Does life exist outside of our planet? The question that continues to haunt us. Millions of years into our evolution, hundreds of years since astronomers have been gazing the sky for signs of life but to no avail. Despite all our technological breakthroughs, we have still not been able to determine whether there was or is life on Mars, our closest planetary neighbor, leave alone our solar system or our galaxy. The real search has not really begun. When we struggle for our own existence, fighting ever shrinking resources and ever increasing demand, looking for extra terrestrial life is an indulgence whose time has not really come. But there have been efforts all the same; Sending out radio waves into Space with an expectation that somewhere, some intelligent specie will intercept and decode those waves. Sending video and audio recordings on all modules sent in space has been a ritual for decades. Yet success has eluded us.
For decades, there have been reports of sightings of UFOs; most commonly as disk shaped objects circling an area, bright lights emanating from the same. Yet most of these sightings and even pictures have been debunked by scientists to be either low flying balloons, or cloud formations that people have really imagined to be disks. There is tremendous data on the internet on UFO sightings from all around the world, pictures, videos and what not. And some pictures I have come across have actually left me dumbfounded. Then again, the authenticity of these pictures can be questioned, and many past digitally altered samples have awakened the cynic in me. A cynic who would not believe unless confronted by any such flying object.
But I question all the same, how can we be all alone in the universe? We are a young civilization still in terms of the evolutionary time scale that reaches into millions of years. And our solar system and Sun are acknowledged to be young systems. And there are hundreds of millions of Stars out there. Stars much older than ours, galaxies much bigger and older than ours that support many times the planets and stars that ours do. Even if the probability of life springing on any one planet is infinitesimally small, the infinitely large multiplier effect of all planets in the universe makes life outside of Earth a surety. Yet we have not come into contact with any such life form. We plod on nevertheless, and this struggle will only intensify in the coming years as Earth slowly ascends the ladder where people gravitate from concentrating on their own needs and start looking for answers to questions that have confronted all mankind for ages. But till a proven life form outside our own is found, I will continue to believe in the existence of the same. For as one movie dialog goes, “But I guess I'd say if it is just us... seems like an awful waste of space.”
For decades, there have been reports of sightings of UFOs; most commonly as disk shaped objects circling an area, bright lights emanating from the same. Yet most of these sightings and even pictures have been debunked by scientists to be either low flying balloons, or cloud formations that people have really imagined to be disks. There is tremendous data on the internet on UFO sightings from all around the world, pictures, videos and what not. And some pictures I have come across have actually left me dumbfounded. Then again, the authenticity of these pictures can be questioned, and many past digitally altered samples have awakened the cynic in me. A cynic who would not believe unless confronted by any such flying object.
But I question all the same, how can we be all alone in the universe? We are a young civilization still in terms of the evolutionary time scale that reaches into millions of years. And our solar system and Sun are acknowledged to be young systems. And there are hundreds of millions of Stars out there. Stars much older than ours, galaxies much bigger and older than ours that support many times the planets and stars that ours do. Even if the probability of life springing on any one planet is infinitesimally small, the infinitely large multiplier effect of all planets in the universe makes life outside of Earth a surety. Yet we have not come into contact with any such life form. We plod on nevertheless, and this struggle will only intensify in the coming years as Earth slowly ascends the ladder where people gravitate from concentrating on their own needs and start looking for answers to questions that have confronted all mankind for ages. But till a proven life form outside our own is found, I will continue to believe in the existence of the same. For as one movie dialog goes, “But I guess I'd say if it is just us... seems like an awful waste of space.”
