What A Fool Believes

Is there anyone left that believes we're the only intelligent life in the Universe?

I was working in the garage today and when I do I like to listen to the Discovery Channel for background noise. Sunday afternoons run a nice assortment of space-related shows. The one that aired today, talked about the distance between objects in the Universe. I truly believe that the human brain has stopgaps in place that prevent you from trying to contemplate infinity. For example, there are roughly 1 billion stars in the average galaxy. There are an estimated 100 billion galaxies that we rationally assume to be in existence. We're finding more and more extra-solar planets everyday so it's reasonable to assume that an average sun might have at least 3 planets around it.

So that gives us:

3 planets x 1 billion suns x 100 billion galaxies

that means there is the possibility of

3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets in the reasonable universe

Let's subtract the number of known planets to support life:

2,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999

And yet, there are still people that believe we're the ONLY life in the Universe and if not, we must be the ONLY intelligent life in the Universe. Notice that I'm bypassing the obvious and stupid "intelligent" jokes. The point is that if it happened once, it must have happened long ago, last week, will happen next Tuesday, and probably again in 100,000,000,000 years.

My Radio co-host and I got into this discussion once on-air and I said "assuming Einstien is correct, and throwing out any possibility of travel through dimensions or inside the curved folds of space, maybe the speed of light is God's way of preventing us from playing in someone else's backyard". According to Einstien, we cannot travel faster than the speed of light (which is really, the only way to get anywhere else in space) because matter becomes energy when it comes up to speed. (e=mc2)

In conclusion for those of you who are still awake, I think we're living in a Universe that's absolutely teeming with life. It is EVERYWHERE. I'm sure we'll discover life (on some level) right here in our solar system. There's probably multitudes of intelligent civilizations right here in the Milky Way Galaxy.

Will we ever meet them? Probably not. But it certainly is wonderful to know (or at least believe) that they're out there.