Anybody Out There?—Part 2

Getting back to intelligent life out there, civilizations on other worlds could be billions of years older than ours, or have yet to develop. If humans have come so incredibly far in a few thousand years, what may have happened on planets where life originated several billion years earlier? If life evolved there anywhere like it did here, we can't begin to imagine how advanced they've become.

And those questions (or speculations, because we yet do not have any evidence that intelligent life has arisen elsewhere) lead yet to another fascinating and significant question: If intelligent life is far ahead of us someplace out there, why have we not yet had it knocking on our earthly door? Where is it? Humans have played with the concept of space travel for at least a couple of hundred years. We've even begun taking baby steps to the Moon and Mars. “Star Trek” and other science fiction tales describe interstellar and intergalactic space travel, but is such travel really possible?

Distances across vasts spans of space are difficult to wrap our heads around. Even at the speed of light—which we may never approach—the length of time required to negotiate these distances is daunting. “Star Trek” engineers could shift the Enterprise into “warp” speeds: faster than light, but those speeds may forever remain fiction.

That said, how about considering an intelligent species on the other side of the galaxy that is a mere million years ahead of us? Couldn't they have reached cosmic speeds and brought transit times down to within maybe hundreds of thousands of years? Or where might we be in space a million years from now? Such transit times are incredibly long, but not beyond the reach of a civilization that may have been around for a few million years.

So where are these intelligent, advanced space travelers? Why haven't we heard by now, if they're so much more developed than we are? Couldn't a super-advanced civilization have spanned the universe by now—or at least the galaxy? Once again there may be no answer to these questions... they may even be the wrong ones to be asking. I'm sure that in another decade or so (a cosmic instant) we'll come up with a better set of questions. Until then, these are the ones we ask.

Some people suggest that the absence of any contact can be explained by the fact that there are no intelligent civilizations out there. Maybe so, but that is no reason to stop looking. What's more, humans were once inclined to believe that we were special, that Earth was the only source of life in the universe. As more and more planets and life possibilities are found, our specialness may not be true.

One rather disturbing answer brought up by some researchers as to why we're still unaware of other intelligent civilizations (if they're out there) is that there might be a limit as to how long a technological civilization can endure. The dinosaurs lasted something like 150 million years. We humans have been around only a couple of hundred thousand years. We have a long way to go, before we demonstrate our longevity. There are many informed prognosticators who raise the possibility that we may not last that much longer. Our technology races forward, with little thought to its dangers, virtually out of control. We tend to do things that we later regret—such as create an atomic bomb or pesticides that are subsequently shown to cause human birth defects and diseases. So far, most of the dumb things we have done have been small and on a local scale, but we are now playing with fire on a planetary scale, via global warming, habitat degradation, nuclear arms, etc. If we keep up our pace, we could render Homo sapiens extinct.

Our extinction is a real possibility. If so, it would terminate Earth's current experiment of evolving “intelligent” life. Of course, not all life forms on our planet would be eradicated—many of them are far tougher and resilient than we are. (Think of ants.) The evolutionary clock for the development of intelligent life on planet Earth would simply be reset. There's at east another billion years or two for the experiment to be rerun, before our sun expands and cooks all life on the planet.

So many questions. So many possibilities. Most are beyond the imagination of our minds. It's an exciting—as well as a sobering—time in our evolution. We are yet infants in the cosmos. We have time to correct our dangerous ways and see where evolution may take us in the far future. It'd be nice if we do, and are able to join other forms of intelligent life in universal kinship.

Addendum

Here's a neat way to get a feeling for the extraordinary length of time the Earth has been around and how short a time we've been here. (The following simile comes from an online course I'm currently taking: “Astronomy: Exploring Time and Space,” from Arizona Sate University, offered by Professor Chris Impey.)

Let a 1,000 page book represent the age of the Earth; thus each page of this massive tome represents 45 million years. Here are a few fascinating facts about this hypothetical book:

• For the first 10-20 pages of the book, no life is present on Earth. It's a barren planet.
• Fish first appear on page 500; half way through the book.
• The dinosaurs become extinct on page 985. (Only 15 more pages to reach to today!)
• Our ape-like ancestors appear halfway down page 1,000.
• Modern humans enter the scene on the book's very last line.
• Everything we humans pride ourselves on, everything from 40,000 year old cave paintings to the recent discovery of the Higgs boson, is contained within that last word on page 1,000.

All of modern humanity's accomplishments are enclosed within the very last word of a 1,000 page book! We humans may consider ourselves the “last word,” but we sure are the Johnny-come-latelies on the planet! I hope that our story does not end there. I hope that we find a way to put out a new edition some day that far exceeds 1,000 pages.

Anybody Out There?—Part 1

One of the most intriguing questions that has increasingly become the subject of scientific investigations, as well as popular media speculation, is the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Are we alone in the universe? I have played with this question in several past postings of this blog. I recently read an article on the subject that raised another fascinating aspect to the question. Here's the essence of it.

Science has edged relentlessly closer to the hypothesis that, indeed, there may well be life out there, for several reasons. (1) We now know that there are billions of planets just in our galaxy alone—something for which we had no evidence just a few years ago. (2) Researchers are getting better at understanding the conditions under which life may have spontaneously originated; if so, it could have done so in many locations throughout the universe. (3) Our space probes have discovered complex organic molecules on other bodies in space, such as comets; which were present at the beginning of our solar system, 4.5 billion years ago. There is a strong possibility that these molecules may be able to initiate life, when conditions allow. (4) Science has widened the conditions under which life can survive, if not thrive—conditions we only recently thought would be too hostile, until we discovered life thriving there, right here on Earth. (5) We also now know that some forms of life can survive the incredibly harsh environment of space, which potentially makes it possible for life to travel (as hardy microorganisms) from one planet to another.

Clearly extraterrestrial life has not yet been found, but we seem to be much closer to discovering it, if it's out there. Recent findings by the Mars rovers have directed our attention to that planet—giving us greater expectation that life may be found there. Scientists are excited by the prospect of this age-old question soon being answered. Thus many of them are turning their attention to what we may discover, if we do find life out there. We'd best prepare so that we are not taken by unpleasant surprises.

Suppose we do come across life elsewhere. It may come in a form that is utterly different from what we expect. Will we even recognize it as life? And the big question: Will it be intelligent—whatever that means? If so, will its intelligence resemble our own? We tend to regard our high-tech smart phones as evidence of our acumen. The guy who invented velcro was very smart; so was the team that discovered the Higgs boson last year. Ants are dumb, by human standards, but they've been around for over 100 million years. Is that not an example of a kind of intelligence? So if there is intelligent life elsewhere, its type of intelligence may be completely unexpected by us. We'd best keep our minds open.

There's another fascinating aspect about discovering intelligent life out there: technologically speaking it may be millions (or even billions) of years ahead of us, or just getting started. Earth is some 4.5 billion years old and life appears to have begun on our planet less than a billion years after it formed. So life has been here for maybe as long as four billion years. Think about that: it took some four billion years for humans to attain the advanced technological state we now find ourselves in. And our highly developed civilization is only a few hundred years old. Where might we be in another 100 years? Or 1,000 years? We can't begin to guess. Any of our predictions in the past have been far wide of the mark. And science fiction is of little help; their scenarios are usually quite naive.

More on life out there, next time...

Red Bellied Woodpecker at Feeder

Click to enlarge.

Idle Activeness

We modern humans often find ourselves frenetically engaging in one activity after another. Modern life pushes us to multitask and be constantly on the go. Our smart phones keep us ceaselessly in touch with a wide variety of people and events, threatening to rob us of any “down time” or quiet time, during which we can rest our mind and rejuvenate. Thus many of us go to great efforts to take a break to come down from our high alert state.

This is one reason why yoga and meditation have come to have so much appeal to moderns. People consider these practices to be of value to them, because the mind is considered to be doing nothing when we meditate; to become idle, to become blank, to rest. Once we go into mental idle mode for a while, both body and mind become refreshed and we're ready to jump back into the fray. It's as if our brain is connected to an on/off switch, that either allows it to be busy or renders it dormant. We flip from one mode to the other, as if our mind is polarized—it's either doing everything or nothing. There seems to be no gray area (sort of like American politics: it's either right wing or left wing, with no middle ground). Our life continues in either case, but nothing changes; no progress can occur, because we can't escape inhabiting and getting stuck in either extreme.

Modern neuroscience is bringing us a new understanding of what's going on in our mind while we rest it in meditation (or sleep). Even when we believe we've entered a blank, meditative state, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines show that certain parts of the brain (those that are mostly below the level of consciousness) actually become more active during meditation. These various regions of the brain do their own kinds of business and problem solving, autonomously, so that when we reengage with the world, we may find ourselves more creative, happier, and more effective.

But it's not that we've allowed the whole mind to “veg out” and recharge; we've let the conscious part of it become idle, as the unconscious part cranks up to do some work on its own. So we have more than just the binary on/off situation in our brain; it has other modes wherein the subconscious part automatically keeps chugging away, even during meditation, sleep, or idle times.

Creative people know that some of their biggest insights come when they are on idle, or even while daydreaming. Many of them have found that, after actively banging their heads against a wall, trying to figure out a problem, the solution comes unbidden after they go into idle mode.

So meditation is not just a process of turning the mind off, so we can let go our stress for a while—then jump back in, refreshed and ready to do battle again, just as we did before. It's more a process of getting the conscious “higher” part of the brain to turn activities over to other regions that can engage with life's issues and concerns, find ways to connect those regions and get them collaborating, so we can bring insightful and fresh ways to manage life.