Blabbers on a Friday (late) night Or Random s**t thoughts crossing an idle mind

Is our earth a cosmic aberration?

It’s a no-brainer. The fantasy about extra-terrestrials – little green men- coming from faraway planets and befriending us or mostly attacking us, has been in vogue for quite a while now. The number of Hollywood movies including blockbusters and flops alike dealing with this topic has been increasing phenomenally in the last few years, may be decades. The use of computer graphics interface or CGI has been able to make a more appealing or ‘realistic’ portrayal of catastrophic damage inflicted by nefarious aliens on earth. To the common man on earth, this kind of existence of an advanced extra-terrestrial civilization on an unknown planet is something he is not worried about, and of course, for him, it is difficult to ponder over 'what it really means’. Its existence ends at the movie theater; it no longer exists beyond the realm of science-fiction.

Some scientists – we can call them astronomers, or may be ‘atrobiologists’ – seriously think and work about it, as in, they try to do research backed by scientific instruments and information, if, out there we do have ‘someone’ listening to us, someone observing us. They try to predict and also find, if we humans, are alone. And if not, then try to find out what implications does it have on our thinking, our existence. Suppose we discover that there are micro-organisms like bacteria or virus in Europa, Jupiter’s famed satellite, or on Titan, Saturn’s famed satellite. What would it imply and how would it affect us? Firstly, that will prove that conditions for germinating and sustaining life are not unique to ‘mother earth’.  Secondly, scientists will become super excited to understand and study what kind of biology those organisms are characterized by – is the same DNA and RNA responsible for their biological and chemical build-up? Are they also carbon based like humans? But, as yet, we have not discovered any such organisms anywhere in our solar system, although speculations still run high, especially on Europa and Titan for various ‘potential life-sustaining’ conditions.

Exoplanets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrasolar_planet), or planets outside our solar system, are something astronomers are really excited about these days. It seems they are discovered almost at the rate of one new planet every day! I am not too sure though, but there are nearly a thousand of them discovered orbiting different parent stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Some ‘orphans’ or lone planets wandering in inter-stellar space are also detected it seems. The latest buzz is that for the first time actually scientists are able to image such a planet in infra-red as opposed to detecting them using indirect means radial velocity measurements. A few of such discovered planets seems to lie at a right distance from their parent star where water can exist on the surface in liquid form and has the right ambient for life to ‘probably’ evolve. Speculations. No proof, no evidence yet. All speculations, hope, optimism. Of course, detecting life on such a planet many light years away from our earth is something beyond our technological capability as of now. But scientists believe there are a few billion ‘habitable’ planets in our own Milky Way galaxy itself! That’s a bold claim. And the hunt continues; it actually is growing stronger every day! The Kepler mission is heralding new dawn in this direction, unveiling so many of such promising exoplanets. And SETI is trying to ‘listen’ to whispers of advanced civilizations, scanning the sky in radio frequency for possible non-natural origin of radio waves. It is speculated that any intelligent species would try to communicate at 1.42 GHz since that corresponds to the fundamental spectral line of hydrogen atom, the most abundant element in the universe. Well, nothing detected or ‘listened to’ so far!

A conclusive or verifiable confirmation about the existence of an intelligent extra-terrestrial civilization would lead to unprecedented affects in both science and in philosophy. Scientists would be curious to know the biology and chemical make-up of those beings, and if their technology is similar to ours, if their evolution of technology is similar to ours, if there are more such planets, and how much diversity we can expect across different advanced civilizations, if they possess threat to us, how they communicate among themselves, etc etc. It would raise a hundred times more questions than answers! Philosophically, people will question who really we are, what our identity is, if God has a role to play at all – if the same God who we worship created those extra-terrestrial civilizations, if those advanced beings too believe in God, etc.

But these are all ‘what if’ and ‘suppose we detect’ conditions. They are, as of now, still in the realm of speculations and hypotheses.

As of now, we know of only one planet with confirmed existence of life, and that is our Earth. Yes, our earth. All our predictions, hypotheses, optimism and belief are based on extrapolation of our knowledge of ‘life on earth’. We believe a planet ‘has to have’ conditions similar to earth’s to have life sustained and germinated – like water being liquid, right distance from sun, organic compounds in abundance, etc. But in statistics, when your sample size or set consists of only one object, how can you draw a conclusion? How can you make a statistical analysis? We can’t!  So, just because there are an ‘estimated’ hundred and sixty billion planets in our Milky Way and an estimated hundred and seventy billion galaxies in the observable universe, should we believe or assume that ‘intelligent’ life does exist apart from on our earth? Since Milky Way is an average sized and average aged galaxy, if we roughly assume each galaxy on an average has 160 billion planets, then we have approximately 3 x 10²² planets in the observable universe. And making a claim that ‘intelligent’ life exists on only just one planet is making a claim which has a probability of something like 10^-22. In engineering at least (don’t know about science!!), that is also called a zero probability event! But until we detect life elsewhere, we are not sure!

May be, again, may be, our earth IS a cosmic aberration. The set of environments which led to such complex organism which can question about its own existence and identity, is probably rare on a cosmic scale. We might just be a cosmic bug after all and not a commonplace!