#2-Are We Alone?

As we discussed last time, it’s easy to say that there are about 100 billion stars in an average galaxy, with 2 trillions galaxies in the universe. And for how long? How long has it been since that first Big Bang?

All this has been going on for 13.82 billion years. Again, it’s comprehending this new fact that’s tough.

So let’s make a time line. The whole of last year, we’ll compress down to about as small as we can easily see, say an eighth of an inch. That would make each 4 year presidential election cycle take a half inch. In 30 inches we’d be back to the founding of this nation. A little more than 20 feet to get back to the first Christmas and just over 50 feet to get to the end of recorded history.

At that rate, by the time you got to the start of the universe, you’d be all the way around the earth, and then some. We are literally a drop in the bucket (actually one drop out of 7 or 8 buckets).

The history of the earth alone would go one third of the way around the globe, at that scale. Imagine each of those grains of salt pictured in the last blog, enough to cover all the land on earth 4 feet deep. Imagine if each one’s history was mapped out. That’s a lot of history!

I don’t care how you believe that our so-called intelligent life began, wouldn’t it be the sheerest of follies, the height of hubris, out of all that space and over all that time, to say that we are the only ones? Ever? Anywhere?

Face it: We are not the only ‘intelligent’ life. We are not even the first. There have been many, many, many others, over a long, long, long time. Again, any way you cut it, any way you choose to believe that we got started.

Sure, maybe most of them were just as stupid and competitive as we have been, and have blown themselves or each other up after a (relatively) short time.

But out of that many, over that long, isn’t it likely, even to the point of being obvious, that some few of them would have figured out a better way?