Children of the Universe

Are Humans an Only Child or Are They a Long Lost Sibling?

This photo is what appeared in Section B of the LA Times newspaper on February 25th, 1942 after a bizarre scene unfolded in the early morning hours of a possible Japanese air attack over the city. Through the chaos of anti-aircraft fire and searchlights, the photo in the upper left of the newspaper page was taken. Does it show a UFO? A proper answer has never been found, but, even 70 years later, the debate rages on. Photo courtesy of National Geographic.

Roswell, New Mexico, summer of 1947, something as yet identified crashed in the desert. And from that moment on citizens of the United States went on UFO alert. In the intervening 65 years, investigations into modern sightings, and sightings throughout human history as far back as ancient Egypt, have flooded not only the American media, but media worldwide. As our technology has advanced, and our exploration of space has progressed, it seems that the quintessential question of human existence has focused intently on one question: are we alone? Theories abound about alien civilizations affecting our burgeoning ancients as far back as 6,000 years; and reports of alien abductions run rampant through the media in the modern day. So much so, that there are television programs on our dedicated science channels on television solely devoted to the alien intrusion of our world. Some of the worlds elite scientists have weighed in on this topic, and the thoughts of alien encounters and first contact have taken on a seriousness like it never has before. A Big Universe In our search for answers on the likelihood of humans being alone in the Universe, let us first understand how big the Universe truly is. Hold on to your seats, reader, we are about to take a long journey chock full of numbers. We will begin here at home, with the planet Earth. Our home measures just over 7,900 miles in diameter. If we were to reduce the Earth to 0.4 inches in diameter (the size of a marble; a reduction of over 1.2 billion times), we would still have to travel 2.2 miles to reach the orbit of Neptune, and 149 feet to reach the Sun (which itself would measure 43 inches in diameter and weigh in at just over a ton)! The speed of light would be reduced to 9 inches per second. Now, lets reduce things by another 15,000 times. Our Sun now becomes so small (0.3 millionths of an inch) that its diameter is less than half the width of the thinnest human hair. The Milky Way galaxy, our Suns ho me, so large that it takes light 100,000 years to travel across it, now measures 3,100 miles across, the distance from Miami, Florida to Vancouver, British Columbia. And, even though our galaxy weighs in at a hefty 700 billion Suns, at this size it weighs in at 7.25 ounces! Thats a lot of empty space! Our Earth would be reduced to measuring only 258 atoms across! For our final exercise in reduction, let us now go nearly 164 billion times smaller still. Our Milky Way galaxy, which was 3,100 miles across, is now a mere 1.2 thousandths of inch across (about the thickness of a typical sheet of copy paper). This now makes the observable Universe, an unimaginable 93 billion light-years in diameter, a more understandable 93 feet. As part of this final thought experiment, the Earth would be slightly less than half the size of an electron! Now that you have a better understanding of how large the Universe is, lets populate it with stars. And to do this, we will make the assumption that all galaxies are similar to the Milky Way. Within our galaxy it is estimated that there are 400 billion stars, and within the observable

Universe, there are an estimated 100 billion galaxies. Following our assumption above, that says that there should be 40 billion trillion stars inside that 93 foot diameter bubble! Even if we look at just the Milky Way, and assume that there is one intelligent alien civilization for every one billion stars, that is still 400 civilizations! The Origins of Life Where did life come from? What was the mechanism behind the required ingredients being gathered for not only life here on Earth, but life throughout the galaxy and the Universe? In 1961, physicist Robert Dicke put forth the notion that the age of the Universe, as observed and calculated, was not a random value, but a perfect fit for the development of intelligent life. Twelve years later, theoretical physicist Brandon Carter first put forth the phrase Anthropic Principle. And, in fact, he put fo rth two forms of the principle, the weak and the strong. The weak form states that, through the evolution of the Universe, there are certain privileged locations in spacetime (that is, locations in a three dimensional space at a certain point in time). These privileged locations are a necessary result for the given values of universal constants in order that intelligent life may evolve. In other words, the Universe must exist, such as it is, for the purpose of providing those locations the ability to produce such life. Then there is the strong form, which changes the purpose to a requirement. Hence, the universe must exist in its present form in order that intelligent life evolves for the sole purpose of observing it. It sounds rather strange that something of this magnitude be spoken of in the forum of science, for this puts constraints on the further evolution of the Universe into a form of predestination. Does the Universe exist for the need to be observed by us? This brings up the quandary that science and religion have been banging heads over for so long; is there a God? But this question is not going to be discussed nor resolved here, that is not the purpose of this article. If the Universe evolved along such strict guidelines in order for intelligent life to evolve, specifically human beings, then what were these special conditions which were necessary for that evolution? The Sun, which is classified as a Main Sequence, small, yellow star, is also classified as a Population I star. In the early Universe there was not much beyond the element hydrogen, but there was LOTS of it. And, so, the first stars were gigantic, pure hydrogen balls; and they burned through their fuel quickly and ended their lives in the first supernova explosions. But the fusion process and the supernovae began producing the first of the heavier elements in the Universe. Population II stars took this process of producing the heavier elements even further. By the time the Sun was born five billion years ago, the natural metallicity of its hydrogen cloud set up for the creation of dense, rocky planets in the infant solar system. As the infant solar system began to form proto-planets, the Suns solar winds pushed much of the lighter gas and dust of the proto-planetary disk to the further reaches of the solar

system. Hence, the rocky planets began to develop at closer distances. But, the next fortuitous event happened when the young Earth was struck a glancing blow by another Mars-sized protoplanet. This event led to the eventual creation of our Moon, which is the largest satellite (in comparison to the host planets size) to be found in the all the Solar System (remember, even though Charon is nearly the same size as Pluto, Pluto is now classified as a dwarf planet). As a result, the Earths rotation stabilized due to the Moon, and the natural cycle of seasons were able to take hold. Earth then became a target for early comets, which not only brought all the water we see today, but also brought the organic building blocks for life to evolve. An atmosphere developed, and, out of sheer luck, the Earths distance from the Sun remained at a point where liquid water remained (a.k.a. the Goldilocks Zone). We have seen how the fundamental forces of the Universe and the formation of our Solar System and our planet seemingly fall into perfect harmony in order that human beings were given the chance to evolve. But, surely, we cant be the only planet to have been provided these rare gifts. Where is everybody else? Fermis Paradox and Drakes Equation In 1950, the famous physicist Enrico Fermi asked this very same question. He came to ask this question as the ultimate response to four ideas. And, in 1961, radio astronomer Frank Drake tried to quantify this idea by developing an equation to map out how many intelligent civilizations there should be in the Milky Way galaxy. The half century since the release of this equation has seen the assumed values fluctuate and argued over consistently. Age estimates for the Sun place it the realm of 5 billion years old; for a Main Sequence star this is middle age, with a life expectancy of about 10 billion years. Comparatively, however, there are billions of stars in our galaxy that are hundreds of millions to billions of years older than our Sun. Presumably, there must be some of these stars which have planets around them capable of supporting not only life, but intelligent life. Looking back on human evolution, it has taken just over two million years for our primate ancestors to evolve into Homo sapiens, and it has only taken a few thousand years from the dawn of civilization for us to advance to the point of being, maybe, less than a century from the onset of interstellar travel. In terms of a stars lifetime, that is less than the blink of an eye. So, Fermi posited that, for any intelligent civilizations that may have evolved throughout the galaxy around older stars, it should be assumed that some of them have developed successful forms of interstellar travel. And, based on the rate of advancement of an intelligent society, the whole of the galaxy should be able to be fully colonized within a few tens of millions of years. Based on these ideas, Fermi asked, Where are they? So, as is the case with scientific ideas, when the qualitative wont provide a solution, then we must move into the quantitative; and thats exactly what Frank Drake did. Taking a step-by-step approach to the idea, he

developed an equation to determine how many intelligent, broadcasting civilizations there may be in our galaxy.

Picture courtesy of http://www.fermisparadox.com/Fermi-paradox.htm

While the listed Historical Values are not the initial values Drake applied to the equation, they are indeed an average of sorts of the argued values over the last fifty years. Additionally, the arguments have spurned the inclusion of more values. One of these factors came as a consequence of life being intelligent. The factor is the Reincidence Factor, or how many times intelligent life evolves on a single planet. Given the lifetime of a technologically advanced civilization, and a tendency for intelligent life to destroy itself once it has the ability, it is possible that, once one form of intelligent life disappears, there will be more than enough time for another form of intelligent life to evolve. This term shows up as (1+nr). For example, Home sapiens have taken 2 million years to evolve, and we now have the capability to eradicate ourselves. Given that the Sun is only half way through its 10 billion year lifespan, I should say that there is plenty of time for evolution to take hold again. A more semantic addition to the equation is thanks to Russian radio engineer and astronomer Alexander Zaitsev, who put forth that a civilization must be differentiated in terms of communications. He postulated that, just because a civilization was sending out radio signals into space, they werent doing it intentionally for the purpose of communicating to other civilizations. He named this the Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) Factor, and it is not necessary to achieve first contact, nor will it be known what its value is until we are well into contact with extraterrestrials, at which point it will be moot. Finally, in January of this year, Nick Prantzos of the Astrophysics Institute of Paris published a paper in which he combined the knowledge we have gained about the Fermi Paradox and the Drake Equation into one complete paper. The purpose for this combination was the based on the fact that, any civilization that makes into the colonization phase of its existence will do so at an ever increasing fraction of light speed, thereby increasing the odds of first contact. Mr.

Prantzos paper uses the volume of the Milky Way disk and a parameterized solution for a spreading civilizations radius of influence to establish how many possible civilizations may be out there. He represents this graphically as follows:

As you can see, his rather intuitive qualitative analysis of the Drake Equation allowed for his development of the elegant quantitative analysis and the seamless inclusion of the Fermi Paradox. For starters, Mr. Prantzos reduced the original Drake Equation to three terms; they describe the astrophysical rate of suitable planetary production (which is a constant value of 1 planet every ten years), the planets production rate of technologically advanced civilizations (the y-axis on the graph), and the lifetime of said civilization (the x-axis). The graph describes the number of civilizations necessary and the associated length of time needed for them to colonize the whole of the galaxy. Let us perform an exercise to get an idea why we havent been contacted yet from this context. Let us assume that, of the 400 billion stars estimated to be in the Milky Way, one in a billion is home to an advanced technological civilization. To answer why we havent been contacted yet, according to the graph, the maximum value for fBIOTEC must be 0.4 and the

maximum space exploration lifetime of any one of the civilizations must be less than about 40,000 years. Panspermia The above idea I proposed also leads to another theory of the spread of life through the galaxy. In my example, one would tend to extrapolate that each of the four hundred civilizations began at the same time. This idea was first put forth by the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras in the 5th century B.C. It was revived in the nineteenth century and has been researched ever since. The theory states that the building blocks for life were spread throughout the galaxy by a common source. Three different mechanisms have been discussed for the application of this idea. Astronomers have observed large gas clouds in our galaxy that contain high percentages of organic materials. Is it possible that, during the production of Population I stars in our galaxy, clouds such as these deposited this organic material on suitable planets? If so, then would it be possible that there are many civilizations of nearly the same age and same general lineage as us? Supposing this was the case, then we may have to wait a long time for first contact assuming that these other civilizations are at the same technological level of advancement. Or, suppose there was a great galactic civilization long ago that, whether accidentally through the deposition of refuse or purposefully through genetic introduction, that seeded suitable planets with the source for life. Ideally, we would end up with the same result as explained in the paragraph above. However, this obviously cannot be the case. Why? Because, in Earths history alone, there have been two great extinctions which set back the evolutionary tree by hundreds of millions of years. There certainly must be planets out there where these extinctions havent taken place or planets where mass extinctions are common place. Not every planet will progress equally, and to therefore assume that all civilizations will be relative technological equals is a mistake. In 1965, Intel Corporation co-founder Gordon Moore wrote a paper in which he concluded that integrated circuit complexity would double every two years while maintaining minimal production costs. And, since then, that idea has followed suit; the concept was granted the title of Moores Law. As we have learned, computers and organic life-forms do not operate very differently from each other. Knowing this, biologists and astro-biologists have used a biological equivalent of Moores Law to determine the progression of biological complexity (the length of functional, non-redundant DNA in the genome). Using a value of 376 million years for the doubling of this complexity and extrapolating the data back to a value of zero, or a singular nucleotide, then life began in the Universe approximately 9.7 billion years ago; that is over twice the age of the Solar System. But, again, this brought on some heavy criticism about the rates of increase of biological complexity not being constant and the fact that just a few nucleotides does not count as life. It is an interesting hypothesis nonetheless.

This concept also marks a point of contention with regards to the Anthropic Principle discussed above. For, if life began in one or a few extraplanetary locales, did it really need those planets that the Universe gave rise to in order to evolve and flourish? Are there species of intelligent life-forms that exist only in space and are not limited to some terrestrial lifestyle? Star Trek, Independence Day, and First Contact So far, we have delved into the likelihood of whether or not the human species is the lone intelligent civilization in the Universe. And, if were not, then how many are there and where are they? Let us now assume that we are, indeed, just one of many civilizations in the galaxy. The question now becomes, how would first contact be initiated? Many UFOlogists claim that we have already been contacted. And these visits date back many thousands of years. The proof, they say, is in the pictures and writings of the ancients, through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, all the way to the present day. It is said that the old gods of ancient civilizations were nothing more than our representation of those alien beings. Paintings from several centuries ago show strange lights and crafts in the sky; and the amount of photographic and video evidence today has led to a very lucrative business for many people. This begs the question, are we being studied? Or is our civilization being directed in a relatively noninvasive fashion towards a goal set by those that are visiting us? What types of alien civilizations are out there? Gene Roddenberry proposed a somewhat utopian idea Star Trek. In his universe, several space faring societies occupy the galaxy and form an integrated social network of communication and politics. And the Federation uses a Prime Directive as protocol for first contact, in which a species can be studied non-invasively, with first contact on hold until the civilization achieves faster-than-light travel of its own accord. In the world of the film Independence Day, an advanced civilization was on the move from planet to planet, choosing only those planets that had the right resources and then consuming those resources, to the destruction of the planet, be fore moving on. The planets destruction included the eradication of any intelligent life that may be in control of the planet at the time. These two scenarios seem to be the norm for Hollywood; we are either incorporated into a grand network of civilizations and meant to fare on our own in the new galactic climate, or we are threatened by a much more advanced species with our total annihilation on their minds. But what if a civilization doesnt want to explore the stars, or is delayed as they advance their own technology on the homefront before exploring space? In 1964, Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev developed a scale for types of civilizations based on the amount of energy they use. His scale had three types, with a Type 0 and an equation for intermediate types developed later by Carl Sagan. As of now, the human civilization sits at about a 0.72. Suppose that the proper course of action for advancing civilizations is to first colonize available planets within their own star system. From there, the energy requirements to sustain

them get too large, and the technology required for interstellar travel is still too advanced. How do they find the necessary resources to keep up? What do they do to harness more energy? In 1960, mathematician Freeman Dyson proposed the Dyson Sphere, the ultimate in solar energy harvesting capability. He said that civilizations that require vast amounts of energy will eventually look towards their home star as a source of power. And through a step-by-step process, will advance from a ring of solar energy collectors, to multiple rings (which he referred to as a swarm, to a bubble, and eventually to a sphere. In all but the last, they are nothing more than integrated collectors from which the civilization can draw power. In the final stage, the sphere may be as advanced as being several kilometers thick with an actual living surface on the inside. This is theoretically possible by the fact of rotation of the sphere and the incredible mass that such a sphere would have. However, were a civilization capable of building such a structure, they would have all the living space they would ever need. For comparisons sake, the Earth has a surface area of nearly 785 million square miles, of which only 235 million is land. If a Dyson Sphere were built at the same distance from the Sun as the Earth, its surface area would 1.5 million times larger. Scaling up the Earths 7 billion person population, this would be enough room for 10.5 trillion people! On top of that, any star with a Dyson Sphere, or a sufficiently complex Dyson Bubble, would affect the amount of light that the host star passes to the rest of galaxy, essentially hiding it from view. And unless there is any residual radiation given off by the outside of the sphere, we would never be able to detect them. Point of fact, there could be a highly advanced civilization only a few light years from here, but if it surrounded by a Dyson Sphere, our only indication of its existence would be a gravitational anomaly, gravity where there should be none. The Verdict So, where does this leave us? We have discussed the origins of life in the Universe, and whether the Universe evolved for it. We have discussed how many possible alien races there may be in the galaxy and the ability for them to contact us. And we have discussed how they would make contact, or if they already have. But this does not answer the question at the heart of the matter. When will they contact us, if they exist at all? I go to Carl Sagan once again, the author of the very famous novel Contact. For those of you that dont know, the premise of the novel the receipt of an alien signal that taught us how to build a machine to open a wormhole in spacetime (a.k.a. an Einstein-Rosen bridge) that zipped Dr. Arroway to a meeting place. When she got there, she was told that first contact was done this way for millions of years, and that the builders of the wormhole network had died off long, long ago. She was then transported back to Earth without a shred of proof about her journey. The two ideas at the crux of the matter were well spelled out in this novel. For a Universe that is 93 billion light-years across, if it is just us, it seems like an awful waste of space. But for the burden of proof, which for us is skeptical at best, we are left with the scientific precept of

Occams Razor. Originally put forth in written form in 1639 by the Irish Franciscan philosopher and theologian John Punch, the idea was proposed by the English Franciscan philosopher and friar William of Occam in the early 14 th century. In modern terminology and eloquently spoken by Dr. Arroway, Occams Razor states: All things being equal, the simplest answer tends to be the right one. I have spent eight pages telling you about concepts, inundating you with numbers, and trying to link one idea to another in an attempt to iron out all the wrinkles in the theories about extraterrestrial life. In a court of law, all this comes down to circumstantial evidence. The verdict is we are guilty of putting forth fanciful theories in the face of no proof. For all intents and purposes, we are alone. And all the theories and ideas hold no weight without proof. By the time we have all the data we need to sufficiently answer all the questions put forth here, it will all be moot, for there will be no need to have an answer. In the end, it is all about what you believe until proven otherwise. Do I believe that we are alone? No not a chance. Do I believe that we will have first contact with an alien race within my lifetime? I dont know, but I sure hope so. Do I agree with the idea that humans should expand beyond the Earth to perpetuate our race? I absolutely do. If this ending is a letdown for you, I apologize. We were building to such a crescendo, and we seemed to fizzle in the end thanks to the truth. So I leave you with this, reader. Whether you are a Ph.D. in a branch of science, a layman scientist, or just somebody that is interested in this subject, the goal is to continue searching for your own answers until a real answer is found based on incontrovertible fact.