The Intelligent UniverseContact with extraterrestrial life will mark one of recorded history’s most important events
Close encounters of the cosmic kind
Minhaz Merchant The writer is an author and chairman of a media group.
It is the most challenging question in human history: does intelligent life exist elsewhere in the universe? Stephen Hawking, the former Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University (the chair Sir Isaac Newton once held) and arguably the world’s greatest living theoretical physicist, says it probably does. Other scientists like Roger Penrose, the leading mathematical physicist, agree. The philosophical and religious implications of discovering intelligent life on another planet are huge. At this level, science and faith converge.
As an undergraduate reading physics and mathematics, i wrote a three-part cover story weighing the scientific evidence for intelligent life in the universe for a weekly news magazine. The story, which ran over three issues in March 1976, posed the question: “Is ours a unique cosmic civilisation – a freakish, unfathomable joke of nature? Or are we just a tiny speck of dust in an obscure corner of the cosmos – merely one of several billion advanced civilisations, each one flourishing with its own commerce and culture, politics and philosophy?”
Thirty-four years later, the question remains tantalisingly unanswered. But evidence is mounting. The weight of scientific opinion now holds that the universe teems with life, some of it technologically and spatially so advanced that it could be unrecognisable were we to encounter it.
Our universe is around 13.70 billion years old. It was created at Time Zero – the point of “ singularity” at which there was nothing: no matter, no space, no time. Within this absolute spacetime vacuum (postulated by the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems based on Einstein’s general theory of relativity), an event occurred which no leading scientist has yet been able to fully explain. That event probably involved the mutual annihilation of a positron-electron twin pair carrying identical (positive and negative) charges and mass. The result of this vacuum fluctuation was the Big Bang, the widely accepted theory of how our universe began.
Before Time Zero, during the pre-universe “nothingness”, it is hypothesised that constant and instantaneous mutual annihilation of positronelectrons pairs occurred several trillion times every second. These multiple collisions cancelled each other out, leading to a perpetual state of zero mass, zero time and zero space – the perfect vacuum. The mutual annihilation of electrons and positrons, however, occurred in unimaginably small crevices of time – 10 -100 seconds or less.
To the observer nothing was occurring – the event started and ended before it could be observed and therefore, as far as the observer was concerned, had not occurred at all. From this nothingness a freak, once-in-aquadrillion positron-electron pair escaped mutual annihilation 13.70 billion years ago, causing the Big Bang and the creation of our universe as well as a “mirror” negative universe.
As the universe expanded, stars were formed within huge solar systems with orbiting planets like earth. Billions of such solar systems made up dense clusters of galaxies with their esoteric black holes, which exert such a powerful gravitational pull that even light bends when it passes near them.
Our nearest solar system is Alpha Centauri. To get there, travelling at the speed of light, would take 4.3 years. Travelling at the speed of the world’s fastest experimental spacecraft, Helios II (1,57,000 mph), it would take over 12,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri. Other solar systems are even further off. Galaxies are, of course, trillions of milies away. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains around 350 billion solar systems – many, as NASA’s Kepler space telescope recently confirmed, with orbiting planets like earth with surface water, moderate temperature and life-supporting oxygen.
Andromeda, the galaxy closest to the Milky Way, is even more massive with over 1,000 billion solar systems. It is around 2.70 million light years from us. So if electromagnetic radiation originating from a planet in Andromeda began transmitting 2.70 million years ago – the Plio-Pleistocene era on earth – it would have barely reached us this year.
And in these distances lies the answer to the second big question: if it exists, why hasn’t intelligent life from extraterrestrial planets, presumably with highly sophisticated communications and transportation technology, made contact with us? Humans, after millions of years of evolution from Australopethicus hominids to Neanderthals through to “modern” man, began sending out electromagnetic radiation (in its earliest form as radio transmissions) a mere 122 years ago. Those signals have today scarcely reached the edge of our solar system cluster. Time and distance – both unimaginably vast – explain why no contact has been established with us by other intelligent species.
So while we are certainly not alone in the universe, we may not make contact with other planetary life for centuries. But there is little doubt that one day contact will be made. What shape, form and mode that contact takes is uncertain. But when it does happen, it will mark one of the most important events in recorded history.
All of human intelligence and wisdom – from Aristotle and Aryabhata to the Vedas and Einstein – do not have an answer, however, to the third key question that has divided sages and philosophers over the centuries: why does the universe exist at all? As even scientists concede wryly, God alone knows
As an undergraduate reading physics and mathematics, i wrote a three-part cover story weighing the scientific evidence for intelligent life in the universe for a weekly news magazine. The story, which ran over three issues in March 1976, posed the question: “Is ours a unique cosmic civilisation – a freakish, unfathomable joke of nature? Or are we just a tiny speck of dust in an obscure corner of the cosmos – merely one of several billion advanced civilisations, each one flourishing with its own commerce and culture, politics and philosophy?”
Thirty-four years later, the question remains tantalisingly unanswered. But evidence is mounting. The weight of scientific opinion now holds that the universe teems with life, some of it technologically and spatially so advanced that it could be unrecognisable were we to encounter it.
Our universe is around 13.70 billion years old. It was created at Time Zero – the point of “ singularity” at which there was nothing: no matter, no space, no time. Within this absolute spacetime vacuum (postulated by the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems based on Einstein’s general theory of relativity), an event occurred which no leading scientist has yet been able to fully explain. That event probably involved the mutual annihilation of a positron-electron twin pair carrying identical (positive and negative) charges and mass. The result of this vacuum fluctuation was the Big Bang, the widely accepted theory of how our universe began.
Before Time Zero, during the pre-universe “nothingness”, it is hypothesised that constant and instantaneous mutual annihilation of positronelectrons pairs occurred several trillion times every second. These multiple collisions cancelled each other out, leading to a perpetual state of zero mass, zero time and zero space – the perfect vacuum. The mutual annihilation of electrons and positrons, however, occurred in unimaginably small crevices of time – 10 -100 seconds or less.
To the observer nothing was occurring – the event started and ended before it could be observed and therefore, as far as the observer was concerned, had not occurred at all. From this nothingness a freak, once-in-aquadrillion positron-electron pair escaped mutual annihilation 13.70 billion years ago, causing the Big Bang and the creation of our universe as well as a “mirror” negative universe.
As the universe expanded, stars were formed within huge solar systems with orbiting planets like earth. Billions of such solar systems made up dense clusters of galaxies with their esoteric black holes, which exert such a powerful gravitational pull that even light bends when it passes near them.
Our nearest solar system is Alpha Centauri. To get there, travelling at the speed of light, would take 4.3 years. Travelling at the speed of the world’s fastest experimental spacecraft, Helios II (1,57,000 mph), it would take over 12,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri. Other solar systems are even further off. Galaxies are, of course, trillions of milies away. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains around 350 billion solar systems – many, as NASA’s Kepler space telescope recently confirmed, with orbiting planets like earth with surface water, moderate temperature and life-supporting oxygen.
Andromeda, the galaxy closest to the Milky Way, is even more massive with over 1,000 billion solar systems. It is around 2.70 million light years from us. So if electromagnetic radiation originating from a planet in Andromeda began transmitting 2.70 million years ago – the Plio-Pleistocene era on earth – it would have barely reached us this year.
And in these distances lies the answer to the second big question: if it exists, why hasn’t intelligent life from extraterrestrial planets, presumably with highly sophisticated communications and transportation technology, made contact with us? Humans, after millions of years of evolution from Australopethicus hominids to Neanderthals through to “modern” man, began sending out electromagnetic radiation (in its earliest form as radio transmissions) a mere 122 years ago. Those signals have today scarcely reached the edge of our solar system cluster. Time and distance – both unimaginably vast – explain why no contact has been established with us by other intelligent species.
So while we are certainly not alone in the universe, we may not make contact with other planetary life for centuries. But there is little doubt that one day contact will be made. What shape, form and mode that contact takes is uncertain. But when it does happen, it will mark one of the most important events in recorded history.
All of human intelligence and wisdom – from Aristotle and Aryabhata to the Vedas and Einstein – do not have an answer, however, to the third key question that has divided sages and philosophers over the centuries: why does the universe exist at all? As even scientists concede wryly, God alone knows
