Extra-terrestrial intelligence?

Last week, a group of scientists announced that they had identified more than 1,000 new "exo-planets" — planets orbiting stars other than our sun. The discovery of more than 2,000 such planets over the past few years has excited a lot of people who see these planets as harboring intelligent life or a livable environment for earthly humans to colonize after Earth has been depleted.

It appears that solar systems like our own are the norm for all of the billions of stars throughout our Milky Way galaxy and, presumably, among all the trillions of start in other galaxies. With so many planets orbiting so many stars, surely there are thousands, if not millions of exo-planets with life like our own planet's.

That's the thinking behind the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Both learned scientists and somewhat knowledgeable laymen dream of contacting intelligent beings on other worlds and even visiting and studying those other creatures populating our universe.

This thinking comes with a major "BUT ..." BUT ... any forms of life out there are so far away that we can never expect to visit them and probably can never hold a conversation with them. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is estimated to be 100,000 to 120,000 light years across. A light year (the distance light travels in one year) is 6 trillion miles. The light we see in the night sky is light that is tens of years, even hundreds of years old. The light we cannot see (because it is too faint) is even older — many thousands of years old.

And that presents a problem for our goal of conversing with extra-terrestrial intelligent beings. Radio waves travel at the speed of light. If we were successful at discovering radio signals from our nearest neighbors outside our solar system, the radio message would be 4 to 10 years old upon arrival on Earth. Our SETI reply would take another 4 to 10 years to reach the other world. If no intelligent life was found around the first dozen (or hundred) closest stars, the search would continue on to worlds that are within dozens or hundreds of light years away and then to those thousands of light years away. Communication would be, at best, an inter-generational effort.

As for direct contact — traveling to distant worlds — just visiting planets within our solar system requires interplanetary travel lasting years. No one knows whether humans can endure such a trip either physically or psychologically. Would you take on a mission to Jupiter's moons, for example, knowing that you (and your family and friends) would have aged 20 years or more on the trip, even if you dodged the solar radiation and small asteroids that could destroy your space ship?

Travel to planets outside our solar system would be totally unfeasible, despite the dreams of "Star Trek" and other science fiction. "Star Trek" imagines vehicles that travel faster than the speed of light. Einstein theorized that nothing can travel faster than light, and no scientist has found a way around Einstein's barrier. Inter-galactic travel cannot be done.

So why are we so intent on finding extra-terrestrial intelligence? We're a curious species and want to know. But any discovery is likely to be a disappointment, perhaps a signal originated from a distant world whose inhabitants have gone extinct or whose world has been swallowed by a dying star.

Stars and planets put on an early morning show

Venus, the moon, and Jupiter have been putting on a spectacular show each morning before dawn. On these clear, chilly nights, as I walk eastward to pick up the newspaper in the driveway, I see the bright jewels in the sky, hovering over the treeline. Each morning is a little different. The moon slides away beneath the horizon, and the planets adjust their relationships.

I turn back toward the house and see Sirius, the Dog Star, and ahead of it, mighty Orion, the hunter with his belt jeweled with stars and brilliant Betelgeuse at his shoulder.

For a moment — just a moment — I see the night sky as our forebears must have seen it — a spectacular light show, ever changing but ever familiar, the constellations like old friends who come to visit at their appointed time throughout the year. Ambient light from houses and streetlights dim the stars to us modern observers, but the brightest ones still mark their spots against the black sky.

I cannot stay and marvel; I have appointments to keep. I walk back into the bright daylight of our home, sit at the kitchen table, drink coffee and read the paper.

Perfect pictures require keeping a camera handy

Whenever you see that perfect picture is when you don't have a camera handy. It happened to my wife and me twice in the last couple of days. The first time we were on the road, somewhere in Cumberland or Robeson County, I think, on a rural, two-lane road, late Friday afternoon. The sun was setting, and I was shifting my head to dodge the glare of sunlight that my dark glasses couldn't shade. Then the sun dipped below the tree line on the horizon, and the scattering of high clouds turned pink and red in a glorious display of natural painting. For 20 minutes and about as many miles, the colors in the sky shifted, brightened and dimmed as we watched in awe.

"If we only had a camera," my wife said.

"There's one in the trunk," I replied. "Do you want to stop?" But we were in a hurry to get where we were going (aren't we always?), so we didn't think it worth the trouble and the delay to stop.

Later that cold night, when the temperature would drop to around 10 degrees, I stepped outside and looked up at the dark sky, which was illuminated more brightly than I had seen it in years by the southern constellations. Orion's belt was brightly jeweled, each star distinct and clear against the darkest black background. Sirius in Canis Major trailed behind the hunter, and Taurus the bull menaced him to the right, bright stars marking the tips of his horns and the Pleiades forming a cloud above him. The clear sky and chilling temperatures had combined for the perfect star-viewing conditions, turning the dark dome of the sky into its more perfect imitator, a planetarium's ceiling, where each star is perfectly visible and their numbers are uncountable.

Modern men have little appreciation of God's promise to Abraham in Genesis to make his offspring as numerous and uncountable as the stars in the heavens or the sands on the shore. Urban skies, with their competing light and air pollution have dimmed out all but the brightest stars. We lose the overwhelming magnitude of that divine promise.

On Friday night, with the right equipment, a fast camera and a tripod, I might have captured a view of the sky as it was 5,000 years ago, before electric lighting, overpopulation and air pollution dimmed everything. But I was not equipped for such a task, so I hold it only in memory and inadequate words.

For readers who appreciate the visual, I offer this link to a blog offered by someone who keeps her camera handy and uses it well.