Intelligent Life Outside Planet Earth?

What if there is intelligent life outside of our own solar system?

The ancient Greek Philosophers thought the skies above were the heavens, and the sun, stars, winds, rain and just about everything else, came from various gods.

Thanks to technology, we now know that the sun rise and set isn’t controlled by Zeus, Apollo, or some other god-like being, but is just the natural course of planetary orbits within our solar system.

The real question scientists and sci-fi aficionados have been seeking to solve, is whether there really are other intelligent life forms.

Movie makers have long used this question to entertain us, creating a whole genre of films featuring the stereotypical olive-green men from Mars, with those scary dark as night eyes, long faces, and just as creepily long arms and legs. Sadly, most of these movies are so bad, they shouldn’t even qualify for their “B-Movie” labels.

But the question I started thinking about wasn’t whether intelligent life exists outside of our safe and comfortable home of planet Earth. My thoughts turned to the infamous “what if?”

What if we do discover intelligent beings, able to communicate with us? What then?

We have enough difficulty communicating with ourselves, with all the wars going on around the globe. Some of us can’t talk to our own boss, wife, or even to our kids without getting all tongue-tied.

How would we relate to beings from another world?

 

Would we be open to sharing our socio-economic and technical knowledge? Would they?

Assuming there are beings intelligent enough to visit us – as we certainly haven’t mastered space travel yet – they would probably be far more advanced than us.

Maybe they have solved all of the common global crisis we face now – war, starvation, famine, drought, holes in the ozone, global warming . . .

It would be an amazing bit of luck to pick the brains of some alien race, who could solve all – or even just one – of these problems.

But then again, what could we offer in return?

Here, have a cheese doodle.

Yeah. Right.

Chances are, if aliens were able to solve the distances of space travel to visit it us, we’d be so far beneath them on the evolutionary scale, we may seem like cockroaches appear to us.

And for the most part, we crush cockroaches, as we just see them as filthy, disgusting insects that invade our homes scavenging for food.

One of the greatest minds in our time, Stephen Hawking even suggested not long ago, that we should stop sending out signals, satellites, and other spacecraft in search of alien life, because it puts us at grave risk.

To Hawking, sending out these beacons is like showing the insect exterminator where the hive is. We human beings haven’t exactly been all that peaceful with others from distant lands down here on Earth – just think of all the wars and currently and previously being fought.

What makes us so sure aliens able to travel to other worlds would be any different?

Our planet is a wealth of natural resources, ripe for the picking of any alien species which might use it for food, fuel or a new home.

And if they have mastered space travel, they certainly have the technological power to displace and destroy us as they harvest our planet’s resources, or make themselves home.