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What hits me right now, finally having time to read one of Carl Sagan’s articles, is how small we actually are. Even though we at this time are very aware of that Earth is not the center of the Universe around which everything else is rotating, many of us still think the humankind some sort of reason of all life, probably because we are the dominating species on this Earth.
But what we often do forget is that it is just the Earth. We do not know what other types of organisms populate the universe. We think of ourselves as some kind of perfect creatures, or highly developed computers that scan all around us with a faultless capacity of evaluation.But if we look to our situation, what are we, actually?
Is life rare? Do living creatures only exist on this one planet? Our answer to these questions has varied through time. For a long time, we did not know of any other planets at all. Stars were in the sky at night and the sun and the moon rotated around the Earth inside a shell of Gods and their homes.Then we examined the world a little more thoroughly and found out this was not the case. After a while the idea of an infinite Universe was accepted, and we started thinking of how many populations the Universe actually contains. One scientist called Drake even came up with a formula for calculating the amount of the number of possible populations in the Milky Way (excuse for the Swedish explanations; it’s from Wikipedia):
R* = hur många nya stjärnor som årligen föds i Vintergatan
fp = hur stor andel av dem som har planetsystem
ne = hur många planeter av samma typ som jorden det finns i genomsnitt i ett planetsystem
fl = den andel planeter av samma typ som jorden där det föds liv
fi = den andel planeter där livet utvecklar sig och blir intelligent
fc = den andel planeter där det intelligenta livet uppnår en hög teknologisk nivå
L = den teknologiska civilisationens genomsnittliga livslängd i år
N = antalet utvecklade civilisationer i Vintergatan i varje ögonblick
There are quite a lot of factors, which with the right values make the possible amount of populations in the Universe huge. This, assuming that we can figure out the value of every factor, which as you can see is not that easy in every case.
But recently, we started to examine this saying a little more thoroughly. Is the probability of other civilizations in the Universe really that big? Well, if we assume the Universe is infinite, the number of possible civilizations also is infinite. But actually, scientists recently found that there are many more things that affect the chance for a star to make a planet available to develop life than they thought before. Our sun is quite special in this aspect. For example the corona of our sun contains a different composition of elements compared to most other stars. Our sun lacks some of the heavier elements and has a bigger percentage of lighter elements. This plays an important part in the evolution of the earth because scientists think the planets are made out of the elements that came from their sun. Thereby this composition affects the chance of the planet to develop life.
I don’t know why I’m writing all this. Probably because it’s interesting and I didn’t know that much about it until I started writing. It wasn’t my intention from the beginning.But my point is what if we’re not alone? Just taste that thought for a moment. There really are other creatures in this Universe. That makes us not alone. Maybe we are not that special.
Maybe we really are that small. Then what special purpose serves our life? We are only one species among others in this one ecosystem. What we do is not very different from the animals’ way of living; we eat, we sleep, we communicate and reproduce, only we do it in a more unnatural way. Well, actually not that unnatural, because the human brain is built to be able to develop in a way that seems to be exponential. We are doing what is expected of us.But the human brain is a great mystery. Personally I don’t think the animals have an emotional life as wide and intense as ours. This because their sense of solving logical problems demonstrably is not as developed as ours, and it would be strange if one of their cerebral hemispheres (halves of the brain) is extremely developed while the other one is not.And still we don’t use more than maybe ten percent of the capacity of our brain.
This didn’t become the text I thought it would be. I’d better just stop writing now. If I ever remember my final point of this discussion, I will write it later on.
/Ika
What hits me right now, finally having time to read one of Carl Sagan’s articles, is how small we actually are. Even though we at this time are very aware of that Earth is not the center of the Universe around which everything else is rotating, many of us still think the humankind some sort of reason of all life, probably because we are the dominating species on this Earth.
But what we often do forget is that it is just the Earth. We do not know what other types of organisms populate the universe. We think of ourselves as some kind of perfect creatures, or highly developed computers that scan all around us with a faultless capacity of evaluation.But if we look to our situation, what are we, actually?
Is life rare? Do living creatures only exist on this one planet? Our answer to these questions has varied through time. For a long time, we did not know of any other planets at all. Stars were in the sky at night and the sun and the moon rotated around the Earth inside a shell of Gods and their homes.Then we examined the world a little more thoroughly and found out this was not the case. After a while the idea of an infinite Universe was accepted, and we started thinking of how many populations the Universe actually contains. One scientist called Drake even came up with a formula for calculating the amount of the number of possible populations in the Milky Way (excuse for the Swedish explanations; it’s from Wikipedia):
R* = hur många nya stjärnor som årligen föds i Vintergatan
fp = hur stor andel av dem som har planetsystem
ne = hur många planeter av samma typ som jorden det finns i genomsnitt i ett planetsystem
fl = den andel planeter av samma typ som jorden där det föds liv
fi = den andel planeter där livet utvecklar sig och blir intelligent
fc = den andel planeter där det intelligenta livet uppnår en hög teknologisk nivå
L = den teknologiska civilisationens genomsnittliga livslängd i år
N = antalet utvecklade civilisationer i Vintergatan i varje ögonblick
There are quite a lot of factors, which with the right values make the possible amount of populations in the Universe huge. This, assuming that we can figure out the value of every factor, which as you can see is not that easy in every case.
But recently, we started to examine this saying a little more thoroughly. Is the probability of other civilizations in the Universe really that big? Well, if we assume the Universe is infinite, the number of possible civilizations also is infinite. But actually, scientists recently found that there are many more things that affect the chance for a star to make a planet available to develop life than they thought before. Our sun is quite special in this aspect. For example the corona of our sun contains a different composition of elements compared to most other stars. Our sun lacks some of the heavier elements and has a bigger percentage of lighter elements. This plays an important part in the evolution of the earth because scientists think the planets are made out of the elements that came from their sun. Thereby this composition affects the chance of the planet to develop life.
I don’t know why I’m writing all this. Probably because it’s interesting and I didn’t know that much about it until I started writing. It wasn’t my intention from the beginning.But my point is what if we’re not alone? Just taste that thought for a moment. There really are other creatures in this Universe. That makes us not alone. Maybe we are not that special.
Maybe we really are that small. Then what special purpose serves our life? We are only one species among others in this one ecosystem. What we do is not very different from the animals’ way of living; we eat, we sleep, we communicate and reproduce, only we do it in a more unnatural way. Well, actually not that unnatural, because the human brain is built to be able to develop in a way that seems to be exponential. We are doing what is expected of us.But the human brain is a great mystery. Personally I don’t think the animals have an emotional life as wide and intense as ours. This because their sense of solving logical problems demonstrably is not as developed as ours, and it would be strange if one of their cerebral hemispheres (halves of the brain) is extremely developed while the other one is not.And still we don’t use more than maybe ten percent of the capacity of our brain.
This didn’t become the text I thought it would be. I’d better just stop writing now. If I ever remember my final point of this discussion, I will write it later on.
/Ika
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