On Aliens

If I had a penny for every time I've heard the question "are we alone?" then I'd wonder who it was with the time and resources to track my hearing and donate a single British pence to me upon my ears' receipt of that specific phrase, and to what end they were doing this. That's some evil super-genius shit right there. But it's a common thing to wonder - here we are after all, dropped into a sea of stuff with no idea why or how we came to be. Let me take that back a notch - plenty of ideas, but pretty short on things like facts and knowledge. We're microbes on a fish's scale in that ocean; barely in reach of our neighbouring scale let alone the fish; able only to theorise about what the billions of other fish might contain.

It would be arrogant in the extreme for those microbes to assume that they were destined to be placed upon that particularly hospitable oceanic vertebrate and that no other such microbes could have been so lucky. Assuming, that is, that microbes had the capacity to display arrogance or make assumptions; both of which I might well be doing by thinking that they can't. Spoiler alert: they can't though. Take that, microbe community. But fittingly, with crazy-awesome telescopes we are starting to discover many stellar destinations that could be just as flourished as ours.

For me the answer has always been "of course we're not alone" due simply to the mathematics of it. There are thousands of millions of stars in just our own galaxy and many thousands of millions more galaxies in the universe - that's trillions of opportunities for the right conditions to emerge. Our biologically refined brains still cannot help but to be engulfed by how big of a number that is. Each one of those incomprehensible numbers is potentially a nutrient-giving sun for one or more of the sextillions (real word I promise) of planets out there; each a chance to produce life. And life is more than happy to try and appear anywhere there's room for it - just look at the plausible attempts of Jupiter's moon Europa, or even the less plausible attempts of the Jersey Shore.

I'm no gambler and it shows here with this sure-fire winner, hotly tipped to be proven without a doubt. I give us 25 years before extra-terrestrial life is a certainty and that estimate feels conservative. Even if we can't contact that life, our technology will have improved enough that we can detect their existence and who knows, they may already know about us but be unable to communicate. To me, it's just always seemed likely that that's the way it is. You might be thinking that it's easy to come out after they've started to find ridiculous numbers of potentially habitable planets and say "I said it would happen" and yes, it is easy to do that. But hey, you can ask my friends if you like. If they were listening to me when I originally said it.

What I find more incredible still is how diverse the universe really is. It has planetary structures, galactic formations and black holes that defy belief and so varied that even the crazed scribblings of madman George Lucas have turned out to be true. There's now nothing original you can guess about the cosmos, because the universe probably got there before you.

I can't do much more than to leave you with a stunning image dredged from the pit of untruth that is Wikipedia. It is of the other side of the galaxy you are in right now and just from the volume of bright dots pictured there I can't imagine that are no alien lifeforms somewhere in its vastness...