Stephen Hawking, this world's foremost physicst has teamed up with Russian billionaire Yuri Milner to harness a $135 million project to search for extraterestrial intelligence. It will use a mix of optical and radio telescopes to probe the dark regions far beyond our solar system in the belief that other life exists in the vastness of space.
Planet Earth first began to announce our presence at the start of the twentieth century when Marconi invented radio and since then we have been blasting radio signals into the cosmos as the speed of light - 186,000 miles per second. By mid century we were into the rocket age and our space probes have travelled billions of miles into outer space. So far, nobody has bothered to call us back !
For some strange reason we seem to think that if other life exists - it will be friendly. A lot of people really believe that we are visited by little green guys in flying saucers and that they are people of great wisdom who are in the process of making up their minds about revealing their presence.
Perhaps we would be wise to reflect on how we earthlings behaved when we developed ships that enabled us to cross oceans. Remember that Spaniard, Cortez and what he did when he found South America and moved in on Montezuma ? They enslaved the nations they conquered in their quest for gold and valuables They simply conquered - and took away anything of value.
Remember what happened when Europeans discovered Africa. That was the start of the slave trade. We rounded up men, women and children and forced them onto ships and took them to distant lands, where they were sold to the highest bidder at the slave markets - and that only ceased about a hundred and fifty years ago.
The same picture was enacted everywhere that those with superior weapons and means of travel encountered less developed races. There was no question of helping them to gain development. We simply took over their lands and imposed our way of life - and demanded that they obey our laws. Such was the colonial era. Explorers found undiscovered lands, placed their country's flag on the beach and claimed it for their king or emperor. Any opposition was put down through force of arms.
In most cases we devoured the riches of these countries for our own benefit and forced both our language and our religion on those we conquered. If we do discover other forms of intelligent life in outer space and it has the ability to travel to earth there is every chance that it is more technically advanced than we are - and that poses the question of whether it will come in peace - or do as we did in past centuries !
Many believe that what saves us from such a fate is the tyranny of distance. We believe that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light and therefore even our radio signals would require the same time lag for a response to reach us. That same limitation would apply to an extraterestial deciding to drop by for a chat.
There is another sombre outcome of our swashbuckling forebears finding new lands that comes to mind. They brought with them diseases from which the natives had no natural immunity. These common ailments like Measles, Chicken Pox and even the common cold tore swathes through populations and destroyed their societies. If we do ever attract visitors from outer space that is an outcome we would do well to remember.
Think back to the sort of life we led just a century ago. The age of the computer, the mobile phone, the medical marvels we can now perform - all of these would have been pure science fiction and unattainable at that time. A further century from now and our way of life will certainly be equally unbelievable - on a similar scale.
If we do manage to establish some form of contact with a form of intelligence somewhere in outer space, we will be setting off a chain of events that will be totally outside our ability to control the outcome. We would be wise to be very careful about what we wish for !
No comments:
Post a Comment