Sta Hungry Stay Foolish

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

A blog by Leon Oudejans

The Fermi paradox and some other similar questions

In yesterday’s blog on the movie Interstellar (IMDb), I referred to Professor Robbert Dijkgraaf‘s lecture on black holes on Dutch public TV (DWDD). He also mentioned the Fermi paradox in that same lecture which he illustrated with a YouTube clip from Dutch comedian Theo Maassen.

Theo Maassen: Either there is extraterrestrial intelligence or there is not. If there isn’t then why bother spending so much money on its search? If there is then either the extraterrestrial intelligence is smarter than us or it is not. If it is not smarter then why bother looking for them? If it is smarter than us then why didn’t they find us by now? Again, why bother looking for it at all?

Wiki: The basic points of the argument, by physicists Enrico Fermi and Michael H. Hart, are:

  1. The Sun is a typical star, and there are billions of stars in the galaxy that are billions of years older.
  2. With high probability, some of these stars will have Earth-like planets, and if the earth is typical, some might develop intelligent life.
  3. Some of these civilisations might develop interstellar travel, a step the Earth is investigating now.
  4. Even at the slow pace of currently envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in about a million years.

Wiki: According to this line of thinking, the Earth should already have been visited by extraterrestrial aliens though Fermi saw no convincing evidence of this, nor any signs of alien intelligence anywhere in the observable universe, leading him to ask, “Where is everybody?”

Actually, Theo Maassen did provide an argument for the “Great Silence” and hidden in his humour: Why would Extra Terrestrial (ET) Intelligence be interested in a rather primitive species like us?? As Professor Robbert Dijkgraaf mentioned in his lecture: we may even be something like a Big Brother tv series or a movie like The Truman Show (IMDb) for the rest of the Universe. 

There’s an “answer” to the question “Where is everybody?” It’s called the Rare Earth Hypothesis and it “argues that the origin of life and the evolution of biological complexity such as sexually reproducing, multicellular organisms on Earth – and, subsequently, human intelligence – required an improbable combination of astrophysical and geological events and circumstances. The hypothesis argues that complex extraterrestrial life is a very improbable phenomenon and likely to be extremely rare”. (Wiki)

The question that has been bugging me for some time is a kind of reciprocal one to the Fermi paradox: Why are there so many stars and planets in the Universe if we are just alone on Earth?? 

So far I have only been able to come up with one answer to my own question: we humans are destined to leave planet Earth and to colonise and exploit other planets for the sake of our own survival. That is the main reason why I have been using the image of humans as the grasshoppers of the Universe in some of my 2015 blogs (eg, 21 July 2015 and 25 August 2015).

A more positive – and a more biblical – explanation is that humans are the stewards (caretakers) of God’s creation. Yet I am puzzled by the question why He even needed us for that purpose in the first place. The ultimate question for non-atheists is: Why did God create us?? I suppose the answer is because He could. The entire Universe is a perfect creation. Perhaps we humans are the crown on His creation. It pleases Him to create us in His image. As long as we love Him, He will love us. Why do we create fellow humans? Because we love having them near us. Like God loves us. Perhaps it is just as simple as that. The best things in life are also simple: Gratitude, Happiness, Joy, and Love.

Archives

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Pin It on Pinterest