Intelligent Life

When you stand out under a starry sky, it’s inevitable that you see all those stars (and a few planets) and wonder about what OTHER intelligent life there is “out there.” It’s an interesting philosophical train of thought to get on because, if you’re intellectually honest with yourself, you stumble across two compelling, but opposed realizations:

1. We could be the ONLY intelligent life in the cosmos;
2. We are NOT the only intelligent life in the cosmos.

Either way, those can be frightening, even challenging ideas to entertain. If we ARE the only intelligent life in the cosmos, then look around at our home planet and see how we’re treating the only place we know we can exist. Think about how we treat each other, especially if we ARE the only INTELLIGENT life in the cosmos.

If we are NOT the only intelligent life in the cosmos, then that means there could be life that’s more or less intelligent that we are. How do we measure up, especially when we examine how we treat our home and our fellow intelligent lifers?

I doubt most of us alive now will know if there IS intelligent life “out there” unless we start getting visited from other planets. But, there’s intelligent life on our own planet, distinct from humans, and we don’t have a good track record with it these days. That life exists underwater, in the oceans, with its own societies and ways of living. If our track record with dolphins, for example, is any indication, our first visitation with intelligences from elsewhere in the cosmos is going to be a rocky one.

So, think about it next time you’re out stargazing. You’ve been blessed with intelligence that lets you comprehend and STUDY the sky, to understand the world around you. It’s special, but how special is it?

The Night Sky

In her column in Parade Magazine, a writer named Marilyn vos Savant made a list of “Questions too Funny to Answer.” Some of the questions were truly funny, belying people’s mis-understanding of science. Sad, in a way.

But, the saddest question, one that I didn’t find to be funny at all (and I’m surprised she listed it as “funny) was this: “Where did all the stars go? In the ’50s, the sky was loaded with them.”

It really isn’t even a dumb question. It’s a query that reflects a changed perception of the sky: we’re not seeing as many stars as we used to. Back in the ’50s we didn’t have much light pollution as we do now. Populations were somewhat smaller, and we were scattered more. Less light pollution per square meter, you might say.

Today, we light the night sky up with photonic pollution that tells the universe, “Look here! These people have money to burn!” Because, of course, when we light the night sky unnecessarily, we’re wasting money. And harming the environment in more ways than one.

If you ever have a chance to be in a truly dark-sky site, you’d see why I label the night sky as one of the seven wonders of the universe. To quote David Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey,, “My god, it’s full of stars!”

And that gorgeous scattering of distant starlight is what set our minds wondering throughout the centuries. They caused us to wonder about what they were, how they got there, what makes them shine, and what will happen to them in the future. The science of astronomy, followed by astrophysics, augmented by physics, planetary science, atmospheric physics, and so many others, flowed from our wonder about the night sky.