Life on Other Planets

Then again, maybe contact is not a good idea

We are lost in space.  Living on the only habitable surface within 15 light years or so, we are surrounded by the blackness of the universe.    We see the stars on a clear light.  Hundreds of millions of stars.  Undoubtedly, some of those stars have planets more or less like our own, a little bigger, a little smaller, a little hotter, a little colder.  Planets capable of evolving intelligent life and a technological civilization similar to our own.

Now, it’s likely that a certain percentage of those species are at the point in their development, the point in the arc of their evolutionary development, that they’ve got some space travel.  Some may still be at their horse and cart days, like all the world’s ever visited by the daring crew of Stargate.  So much science fiction is just thinly disguised sword and magic nonsense.  Speaking of which, why haven’t Terry Pratchett’s books ever been made into a movie?  Or have they, and I just wasn’t paying attention?   Actually, I think it would make a good TV series.  Dozens of lovably evil characters in a dingy yet exotic setting.

But I digress, I have a point coming.  Some of them may be hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us.  If interstellar travel is possible, and I see no theoretical reason why it shouldn’t be, traveling at sub-light speed, then they could make it here.  But it would take hundreds and hundreds of years.  The universe is a really huge place.  To say we are like a tiny Pacific atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, still undiscovered in the 21st century, is to underestimate and misunderstand the scope of space.  We are like a minnow in the vast Pacific, we are the proverbial needle in the haystack.

I am sure that if we were visited by aliens, they would make contact.  What, you’re going to travel all that way and not say hello?  The non-interference rule was made up for Star Trek.  There’s no reason to believe it would play out like that in reality.  So, the very fact that they are not known pretty much proves they aren’t here.

But that’s just because space is so big that nobody has stumbled across our little corner of it for the last few thousand years or so.  At least nobody who made their presence known.  They could show up any time, though.