‘The universe is a pretty big space. It’s bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So, if it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space, right?’ Carl Sagan
The Milky Way is studded with two-to-four-hundred billion suns, each dripping their own dream-team of darling planets, and the universe is studded with a harem of two-to-four-hundred billion galaxies. Estimates vary, but all agree the universe is bigger than Disneyland. And more fun.
The nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi over an informal lunch confounded colleagues with the indigestible entrée, ‘Where Is Everybody?’ (or ‘Where Are They?’). And by the dessert course, Fermi and his meringue whip of space-heads had conceived the cosmic egg of the Fermi Paradox — the contradiction between the high probability of aliens vs. the reluctance of aliens to make contact with cardigan-wearing, bespectacled, shaggy-bearded scientists.
And from those primeval days — when creatures other than politicians crawled from black lagoons — scientists at SETI (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) have been zapping the heavens with radio telescopes in the hope of swapping mobile numbers with back-packing outward-bound aliens.
The Big Scientific Knobs who, tuning in and dropping out, founded SETI included astrophysicists Carl Sagan and Frank Drake. To assist SETI space-heads — and their incredibly hard work of staring at computer screens all day — Frank Drake scribbled a scratch equation to estimate the number of aliens hanging out in the bars and pool-rooms of the Milky Way.
Feel free to add your own constraints to the seven big-sisters of Drake’s famous equation: average annual rate of star formations (about seven); fraction of stars with planets; fraction of planets that can support Life; fraction of planets to evolve Life; fraction of planets evolving Intelligent Life; fraction of intelligent civilisations that evolve technology; time taken by intelligent civilisations to release detectable radio signals into space.
You may deduct from the total, say, the dunderheads who self-destruct from nuclear or climate disaster; the geographic separation of a species to enable evolution of further species; and lowest of all, species that die of boredom from an excess of Country & Western music.
‘Occasionally, I get a letter from someone who is in ‘contact’ with extraterrestrials. I am invited to ‘ask them anything’. And so over the years I’ve prepared a little list of questions. The extraterrestrials are very advanced, remember. So I ask things like, ‘Please provide a short proof of Fermat’s Last Theorum’. Or the Goldbach Conjecture ... I never get an answer. On the other hand, if I ask something like ‘Should we be good?’ I almost always get an answer.’ Carl Sagan
The nearest detectable intelligent civilisations should by now be receiving our ever-rippling television signals of I Love Lucy, which may explain their reluctance to visit planet Earth for lunch with shaggy-sandled cosmologists.
Intelligent Life may be encountering muddy difficulty in arising from the slime, and if you’ve ever found yourself on the terraces of Arsenal’s North Bank, you’ll understand why.
Intelligent Life may be hardwired with the propensity to self-destruct — which includes the gross stupidity of spending precious resources on nuclear weapons.
‘The planet will be here for a long long long time after we’re gone. And it will heal itself; it will cleanse itself ’cause that’s what it does — it’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover. The Earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm — the Earth plus Plastic. The Earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the Earth; the Earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the Earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place — it wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it — needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old philosophical question — Why are we here? Plastic, assholes!’ George Carlin
So here we stand you and I — fragile freaks stranded on the shore of an unfriendly universe, surrounded by a sea of indifferent silence.
‘So what are we? A statistical accident. Where are we? Nowhere special. Where are we going? Into oblivion. A meaningless hiccup in the blank procession of matter through time. It’s a tatty destiny.’ BBC Horizon: The Anthropic Principle, BBC 1987
We face not the inevitable return of a living God but the inevitable invasion of an asteroid or comet to read us our rights. Our lucky stars. Stragglers may await the collision of the Andromeda Galaxy with our own, and a cosmic son et lumiere fireworks display. Our Sun will devour its children, and fizzle out of rocket fuel for good.
‘An expanding universe does not preclude a Creator but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job.’ Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time series, 1991
What are the chances that after such a long absence from the scheme of things God conjures the bright idea, a couple of thousand years ago, to intervene with a sordid session of eldest son sacrifice? God it seems can’t be arsed to let us have the Big Kahuna message godo-a-mano.
God, we suspect, may be found conspiring with high-court lawyers to conjure a plea of not-guilty against grievous charges of having creating planet Earth on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
The universe doesn’t give a cat’s furball for a fascist gangster God muscling in on the action of a backward bunch of hairless apes and our brief moment in the sun.
‘Meanwhile, the sun is getting ready to explode and devour its dependent planets like some jealous chief or tribal deity. Some design!’ Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great p80
The universe won’t miss us when we’re gone, and won’t thank us for the ever-rippling television signals of I Love Lucy, our final legacy to a friendless, faceless but fantastically fire-balled universe fleeing into the setting sun.
‘We will disappear into the blackness of the space from which we came. Destroyed as we began in a burst of gas and fire. The heavens are still and cold once more. In all the immensity of our universe and the galaxies beyond, the Earth will not be missed. In the infinite reaches of space the problems of man seem trivial indeed. And man existing alone seems himself an episode of little consequence. That’s all.’ Rebel Without a Cause 1955, planetarium commentary
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