Are we alone?
This is one of the profound questions humans have been asking for many millennia . Is humanity the only species to walk, talk in trillions of stars? Is Earth the only place with Living organisms?
Many have attempted answering this, and here is mine.
There are multiple ways to answer this but let’s start with the famous paradox -
The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence.
What a cliche, right? No conclusion,Boo! They could exist but we haven’t seen them yet ! It’s like that every man can be a father because he can, but not all by himself!
So what are we doing here? Why can’t we be the only species to have a sixth sense of consciousness? Well being among trillions of stars makes us feel that we shouldn’t be alone . It's human intuition. If not, what's the point of empty stars and void if there is nothing to fill it?
So the paradox raises the questions on both ends but if you look closely only one is a fact and another is a presumption.
Talking about presumptions , The moment we realize that we are just blip in the history of the universe , all the self centered presumptions that we make will disappear . We haven’t had any concrete proof that an extraterrestrial has visited us? Or maybe they did , and we called them gods! Is the Sun an extraterrestrial that just wants to look at all the misery and suffering and pain on earth? Or an alien created the sun , the moon , the planets as an elaborate prank or a gamble to their amusement. I am not a conspiracy nut but even I can’t deny some of these with hard proof!
Scientifically it all started with the Big Bang? Right? The problem
With the big bang is that we don’t know what happened before that ! , we(mainly scientists) all just agreed to agree that , that could’ve been our beginning ! Because it was the most probable cause that looked logical to us .
Humans and their logics. Sigh!
We are , After all just a species of 100 billion living souls to have ever lived. All our inventions , discoveries could be dismissed in a jiffy as soon as our physics and mathematics falls apart . Can any one categorically , equivocally, with fact, deny that there wasn’t a big bang before the Big Bang? There could’ve been a million big bangs before our big bang , maybe there we’re civilizations that could travel a million miles per second, a world where physics or its rules don't exist !
The probability of such a realm might look impossible. Yet you can never deny the mathematical possibility of such a realm to exist even if it’s one in a quintillion chance of it happening.
Maybe we are looking at things from a logical angle , whereas theirs are not bound by any? their planets could circle clockwise one day and anti-clockwise the other day , they could live without oxygen! We may co exist for hundreds of millions of years without knowing each other exists! How could we find anything with our physics and mathematics as the basis?
Ok but why do we do this then? Why do we even think or search for aliens?
Because looking up is fascinating , imagining the possibilities is fascinating , thinking we are not alone is terrifying yet much much more fascinating than sitting alone and staring at all those stars with no life .
ok the scientific answer turned out to be a dud, what if we approach this philosophically? -
Let’s start with a random question - What is the logic of having sand at the beach? We might have given it a purpose , We might have figured out how it happened and even why it happened , but there is sand at the beach and not at my tub of water . In an extraterrestrial world these both could exist regardless! If we see such a place , we would work tirelessly on the “ how is it happening” part! But fundamentally - Why is there effing sand at the beach ? We simply don’t know! One thing led to another , rocks crumbled , wind was there , water was there and then sand was there !
Now apply this to anything , why is anything anywhere? What is the reason? I think it’s the reason why we have billions of stars with nothingness !
Only if we understand and agree that things can happen at random, with absolutely no logic , that anything could have no purpose to exist is probably the first step towards understanding where are the others part!
Ok where do we go from here?
Humanity may not have started with validation as one of its core principles but it has fast become a species looking for validation! Our search to look for others is in a way of validating ourselves against them . While we expect an extraterrestrial to be either much more intelligent than us , or even to be dumbest of the dumbs , We never expect feature parity with them , because that would make our validations , glamorous .
So far , we tried answering this “are we alone “ question through spirituality, philosophy and science . The answer may never be found but we won’t stop asking these questions , simply because we can . We are after all children and descendants of humanity that survived - because we kept asking questions and found answers.
Now we look up and ask .. why not?