Say It Ain’t So, Spock
I grew up in a home headed by a sci-fi geek, my dad. My dad claimed his interest in science fiction was because of the technology. He figured that new technology would make into sci-fi movies before it would make it into Civilian use. I’ve seen the vast majority of Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes. It was practically a family tradition while DS9 and TNG were on the air together, my dad, my brother and I would be in the living room from 5-7, watching the exploits of Captain Picard and Commander (later Captain Sisco.)
We watched the Star Wars movies (i’ve seen all but the last and from all accounts, I didn’t miss much), Contact, Farscape, Enemy Minds, cheesy old Sci-fi shows like Lost in Space. You get the idea. If it was sci-fi and not a total blood bath, sexfest, or bad beyond awful, we saw it.
I remember one movie that we watched when I was a dumb kid about alien abductions. I slept with one eye open for about a month, fearing that should I go to sleep, I’d be kidnapped by extra-terrestials.
As a writer, I’ve used aliens quite a bit. A short story to be released next month in an anthology, "Light at the Edge of Darkness" features a stereotypical sci-fi geek in a humorous alien abduction story. A novel I’m working on features an Alien symbiot that provides a man with an amazing litany of superpowers.
While they might pose a theological prolem at one point, that’s a, "I’ll cross that bridge" when we come to it issue. The way I was brought up, it didn’t have a problem. My dad always quoted Isaiah 40:15, "Surely the nations are like a drop in a bucket; they are regarded as dust on the scales; he weighs the islands as though they were fine dust."
My dad took the plural of nations to suggest there was more than just the nations. (After all if they were a drop in the bucket, what was the bucket full of.)
We may never know, but at this point in my life, I’ve come to be a skeptic of extra-terrestial life in our galaxy, the more I’ve come to realize how rare what we’ve got on Earth is.
In Star Trek, the Galaxy is divided into 4 quandrants. Our quadrant is called, "The Alpha Quandrant." and there’s also the "Beta Quadrant" which is a main focus of the Star Trek shows up to Voyager. In the Alpha Quadrant, you have Earth, and you find countless different species that are a little different. The Federation of Planets is a huge conglomoration made up of hundreds of different Alpha Quadrant worlds. The Vulcans, Klingons, Cardassians, Ferengi, Romulans, and a slew of minor species all have M-Class words. And then, there opens a wormhole and we find hundreds of more worlds in the Gamma Quandrant. Finally, Katherine Janeway and the Crew of Voyager spend 7 years running into even more species in the Delta Quandrant.
Gene Roddenberry’s universe is teaming with ETs everywhere you look. It is as fantastic as it is improbable.
Guillermo Gonzalez explains this quite well in Privileged Planet:
KEVIN GRAZIER
“A lot of things went right on Earth to have yielded complex life. Absolutely.”BIJAN NEMATI
“The number of factors that have been postulated has grown. Currently the typical number you’ll see in a typical list would have something like 20.”Guillermo Gonzalez
“We find that we need to be in the right location in the galaxy…that we’re inside the Circumstellar Habitable Zone of a star…that we’re in a planetary system with giant planets that can shield the other planets from too many comet impacts…that we’re orbiting the right kind of star that’s not too cool or not too hot… that we’re on a planet that has a moon that can stabilize the tilt of its axis…that we’re on a planet that’s a terrestrial planet…a planet that has a crust that’s just thick enough to maintain plate tectonic activity…that has enough heat in its interior that its still circulating its liquid iron core so it can generate a magnetic field…that has an atmosphere that has enough oxygen to allow for complex organisms to survive…that has enough water and enough continents that allow for the diversity of life and an active biodiversity that you need to support complex creatures such as ourselves…”“All these factors have to be met at one place and time in the galaxy if you’re going to have a planet as habitable as the Earth, which you need for complex and even technological life.”
Donald Brownlee, author of Rare Earth concurred:
“There’s a general feeling that nature wants to make earth-like planets and that, naturally, life will evolve on them…and, naturally, evolve into something like us, and yet…
“…the conditions, the environmental conditions on a planet that would allow more complex creatures similar to people or plants and animals is very rare.”
“…and so, we wrote the book, Rare Earth, to point out that the Earth is, actually, a rather special place…"
When they try and figure out the odds, they come up with a probability of finding life on another planet at 1/1000 of a trillion.
Certainly, no situtaion like Star Wars or Star Trek could reasonably be said to exist in the Universe. Whether there’s intelligent alien life on some other planet in the Universe, who is to say? Only God knows. But I doubt very much with given odds that there’s intelligent life on other planets in our galaxy.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you won’t ever see an alien in my story. They still make fun plot elements, whether they’re real or not, and most reasonable folks place sci-fi and fantasy on the same level. So, you can include them without necessarily believing you’re going to actually see one coming near Earth anytime soon.
whereIstand Tags
March 23rd, 2007 at 9:20 pm
And indeed, there may be bacteria on other planets, but that’s not intelligent life.
Water is essential for life, but there are so many other factors. In each solar system, there’s a habital zone. Too far away, you freeze, too close you burn up. There’s the position of your solar system in the galaxy. Too close or too far away from the center and it will not support life. You need large planets surrounding you to take hits from the debris. The crust of a planet comes into play, it has to be the right composition. You have to have the right type of sun and the right size moon to control gravitation.
All told the odds of there being intelligent life on another plan is 10 to the power of 15 which is enough to make me conclude there’s no intelligent life in our galaxy. One hundred billion star systems v. odds of 1 in a 1,000 trillion of the presence of intelligent life.
While I would never speak for the Universe (it’s a big place, so the 1 in a 1,000 trillion could come true out there.) The odds are mind boggling that you’d have 2 planets, let alone 12 or 15 or several hundred and given the vastness of our own galaxy, it really doesn’t matter if there’s intelligent life somewhere else, we’ll never see them.
I think it does and what I find revealing about this conversation is that the alien life thing really seems to be your substitute for God. You’ve argued for intelligent life that breathes helium or nitrogen when we’ve never found such a creature. Despite SETI’s work for decades, we really have no proof of aliens, but you believe "they’re out there." With the main argument that they could be if physics and life as we know it were entirely different in some other part of the galaxy.