Chris Skinner
I just watched The Life of Chuck based upon a story by Stephen King (strongly recommended). Throughout the film, it constantly references Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar. The Cosmic Calendar compresses the 13.8-billion-year history of the universe into a single calendar year, where January 1 is the Big Bang and December 31 is the present*. At this scale, modern humanity is just 25 minutes old.
It kind of makes you feel small.
It also makes you wonder a bit, as there’s a theory that the biggest breakthrough in humanity was when Egypt was visited by aliens 5,000 years ago. This would answer many questions around how they built pyramids and worked out the size of the Earth and more. There is no doubt that the Egyptian period of progress was a massive leap for humanity – not ignoring the fact that there were other civilisations who may have had visitations (look over South American mummifications) – and some speculate this was all due to a Periodic visit by alien life forms.
Much of this theory is formed by the themes of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods, which proposed that extraterrestrial visitors interacted with ancient humans 5,000 or more years ago, changing our technological development, religion, and culture. More than this, he believed there was evidence of “ancient astronauts” being mistaken for gods, suggesting humans are descendants of these extraterrestrial pioneers.
Equally, before von Däniken’s book, there is the Fermi Paradox. This is a question posed by physicist Enrico Fermi back in 1950 and asks, with the vast expanse of space out there, how come we haven’t found alien life? His reasoning:
- There are billions of stars in the Milky Way similar to the Sun.
- With high probability, some of these stars have Earth-like planets orbiting in the habitable zone.
- Many of these stars, and hence their planets, are much older than the Sun. If Earth-like planets are typical, some may have developed intelligent life long ago.
- Some of these civilisations may have developed interstellar travel, a step that humans are investigating.
- Even at the slow pace of envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in a few million years.
- Since many of the Sun-like stars are billions of years older than the Sun, the Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial civilisations, or at least their probes.
- However, there is no convincing evidence that this has happened.
All of this is interesting, but why blog about it? After all, the first time I visited a Futurists conference, they had a whole stream dedicated to close encounters of the fourth kind. This was speculating that we would one day be dealing with alien life forms. It’s an interesting idea and, as a Trekkie and Star Wars fan, it would be lovely to meet an alien … but highly unlikely. It’s just good fiction, which is why I no longer go to Futurists conferences.
Having said this, Elon Musk caught my attention when, at Davos last week, he admitted that he is an alien.
When BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink asked Elon whether we are alone in the universe he replied probably yes. With 9,000 satellites in orbit and no sign of alien activity, he called human consciousness a fragile “candle in a vast darkness” and stressed the moral importance of protecting it. Musk argued that becoming a multi-planet species through SpaceX is key to ensuring humanity’s survival in a universe that may hold no other intelligent life.
But then he concluded with a joke that he was an alien. That statement does not surprise me as he is weird, but he is also our leader in building a multiplanetary species, using space for connectivity through Starlink and building a reusable rocket firm called SpaceX. Is he an alien?
Finally, I did blog last week about trading with aliens as this was a question posited by Helen McCaw, a former analyst at the UK’s central bank, to Andrew Bailey, the Bank of England’s governor, urging him to set out contingencies if the White House confirms the existence of alien life.
Is this just all smoke and mirrors, pomp and circumstance, fluff and puff?
Who knows? What we do know is that we, as humans, desperately want to find another life form to connect with. That’s the point of Star Wars, Star Trek, Aliens, Dune, Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica and more.
It’s great entertainment, but the reality is that there is little evidence of life out there beyond Earth … or is there?