When you look up to the night sky, you can see billions of galaxies with trillions of stars and even more planets. If we humans are so lucky that only 0,0001 percent of all those planets have the optimal environments required to make life possible, that would bring us a huge number of intelligent species, one smarter and more evolved than the other.
Author: Luka Takki
So how can it be that we still frown in loneliness on our small planet Earth? Surely many of these alien worlds have had more time than us humans to evolve intelligence and create the passion to find others and conquer the universe like us.
As we took over this planet, we destroyed any possibility for another intelligent life form to evolve on Earth. We destroyed their habitats. We acted as gods and killed their chances. The very same thing is likely to happen in our universe, smarter and stronger species will conquer planets for resources, and at the same time, they will destroy other, less intelligent creatures, seeming irrelevant.
Though intelligent life seems very possible, we have never been able to detect a signal or even a faint message from them. As if we were alone. In this article I will be introducing you to some of the reasons why we might be alone or why we still haven’t found our fellow alien friends. This is the Fermi Paradox.
One of the great answers explains that maybe we are the first. Although the universe is 13,8 billion years old, a big chunk of that time has been just boiling plasma and extremely hot and hostile environments all over which have made it almost impossible for any life to evolve in that time. If that is true, it could mean that as humans, we are one of the very first intelligent species in the universe. That gives us a good head start to conquer other planets and kill the chances of other civilizations before they destroy us.
The second solution could be, that the universe would have so said “Great filters”. These great filters will occur at some point in the evolution of lifeless matter into intelligent species. Great filters will be almost impossible to surpass, and they will kill or hold life from evolving further which is why we might not see huge stellar buildings.
These great filters could be already behind us, for example, this great filter could have been just at the start when one-celled organisms evolved into multicellular beings. Or it could still be in the future, where we would destroy humanity in our ignorance.
A third solution could be that maybe we have just not found the right ways to communicate with aliens. Right now, the old-fashioned radio waves we are using take millions of years to travel to distant stars. This method is probably outdated and too hard for aliens. We might just need to wait until a scientific breakthrough brings us new tools to communicate with other species. We humans are like ants trying to talk with people.
The last big possibility could be that the universe already has one Godlike species controlling, destroying and colonializing everything in its greed for resources. We might just see ourselves as lucky that we are too primitive for them to care for us.
These are just some of the various explanations for why aliens aren’t running around blasting our cities to ashes, but how can we know? Maybe already tomorrow aliens will be running around capturing planet Earth. Whatever happens, humans will never stop questioning the great powers of the universe. And why wouldn’t we be the aliens invading other planets? Who knows?
Cover picture by: ELG21 – Pixabay
Edited by: Sophie Van Den Berge, Johanna Larsson Krausová
