| | Life and Death in the Universe | Of all the problems facing mankind, perhaps the most intriguing is: Can there be life on other worlds? Are we alone in the universe, or is life likely to be widespread? Let us admit at once that we do not yet have the slightest evidence of the existence of life anywhere except on the Earth. Moreover, we must confine ourselves to discussing life of the kind we can understand. All our science tells us that life must be based upon carbon; if this is wrong, then the rest of our science is wrong too, which does not seem very likely. Rather reluctantly, we must reject the weird and wonderful beings so beloved of science-fiction writers, and which are usually classed as BEMs or Bug-Eyed Monsters. Life-forms on other worlds need not necessarily look like us, but they will be made up of the same ingredients — and after all, there is not much outward resemblance between a man, a cat and an earwig. A planet is very small compared with a normal star, and has no light of its own; so far, no extra-solar planets have been directly observed. Luckily, there are other ways of detecting them. A massive planet orbiting a normal star will make the parent star ‘wobble’ very slightly, and these tiny wobbles can be detected. The first success came in 1995, when two Swiss astronomers, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, tracked down a planet orbiting the star 51 Pegasi, 54 light-years away. The mass of the planet was a little more than half that of Jupiter, so that it was clearly a gas-giant; also it was very close to the star, and had a period of only 4.2 days. Since then many other extra-solar planets have been detected, and by 2003 the grand total had exceeded 100. …Can any of these extra-solar planets support life? This is a question which is not too easy to answer, because we are unsure of the origin of life even on Earth. (Suggestions that life did not originate here, but was brought to Earth by way of a comet or a meteorite, seem to raise more problems than they solve.) All we can really say is that if we could locate a planet similar to the Earth, moving round a star similar to the Sun, it would be reasonable to expect life not unlike ours. So far as communication is concerned, we must concede that in our present state of technology interstellar travel is impossible; even if we could travel at the speed of light it would take a spacecraft years to reach even the nearest star. When we consider ‘exotic’ forms of travel — teleportation, thought-travel and the like — we are back in the realms of science fiction. It may happen one day, but at the moment we cannot even begin to speculate as to how it might be done. …It has been argued that we really are alone, and that there are no other living things anywhere in the universe. On the other hand it has also been argued that there may be civilizations in all parts of stages of development. It is also possible that there are planets upon which the inhabitants have wiped themselves out in war — as we are ourselves in danger of doing; we have the ability to turn the whole of the Earth into a barren, radioactive waste, and our technology has far outstripped our actual intelligence. | —Sir Patrick Moore, Atlas of the Universe | Indexes/05 |
1 comments:
It may also have planets, which erased its own residents in the war - because we are in danger of their practice, we have the capability to the entire planet into a barren, radioactive waste, and our technology has far exceeded our actual intelligence.
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