A few months ago, scientists made a startling discovery about the size of our universe. Previously we had thought that there were hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe.
The new discovery however, pointed towards a mind blowing 2 Trillion possible galaxies, suddenly making the observable universe a lot more crowded than we ever imagined.
Just imagine the amount of stars in all those galaxies and the number of planets around those stars. It’s a number that we cannot even comprehend. And yet, humanity finds itself all alone, in the sheer vastness that the universe is.
This has haunted scientists and non-scientists alike for ages and nobody knows how long it will continue to do that. Judging by the size of the universe, it is statistically impossible that we are alone. So, where is everybody? Let me talk about what I feel, assuming for the purposes of this post that they do exist.
Just take a look at the amount of progress that we have made ourselves in just the last 100 years. Technology is always progressing at increasing speeds and it is changing the world faster than we can adjust.
Now consider a race of alien civilisation that is anywhere from thousands of years to hundreds of thousands of years more advanced than us. Their technology would literally be like magic for us, or maybe even beyond that.
Such a highly advanced race would not even spare a single thought about us, if they knew about us. Assuming that they do, they would most probably think that we are mere animals.
I mean would you care for contacting a pack of elephants in the wild for the sake of sharing of knowledge and what not? No, right? Similarly we might just be nothing more than dumb animals for these kind of aliens.
The second scenario is a little less depressing. Maybe the advanced race does indeed know of our presence but are only observing us at this stage in our evolution.
They can have any number of reasons for observing us, be it studying how our particular type of species developed and progressed our intelligence and what we do with it, or it might be to understand how intelligent life in general develops.
It might be also that we belong to one of their territories without us even realising it. That is totally plausible isn’t it? It would be like owning an aquarium without the fish realising that they are in somebody else’s home!
There have been innumerable sightings of UFOs over the years. I know most of these are fake. But somewhere, I can’t help but feel, what if some of these were indeed true and they were just on their routine observations?
There is one more idea that is quite popular and something that has a huge chance of happening and one that might explain why we haven’t encountered any alien species yet.
See, we have begun developing AI and it has been really helpful and experts believe that one day it might even become more intelligent than us and that one day it might go one step further and gain consciousness.
What if the aliens went through the same thing? So, they develop this cutting edge AI and then it becomes conscious. Then one of two things might have happened. Either the aliens delegated all this space faring work to the AI equipped robot army.
Or, they wiped the aliens and started to explore the different worlds for themselves. Or maybe they didn’t want to become a space faring robot species and still exist on the home planet of the aliens! This is completely plausible in my opinion and something that any intelligent civilisation would come across one day in their advancement as an intelligent species.
