“What if…” quoth the science fiction writer. The following musing is what happens when you have a few minutes of down time, just the right amount of coffee, and a novel you’re trying to write but are struggling with on a Saturday morning. I fact checked nothing – you are forewarned.
What if….what if life in the universe were no different than life on Earth? That is to say, countless millennia of nothing but raw elements and rock followed by a burst of seemingly spontaneous outcroppings of life everywhere, divergent evolutions and parallel but segregated developments resulting in similar life forms in ways that seem to defy explanation other than Nature has a wicked sense of humor? The saber tooth cat, for instance, which has existed multiple unrelated times, because every now and then evolution demands that we have a cat with killer teeth?
Now consider our night sky, and what the word light year really means – the distance it takes light to travel in a single year, as defined by our orbit around the sun, to be roughly 365 days. The further out and deeper into the sky we look, the further back in time we are peering. But what if the burst of life in the Universe was like here on Earth, spontaneous, immediate, and rapidly spreading?
For the sake of our mind game, what if life out there began on the same day as here on Earth? Some kind of cosmic event (which, by the way, would defy the genre as being mystical and not scientific, I realize), but just imagine for a moment that for life in our corner of the Universe, the Milky Way, to exist, there was needed to be some Universal conditions (gravity, radiation levels, position in the fabric of the Cosmos) that needed to be just right for life to exist on a particular Tuesday everywhere in the MW. Here on Earth it started, failed, and started again a couple of times, but even if that wasn’t the norm, it would mean that life elsewhere wouldn’t be visible to us, just as our existence wouldn’t be visible to them – because the light that’s carrying that information hasn’t had a chance to arrive yet.
And that might be the saddest thought of all. We’re all looking at the same snapshot before the life event, and we’re all drawing the same erroneous conclusions. What if we, the life of the MW, are all staring at the stars and seeing light that left before life began and concluding no one else is out there, all at the same time?
But if you’ve leant me your imagination so far, lend it to me for one more moment. Imagine what it might be like that night we look up at the stars, that night when we do catch up with the birth of our alien brothers from other mothers, and the entire night sky comes to life.
Can you imagine how amazing and awe inspiring that night will be?
