It is fanciful to think that many such life forms like those on Earth exist in the Universe and those have given rise to the myriads of stories about aliens to us.
Earth was once considered to be the centre of
the Universe, with humans being the epitome of perfection, but are we really
the perfect product of evolution?
When we do not know the facts, we tend
to generalize things and try to bring them into our own thought to make things
easy for us to understand. But those principles that we hold sacred may not
hold for other forms of life. We tend to straight jacket life into a particular
familiar pattern.
We initially assumed that earth was the
centre of the Universe which is today exploded to bits by newer findings
over the millennia. Today we know that earth is but a tiny speck of dust moving
in space, utterly insignificant in the Universes’ scheme of things.
That is why in our way of thinking and
definitions we search for life, and thus far our search has not yielded anything
that can be remotely considered as life as we define it on the earth.
Earth teems with life whether it is in
the steaming pools coming in from the earth by way of sulphur springs or even
in the frozen wastes of Antarctica. Life started fairly recently as per
Geological time scale, yet it abounds everywhere on earth.
But the in the past, earth has been
radically different from the climate and atmosphere on the earth we have today.
Initially it had been lava covered rock with a poisonous atmosphere, a world of
oceans with bare microbial life, later a steaming tropical planet with huge
dinosaurs and finally came the cave dwelling humans. It passed through many
stages and life as we know slowly evolved.
Now, technically life cannot be an
accident that occurred only on earth. It should have also occurred elsewhere,
but mankind searches for life that is akin to it as per its definition on earth.
Movies portray aliens like lizards with horrendous looking features looking
exactly akin to our physical structure with a head, a torso, hands and feet.
Is it necessary for life to resemble
the way we look? It may look like a sphere, or a cylinder or a block which uses
other ways to move than hands and legs. Its physiology may be utterly different
from us and its internal organs need not resemble ours in any way.
When we search for life, we essentially
search for life as we know on earth in an anthropomorphic way. Perhaps that is
why we are failing to spot life elsewhere. The way other forms of life perceive
and communicate may be totally different from ours.
We use radio waves for communication,
so we send out radio waves into the Galaxy hoping that if there is life
elsewhere they would be spotted by them.
What if they do not use radio waves for
communication and use some other principles that is unknown to us (say Z
waves)? What if they find the principle being used by them is the most
appropriate for long distance communication and radio waves are not perceived
by them at all.
Hence, just like us, they would be looking
only in the Z waves for interstellar transmission and not through Radio
waves. Similarly another civilization on another planet may be using
a third principle which is unknown to both us as well as the 2nd civilization
mentioned above.
Organisms in different planets because
of their evolution may perceive things differently from us and their organs
register something else which we cannot. They in turn may not be able to
perceive what we do.
This may well be the reason we are not
finding another civilization. We look for life forms and perception resembling
our own, with also the same mistake being committed by them. That is why we
cannot find each other.
It is both improbable and impossible to
assume that we are alone in this Universe. Therefore the only logical
explanation is the difference of methods and perception that is foxing us all.
Now is this barrier of perception insurmountable?
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