Are We Alone In This Vast Universe?

Harshverma
4 min readOct 31, 2020

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The universe is incredibly old.

The universe is incredibly vast and old. According to certain estimations the observable universe after the big bang has extended upto 92 billion light years in diameter and is continuously expanding bigger and bigger with every passage of second. Certain measurements have estimated that the universe is 13.82 billion years old. This long time period is sufficient for extraterrestrial civilizations to grow and fluorish. The earth in itself is 4.6 billion years old. Industrial revolution which has brought tremendous achievements in technological fields took place nearly 300 years earlier and in such short span we stand at a position where we see the possibilities of mining asteroids, colonizing Mars and the moons of the planets of our solar system and even exploring beyond solar system. Hence it is quite rational and logical to say that the other civilizations should have achieved sufficient technological advancements in this universe so old that contains more that 100 billion galaxies in which our own galaxy Milky Way contains around 30 billion planets alone. This means that there has been enough space and time for the other civilizations to fluorish and colonize atleast our own galaxy. In contrast the entire universe is deafening silent.

Why is the universe so silent ?

Where is everybody ? These were the words exclaimed by Enrico Fermi, an Italian scientist. The Fermi paradox is named after this physicist and refers to the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for and various high probability estimates of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations elsewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy.

There are billions of stars in the galaxy that are similar to sun and many are even billions of years older than the sun. With high probability many stars have Earth like planets and in such situations civilizations may have developed interstellar travel. Even at a slow pace of currently evisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way Galaxy would be completely transversed in a few million years. In this case, the Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial aliens or atleast their probes.

In this context there have been many theories and opinions. A Dutch biologist Hart argued that aliens never came because of physical difficulty like that of humans "that makes space travel infeasible", which would be related to astronomy,biology or engineering. Other civilizations may have risen up just rightly as we humans did making it too unlikely for them to visit us. The most prominent arguments have been that the aliens visited us in the past, but we did not observe them.

What is the context of The Great Filter?

With no evidence of intelligence life other than ourselves, it appears that the process of starting with a star and ending with "advanced explosive lasting life" must be unlikely. This is what we call 'The Great Filter'. Well this filter is actually that stage which brings end to an entire civilization. This Great Filter may be behind us, in the process that led from inorganic compounds to humans. That means we human beings are rare and we are destined to colonize the universe one way or another.

Maybe the conditons that led to life are extremely rare, either due to instability of planetary systems, or to the low probability that life gets started. It can also happen that the conditions that make life possible be recent. That means we are not alone in the universe, but we may be the first to have developed intelligent lives. The final explanation says that The Great Filter is ahead of us. This means that howsoever technological advanced we become, at the end we'll collapse due to unknown factors. This means that no civilization is meant to colonize anything beyond their own planet. In this case, we are doomed, like all other civilizations that presumably existed.

Well these are just hypothetical aspects and we never know when may the aliens arrive or if they are already observing us. There are possibilities that they might be sending us signals but our technologies may not be able to catch them. Or is it simply the dark energy that has pulled us so apart that it has turned out to be an unconquerable distance ? The chances are many but the truth is yet to be found.

HARSH VERMA

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Harshverma
Harshverma

Written by Harshverma

I am an enterprising content writer with 4 years of experience in content writing. I have worked as a content marketing strategist with various start-ups.

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