A story in National Geographic launched me into fifteen years of study. The cover read, “Are We Alone?” For years science fiction stories introduced us to intelligent life from other planets. But that was fiction. If there was intelligent life elsewhere, why hadn’t they introduced themselves or at least transmitted electronic signals that screamed, “We Are Here!”
How naive of me. With literally billions of suns, many with orbiting planets, the odds were in favor of life out there. If you define life as the chemical process that creates life or you believe that creation is the work of a supreme power, the odds favor life. If it’s all science, the odds of the right mixture of chemical, temperature, and atmospheric conditions allowing the creation of life are probably billions to one in favor. And even the most devout must consider that a Supreme Power wouldn’t stop with earth. We may be just one experiment, maybe not the most successful.
So, why haven’t we detected extraterrestrial life yet? We have hundreds of dishes pointed into space, all designed to detect electronic transmissions. Land and space-based telescopes search for planets orbiting foreign stars. Then the search is refined to look for chemical signatures of their atmospheres, searching for the telltale signs of life as we know it. Just this month another planet with a promising atmosphere was found, but no smoking gun.
As a writer, I spend much of my mental energy figuring out how to make implausible situations turn out to be real, that’s a big part of creating drama. It has slowly occurred to me that the same may be going on ‘out there.’ If scientists believe that life will only be found where we would look for it on earth, perhaps we are missing the big picture.
Perhaps there are very different forms of intelligent life. Think what might have happened when a society far advanced from ours created artificial intelligence to serve their population. But if competing populations destroy the environment, all that may be left is AI, which can function in entirely different environments. Or what if some massive crises, like a huge meteor strike or a corona blast from their sun destroyed the terrestrial atmosphere? Given enough planning and time, intelligent beings may have figured out how to survive and rebuild underground where they could draw on the planet's resources to create a life allowing atmosphere, energy source and sustenance. There would be no detectable telltale signs of life.
Astronomers have detected planets orbiting suns only tens of light years from earth. They have not detected life there, but what if…
For more than a year now, I’ve been working on a book that explores the possibilities of first contact. I believe the big story that might come from contact might be overshadowed by how human’s foibles deal with it. That is, until we truly listen to the message.
Look for the book this fall…