The Grumbler Cat

It is challenging to even conceive that we may never find life out there.

Scientists are working hard to find traces of life, similar to that of Earth, as well to spread the awareness and teach the masses. However, with all the dumb-down and analogies, much is lost-in-translation, and the concepts of time and space (different entities in this sentence) is often ignored or not absorbed by the public.

The complain here is that, contrary to popular belief nowadays, in some bubbles, we may never find life in outer space. Not now, not never. And the key word here is outer space.

Space is big, incomprehensibly big, the human mind cannot fathom the vastness of space. Even trying to translate it into numbers gets confusing and abstract.

I’ll start with a sci-fi book, Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, without much spoilers and without touching character creation that many didn’t like, the concept of distance and time is nicely demonstrated in this book. At some point the protagonist ends up in distant planet, still inside the Milky Way and quite close to us, but this planet is still a bit over 16 light years away, meaning the light and any form of communication will take at least 16 years to go, and then 16 more to come back. So for a human, the protagonist, it is just impossible to communicate with Earth, send a message now and wait a minimum of 32 years for the reply? No thanks, better figure something out by myself. Nice book by the way, a good read, if you don’t mind a few flaws in it.

You are aways looking at the past, there is no present, there is no future.

If you look at a mirror, paced at 1 meter away from you, you are seeing yourself 6 nanoseconds on the past.

If you see someone 100 meters away, you are seeing how this person was 300 nanoseconds ago.

If you look at the moon, you are seeing a bit more than 1 second on the past.

If you look at the Sun (don’t do that, at least not without proper filters) you are seeing how the Sun was 8 minutes ago.

Light is not instant, light takes time to travel, it is insanely fast compared to our local, isolated perception, but it is so slow when the scale is bigger. So yes, everything you look at, you are seeing the past, even though the act of seeing is happening now, if you look up into the sky, whatever you are seeing does not exist anymore, not as you are seeing.

This bring us back to Life and my complaints.

The drake equation, a probabilistic formula that plays with numbers on a pessimistic side, to tell that the chance of life is actually quite high, tells us that life out there most certainly can exist, or existed, or will exist, but out there.

And again out there.

An imagination exercise, assuming we as a sentient species are alone in the milky way, there might be life but too early in its evolution stage, or they already were decimated by internal conflicts, or an asteroid, or their start exploding (like our Sun will swallow Earth in a few billion years in the future). Ok, let’s assume that in the Milky Way we, intelligent, space-capable, at this moment, are alone. But there is a space-capable civilization on Andromeda, the closet galaxy to us.

Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away. If at this moment, the space-capable species we are imagining that lives in Andromeda look at Earth, they won’t see much, perhaps they will believe there is no life on Earth, humans didn’t exist yet, not in this final form, just some homo-something that barely new how to use rocks as tools. Plus Earth was going through an Ice Age, so if a Andromedian Scientist look for Earth, on its andromedian telescope, it will see a little frozen planet, with no lights, no radio signals, and will never know we are already polluting the space around us.

The same is true for us, when we look for the stars and planets on Andromeda, we cannot see “now” we can only see what was happening 2.5 million years ago, there might be civilizations, they might be colonizing nearby planets and moons, but there’s no way we can see what is happening now, on Andromeda.

And this is the closest Galaxy!

But how about GN-z11, one of the oldest Galaxies we know, since it is so old, life could be thriving there, there could be multiple forms of life way more advanced than us, but we will never know because it is 13.4 billion light years away, when we look at this galaxy we can only see what was happening 13.4 billion of years ago, even if at this moment, an advanced civilization living there pointed a super high-tech laser beam at us and tried communication, we will never know, because this laser will only reach us 13.4 billion or years in the future (or even more) and by then, Earth will have being consumed by the Sun already.

So yeah, although it is fun to find planets where there could be life in outer space, unless we find it on the closest solar systems inside our own Milky Way, we will never be able to see much of anything, sadly.