Space race: Is there anyone out there?

            I grew up in what was called “The Space Age,” which superseded “The Jet Age.” Living in a rural area with very little light pollution, I was able to marvel at the stars and planets, identify the constellations, and dream of discoveries of worlds beyond Earth. “The Space Race” was under way, pitting the United States, bastion of democracy and godliness, against the Soviet Union, that oppressively communist and atheistic regime that wanted to destroy America.

We had to win the Space Race, and I dreamed of being part of it. Twice I asked for a celestial telescope for Christmas. I still have the second of those telescopes, which allowed me to see the craters on the moon, count the moons of Jupiter, see the red dust of Mars, and ponder the rings of Saturn. I stayed up late in 1969 to watch “One small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind.”

Reports of UFOs — Unidentified Flying Objects — intrigued me, and I became convinced that the reports of other-worldly spacecraft were factual, indicating that beings from other planets were observing or perhaps trying to communicate with us.

As my career interests shifted from astronomy to writing, I grew less convinced about the reports of UFOs and less interested in astronomy (which, I had discovered, entailed a lot of mathematics).

So much has changed since the days when my elementary school gathered the entire student body to watch the launch of a Mercury astronaut. The simple mention of NASA no longer makes hearts flutter with excitement. We’ve been to the moon and might get no farther. Unmanned probes have explored Mars, but the obstacles to putting astronauts on Mars remain daunting. Planetary probes and fly-bys are interesting, but wouldn’t a cure for cancer be better?

The latest intriguing object in space is an anomalous visitor to our solar system that does not behave like any planet, asteroid or comet ever detected. Some scientists believe the object, which flew past Earth recently, might be an exploratory probe from a distant civilization, which might be checking out the civilization on Earth. This theory is being taken seriously by scientists.

Residents of Earth have been searching for signals from distant civilizations for generations. The SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) program has listened and watched for signals from other planets. Some of the biggest names in astrophysics, such as Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, have supported SETI. Simple odds seem to favor the existence of intelligent life somewhere out there.

“If you roll the dice so many times, and there are tens of billions of stars in the Milky Way, it is quite likely we are not alone,” Isaac Chotiner wrote in The New Yorker.

The odds certainly favor some form of life on distant worlds, but the chemical combinations to sustain life don’t seem to be common. The odds of basic life forms evolving into intelligent life capable of creating an interstellar probe seem prohibitively greater. Life on Earth defied extraordinary odds over billions of years. Suppose it’s a miracle and not an accident.

Even if we accept that SETI is scientifically valuable, the incomprehensible distances of interstellar and intergalactic space makes meaningful contact with extraterrestrial life impossible. A two-way conversation between Earth and another planet would be an intergenerational task. The closest stars with planets are dozens to hundreds of light years away. We would be waiting hundreds of years for a reply to our greeting, and that assumes that language barriers could be overcome. Einstein established that nothing can travel faster than light, so the “warp speed” dreamed up by “Star Trek” writers defies the laws of physics

Among the billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy or the trillions in the thousands of other galaxies known to us, there might be intelligent life, but communicating with that civilization, much less visiting it, appears impossible.

Be awed at the vast heavens, the unfathomable distances, the varieties of objects and the enigmas of how it all came to be, but don’t count on spending your vacation on some distant world hundreds of light years away.

             

This article first appeared in The Wilson Times Feb. 2, 2019.

-->