IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE?
‘The Erie Silence, Are We Alone in the Universe’ Paul Davies. Allen Lane Books
I have a mug, which a few years ago I took into work with me whilst working in the Mental Health Team in Haringey. It’s a large black mug bearing the motif of the SETI institute in California USA, SETI being The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The mug was the subject of much derision, so I was a UFO geek, a believer in little green men. No end of protestations that SETI was a respectable organisation based on rigorous scientific principles, that it had enjoyed NASA funding, cut any ice. No the whole idea of the search for intelligent life outside our solar system was risible.
I suppose I ought to state, for the record, as they say, that I am not interested in the outpourings of the so called Ufologists, nor do I believe that we are regularly visited by astonishingly humanoid aliens taken to abducting hapless homo sapiens for the purpose of surgical experiments.
I do however believe that the question are we alone in the universe is amongst the most important question ever asked. Discovery of intelligent life in the Universe would, to put it mildly, have radical implications for the whole of humanity. So what are the odds? Well astronomers estimate that there are 200 billion to 400 billion stars contained within the Milky Way, moreover recent discoveries indicate that planetary systems are almost certainly the norm. Estimates of how many of these will be rocky earth like planets vary, Dr Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Science in 2009 estimated that there could be one hundred billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy. These Goldilocks planets, neither too hot nor too cold, would all be candidates for the formation of some form of life, with the potential to develop intelligent life. All of this predicated on the assumption that life would need water and be carbon based, what if other forms of life could develop in habitats inconceivable to us? I have also not mentioned the reality that our own galaxy is only one amongst 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the universe.
SETI currently raises far more questions than answers, but they are serious questions that need to be examined, questions which Davies seeks to explore. At the heart of the enquiry is the question of the eerie silence, where is everybody?
Cosmology of which SETI and disciplines such as astrophysics and astrobiology are offshoots, is the most exiting area of human exploration, I recommend a visit to the Hubble website should you require any further persuading, www.hubblesite.org/ , as to SETI, well as Jody Foster’s character in the film contact framed it, ‘if we are alone it represents an extraordinary waste of space.’ Alternatively as Arthur C Clarke one mused:-
‘Sometimes I think we are alone in the universe, sometimes I think we are not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
I have a mug, which a few years ago I took into work with me whilst working in the Mental Health Team in Haringey. It’s a large black mug bearing the motif of the SETI institute in California USA, SETI being The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The mug was the subject of much derision, so I was a UFO geek, a believer in little green men. No end of protestations that SETI was a respectable organisation based on rigorous scientific principles, that it had enjoyed NASA funding, cut any ice. No the whole idea of the search for intelligent life outside our solar system was risible.
I suppose I ought to state, for the record, as they say, that I am not interested in the outpourings of the so called Ufologists, nor do I believe that we are regularly visited by astonishingly humanoid aliens taken to abducting hapless homo sapiens for the purpose of surgical experiments.
I do however believe that the question are we alone in the universe is amongst the most important question ever asked. Discovery of intelligent life in the Universe would, to put it mildly, have radical implications for the whole of humanity. So what are the odds? Well astronomers estimate that there are 200 billion to 400 billion stars contained within the Milky Way, moreover recent discoveries indicate that planetary systems are almost certainly the norm. Estimates of how many of these will be rocky earth like planets vary, Dr Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Science in 2009 estimated that there could be one hundred billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy. These Goldilocks planets, neither too hot nor too cold, would all be candidates for the formation of some form of life, with the potential to develop intelligent life. All of this predicated on the assumption that life would need water and be carbon based, what if other forms of life could develop in habitats inconceivable to us? I have also not mentioned the reality that our own galaxy is only one amongst 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the universe.
SETI currently raises far more questions than answers, but they are serious questions that need to be examined, questions which Davies seeks to explore. At the heart of the enquiry is the question of the eerie silence, where is everybody?
Cosmology of which SETI and disciplines such as astrophysics and astrobiology are offshoots, is the most exiting area of human exploration, I recommend a visit to the Hubble website should you require any further persuading, www.hubblesite.org/ , as to SETI, well as Jody Foster’s character in the film contact framed it, ‘if we are alone it represents an extraordinary waste of space.’ Alternatively as Arthur C Clarke one mused:-
‘Sometimes I think we are alone in the universe, sometimes I think we are not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
