An interesting question. Would a universe without any life in it make any sense? It doesn't seem like it would. Why would it be here? What would its role be? We can take this one step further. Considering how unbelievably large our universe is, does it make any sense that we are the only life in it? We know that life will evolve naturally if the conditions are right. All you need is proper temperatures, a reasonable atmosphere with oxygen and water, and life would eventually appear. It would be a long way from advanced life as we know it, but still it would be life. Furthermore, we know that this life would evolve and develop into a higher form. With survival of the fittest this only makes sense. But I'll admit it's a long ways from very primitive forms of life to an advanced form like us, but time is on the side of the advancing forms. Millions, even hundreds of millions of years are but a blink of the eye when we're talking about the universe. What does all of this mean?
We have discovered dozens of planets in our tiny corner of the universe, and some of them have conditions that are "almost" satisfactory for life. If we extrapolate this to the rest of our galaxy with it 200 billions stars we should have at least hundreds of millions of planets, and if only one in a thousand have conditions satisfactory for life we'll still have thousands of planets that could contain life.
And I'm talking only about our galaxy. There are at least 200 billion galaxies out there. It's unlikely that we will every be able to communicate with the life in other galaxies because of their tremendous distances, but that doesn't mean that they're not there. And, of course, there is the possibility that one day we'll discover a way to get through to them. Anyway, it gives you a lot to think about.
Barry Parker, author of "Learn from Yesterday, Live for Today, Hope for Tomorrow
No comments:
Post a Comment