Post
by Ann » Tue Jun 15, 2010 2:41 am
And that's what we are reduced to when it comes to pondering the question of extraterrestrial life - believing, thinking, guessing.
Proving the existence of extraterrestrial life might well be hard, if that life doesn't look like we expect life to look, and if it exists in places where we have a hard time finding it, such as underground.
But as hard as it might be to prove the existence of extraterrestrial life, that's nothing compared with how hard - no, make that how utterly impossible - it is going to be to prove the non-existence of such life.
Bear with me for a moment and consider the possibility that we are alone. (You may conclude that if we are alone, then that is because we were created by a God and this God chose not to create life elsewhere. But you may just as well conclude that if we are alone, then that is because life is really so improbable that it took an entire universe to come up with life on just one planet.)
Okay. So play this mind-game with me and accept, for the moment, the idea that we are alone. How do we go about proving that? How do we ever prove that there is nobody else out there? The way I see it, we would literally have to search every nook and cranny of every terrestrial planet out there, plus the innards of all said planets, plus, I'm sure, a few places that have nothing to do with extraterrestrial planets such as comets and perhaps the atmospheres of many gas giants, before we could know that there is no life there. And let's not forget that we would have to travel in time, too, and conduct our search again and carefully examine all the possible cosmic habitats of life at every possible time period.
So are we ever going to prove the non-existence of extraterrestrial life, if we are indeed alone?
Of course we aren't. I thought you'd see my point.
With me being so negative, do I believe that we are alone?
Well, let me put it like this - if a person strongly believes that we are alone in the universe, then that person has a religious belief in that concept, because a conviction should be termed a religious belief if it is forever beyond the reach of our knowledge. And I'm not particularly religious.
Then again, a person who believes that the universe is teeming with life is also a bit religious in his or her belief, as long as we have no proof whatsoever to back the concept up. But the person who believes in life elsewhere at least has a chance to be vindicated by science in the future.
Somebody put it like this: We are either alone or we aren't. Either way, it's a staggering thought.
I like that.
Ann
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