Between the Earth and the Moon are about 240,000 miles of empty space, as this image shows [via Metafilter]. Imagine the Apollo astronauts on their four-day journey to the moon, encountering along the way absolutely nothing.
This page puts it in perspective, using pixels as an analogy.
There’s so much empty space out there — not accounting for dark matter, of course — and it makes me wonder whether our species will ever encounter another intelligent life form in the universe — even if that intelligent life exists.
Imagine you’re the only person on planet Earth. Or at least you think you are. Unbeknownst to you, there is another person on Earth, but you’re in Kansas and the other person is in Sydney, Australia. You have no car or horse, no way of getting around really quickly. What are the chances that you and this other person will ever meet? Even if there are a couple of other people out there — say, one in Moscow and one in New Delhi — it’s still not likely you’ll ever become aware of each other. You could live your entire lifespan and never realize there are others out there.
Maybe one day, if you’re supremely lucky (but it’s incredibly unlikely), you’ll find a message in a bottle that has washed up on shore from halfway around the world. But it will be in a language you can’t read — heck, who knows if it will even be writing — and anyway, you will have no idea how long ago the sender threw it into the ocean or if the sender still exists.
What if it’s even worse — what if you’re the only person on Earth and this other person lives on the moon?
Even if there is intelligent life out there — not just life, but intelligent life — it’s unlikely we’ll ever encounter it.
We are, for all intents and purposes, alone in the universe. We are a cushy oasis in a vast nothingness.
We are all we’ve got.
Without any means of surpassing or circumventing the light barrier, you are for all practical purposes correct.
Even though we do not have such technology now nor do we really have any idea how such technology could even be developed, that does not mean that such technology cannot be developed at some point in the future. It is also possible that another sapient species has achieved the technology for interstellar travel.
However, there are just too many variables. We can’t know when (or if) we will develop practical interstellar travel. Even if we did, there are millions of stars in the galaxy and the odds of coming across a system with sapient life are infinitessimal. Likewise, the odds of a space-faring sapient species finding us are negligible.
The greater the samples and the greater the time, the probability of even the unlikeliest scenario approaches 1. I think there probably is sapient life somewhere else in the universe. But if we have no means of contacting it and it has no means of contacting us, it effectively does not exist.
This is why I vastly prefer alien-free science fiction ;)
There’s always been one fatal problem with the “it will never happen” faction of our civilization: innovation.
Rest assured it is highly improbable that we are alone, and that it’s equally improbable (given the rate of innovation) that our experience will always make the less than optimistic of our species think so. Those that live contrary to the “that’s impossible” faction have always been our future, and history’s favorite sons.
rob@egoz.org
Did someone say anything about “It’ll never happen?”