'ALIENS'

Hey I'm back! As promised here is a super scary, mind blowing thread on Aliens this time! Are we alone in the universe? Who is out there? How likely is it that they exist? Where can we find them? I'm so excited to tell you omg!
LET'S DIVE DEEPER INTO THIS!

Ever since the dawn of civilization we have looked up & wondered about our place in the universe, we've asked questions like 'who are we?' where are we?' we used to think we are the only ones, but it turns out that this MIGHT not be the case!

Okay, let's backup a little bit. Our ancestors thought that the Earth was very special, it was like a fixed stage around which things like the Sun, stars, planets and all the heavenly bodies revolved! Because it looks like that! But you know what? seeing isn't believing actually.

Then one fine day in the year 1543, Someone dared to Question this idea, it was Nicholaus Copernicus who proposed that with enough evidence it can be shown that it is actually the SUN who's at the centre and all the planets and heavenly bodies are revolving around it!

Okay so now our hubristic human nature thought that our sun was at the centre of the known Universe & if not our planet then atleast our Sun must be a special kind of star in the entire Cosmos, but again reality is not what we think

Later on Astrophysicists discovered that there are sooooooo many Stars that are WAYYYYYY BIGGER THAN OUR SUN, So big that if the sun is an ant then you are one of those stars! Infact, get this there are about 10000000000000000000000000 stars in the Observable UNIVERSE! Holy shit!

In the 1990's we began to discover some planets around other stars(known as exoplanets) aaaandddd! Some of those planets were in the habitable zone of their host Star! Now what is this zone? It's a zone around a star in which it's planet can sustain water in liquid form!

The planet is just right at that distance, and you already know that wherever there is water, THERE IS LIFE! Now we know of 4000+ exoplanets. Hence Our solar system also isn't unique in that way,

But surely our Milky way galaxy must be very special, right?

Our galaxy contains about 400 billion stars & so many planets. Surely it is the only thing to exist! What could possible exist now? Get this, THERE ARE ABOUT 2 TRILLION GALAXIES OUT THERE, SOME OF THEM ARE BIGGER THAN OUR OWN! In this image each dot you see is an ENTIRE Galaxy!

This is why it is reasonable to think that life must be out there, our Universe must be teeming with life! But 'Where is everybody?' this question was asked by Enrico Fermi, we call this The Fermi paradox! This paradox is getting more & more paradoxical as we are peering out

Now suppose you're bored & you wanna figure out that how many Alien civilization are out there! There's a way to figure out how many of these civilizations can exist in our own galaxy! Here's how it goes:

This simple equation is known as the DRAKE EQUATION, it gives an average Estimate of how many Alien civilizations you want to talk to! I don't know the latest estimates but I think it's about 1000 or something, these many civilizations in our own galaxy

@nadiamdrake

In our own solar system there's a high chance that life can exist!
Mars cause, it has river beds, evidence shows that it once had water!
Jupiter's moon Europa cause under its icey surface there's so much fresh water(3 times more than earth) Enceladus for the same reason!

We have come so far now, let me tell you about one of my nightmares, this keeps me awake at night! And it is possible scenario, let's do this: what's the next closest animal to humans? Chimpanzee! What's the DNA difference between us and chimps? Just 1% percent!

Yet what's the most they can do? They can stack boxes to reach a banana or talk to us with sign language, that's all they can do! Our kids can do that very well, so with just 1% difference in DNA....

They're stacking boxes and here we are, we do poetry, art, math, Physics, we can paint Monalisa, we can compose Beethoven's sonnet, we built telescopes! Okay, now consider some other species, they are 1% beyond us as we're from chimpanzees!

What would we look like to them? They would literally roll the smartest us of among them like a toy or an animal, and say 'oh, this is the smartest among those guys like our Timmy over here who just came home from primary school' alien Timmy

They would say 'oh Timmy you just composed the 12th sonnet, oh you just derived the fundamental theorem of Calculus, oh you just built the Taj Mahal for your project, how cute is that, let's put up that on the refrigerator' that's what their kids would be doing!!

Just like our most common thoughts are not even concieveble to the smartest chimp, I wonder what kind of common thoughts aliens might be having that we can't even think about!

If those aliens have only that much difference in intelligence, THEY COULD ENSLAVE THE ENTIRE EARTH AND WE WOULDN'T EVEN KNOW IT!!!! MAYBE THAT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED??? OH MY GOSH and maybe we're living our lives as though we are talking our own decisions! This is scary

I read about this thought experiment in a book, it's so amazing! So yea we need to peer out more in the Cosmos to find Aliens but trust me every Astronomer you meet will tell you that they personally believe that aliens exist! Because the possibility is wayyy too high

It has been 70 years since we have started signals sending out in space, that means our signals are about 70 light years away from Earth (radio bubble) this distance is vvv tiny in cosmic terms, it's like scooping up a cup of water from the ocean & saying I see no sharks here

There are so many things to discuss more! Like the great filter, cosmic abundance of elements that are responsible for life in the Universe, I'll discuss Fermi paradox in Detail, this was just to give you a glimpse of what is going out in the cosmos!

And as Arthur Clarke once said 'Two possibilities exist, either we are alone in the Universe or not, both are equally terrifying' and yes they actually are terrifying! Anyways I'm sure they are our there! Waiting for us to make a contact

Thank you and keep looking up