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While you have been earning a living here on Earth, Jill Tarter has spent her professional years looking for signs of intelligent life everywhere else. She was the longtime director of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program.
Yesterday I heard Jill on the radio while I was driving for hours alone on the highway. She spoke about the near-infinite numbers of stars in our universe, and the odds that these stars are surrounded by planets and perhaps intelligent life.
But here's what she said that most impacted me:
"Are we alone? Is it really just us? Are we alone in this vast universe of energy and matter and chemistry and physics? What if out there, others are asking and answering similar questions? What if they look up at the night sky, at the same stars, but from the opposite side?
"Would the discovery of an older cultural civilization out there inspire us to find ways to survive our increasingly uncertain technological adolescence?
Might it be the discovery of a distant civilization and our common cosmic origins that finally drives home the message of the bond among all humans? Whether we're born in San Francisco, or Sudan, or close to the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, we are the products of a billion-year lineage of wandering stardust.
Look around the world today, and you see one tribe fighting with other tribes. In Iraq, and Syria and Africa, tribes can't seem to live peacefully together. This is not a new development; it is the way humans have long behaved.
Would the knowledge of other races alter our perception of "our tribe"? What if we learned that our galaxy harbors roughly 150 billion 8,000-lb, extremely intelligent blobs who thrive under extreme gravity and cold? In other words, what if humans are a minority... not some of us, but all of us?
Would the Tutsis suddenly realize that they are in the same "human" tribe as the Hutus? Would they forever stop fighting?
It has always seemed to me impossible that humans are alone, but our race has long acted as though that is true. In truth, it's only been about 100 years since we had the technology to make our voices heard in the universe (through radio and TV waves radiating our from our planet). It's an even shorter time since the birth of SETI and any organized attempt to search for life elsewhere. These are mere blips in time on a cosmic scale.
Personally, I like to be prepared. Rather than waiting for the day aliens replace our TV commercials with "we come in peace" messages, I prefer to think of all humans as part of my tribe. Even if we never discover life elsewhere in the universe, it makes sense to me to stop hating each other and to start living in peace.
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The first person to comment on this article was Maria Maragudakis, who pointed us towards a speech given in 1983 by astronaut Rusty Schweickart. Speaking about his experience orbiting the Earth and looking out the window for hours, he asked the audience to imagine that his eyes were nothing more than sensors. You can see through his eyes. You can see what he saw.
In Rusty's words, here is what you experienced:
"Up there you go around (the Earth) every hour and a half... You wake up usually in the mornings, over the Middle East and over North Africa. As you eat breakfast you look out the window and there’s the Mediterranean area, Greece and Rome and North Africa and the Sinai, that whole area. And you realize that in one glance what you’re seeing is what was the whole history of humankind for years – the cradle of civilization...
"And you identify with Houston and then you identify with Los Angeles and Phoenix and New Orleans. And the next thing you recognize in yourself is that you’re identifying with North Africa...
"When you go around the Earth in an hour and half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with the whole thing. And that makes a change...
"You look down there and you can’t imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross, again and again and again, and you don’t even see them. There you are – hundreds of people in the Middle East killing each other over some imaginary line that you’re not even aware of, that you can’t see. And from where you see it, the thing is a whole, the earth is a whole, and it’s so beautiful."
Read Rusty's words for yourself. You'll be glad you did. Thanks, Maria!