Historical November–December 2007 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
Good afternoon, class. I’m glad you could make time in your busy social calendars to join me today.
Some of you look a bit worse for the wear but, hey, when I was your age I enjoyed wearing too.
Please take out your pencils or open your laptops, and we’ll get started. For those of you who wear both suspenders and a belt, take out your pencils and open your laptops. You may recall that when we last met, we were in the midst of a great discussion when the bell rang.
We were trying to determine the definition of life. Hundreds of years ago, I’d pointed out, it was hard for many people to determine what was living and what wasn’t.
After all, people believed in – swore that they saw and communicated with – angels and trolls and all kinds of hobgoblins. Life was considered flesh and blood but it was also considered the supernatural. Apparitions were simply viewed as a parallel kind of life, but alive to be sure.
The clergy often reinforced the notion of a parallel and living world, and used it for their purposes. Beginning around the twentieth century, that changed. That is, even the devout believers defined life as comprised of flesh and blood. You were either living or dead, pure and simple. Oh, lots of people believed in ghosts, some still do, but they wouldn’t say that those doppelgangers are alive.
They might not be dead but they sure aren’t alive. Alive is limited to plants and animals. Ahem, Jane, please stop talking to your neighbor.
Most recently, though, and this is where our class ended, that thinking has become a bit fuzzier.
If alive is defined as something that moves and can regenerate itself, what about a computer virus? Think about it. Computer viruses jump from file to computer to file; they inhere themselves in computers and in email; they replicate. No, they don’t eat quarter-pounders or listen to Fleetwood Mac, but neither do whales. Further, it gets even trickier: We have designed computers which move, which need substance (in this case, electrical power), and which reproduce. Are they alive?
If not, why not? And if you read any of Ray Kurzweil’s works – The Age of Spiritual Machines is my favorite – it’s hard not to become convinced that in the near future we won’t be able to distinguish between human beings and the holograms in our midst. Indeed, Kurzweil would say that we won’t even need to do so; we won’t know and it won’t matter. So how we define life has once again been expanded.
We may look at life as broader than animal or plant. Life can be almost sub-atomic or life can be larger than life. By the way, write this down, please, on the next exam, be prepared to answer, given some of the criteria I’ve just described, whether an idea can truly be alive. Oh, and welcome, Mr. Sanrea, I’m glad you could join us today.
Please see me after class to let me know why you are late – again. OK, back to life.
All of the visions that I’ve described, except the ghosts, maybe, are limited to good old planet Earth. Sure, heaven transcends Earth, but not counting Heaven or Hell, we always envision life as being on our planet. That’s only logical because it’s all that we know.
We see artists’ renditions and sometimes photos of other planets, but we really don’t know.
The images we see show gaseous blobs or dry and rugged terrains. So far we haven’t found any Starbuck’s or pyramids on another planet.
We haven’t even found grass or ants. Surely we are alone in the universe. You may or may not buy the notion that Noah got two of everything before the flood came. Personally, I think it’s pretty silly but then I think it’s pretty silly that we elected Bush. So there.
But Noah or not, the rest of the universe is quiet.
We are here, alone. Guess what: wrong.
After all, class, it demonstrates an awful lot of hubris to think that God created us in his image.
If there was a God, why would he keep this image? Would God want to have to shave each day or get braces to have straight teeth? Would God endure acne? OK, sorry, class, I digress. What does God look like is for another week. Let me come back to life and whether or not we’re alone.
I know that it’s easy to believe that we’re the only occupants of this universe.
After all, we haven’t heard from anyone else. It’s hard enough to get mail delivered to the right address, much less a message from E.T. Our telescopes have seen nothing and our project SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence; google it) computers have only found silence.
But students, that is a very, very short-sighted approach.
We are part of a vast enterprise, and we have to keep that in perspective. “How vast?” you ask?
There are one-half trillion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. That’s right, it’s trillion with a T. That’s 500,000,000,000 stars. Think about the number five hundred trillion for a moment; that’s a million times one thousand, times one thousand again, times five hundred. Yeah, that’s way big. And our galaxy is only one of billions of galaxies!
The Hubble telescope has discerned areas that contain 80 billion galaxies, and there are many, many more galaxies that are beyond Hubbles’ purview. Are your minds boggled yet, oh intrepid students?
Another way to state that is that there are as many as one-half trillion suns in our Milky Way galaxy.
The difference? Well, there really isn’t any; a star is a sun and a sun is a star, but often we think of them as different.
We think that stars are gas spheroids that burn at thousands of degrees of heat. Suns, though, are gas spheroids that burn at thousands of degrees of heat and have planets orbiting them. Ah yes, planets. Planets! Can you see where I’m headed, class? Our sun is a medium-sized star with nine planets in its orbit. (Sorry, I refuse to decommission dear Pluto from its planet status. For that matter, I still think Mickey Mantle is a hero.) So if an average sun has nine planets, and there are 500 trillion suns in our Milky Way galaxy, it’s reasonable to assume that there are four and one-half quadrillion planets in just our galaxy. Are you paying attention, Henry? Of course, not all of those four and one-half quadrillion planets will have life. What might be a reasonable guess? Well, in our solar system only one of nine planets, just 11%, supports life (at least that’s what we think now). So let’s assume this is the norm. Of those quadrillions of planets across the universe, maybe only 11%, have life. Ready? That gives 9,500,000,000 planets that might have life. Or maybe it’s just 1% of all of them, just nine and one-half billion planets. Gasp, class.
There are no guarantees, we know that, but still, it’s pretty hard to think that life would be oh-for-nine and a half billion, isn’t it? So, stay with me here, Henry, let’s assume that there is life elsewhere. Probably lots of it.
But what does that mean? Just like those earlier periods in mankind’s history when life was defined much more broadly, we’re there again. Think life as defined very broadly.
We really don’t know what these other life forms might look like or how’d they behave.
The only thing about which I am very certain – and if you disagree with this, I’m sorry, but you’ll lose 10% of your final grade – is that these other life forms would not look like us. Indeed, Stephen Jay Gould, the late Harvard anthropologist, said that if evolution began all over again on our planet Earth, if it started again with the exact same conditions, what would evolve would look and be quite different than what’s here today. Our design, really, the result of our evolution, is certainly a function of environment, living forms adapt to their surroundings, but it is also a function of chance, millions upon millions of rolls of dice gave us who we are today. No way would that exact evolution and configuration result today. And it’s like that these other planets are very different than Earth, thus further reducing the similarities between their and our life forms. For that matter, and I’m getting on some thin ice here, I know, but I’m not convinced that the physical laws of nature will always apply in the same ways. Oh sure, I believe in gravity and I know that the speed of light is a constant (186,000 miles per second equates to 5.9 trillion miles per year), but I wonder about everything else. Why couldn’t a life form – note that I am not saying “human,” please – live off ammonia? Why couldn’t a life form consist of mercury or take sunlight as its only food? Why couldn’t a life form communicate by thought? Would a life form need to have a physical presence?
I don’t know what’s out there, class, but I am confident that something is out there.
But given the vast distances of space – it would take many lifetimes to reach the nearest stars, oops, I mean nearest suns – we may never know. That answer might be hundreds and hundreds of years away, and long before then we might self-destruct, either being eradicated quickly in a nuclear holocaust or slowly under the weight of our increasingly deeper carbon footprints. Given that the Earth is billions of years old, it’s pretty obvious that things change quite quickly.
After all, five hundred years ago the “New World” was still largely unknown, and there was no email. No one can predict what will be here in five hundred years or whether, in fact, a here is still here. Class, I see some of you squirming and looking at the clock, and I see that it’s almost time for dismissal. For your assignment, I’d like you to jot a couple of paragraphs in response to a question. Neatness and spelling count, of course, but I’m really looking for your synthesis and creativity. Ready? What impact would it have on us if we were to learn that life, intelligent life, existed outside our solar system? You’re limited to one side of a piece of paper or 500 words.
Please submit your response to me before we meet again.
I look forward to hearing from you. Readers: You can contribute too. Send your pithy answers to Hawkeye at trhoerr@AOL.com.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, November–December 2007.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Archival transcription note: Source alternates half trillion, 500 trillion and 500000000000 stars and gives inconsistent resulting planet arithmetic; preserved as source, not corrected or endorsed scientific data.
Original source: SD_Times2007_11.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 8.
