Where Is Everybody?

Enrico Fermi was not only one of the lead physicists who, together with John Oppenheimer, led the Manhattan Project that launch America and the world into the nuclear age, he was also notorious for his response when confronted with the idea  of the existence of extraterrestrial life. Told that there is high probability, based on statistical analysis from the ever expanding view of a very large universe, that other beings exist and may have either visited earth in the past or, at the very least, pose future contact potential with us, he asked, "So where is everybody?" 

That was also partly his intention to tease purveyors of science fiction, new-age philosophers and ordinary folks, who are quite exuberant in their opinions on the possibility that someday ET will indeed show up. The now famous Drake Equation, first postulated and presented widely by Frank Drake, an astronomer, who handily "proved" that it is extremely highly probable, based on an equation using several "reasonable" assumptions, that indeed not only is the universe teeming with habitable planets, the likelihood that there could be countless worlds out there that had developed highly intelligent beings, some having civilizations even far more advanced than ours. Others took that one step further by predicting, even if only as wishful thinking, that one day they will come and visit us.

For now I prefer to be an agnostic when it comes to UFO's and alien  encounters of the first all the way to the fourth kind. Not that I am not convinced by the Drake equation on the possibility of extraterrestrial beings elsewhere but for the simple reason that the universe is so incomprehensibly vast that it precludes the possibility of such an encounter. I look at it this way. The Drake equation may help one amoeba  floating on  a droplet of water at the water's edge of Lake Michigan understand that there is another amoeba across the other side of the lake  but that single-cell creature holds little hope of ever getting anywhere near that other amoeba. Earth, in the context of the entire Milky Way, is insignificantly smaller than the amoeba as it relates to Lake Michigan. The sun is just one of two hundred billion stars in our galaxy that are so spread out that our nearest star-neighbor, Proxima Centauri, that happens to have an earth-size planet orbiting it, is 25 trillion miles away, or about 300,000 times the distance between our sun and us. These distances and the time it would take for us or anyone from anywhere among the two hundred billion or so other stars in our galaxy to "run into each other" boggles our feeble mind.  I am going to admit if proven wrong at some future  ET arrival event and will willingly eat crow but, at a minimum,  proof will have to be more than a hazy photo or an interpretation of an artifact or ancient art work. It will have to be no less than the final scene depicted in "The Day The Earth Stood Still".

Universally speaking, interplanetary travel (limited to within our solar system) would be like a trip to the corner store, right? So, let's go to Mars.  That trip right now is  formidably challenging because first, the space launch will have to be timed when both planets are closest to each other - about 34 million miles. That will take 40 days, but astronauts, once there, will have to wait for the next opportunity to depart the planet for the return trip,  which will not be for another several months when the planets closely "re-approach" each other again. There is no doubt we will develop the technology and  perhaps evolve the human capacity to withstand such a long perilous journey and live through the inhospitable Martian environment, but can we afford it financially. Or, put another way, are we not going to be better served by first investing our resources to solve the myriad human crises the world faces today that are more existentially vital?

Stranger than fiction would be the mildest of sentiments to ever confront us when it comes to extraterrestrial visitation. Our normal idea of what a stranger is or whom we consider strangers in our lives will have been altered  beyond comprehension. An extra terrestrial - friendly, benevolent, fearful, menacing - would either be a welcome savior or oppressor. 

The Creator had set limits. The laws of physics cannot be altered. The speed of light can not be violated. God must have intended for the universe to have separate histories for each discrete location. Let me explain. If it was God's intention for these wishful human encounters to occur, distances between stars and galaxies would have been a little closer. Why would it take several thousand years to get to the nearest star-neighbor? Even if we travel at the speed of light it would still take us four years, and then even a mid-fraction of the speed of light is unattainable.  Even if we increase to ten, even twenty times the current velocity of our space vehicles, the trip to the nearest star would still take centuries just to traverse empty space with nothing in between. We may someday know how but clearly not achievable with our physiological limits and limited technology.

In this universe it is not just the needle in a haystack but threading the needle of time as well. If we go by the Drake equation our galaxy and billions of other galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars each, civilizations should have emerged and evolved and developed but not all at the same time or at the same rate. So, 67 million years ago and earlier before that for 150 million years all this earth had to offer any alien visitors was one lush world dominated by dinosaurs. Or, anyone sending radio signals from somewhere towards here would not have gotten any response during that long period of time because T-Rex had no radio. Similarly, everything we've broadcast so far since the invention of radio and television may not be detected by any advanced civilization for hundreds and thousands of years, or just four if that planet orbiting Proxima Centauri has anyone living there that had also developed the ability to receive radio and TV broadcasts at the exact bandwidth of frequencies. With light and radio as the ultimate speed limit, civilizations from anywhere to anywhere will have the daunting task of detecting or being noticed by others at the right moment of their development and by then the ability to make contact is naturally hindered by vast distances; consequently, by time.

Here on earth alone and during our relatively brief history we, modern homo sapiens, already missed out on contact with earlier human-like creatures, such as the Neanderthals and cro magnon and others. Running into one another, as between alien worlds from different corners of the universe is the ultimate jackpot of picking 100 correct numbers in a lottery that has a million ping pong balls. Time in the cosmic sense is as formidable a  barrier as space.  

For that reason, "Where is everybody?" is a question we need to ask only of ourselves about where everyone is.  Here on earth, that is.

The ocean depths  have as much enticing mystery as what occurs inside a nebula. The latter is a view of the past (hundreds or thousands of years may have elapsed before the image of a nebula reaches our telescopes) while the health of the oceans holds our future. Just to clean up all the plastics and flotsam that beleaguer all the seas, even including the area closest to Antarctica,  is significantly more earth-changing than a trip to Mars. I have not suddenly turned environmentalist but a dead whale found recently that had a stomach full of plastic is a micro-image of a far larger problem.

So, we ask, where is everybody, where is every snow leopard, every narwhal, every endangered species today. Granted, the odds are grim because what we see today, alive, is less than 5% of all living things that had ever lived. In other words, extinction was, and even today, a common occurrence on earth. While natural disasters and  failure to adapt were the main causes then, we have far more to worry about today  - from nuclear and chemical warfare to over population, diseases and famine, etc. 

"Where is everybody?" should be the emblematic question we should all be asking ourselves but must be confined to within this small orb of a vessel, a very tiny one indeed, that is hurtling through space right now with nearly 7 billion other passengers.

The prospect is real that the last survivor's question could  be, "Where is everybody?".