Second star to the left

Ok, time to discuss some astronomy, logic and something that is either extremely interesting or depressing depending on your point of view.


We know that there are billions and billions of stars in our visible universe alone. We have found evidence of planets around stars so we can easily assume that there are billions of planets out there. Given that in our solar system we have intelligent life on one of the eight planets (Pluto isn’t a planet, sorry) and since there is nothing to indicate that we are in any way unique in the nearly infinite universe then we should expect that there is life all around us in the universe. Given that the universe is billions of years old then numerous planets should have resulted in intelligent civilizations who have achieved space travel and are exploring the universe. Except that we see no evidence of this at all leading to the question “Where the hell is everybody?”

(This is called Fermi’s Paradox as Enrico Fermi was the one who first brought this point up. It also ties in Drake’s Equation, which tries to determine the likelihood of life in the universe, and the Copernican Principle, which states that we aren’t special in the least. Why I know these things and why Kim has to constantly say “Well he’s kind of like Sheldon” when describing me are probably related.)

So here is what all of this probably means. If civilization’s natural endpoint would be massive space traveling cultures like in Star Trek or Star Wars complete with laser beams and Ewoks and the planet Endor being crushed under the debris of an exploding Death Star then the evidence of that should be easy to find. Since there isn’t though then it would seem that we never reach that point (and by we I mean intelligent civilizations across the entire history of the universe.) Or it’s because those civilizations realize that they don’t want to make anyone know where they are so they don’t broadcast themselves. Or they’ve visited us and just decided to drive on the way you do when you get off a highway exit to get some food and take one look at the McDonald’s parking lot and figure you would rather try again ten miles down the road. Or we are living inside a hologram so there is no other life because they just didn’t bother to program that bit. Though that leads to the question of who they are.

Why is this on my mind? Well, partly because I came across this on Wikipedia so I got sidetracked reading about it but mainly because we spend so much of our time thinking about the narrow piece of space and time that we inhabit. Most of the time we probably only think about the few miles we cover in a given day. We can’t really grasp just how vast and full of stuff is really out there. Sometimes it is useful to be amazed by just what is out there just outside our grasp.