Are we Alone?

Does this question make you wonder when you look at the night sky and see the stars? Don’t you think about the stars and their possible planetary system?

If this same thought or idea had ever made you ponder then you should continue to read.

Before we start, let me tell you when it all began? The questions I started to ask around and nobody had answers. Those who answered, simply said it is Gods who are responsible for everything. That was not the answer I was looking for and I was never convinced.

My fascination and quest to know more about universe started in my early childhood. I started with newspaper-magazine articles. Later on, Dad got me a book about Solar-system and I fell in love with it at that age. That was the first time when I started to ask myself:

What lies beyond Earth and Solar System?

To get back to the question or topic of this post, we should first understand how much we know about our Solar system itself. We have gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn), extreme cold (Neptune and Pluto) and extremely hot (Mercury and Venus) worlds. Their moons; some of them are super volcanic (Lo - Moon of Jupiter), some may support life in the water beneath ice-caps, some of them are even weirdly shaped (not round - Phobos and Deimos – Mars Moon) and are often referred to as potato moons. Just recently, we came to know more about Jupiter's dense atmosphere, some of the fastest cyclones near poles and auroras with the help of Juno Spacecraft.

Checkout NASA's official Juno Image Gallery

Our solar system itself is full of mystery and in just recent years we have started to know more about our neighbors because of the boom in Space explorations. In few years we may reach to Mars and can call ourselves interplanetary species. We have so much to learn about MARS first and find the answers about the kind of life-form it supported in past. 
Let's hope we may see enough advancement in Technology that can lead us to Proxima Centauri star system (nearest star to our Sun) in our lifetime. 

Now, Proxima Centauri has its own solar system and recently some planets have been discovered in the habitable zone. Scientists suspect there may be life or life harboring environment present. Even though the planet(s) turns out dry and dead; this will be the 2nd star we will reach to. In our galaxy itself, we have approximately 100 billion stars and that means 100 billion possibilities. Just to boggle you a little more, there are 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in the Observable Universe itself. 

Do you still think we may be Alone?

You may be thinking; well all this information is very fascinating but where are all the Aliens? Why they never showed up and why governments always deny about existence Aliens and UFOs? Answering these questions will require another post but I will try to share one possible explanation. 

Imagine we, as intelligent beings, discover another intelligent life on one of the planetary body in our solar system itself but they are hundreds of years behind us in terms of evolution and technology. Would you consider going among them and claiming your presence?  Of course Not! Doing that will simply disturb the whole ecosystem, environment, and even beliefs. In most cases, the primitive society will not be even ready to accept the existence of beings from other worlds and can be treated as either Gods or evil spirits from Hell. Exposing ourselves could create religious differences among the alien society and plague it with the same disease like we have it on Earth.

 

Consider how far we have come in just last 100 years (in terms of technology). What about an intelligent civilization that is 1000 years more advanced than us? We know technology evolves exponentially; how about an intelligent civilization 1 million years more advanced than us? They will be literally Godlike to us, won’t they? 

What do you think? I'd love to hear back.