Star but by it's old designation. There has been an update there I posted a few days ago. I think you'll find it interesting.
https://steemit.com/news/@williambanks/did-we-just-discover-a-type-ii-alien-civilization-not-popsci-or-science-fiction
You sound as if you've never seen a large disc silently sliding through the sky, stopping dead still, rock solid, hover for a few seconds, then streak off, literally.
One moment its there, next moment a streak of cyan colored (like an arc welder) light strobed once, then nothing.
March 1974 - Lousiville, Germantown neighborhood.
It hovered over a food stuffs factory.
Durkee's Famous Foods. No longer there.
Durkee's had a few dozen large storage tanks, for all sorts of ingredients. Maybe 20feet diameter, and 30 feet tall.
I think these were consdered to potentially be nuke missile silos, and they were taking inventory of the installations. (just a hunch)
no i haven't seen one in person. and the one's on the internet are shady at best. some of them seem convincing though. i personally believe that they have here for thousands of years and have some agenda with the humans. I'm not sure about that. A lot of countries have released their files on UFO too. It's not disclosure but it tell us that something is up.
I like how you mentioned that it may not be a matter of contact anymore, but a question of disclosure. I'm a big supporter of SETI because I believe that we're not alone in the universe. I take comfort in that thought. I mean, what makes us so special that we're the only ones that exist. I hope we get a chance to see contact realized in our lifetime. Thanks for sharing this!
i am hoping for either contact or disclosure in my lifetime too! it is too exciting to think what would happen, how it will change the world, religion, philosophy.
thanks for the read :)
This reminds me of the SETI screensaver that I had ones. I helped to search for the aliens. Good old times. :-)
you did?? wow awesome! :D
I hope we find hyper advanced aliens in my lifetime. I want some of that sweet Alien technology so I can have superpowers. OK so that isn't very realistic. Great post though. My favourite candidate is that dimming star that you actually mention here and I read about it either in New Scientist or Ars Technica. It needs a better name than KIC 8462852 though!
hahaha scientific names suck in my opinion hehe...but it's a system they follow. That's why the names are like that...
thanks for reading :)
It' s also known as Tabby's Star, after Tabatha Boyajian, who wrote up initial studies on the star. And also the "WTF Star". Seriously!
I can't remember where I saw it but it was a documentary about our star system and they proved that in the Libra Sign one of the stars (sun in that solar system) had a planet with life, The planet apparently was made completely out of water and there were molecules or plankton living in it. This proves that lifeforms such as ourselves might exist. However doubtful that we will ever make contact.
I don't think a proof has been shown yet of the existence of life. Maybe they were saying that it was "probable".
If they had proved something, the world would be a different place now ;)