Looking For Alien Life
Lately, we have been seeing a much greater interest in finding alien life. It has become a staple of much of the scientific community. There was even an announcement which stated we searched many of the stars systems in the Milky Way galaxy and have come up cold. The galaxy has billions of stars. Why is it we can’t find any signs of alien life? One of the main problems is we are thinking like humans. We presume aliens have at least some of the needs and problems we have. Let me ask you a question. Do you think an alien race which is much more advanced than us would be a polluter? Apparently, we think so, because one of the things the James Webb space telescope will look for is pollution which is felt might be a sign of intelligent life.
Look at our history. Modern humans have been on this planet for 200,000 to 300,000 years. In all that time we were only capable of noticeable pollution for a couple of hundred years and are looking to clean that up and hopefully will succeed in the next few hundred years at the latest. This is a very short period to detect our pollution. This tiny sliver of pollution is what we are looking for. It could even be a tinier stretch of time for another race, if at all.
We thought there might be a Dyson Sphere we could spot and thought we had found one or two, but they turned out to be something else natural. A Dyson Sphere is something which is believed a super intelligent race would might construct. It would be some sort of metal ball encapsulating a star so all its energy could be used. There are problems with this idea. First it would take a super effort which seems impossible, to build one. Second, surrounding a star with a metal ball would cut off its light and energy to a planet or planets so some other means of providing this light and warmth would be needed. Supposedly the energy gained from doing this would have to be modified to accomplish this. If a race was this advanced perhaps, they could create a Dyson Sphere we couldn’t detect made from plasma or some other gas which could allow the heat to be captured but not the light. Also, there might be other ways which would be easier to get energy from. An example might be to draw zero point energy from space. Lastly, we might not have the means to detect an advanced race.
We have been looking for aliens for years using the premise they would be using some sort of radio wave. We have only been using radio waves for about 130 years. We are already looking into faster ways to communicate and other ways where more data can be sent at one time. We have started to test laser communications which travel only at the speed of light such as radio waves, but contain more data. Another thing we are looking into is quantum communications which would be instantaneous. This would be a much more likely way advanced aliens would communicate or by using something with similar abilities. If we detect a radio source from thousands of light years away it means that signal took those thousands of years to reach us and we have no way of knowing even if that planet still exists, because even if we could see it, the light took that long to reach our telescope.
Then there is the problem we might not even recognize an alien race even if it was right in front of us. Time might not be the same for them as it is for us. They could be moving so slow we couldn’t even notice or so fast we can’t see them. Life spans might be incredibly different with some races living thousands of years or even eternally while others pass in the blink of an eye and live an entire lifetime in a second. We also have to remember our eyesight is very limited in what we can see and advanced alien races might be able to take advantage of this shifting their light spectrum over to what is hidden from us. There is also the problem of possible dimensions. Extraterrestrials might come from a higher dimension and we might not be able to see them because of that.
We believe we may have had alien probes pass our way and the asteroid Oumuamua was thought to be one and we are even building a probe of our own to catch up to it as it departs into deep space. Basically, its shape spurred many scientists into thinking it was too odd just to be an asteroid. It had a sort of cylindrical shape which was very strange and some scientists believe it had only a thin skin which was hiding the mechanics. I can’t go along with this idea, let me tell you why. It was traveling too slow and would have taken forever to reach us from another galaxy as the scientists predicted. Why would any race launch a probe which would take many billions of light years to reach us?
We are very busy looking for alien life throughout the galaxy as best we can, and yet, there are areas on earth which we know less about than the surface of the moon. I am talking about the bottom of the ocean. Anything could be down there. We have to remember we are on a water world with far more water than land. We should explore it before exploring space or at least while we are. For all we know there could be intelligent life there. Many UFOs have been seen going into the water and coming out. There is a theory by some which states UFOs are from earth and are using underwater bases. Could there be an advanced human race living at the bottom of the sea? Maybe.
Some scientists have warned us about sending out signals indicating we are here. I personally don’t believe it matters since we have been sending out television and radio signals for over one hundred years now. Any signal we send out won’t even catch up to them. There could be aliens watching some of our old television shows or listening to our old radio broadcasts. It could have given them a distorted view about us. They might believe this is our real life and not realize it is only entertainment.
Will we make contact with aliens soon? I and others believe we already have.