Aliens looking for humans
Is there life outside Earth? Are aliens real? If so, where are they? What are they like? These questions are so complex that billions of dollars have been spent by Earthlings in the search for answers to them. But the search is still almost the same as it was when it began.
On the contrary, the questions are getting deeper and more numerous over time. Do aliens fall within the scope of religion or not? What is the guarantee that they will not harm us if we meet them? Is communication possible between humans and aliens? Can language, consciousness, and thought become a common medium? But such questions seem relevant only when we can confirm the existence of aliens.
Before, all these speculations would be just a world of curiosity and imagination. Last year, the BBC World Service broadcast a 26-minute story about this. At that time, the broadcast was divided into four parts. The first part explored how and where the question arose, while the second part focused on the search for life on other planets. Similarly, in the third part, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft and in the fourth, what is our preparation if we find aliens are discussed.
Overall, through them, the Query Team has told us the story of the search for life outside Earth. Is there really life outside Earth? Let’s discuss this today. According to Natalie Haynes, who is particularly interested in science fiction, there were no spacecraft in space two or four years ago. In fact, such a spacecraft was not even imagined at that time. At that time, the author Lucian of Samosata had mentioned in his book that there was life outside Earth.
In his book titled ‘True History’, Lucian has written the story of some travelers. Those travelers get stuck in a vortex and reach the moon. It takes them seven days to reach there. Nowadays, it takes only about half the time to reach the moon by rocket. According to the book, there is a war going on between the king of the moon and the emperor of the sun. They have armies that are surprising. Lucian has discussed wings and giant vultures on the moon.
He wrote about an army with amazing bodies. Which cannot be mistaken for aliens. About 800 years later, another science fiction story, THE BABOO CUTTER’S DAUGHTER, was written in 10th century Japan. In this story, a bamboo cutter sees a bright light inside a bamboo. He meets a little girl there. He takes her home. And raises her like his own daughter. When she grows up, the girl tells him that she came from the moon.
Interestingly, in every story that has discussed aliens before, the moon is also discussed. According to Natalie Hens, what has been written about the moon for a long time is true. This may have happened because the moon is clearly visible from Earth. But we cannot see Venus and Mars from Earth. Later, Mars also became a topic of discussion on Earth. In the 1870s, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiapare saw Mars through a telescope.
He wrote about it in detail. He saw something like a drain on the surface of Mars. People assumed that he might be talking about a canal. At that time, the Suez Canal was completed. After this, a belief began to form among people. The inhabitants of Mars have built a canal there. A few years later, a Polish priest wrote a book called Wild to Another World. In the book, he discussed nine-foot-tall aliens living on Mars. At first, he used the term Martian for these creatures.
Then, at that time, a story called The War of the Words was told on the radio. This story was told in a news bulletin series. What the listeners thought was that Mars had started attacking Earth. The sound of an attack from above and people scattering and running away was heard on the radio.
Now, the search for life on other planets was also being discussed. In the 1960s, a young scientist, Frank Drake, suggested using the advanced radio technique used in the World War to send signals from one solar system to another. Since aliens could also do the same, it was argued that this technology was suitable to search for their existence. After all, finding an alien signal is like finding an alien itself.
Senior scientist Seth Shostak had been trying to listen to such a signal for a long time. According to him, Frank Drake turned the mouth of the antenna on the west side towards the nearest star. He was trying to catch the signal that the aliens were sending. He was looking at two stars. Interestingly, he did not get any signal from one star, but he heard some sounds from the other star. He thought he had found an alien now.
However, it could have been a signal from a military aircraft. Since the 1980s, the US government has been financially supporting St. Cloud State University – SCSU. Radio waves can easily travel through space. The sound that Seth Shostak heard on his radio receiver was not actually an alien signal. Seth Shostak had created it from a sequence. So that he could understand what he was looking for. But the problem was that he had to look at millions of radio frequencies. And how did he know which one to look at first? This was a huge problem.
The aliens did not send him any messages telling him which frequency to tune to. So he had to check every frequency. But doing this was a waste of time. We needed a receiver that could listen to all the channels at once. An astronomer at Ohio University was looking at data from a radio telescope when he saw a signal with a very high intensity and frequency. He thought it might be an alien signal. He was very happy and wrote wow next to the data. But no one knows exactly what he saw.
Others also searched the same part of the sky but never found any signal. In this case, there were two possibilities. Either it was aliens. Or it was the sound of something on Earth. Some people considered it an example of an alien signal. But in reality, after years of searching, there was no sufficient sign of aliens. At the same time, the question of how much governments were willing to spend billions of dollars on a project that would not yield such results was also raised.
In the early 1990s, the support that St. Cloud State University – SCSU was receiving was stopped. But this was not the end of the alien search. According to astrobiologist David Greenspoon, people were not very confident about the search for aliens because they started searching for many planets without knowing them. But since the early 90s, scientists have discovered new small planets in our own solar system. And the question has arisen again. Could there be planets like this outside our solar system? Where is life possible?
In March 2009, NASA launched the Kepler space telescope. It was an object with a telescope whose purpose was to search for life beyond Earth. Kepler was a brilliant idea. It was placed far from Earth in a place where it could observe the entire universe. Kepler monitored the stars for years. Its job was to see if the light coming from a star changed or not.
According to David, if there was a change in the light, it meant that there was some activity between us and the star. This could be caused by a planet. If a star was twinkling, it meant that something was moving around that star. Kepler was expected to find only a few planets, but in its nine-year period, it discovered 2,600 planets outside the solar system. How many of these could have life?
According to experts, there are rough estimates. But we do not know under what conditions life would exist. We only have the example of Earth. But we can assume that if a planet the size of Earth is in a certain climate zone, there is a possibility of life. In this way, it can be said that there could be 300 million such planets in our galaxy. This discovery was a revolution that changed the way scientists think about the possibility of life outside the Earth.
Most astronomers and scientists believe that life may exist on another planet. So far, there has been no specific discovery about Earth that would suggest that life is only possible here. Some organisms like exomoons have also been discovered on Earth. This proves that life is possible even in complex conditions. Scientists believe that this small organism, which is also the basis for the beginning of life, is spread throughout the universe. The new discovery has once again increased interest in the alien search. But what is the biggest question? What if aliens are found?
According to astronomer Stephen Hawking, there may be life somewhere outside Earth. Many scientists are worried about what will happen if this is discovered one day. What will happen next? What will we do after aliens are discovered? What could be the impact of this? Neither the governments of the countries nor anyone else have a plan for this. We do not even know what aliens are like yet. In this case, what will their reaction be after meeting us?
Can we move forward with the idea that aliens are good? Even if we look at it from a micro level, this is possible. Bacteria from another planet can spread infection here. We do not know whether there is a principle of benevolence in the alien world. So we are talking about searching for aliens. But are aliens searching for us? How can we talk to aliens even if they come to Earth? This is a more complex question. This is a serious topic of discussion.
This is shown very well in the movie Arable. In this movie, some aliens try to talk to humans. At such times, a language is needed that can be understood by the entire universe. According to some people, mathematics may be the answer. But there are different theories about this too. Some say that mathematics was invented. Some think that it was invented. Apart from this, there are many other questions. Are we looking at them in a religious diorama?
How do we treat them? Who talks to them on behalf of Earth? The United Nations or someone else? No one has the answer to these questions yet. Back to our original question, are there really aliens? We know that scientists have not been able to find any evidence of life on any other planet. After decades of searching, scientists are still where they started looking for aliens. But it can also be looked at from a different perspective. It is a matter of possibility.
There are millions of galaxies in the universe. One of them is our Milky Way. It also has billions of planets. Earth is certainly not the only planet where there is life. There may be life on other planets, perhaps even similar to ours. Someday we may evenfind aliens. Or aliens may find us.