There are plenty of planets.. plenty of galaxies.. and who knows how many multiverses, right? (Of course if they exist) ..
But we know one thing: Thus far, besides those who claim to have met anal probing aliens, we have yet to come in contact with beings from another world.
Why?
Is it possible–though unlikely–that we really are alone in this vast universe?
There is a story running about what exactly some at NASA actually thing.
Let’s explore that theory for a moment–truly consider it and not just brush it aside.
“The key to humanity successfully traversing such a universal filter is… identifying those attributes in ourselves and neutralizing them in advance,” JPL astrophysicist Jonathan Jiang and his coauthors wrote in a new study that appeared online on Oct. 23 and has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Not everyone in the sciences buys the idea of the Great Filter. “It feels overly deterministic, as if the Great Filter is a physical law or a single looming force that confronts every rising technological civilization,” Wade Roush, a science lecturer and author of Extraterrestrials, told The Daily Beast. “We have no direct evidence of such a force.”
And more..
To understand the Great Filter, Jiang and his coauthors turned a mirror on humanity. Whatever seems likeliest to kill us might also pose an existential threat to intelligent life on other planets, they proposed. They drew up a short list of the biggest threats to the human species, all but one of which are entirely our own fault.
Sure, an asteroid might hit Earth with enough force to kill pretty much everything on the planet. That’s not necessarily something we can prevent. But the other civilization-killers the JPL team think are likely are also self-inflicted. Nuclear war. Pandemic. Climate change. Runaway artificial intelligence.
It is a lot of science and a lot of research that goes into a theory–including this one. It also makes some sense, right?
So often, those stars we see in the night sky may be long gone. Their light just takes a bit to extinguish from our vision.. And life itself? Maybe gone, too. Maybe we are just.. alone.
That is immensely strange to consider–the prospect that we are just about. This universe, filled with rolling asteroids and comets and maybe water, and we are just it?
NAH.. cannot be possible, right? Way too many possibilities.
Perhaps the other possible scenario is that we are just too small, too blue, and too hidden to be found. We are in the Goldilocks zone after all–a safe space in a universe teeming with creatures that would eat and devour us if they knew we were here.
So we vote to stay alone! We vote to stay hidden.
So many WANT to find more life, DESIRE to make contact–and for too long we have just opted to think the better choice was to hide our face under the covers of the stratosphere.. Go about our earthly business. And live our lives without much pondering the existence of other life forms.
But … if they are out there, they will find us. Or we will find them–maybe just evidence of them in the end..
You know how kids get scared in the darkness of their rooms at night, and they pull their covers up real tight over their faces? Yea.. that is probably what we should do. But just be careful we don’t expose our feet in the process.. monsters always attack the feet first.
