There is so much crazy conspiracy shit out there. This is not that, I promise.
I understand why anytime this topic is broached people roll their eyes. But there is almost nothing I fully believe in more than that there is life throughout the universe.
Additionally, if life is as abundant in the universe as I believe, they most certainly could have come here at one moment in time, if not right now.
Most people consider themselves rational and logical and so refute anything so fantastic. They believe in what they can see, and since there has never been a confirmed encounter with life from elsewhere in the universe and humanity, it remains just a thought.
At it’s core, the belief in human exceptionalism puts us at the centre of the universe in our minds and forces our gaze just shy of the horizon.
I know what you are thinking. “But we have mega telescopes that are capable of diving into the depths of the universe far and wide.” Not only that, but astronomers have been deciphering our solar system for centuries.
To this I say, to date our efforts to explore space from our own backyard represent merely a baby step in the grand scheme of things. After all the universe remains fucking big.
Which brings me to my first major point.
So much time and space!
To help you understand where I’m coming from I need to go back, like way back, to shortly after the formation of the universe.
After the big bang (if you buy into that theory), the universe was plain craziness. The laws of physics had yet to take effect, there was no gravity, and no stars yet, but it was in this infancy that the universe created everything that it would need later on to make a nice orderly predictable situation that we are familiar with today.
The big bang is theorized to have taken place roughly 13.8 billion years ago, and after a few moments of gaseous turbulence, the first stars were formed.
Now for me this is where it gets interesting. Because every rocky planet is formed from elements created at the centre of stars when they begin to run out hydrogen to convert to helium. Eventually, stars god damn explode, sending these heavy elements across the universe, eventually forming clouds.
These clouds begin to form discs and one thing leads to another and they begin to form planets with a new star at the centre.
It happens over millions of years but first one particle of dust will collide with another, then another, and before you know it, it’s a planetesimal. Add more time, and perhaps a few collisions with like sized objects and you get a rocky planet that is one day capable of supporting life. Not yet however, as such an object is far too hot to house liquid water on its surface, and from what we know liquid water (at least to us) is the primary building block of life.
Rewind a little, and let’s go back to the moment just shortly after the big bang happened. And then let’s wait about 150 million years. At this point the gas that was created by the big bang is coalescing into discs and forming the first stars.
It was these first stars that eventually died and scattered the first heavy elements (iron, etc) throughout the universe and began forming planets. It took some time for these planets to form and to cool just like with the formation of our own solar system but important shit was happening.
For arguments sake, let’s say that one billion years after the universe kicked off, it was business time for making planets and stars, and it’s been that way ever since.
Now to put this in perspective, our solar system is roughly 4.5 billion years old. This means, that excluding the first billion years of the universe there has been a total of 8.3 billion years where planets and stars have been forming before we barged onto the scene. Some stars just like our own, some different.
Even in it’s infancy the universe was unfathomably large, so large in fact that it hosted billions of stars with planets orbiting them.
If we use the history of our solar system as an example, and I freely admit that it could have happened much differently else where, we know that once the Earth cooled and water formed on its surface (3 billion years ago), life began.
These life forms were simple bacteria and were bound to the water. But they were similar to life today in that they were carbon based.
Eventually, life colonized the land, vertebrates started to dominate the Earth and plant life sprang out of the soil. The whole process took roughly 500 million years.
Obviously, the Earth would have looked much different back then, but as far as it’s ability to host life capable of learning behaviours and adapting to the future, the Earth has been in business for 2.5 Billion years.
One thing that is important to my argument, and once again using our own solar system as an example, is that each star, depending on its mass, size and intensity, has what is referred to as a ‘Goldilocks’ zone.
This zone is the appropriate distance away from a star so that if planets formed there they could in theory host liquid water, which we know was absolutely crucial to the formation of life on Earth.
Presently, astronomers believe there is roughly 100 billion stars in the universe. Not all of them have orbiting planets, and not all of them are as stable as our Sun. But for arguments sake let’s say that 1 percent of all stars ever created have orbiting rocky Earth-like planets, and that 1 percent of all of those solar systems have those rocky Earth-like planets orbiting within their ‘Goldilocks’ zone.
Let’s backtrack a little to when the universe was 1 billion years old and freshly populated with stars and planets. There doesn’t seem to be any figures on exactly how many solar systems there actually were at this time, but again, for arguments sake let’s say that it is roughly 1 percent of what currently occupies the universe.
That means that roughly 8.3 billion years before the formation of our solar system there were 1 billion stars, and 10 million rocky planets orbiting stars within their ‘Goldilocks’ zone. Give each of these planets a reasonable amount of time to cool so that they can host water, and for life to take form and colonize the land, using our own experience as an example, we can say another billion years and these rocky planets would have abundant ecosystems.
So even before the formation of our own solar system, there was 7.3 billion years of the possibility of life in the universe. Just for reference sake I’ll call this the ‘habitable window’.
Let me just do some math….this means that at the very beginning of this ‘habitable window’ that began 11.8 billion years ago, there was 10 million planets who could have in theory harboured life.
You might be thinking, “Hey! It took quite some time before the Earth was suitable for humanity to proliferate.”
To this I agree. There have been several mass extinction events that we surely could not have survived, let alone the fact that several ton dinosaurs roamed the earth for the majority of life’s history on Earth (they would have fucked us so bad).
Our ancestors just happen to show up right now, when mammals dominate the scene. The figures are that the lineage that would become homo sapiens diverted from chimpanzees between 4.6-6.2 million years ago.
This means that we are practically brand new to the Earth. Roughly 300,000 years ago modern homo sapiens burst onto the scene (totally with their dicks out) and for about 50,000 years we have been behaviourally the same.
People like to use themselves as the prime example of what an intelligent species is, and certainly humans are the most intelligent species that we know of, but at it’s core it’s the ability to learn behaviours and adapt to the future that make anything intelligent (in my opinion).
Sure we have wifi and smart phones, so we are eons ahead of say a squirrel. But just like all the animals across every ecosystem, we are simply going through life learning and applying that knowledge to our daily activities. This is what all animals do. It’s called evolution, bitch.
I am not saying that a squirrel could one day become an IT professional given evolution and a few billion years. There are limitations. In this respect I must admit that humans, and primates in general, are outliers in the grand scheme of intelligence on Earth.
When researching I tried to find figures on how many species have ever been on Earth and how many exist presently, and the answers I got ranged wildly. Scientists have logged 8.7 million discovered species on Earth, but that doesn’t account for what we haven’t found yet (of which there is a lot).
An estimation puts the total number of species on Earth at roughly 1 trillion, and there are no figures estimating the total number of species ever.
I would have liked to factor this into my argument, but I’ll have to settle for what I’ve already laid out and that is that rocky Earth like planets are abundant throughout the universe and have been for billions of years, many of them likely occupy ‘Goldilocks’ zones, and therefor harbour liquid water and thus are full of life.
For reference sake, I’ll call these rocky Earth-like planets with life ‘Gaia’s’.
So then, in my mind it is totally reasonable that some time (500 million years) after the beginning of the ‘habitable window’ species were evolving across many ‘Gaia’ type worlds that could, given time and successful circumstances form into societies.
Do not confuse society with civilization. For example, monkeys live in a hierarchical society. Humans on the other hand form civilizations. Some are simpler than others but the key difference is organization, often political and resource oriented.
The creation of a society doesn’t lead to the making of a civilization, as we can clearly see all around us on Earth.
But rather, once a society becomes more about handling resources (setting them aside for the future/task specialization), politics are formed.
I’m not going to try and define the exact moment a civilization is formed because the definition of civilization is quite ambiguous. But you probably know a civilization when you see one.
The thing is that when individuals start pooling resources, organizing, and politicizing their lives, inevitably some people have what others need and vice-versa.
BANG! just like that trade and commerce is born, and with it often times currency that allows individuals to exchange even when the tradee doesn’t have exactly what the other person needs.
This is a great way to get what you need while focusing on what you do best.
But sometimes there are scarcities of certain resources on the market due to circumstances or conditions (especially in terms of agricultural goods). And individuals must travel for what they are seeking to acquire.
This brings me to my second major point
The history of travel
First people travelled by foot, then by horse, then by boat, then by air craft. I’m speaking really broadly because this all took 100’s of thousand of years to come about.
Humanity first travelled to neighbouring communities, then to far off places, and before they knew it, they had migrated out of Africa and into Asia, Europe, across the bering strait and into the America’s.
The need to travel has always existed.
Fast forward roughly 10 thousand years to the first world war. The first air war.
Bi-planes circulated over Europe for the first time, firing at each other from open cock-pits.
I mention this only to highlight that less than 50 years later aviation technology would be advanced so extremely that the USSR would be successful in putting the First man in space (Yuri Gagarin, 1961).
The process was expedited by the cold war. Neither the United States or the Soviet Union wanted to back down and they thrust all of their available resources into investing in space travel technology.
Had the cold war not happened, who knows if the Neil Armstrong ever would have walked on the Moon (1969). But it did happen this way so we know that in less than a hundred years a civilization can push itself to go from boat travel to the surface of the Moon.
Back to the ‘Gaia’s’ (10 million) inhabiting the early period of the ‘habitable window’ (10.8 million years ago).
For the sake of my argument, let’s say that only 1 percent of all the habitable ‘Gaia’s’ from this time period eventually foster species that develop societies that then evolve into civilizations that develop commerce and by necessity set resources aside for travel.
We know that on Earth, from the foot, to the space craft, it took roughly 30,000 years.
So let’s go back in time to the beginning of the ‘habitable period’ add a billion years, just for arguments sake, and say that the period of time for ‘Gaia’s’ that end up fostering civilizations (100,000), began 9.8 billion years ago.
If a society was never destroyed by cosmological anomalies, such as asteroids, the oldest civilizations began roughly 9.8 billion years ago at approximately 100,000 different civilizations across the universe.
But it probably wasn’t like that. I’m sure there have been intelligent species annihilated by nature or the cosmos all over the universe, before they even had a chance to collectivize and reach space.
However, I truly believe for those out there, like us, that were lucky enough to survive through their societal infancy onto civility, they will eventually make it to the stars. And here’s why.
Necessity is the mother of all invention. This could not be more true, and we can see evidence of this in our own history.
One thing that is looming over humanity is that one day, should our civilization survive long enough, our own solar system will become uninhabitable.
As our Sun converts its fuel (hydrogen) into helium, it will slowly grow. Eventually engulfing the inner planets including the Earth before exploding.
We as a civilization, to survive, must leave our solar system before this happens. This won’t happen for a couple billion years but still it is a hard deadline for tremendous technological achievement.
If we look back at what we have achieved in only a short time as far as travel is concerned, imagine what we can achieve in a thousand years, ten thousand years, a million years.
Overcoming the barriers put on us by the physical world, is just a matter of time and resource management. It wasn’t too long ago that big bodies of water stopped us from going forward. Now the frontier of the unknown is quite literally the great unknown of space.
Some might say this is impossible, as E-mc2, meaning nothing with matter can travel faster than light. To this I say, it only took decades after the first flight for air craft to break the sound barrier. Given time (lots of fucking time) who knows what we could accomplish.
I don’t doubt that the civilizations that popped up in the early part of the ‘habitable window’ eventually faced this problem as well. As some stars only live for 10 million years and others are projected to last at least a dozen billion years.
Let’s say that only 1 percent of all civilizations from this period of the ‘habitable window’ (1,000) made it out of their solar systems before their star collapsed or an asteroid crashed into them.
There are a few possibilities how they did it. First is multigenerational travel. The second is managing to break the light barrier. And if they, like us, discovered some reason to need to leave their solar system and find home elsewhere, would they not study and examine it.
That’s exactly what we do.
To return to an earlier point, the belief in human exceptionalism causes us to look inwards and because we haven’t done something yet, like breaking the light barrier, we don’t think it can be done.
To this I say, with time, all things are conquerable.
To summarize all the calculations I’ve thrown down – in the earliest possible moment that it could, the universe produced a thousand space faring civilizations that could have in theory broken the light barrier.
This is crucial as this would have opened quite literally a universe of possibilities to them.
Now remember, that there are billions of years before humanity showed up on the scene and during this time (within the ‘habitable window’) that solar systems were being created, ‘Gaia’s’s were coming into existence and life was spreading throughout the universe.
So we can only imagine how many space faring civilizations are actually out there, but at a minimum it is at least greater than one thousand.
Onto the Butts!
we know that at least on our own planet the human rectum has been studied into oblivion. And not just our rectums, other ones too!
When we study something, we usually try to learn about it in it’s entirety, thus the massive wealth of knowledge of butt stuff that circulates in peer reviewed scientific journals.
I’m assuming that life that sprang up elsewhere is just as curious as us, and at the same time they have invested in medical sciences. As there are often problems with the human rectum, it required study by the scientific community at large.
Scientists have studied whale butts, kangaroo butts, hummingbird butts, mouse butts, and any other kind of butt you can imagine. And yet we consider ourselves not rectum obsessed.
This is where I am going to delicately broach the topic of anal probing and why for sure it’s a real thing.
To do this i’m going to use an analogy. When the Huron and the Iroquois were living in North America before the Europeans arrived they lived in a civilization where they travelled from location to location in canoe and often had to go over land that was in their way, by means of portage.
Imagine the universe is one giant lake system and the land that’s in space faring civilizations way are the planets and the stars.
If they are headed in one direction, they might make a short stop over for a lunch picnic on whatever planet that is around, just to take in the sights or for the purposes of study.
If it’s for study, than you can bet your bottom dollar that travelling aliens are going to study your butt. I mean, we’ve done it a lot (think colonoscopy).
I wouldn’t be surprised if there is an intergalactic association of proctologists just frothing at the mouth, waiting to get their hands on strange butts from around the universe.
If you are thinking, “You had me until the anal probing part”, just think about it. Because if life is like how it functions here on Earth, the universe is definitely replete with assholes, and these assholes need care. I doubt proctologists are unique to Earth, and if they make as good money as they make here than they have the coin to go on asshole safari to Earth every now and then.
If you or someone you know believes they have been probed by Aliens, trust in the fact that I know it’s real.
The events that got us here have been in the making for 13.8 billion years. The universe was created so life could take shape, and so that that life could learn about it’s surroundings and improve it’s situation.
Unfortunately for our assholes, this means interstellar rectal examinations, quantum colonoscopies if you will. The number of probings that have taken place in the universe is unfathomable. So many butts, so little time.
On our own planet we can infer that doctors as a whole have probably said “turn your head and cough” more times than there are people that exist.
So next time someone say’s aliens don’t exists, shout in their face “WRONG”.
SOURCES
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_formation
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_evolution
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the_Solar_System
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_history_of_life#Earliest_evidence_for_life_on_Earth
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aviation
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_world#Early_humans
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_spaceflight