According to humans, the most intelligent creature on the planet is- human. I believe you do agree with this statement, if you are presumably aware of the monumental achievements that humans have bagged within their short time span of existence on earth at the cosmic scale. Humans have been hanging around on the Earth for just the last few seconds on the cosmic calendar. To understand this, just imagine the time elapsed since the big bang till the very present time as one calendar year, with the big bang marking January 1st while the present time being the 31st December midnight. On this scale, all the recorded human achievements, industrial and technological advancements have shown up for the past few 12-14 seconds. We are just a blip on this cosmic year, yet, have been intelligent enough to have a pretty good understanding of the laws and the rules that run this cosmos along with the driving forces behind it. For most of our existence, we had been wanderers, hunters and gathers relying upon our environment for our safety and survival. It has been for just a few thousand years since we have devised tools and methods to not only survive, but thrive by exploiting our planets resources at our will. This could have been possible because of our intelligence, driven partly by the creed for survival and partly by our curiosity.
Since the advent of our collective consciousness, we have been into the business of quenching our curiosities through explorations of our surroundings. From domesticating fire to fantasizing about life on other planets, we have been trying our best to satisfy the intelligent being within us. Space explorations have become the new area of interest for a class of intelligent people all over the world. There has been a plethora of questions which these people have been attempting to search answers for. Some of them are the ones that have and will pave the ways for successful applications of the findings of the space explorations while some of them have been and are merely meant for the satisfaction of our intellectual ego. Nevertheless, many of these questions are bigger than others and have a great repute in the club of cosmic mysteries. One such big mystery is the possibility of intelligent life outside the Earth. But, before we hunt for life in the cosmos, we must have an introspection within our own planet. Before we step outside of our planet for the search of life, let’s first examine how much we know of life as it is on Earth.
Life on the Earth probably germinated around 25th September on the cosmic calendar. The nature of life that originated on Earth was based on the chemical elements on our planet and their inter-relations with each other. These elements were originally, manufactured in the core of the super massive star that prevailed before our sun was born from its remnants when it exploded at the time of its death in a fierce explosive event called supernova. The huge amount of heavy elements like carbon, oxygen, iron, nickel etc got scattered with the debris of the star which later condensed to give birth of the balls that we call ‘Planets’. These planets revolve around the next generation of star, called our ‘Sun.’ Our planet Earth is among the newly formed balls (planets) that form the family of the Sun which is the next generation of that supermassive star. Now, when life on earth originated, the raw material required for the creation of life was already present, in the form of the same heavy elements that create our planet and were once manufactured in the core of a supermassive star. Life as on Earth is made of the same elements that compose the life of a star. So, technically, we all our made up of ‘Star dust’. Now that we know that the life on earth is based on its chemical composition, by analyzing the chemical composition of all the life forms that ever was present on earth, we can surely state that the life on earth is based on the element carbon. Carbon is a very extraordinarily special element that sports the property of being able to make long chains of stable chemical bonds with itself as well as with all other elements found on the periodic table. This property of carbon is called Catenation. This wonderful element is the backbone of the diversity of life forms present on our planet. Life forms on earth may seem to be of very different nature, color, shape and sizes. There may be drastic differences in the way they eat, reproduce, catch their prey, avoid predators, communicate or perform their daily activities, however, there is one factor common in all life forms on earth, which is all these life forms are based on the element Carbon. Now, we can surely say that the only life form that we know is based on Carbon. But, are we sure that, if there is some other life form present outside our planet, it would also be based on Carbon? Answer to this can be a straight- No. We can never be sure about the possibility of carbon or some other element being the rudimentary base of life in the cosmos. Who know, there can be a life form based of silicon or magnesium or even hydrogen, the most abandoned element in the cosmos. Do we really understand the role of chemical elements in formation and sustenance of life? Or do we know the possible number of elements that can serve as the bases of life formation? So, before we find an evidence based answer to this, we cannot move ahead with hunting of life any further.
Now, let’s have some discussion over the possibility of finding ‘Intelligent Life’ out in the cosmos. As for earth, we end up the debate by stating that human are arguably the most intelligent form of life present on earth. And there have been reasons and evidence in support to this statement, I mean, just take a look at the monumental achievements that we have embossed the face of this planet. The Pyramids of Egypt, use of computers and machines, understanding of natural phenomena and their predictions etc have some of the testimony to the fact that humans are the prime representation of ‘intelligent life’ on earth as we know it. Now, there is one question that we must ask before we begin searching for intelligent life. Do we understand ‘Intelligence’ at the first place. Intelligence as we define it on earth is the ability to exploit our surrounding resources effectively and progressively for our existence and to be able to evade potential hazards that may pose threat to us. Now, one can argue that even beavers have this ability to exploit their surrounding natural resources and avoid predators, then do we categorize them as the same intelligent life as us! May be yes, but the counter-argument can be put in this way- since the beavers or any other relevant species is not able to forge new thinks out of the natural resources and spare time to develop the advanced understanding of the natural world only to exploit the resources in many ways imaginable, we cannot categorize them as intelligent as humans. Now, this idea of intelligence can be self-defying for us. Lets think of an alien who locates our planet and makes a maiden visit to us. Suppose he manages to peek through a snake while in action of hunting its prey down. Upon his return to his world, his report to his senders can be somewhat like this- I saw life form on this planet. It had non limbs but can move to places, yet can detect its prey through infrared technology and kills its prey by injecting venomous chemicals. This report might seem to be of some extra-ordinary display of intelligence present on earth. Through this example, we can be sure of the fact that we cannot define intelligence in a generic term implementable to the whole universe. There might be some case where we end up finding a rock on Mars which grows in size every year and we seem to discard it as a non-living thing.
There is another point that needs to be discussed before we raise our excitement towards witnessing intelligent life. Statistically, the possibility of finding intelligent life can be very low in the vast cosmos, contractory to the fact that the cosmos is filled with billions and billions of galaxies, stars and exoplanets (planets outside our solar system). This idea is well-known as the ‘Fermi Paradox’. If we look back at the history of life on earth, for billions of years it has been dominated by the single-celled life forms. Existence of the complex life can be traced back to just around a billion years. And we zoom into the history of the existence of intelligent life, we might find it dating back to just a few million years. So, this indicates that even if we succeed at finding out a form of life elsewhere in the cosmos, there are chances that the planet is yet to host the intelligent beings and we might wait and return back in distant future in order to be able to communicate with them. At present, we have, according to the facts of science, developed tools to communicate with our counter-parts if and when they show up.
Now let’s presume, we succeed at finding an alien civilization outside our planet and even succeed at establishing communication with them, we are unsure of whether that rendezvous would result in our favor or would turn out to be our ultimate mistake! Renowned science fiction writer Arthur C. Clark said, whether we are alone in the universe or not, both the scenarios are worth freaking out. We are free to debate upon the question of possibility of life for hours and might return to the same question again. We might be the leading representation of life on earth with the potential of being the leader for the whole universe sometime in future, but we cannot ignore the fact that something in contrast to this has an equal possibility of occurrence. After all, we that the only model we know of representing the intelligent life is ours. Now, this sounds a bit scary to me. Prof. Stephen Hawking in an interview once said that he will be more worried than be excited if an alien civilization would be able to find us and would visit us. There is a very chance of them trying to enslave us for their own benefits. Now you may ask what makes him think so skeptic like that! Then, I would just say- go read human history of colonization. Our history is full of evidences that we as a human being with better intelligence have tried on enslaving the inferior human beings. I am quite sure that the same can be done to us if we encounter some superior intellectual life form from outside our planet.
So, now we have last but the most important question to answer. After this much analysis, should we keep our search for extraterrestrial life anymore? I would say –Yes. despite many questions left unanswered, it is our duty to satisfy our curiosity of knowing everything. This is what we live for. These explorations define our ingenuity and caliber to mark our names in the history of life as the forefront of life forms as there ever was.