All set – Waiting for the extraterrestrial life to show up
While we wait for them to appear or discover them, here is an article discussing the idea of aliens briefly. Care to join us in this brainstorming?
Regardless of the fact that we don’t know anything about extraterrestrials, or even whether they exist, we still have to make some division of them in the discussion about them.
In popular literature, as a rule, aliens are something like caricatured people, in form they are often freaks for our notion of beauty, although sometimes they are cute, mostly excessively evil or good, very smart or mentally quite limited, etc.
Actually, they might be ordinary with some exaggerated human characteristics. That in literature, and as far as science is concerned, they are simply living beings. Those beings can be:
- Simple organisms.
- Complex organisms.
- Intelligent organisms.
The best chances are that the first ones exist, although many conditions need to be met for their creation.
Complex, or higher organisms are an immeasurably greater challenge to nature. It took our planet two billion years to give birth to them.
An even greater challenge is the emergence of intelligent beings. Otherwise, when you say “alien” in everyday speech, you usually refer to just such an intelligent being.
But as far as we know, the firm belief of many that intelligent extraterrestrials exist and in large numbers has waned. It seems that the incessant and persistent noise from space, without any sign of their existence and despite great efforts to catch it, has led to the fact that even the great optimists are slowly giving up.
Besides, the more we know about space, the more we discover its inhospitality.
- Even those who are convinced of the existence of advanced aliens say that there are probably not many of them, but perhaps only one to a few civilizations in the galaxy.
- And that is much less than hundreds of thousands, and even more in our galaxy, as Carl Sagan and the company around him believed.
- As far as the solar system is concerned, if there is any extraterrestrial life in it, it differs very little from non-living nature. There is no question of intelligence.
There seems to be some “wave” system in the belief about the existence of extraterrestrials.
- In ancient times, it was timidly believed that they existed, then with the Middle Ages, a firm belief prevailed that they not only did not exist, but that they could not exist (because God sowed life only on Earth), so that from the end, in the 16th century, the idea that they might exist after all appeared again.
- Then there was a kind of paroxysm and frenetic belief from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century that they not only exist but must exist and are sown everywhere: on the Sun, Mercury, Venus, the Moon, and so on. To infinity.
Today, it seems that this belief has subsided before the inescapable fact that they do not appear, that we do not see even a trace of them.
There is no sign in space that we could interpret as a consequence of the existence of some highly developed civilization. But it still counts with simple life forms.
It is possible, that there is intelligent life, but at a technological level that we cannot see with our telescopes. Maybe someone is discovering television right now around a neighboring star. Or the theory of relativity. Maybe.
Scientists hope that in the next ten years, when research based on new technologies begins, they will be able to detect traces of life around neighboring stars.
We use the term traces, because the new technology will only be able to see some changes, for example, in the composition of the atmosphere, which cannot be explained in any other way than by the existence of something alive.
