So I’m hangin’ at the house one night, kickin’ it and flipping through the dial when I come across Penn and Teller’s new show: Bullshit!. As Penn so eloquently said, “if you call someone a liar or a quack, they can sue you. But if you call what they do ‘bullshit’, you’re legally OK.”
Anyway, as you might imagine from the name, the show is dedicated to debunking spurious claims, such as penis enlargement pills, global warming – or in the case of that night’s episode – UFOs. In my time I’ve known several people that genuinely believed that aliens walk among us, visiting regularly in their super-fast spaceships to find out all they can about us with the dreaded anal probe. Personally, I think the whole thing is a sickness. Just as some people get addicted to drugs or join cults, these people are tying to fill some void in their lives. They have a need to be “different”, yet part of a group at the same time. It becomes an almost religious belief. And interestingly enough, most everyone I know that believes in UFOs – the little green men with anal probes – also thinks Christianity is “silly”. Go figure.
Of course, as soon as you tell people that you don’t think UFOs are real, they’ll instantly come back with “so you think we’re the only intelligent life in the universe?” Which is obviously not the case. To wit, here’s what I believe about life on other planets:
- There is life on other planets. Given that there are an infinite number of planets, the probability that there is some other life somewhere must be 100%.
- But it’s not necessarily intelligent. It seems logical to assume that out of the infinite number of planets, there are only a finite number of them than can support life. And for any given planet, I put the odds of that life being able to write an article similar to this at 50-50. I’m sure there are thousands of planets out there teeming with bacteria, but I don’t think there’s nearly as many with Beethovens or Monets on them.
- And it doesn’t really matter anyway. Space is big. Really, really big. If there are indeed people just like us on another planet, they are far, far away. So far, in fact, that they may as well not even exist at all. Even if a life form could travel at the speed of light – an unlikely possibility – it would still take decades to reach us from most places in the universe.
- But people aren’t crazy. They really are seeing something up in the skies. But there are far too many more likely things – solar flares, reflections off satellites, atmospheric anomalies – to assume it’s the little green men with the anal probes.
If my theory in any way interests you, I wholeheartedly suggest that you check out Fermi’s Paradox. Famed scientist Enrico Fermi – who built the first working nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago – was once eating lunch with colleagues. The topic of conversation was extraterrestrial life. Fermi was rather quiet as his colleagues excitedly exchanged ideas about what life would be like on other planet. Suddenly Fermi – with one brilliantly simple question – ended the conversation: “where is everybody?”
Fermi wasn’t trying to be a smartass. He thought that if the universe was 14 or 15 billion years old someone somewhere should have colonized the universe. But yet, no one has. Think about it – had we human beings appeared on this planet a piddling million years earlier than we did, there would surely be Starbucks coffee shops on Mars right now. Or ask yourself – how many more years from today would humans have to evolve in order to travel in space like in Star Wars or Star Trek? 10,000 years? A million years from today? It’s all still a squirt of piss in the age of the universe.
Heavy, man.