Extraterrestrial

CHAPTERS (temporary)

Drake
How likely is it that there is life outside Earth? We, as a species, have since ancient times looked up at the sky and wondered what our place in the Cosmos was, and if we were alone or some otherworldly gods or creatures existed. Today we know so much more than our ancestors, at the dawn of civilization, yet we still look up and look for answers to those fundamental questions. The Universe is a place that, thanks to modern Science, we have started to understand a few centuries ago, and progress has been spectacular in the last century or so. We know how small we are, a tiny dot circling an ordinary star which circles around an ordinary galaxy. There are about 100 billion stars like the Sun in the Milky Way galaxy, and there are about 100 billion galaxies like our Milky Way in the Universe. This means that there are about 10^22 stars in the Universe, with possibly billions of billions of habitable planets. In 1961 Frank Drake proposed the famous equation that carries his name to stimulate scientific dialogue at the first scientific meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. One of the most widely known mathematical formulas, Drake’s equation estimates the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy using purely probabilistic arguments.
What the equation shows us, is just how unlikely it is for the human race to be the only civilization in the Milky Way, let alone the whole Universe. Christopher Conselice recently refined Drake’s equation, and according to his estimate, based on the progress in our understanding of the Cosmos, there are between 4 and 211 civilizations in the Milky Way!
Recently, the search for extraterrestrial life has been one of Avi Loeb’s – one of the worlds’ top cosmologists – research topics, with surprising results.
We ask his opinion and he explains how important the quest is for a radical change in mentality in scientific investigations concerning ET life. He discusses how and why we should find a way to probe nearby stars within our lifetime.

Where are they?
The Fermi paradox, named after Italian physicist and Nobel prize winner Enrico Fermi, focuses on an apparent inconsistency: if there are many civilizations in our galaxy, why don’t we see them?
The argument goes as follows:
(i) there are billions of stars in the Milky Way similar to the Sun, and very likely billions of habitable planets;
(ii) many of these are older than the sun, therefore an advanced civilization could be billion years ahead of su;
(iii) it is logical to assume that humans, if no catastrophic events happen, would be able to cross the galaxy in a few million years by interstellar travel, becoming a galactic civilization; (iv) if it is so, why no alien civilization has visited us?

Explanations to the Fermi paradox seem to suggest that either
1 – intelligent life is very rare, or that
2 – the lifetime of civilizations is short, or
3 – that they exist but remain stealthy.
We go back to Christopher Conselice, how does his study fits into the apparent gap between Drake and Fermi?

Rendezvous with Rama
We introduce the story of ‘Oumuamua from the point of view of a famous sci-fi novel of the 1970s, “Rendezvous with Rama” by A.C. Clarke. This 1973 novel describes the discovery of a very peculiar and gigantic object in our own Solar System. In the year 2131, a peculiar and mysterious object appears in our Solar System around Jupiter. First identified as an asteroid, its orbit clearly indicates its interstellar origin, with a path swiftly leaving the Solar System for good. What is it? Why was it empty and who created it? These questions will remain forever unanswered.

In October 2017, ‘Oumuamua was discovered: the first extrasolar object appearing in the Solar System. The same word ‘Oumuamua means “scout” in hawaiian. It is unusual in so many ways: its light curve can indicate a very elongated shape with a fast rotation period (does this sound familiar?) or a very peculiar distribution of bright and dark zones on its surface, what astronomers call albedo. One of the main peculiarities of ‘Oumuamua is its apparent non-gravitational acceleration, in other words there is some force that is accelerating the asteroid and it is not gravity.

We will likely find life soon
Scientific studies clearly point to the significant probability that several advanced civilizations are hosted by planets in our own Galaxy.
Christopher Conselice could make some comments about his latest study on the number of advanced civilizations in the Milky Way. Despite a century-old tradition of sci-fi movies and literature, it is very unlikely that we will experience a close encounter with an alien civilization any time soon. The dimensions of space and time, even within our own Galaxy, are so extended that an actual travel between two inhabited stellar systems is far from realistic without any breakthrough in Physics. Hence, how are we going to find the definitive proof of alien life? Science has already provided some conclusive answers. Several telescopes are now, or will be in the near future, used to search for extrasolar planets, whose total number today is 4,000+. Several of these planets are within the habitable zone of their star, meaning that the basic physical/chemical properties (for example, liquid water) necessary for life are met. Even if a planet is just the right size and within the habitable zone, this does not imply that life is present. The next step will be to analyze the light emitted by these faraway planets in search for so-called biomarkers. A biomarker is a chemical species that can only be produced by some sort of biological process. For example, on planet Earth, a significant biomarker is dimethyl sulfide, produced by marine phytoplankton. In a 2014 paper, Avi Loeb and collaborators also suggested the possibility of detecting CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) in the atmosphere of other planets, to search for industrial pollutants with future telescopes.
Given the current development of these fields, several scientists project that in our lifetime it is very likely that we will find a definitive proof of life.

Life and Origin
Every tale of the origins starts with Time, before Time, within Time or in a set point in Time, most traditions talk about Gods, Spirits or Natural entities that have created our time and space, very few address the existence of a life “other” than ours (and here by ours we intend all known species and vegetal life), out of our Earth or afar from our realm of existence.
One of the oldest religions of the world, the Indian Jainism, has a cosmology – similarly to Buddhism – that affirms the coexistance of multiple realms, multiple realities called Lokas, which could sound for sure crazy to all the Spanish-speaking. Jainism divides the universe in six different substances, one of which is Jiva (the Living substances) that we can translate somehow to the concept of Soul. Each soul has different states going through time and for which bodies are just temporary vessels. Jainism cosmology diversifies Time in perceived time and real time, the latter being the time of substances, that indicates the continuous changes in the status of the substance – making it sound as if they would already know about quantum physics! The creation of myths, stories and the urge to create a narration of our origin are ancestral elements of our being that develop within and with us, when mastering fire or during the birth of language. Some say that since we leave our mother’s womb we inherit both a sense of loss and belonging, how we tell this tale is up to us, loss of the Golden Age or a Paradise Lost, the sense of family. Our subconsciousness perfectly understands the cycle of life and somehow our cells transmit the recollection of a lineage, “someone like me was here before me” as much as “something else is out there”, there is something else than me.