ASTROBIOLOGY PART-II

 

NASA has given a working definition of life in the 1990’s.

‘Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian Evolution”.

The Earth may look ancient to us with its 450 crore years of age, yet the average age of the galactic planets is about 600 crore years. This means, if other civilizations have evolved and progressed ahead of us, then they should leave their techno signature wherever they lived and possibly they could have transmitted them into space.

Now we come to the Fermi’s paradox. Enrico Fermi won the Nobel Prize in 1938 for Nuclear Physics. He was on the team where the first atom bomb was built by the US. He became a professor at the University of Chicago and later collaborated as a consultant for the Hydrogen bomb.

One day in 1950 Fermi got into a discussion with fellow physicists about the news on Flying saucers in the New Yorker magazine. The group as scientists realized there should be many stars that had planets and supported life and the space should be teeming with aliens. If there are so many, then we should at least see the evidence about some of them.

The fact is one of the following statements had to be false:

1.       There has to be a flaw in the logic that  extra-terrestrial intelligence must be widespread

2.       Or in the assumption that we should have detected it.

3.       Or in the assertion that there is no evidence for it.

That is the Fermi’s paradox. Fermi’s question is; where are those teeming aliens, if they indeed exist?

At least some of you must have read the Mars series of Edgar Rice Burroughs. At one time I found them extremely fascinating. One of them Princess of Mars had been made into a film and I love it even now.

In that the lead character John Carter accidentally lands up on Mars and finds himself to be far stronger than on the earth because of its lower gravity. The gravity on Mars is just over 1/3rds on earth. So in practice a resident from the earth would find himself 12 times stronger. If he jumps (and controls himself of course) he would jump 12 times more distance than on earth.

Technically, life or intelligence can exist in many forms that would be far beyond our definition. Most of our authors and movie creators love to depict extra terrestrials resembling us, with hands, feet, eyes et al. But is that not short sightedness? What is us? We are nothing but mere recorded electrical impulses in the brain. The electrical impulses record whatever inputs they get through the sensory organs and form the us. The body therefore is always secondary to the brain.

I have mentioned this because in 1957 the famous Cosmologist Fred Hoyle has written a novel called the “Black Cloud”. In that book the intelligence is the Black Cloud of gas itself and dust itself like the Nebulas we know of. His black cloud was intelligent and was communicating with earthlings through radio waves. So the particles within it could achieve a sufficient degree of organization to initiate the thought processes. Impossible? Maybe, and maybe not!!!

Some people wrote books on Silicon beings. Silicon and Carbon are common elements, both on the earth and the universe. There is plenty of Silicon in the earth’s crust but it does not form any complex molecules whatsoever like Carbon. It combines with Oxygen to form Silica, the constituent of most rocks, but it does not go further and undergo any change. Same is the case of silicon in all the asteroids that have been examined. Unlike Silicon Carbon is also found in the Asteroids as complex molecules. So, there is no reason to believe that life may form from Silicon. But how can we say this with any finality? This is merely an estimation we make with whatever information we know.