The Truth is Out There

Posted on | January 23, 2012 | 2 Comments

I think it’s pretty obvious by now that I’m a pretty big geek and that much of my geek-dom centers on science-fiction. I love the Star Wars movies more than I love some of my family members, I can make the “live long and prosper” sign with both hands, I have a star-covered teddy bear named Mr. Sagan from New York City’s Hayden Planetarium, and I know what you mean if or when you use “frak” as a swear word. Oh, and I totally believe in aliens.

The origins of my belief in extra-terrestrial life are two-fold: first, I saw the novel Contact by Carl Sagan and subsequently saw the movie starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey (the movie’s good; the book is better); and second, I saw a planetarium show narrated by Tom Hanks in New York City.*

The planetarium show was called “Passport to the Universe” and, among other things, it emphasized just how microscopically tiny Earth (and therefore all of human existence) is when compared to the rest of the known – and unknown – universe:

“During the last four hundred years, in a series of astonishing discoveries, we filled out our Cosmic Address. We learned that, far from being the center of the universe, the Earth is actually but one of the planets, moving in orbit around the Sun. Our Sun in turn is just an ordinary star. It is one of over a hundred billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. And our Milky Way Galaxy is one of several thousand galaxies in the Virgo Supercluster. Finally, this vast supercluster of galaxies is but a tiny part of the Observable Universe.”

Meanwhile, in Contact, one of the tag lines for the film and one of the more memorable quotes was the line: “If it’s just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.” Both the planetarium show and the tag line have stuck with me for years and from the two, I can only come to one conclusion: if it really is just humans on Earth, then it probably would be an awful waste of space (pun totally intended).

As long as humans have been building and constructing civilizations, we’ve been fascinated by the unknown. Astronomy is one of the oldest sciences and dates back to the earliest civilizations and the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Chinese and the Mayans all studied the stars and tried to imagine what they were, what they meant and how we fit in. And not long after we discovered the stars, someone started to think about the possibility that life could exist elsewhere in the universe, even if we don’t exactly understand how, where or why.

In the 15th century, Nicolaus Copernicus became the first person to propose a heliocentric cosmology, which stated the Sun was the center of our universe, not the Earth. Centuries later, this Copernican principle has been expanded and generalized to mean that the Earth – and by default, humans – are not central in the universe and don’t have a favored position. The implications, of course, are that we – Earth-bound humans – are insignificant in relation to the known universe and to assume that we are the only forms of life, let alone the only forms of intelligent life, well, that’s rather arrogant, isn’t it?

Of course, the prospect of alien life or even of intelligent alien life is kind of scary. We have no way of knowing whether these extraterrestrials would friendly, hostile or merely indifferent, though Hollywood has certainly let its collective imagination run wild for years. (I vote for merely indifferent, especially if the aliens are intelligent. Surely they would be smart enough to see we’re doing a fine job of fighting and killing amongst ourselves.) Still, even if the aliens do turn out to be hostile, I like the idea that there may be other forms of life out there in the great cosmos. Somehow, it makes me feel that, as random as evolution is, it all still happened for a reason.

* Interestingly enough, the “Passport to the Universe” script was penned, in part, by Ann Drugan, who was the wife of Carl Sagan. Coincidence? Perhaps, but then there are few things in this universe that are truly coincidental.

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