Extraterrestrial Life and Physical Reality

Extraterrestrial Life and Physical Reality

Audrey has always thought about extraterrestrial intelligence, abbreviated ETI, harder and more carefully than anyone else. As she grew to know better the science, she saw that ETI provided a romance, a fascination, a dramatic contrast with the humdrum business of her personal life and the life of everyone who surrounded her, with their carnivorous plants, something called transcendental meditation or topless bars.

This thinking about extraterrestrial intelligence was not work for her, but play. Her imagination soared.

It was like entering the Emerald City or Wonderland. Actually, it was better, because at the end of all her ruminations there was the thought that maybe this could really be true, could really happen.

Someday, she mused, there might in fact and not just in fantasy be a message received by one of the great radio telescopes. But she repeatedly stressed for herself that speculation must be confronted with sober physical reality. It was a kind of sieve that separated the rare useful speculation from torrents of nonsense. In fact, the extraterrestrials and their technologies had to confirm strictly to the laws of nature, a fact that severely crimped many a charming prospect. But what emerged from this sieve, and survived the most skeptical physical and astronomical analyses, might even be true. You couldn’t be sure, of course. There were bound to be possibilities that you had missed, that people cleverer than you would one day figure out.

The scholars and linguists will be given the job of reading every available Extraterrestrial newspaper and magazine. If they have ones, obviously (Quotations from M. Jorgensen). Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

We are trapped by our time and our culture and our biology… we are limited, by definition, in imagining fundamentally different creatures or civilisations.

Separately evolved on very different worlds, they would have to be very different from us. It is possible that beings much more advanced than we might have unimaginable technologies – this is almost guaranteed – and even new laws of physics.

Here we are, just beginning to stand up on our two feet, discovering fire last Wednesday, and only yesterday stumbling on Newtonian dynamics, Maxwell’s equations, radio telescopes, and hints of Superunification of the laws of physics.