Is Humanity Meant to be Isolated, in this Universe?
It sure looks like it.


by Will Wainwright

I would put it this way; The Universe, ever cloaked in darkness, is the nursery for the souls that will eventually reside outside, in the light of eternity with our creator God.


A Sister Planet - Kepler-186f, 582 light-years away - It might look like this.


Preface:

I happened upon a show; Hunt for Alien Evidence, narrated by Mike Rowe. It is a great show on the possibility of space travel by us, or by others coming to visit.  The easily arrived at conclusion is we are stuck in our little corner of the Milky Way Galaxy and remain confined to our own solar system. God is not mentioned (in the documentary) but it seems like our isolation from other intelligent life is intentional. 


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Back in the day, like so many other kids I tried to imagine what Aliens would look like, if they were to stop by earth for a visit. Would they be frightening, like so many in the movies? Would they be kind or aggressive? As I grew older I assumed if they were smart enough to get here they would be benevolent. Assuming they would speak English, I used to fantasize on what would I ask them first.  Where are you from?  And how did you get here? And if there was a craft involved, what kind of propulsion do you use. I’d of course ask the most important question of all, “Do you have a God”?


Today,especially in the areas of the very small, Quantum Physics and DNA, science, keeps bumping into the “Intelligent Design Scenario”.  1) Something so perfectly engineered like DNA couldn’t have evolved and,  2) Our universe couldn’t exist at all if any of its parameters were altered, even slightly during the nanoseconds following the big bang. As a result, scientists are beginning to say, “something or someone, out of our realm, had something to do with it”. 


I concur with the IDS, but arrive at another additional conclusion:  

Humanity is Isolated, and It’s Meant To Be. (Now Follow me.)


Most of us assume, as I do, there just has to be intelligent life out there on some of the planets orbiting the 250 billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy alone. As far as the billions of other galaxies, I’m not even going to go there.


Lets start with Radio. Our radio signals have been going out for over 100 years. Maybe an alien civilization has heard us but too far for a reply. As you know a light travels at 186,000 miles a second - light speed, so do radio waves. By now we could have, despite our serious attempts, picked up an acknowledgement of one of our radio/TV signals from here on earth from someone, somewhere out there in the 50 light year range. (50 out and 50 back = 100). Why not? Who knows. Maybe their civilization came and went. Also, say a civilization 10,000 light years away started broadcasting 10,050 years ago, their signals reaching us in the mid 50’s . But nothing, in either case. Now multiply the latter by thousands of civilizations, still nothing. Simply put their signals could have stopped coming, or they may not have reached technical maturity, or maybe it was meant to be that way. 


From another perspective; Just about every star has planets. Whether life inhabits them is a guess and we are detecting more almost daily. Since we can see the stars light that implies they we could tune in to their planets radio broadcasts assuming they had a civilization that evolved long enough ago and their signal was strong enough to cover the distance. The light from those stars has been streaming to earth for eons, plenty of time for civilization to evolve on another of God’s planets. Why no radio, AM or FM, short wave or long wave? One asks, what frequency would be common to all intelligent beings? That would be the frequency of the “hydrogen atom", the universe's most abundant element. SETI has been tuned for generations with no luck. Then with the demise of the Arecibo Observatory, a new player took up the slack, it's called Breakthrough Listen Project, but still nothing.


Our closest exoplanet in the “Goldilocks zone of its sun, is Proxima B, the second planet orbiting our closest star neighbor, Proxima Centauri. It is only 4.2 light years away. But Proxima B completes one orbit of its star in, the hard to imagine, every 11.2 Earth-days! As a result, it's likely that the exoplanet is tidally locked, meaning it always shows the same face to its host star, just as the moon shows only one face to Earth and as does Mercury to the Sun. That translates into boiling hot surface on one side, ice cold freezing on the other. Not a place to live or visit.


Of all the exoplanets (catalogue) that we have discovered, and that is over 4000 so far, 150 are analyzed as earth-like, but for assorted reasons are not suitable for carbon based life like ourselves. Surely nothing close. There are numerous features required. First it has to be in the Goldilocks zone, and most obvious, it has to be a planet of similar mass and gravity, oxygen atmosphere and water. A liquid metal core that produces an earth like magnetic field for gamma ray protection and atmosphere retention. Polar tilt  for seasonal renewal.  A large mega planet nearby (like our Jupiter) would help attract space debris like meteors, astroids and comets. As far as alien intelligence goes, sure, they may have evolved  in an atmosphere and gravity different than ours, which in a reverse scenario, would make our atmosphere and gravity, perilous to them.


As for getting there (here), Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched back in 1977, is now passed our solar system and currently traveling at about 38,000 mph. As for manned craft, Apollo 11 hit about 25,000 mph on its journey to the moon. Lets say we were to head out to our closest neighbor Proxima B at 40 times that speed at a million miles per hour, still it would take 2,500 years just to get to our closest neighboring star’s planet. (You can do the math.) And that works in reverse for any visitors, despite what they say at area 51.  


The way I see it, the bottom line is, we will never be able to leave our solar system in any practical sense. Maybe with the unlikely “hibernation chamber” as in many scifi movies. Then we’d have to take our chances on, “where to go”. And lastly another favorite of scifi is Warp Speed - a way to surpass the speed of light with an exotic propulsion of some sort. Without the bending of time and space itself, this is just not possible. Still, there are some scifi writers today, that fantasize quantum mechanics's entanglement principal might some day enable faster than light travel.


Already a believer of the Intelligent Design Scenario, I arrived at my conclusion that the, “Intelligence that conceived and formulated the universe”, also intended us to be isolated in our little corner of the Milky Way Galaxy surrounded by a zillion more galaxies in an ever expanding universe.  The 8 minute documentary mentioned in my opening sentence, helped precipitate this conclusion and prompted this dissertation. Watch it and see what conclusions you come to.



Our Milky Way

Carl Sagan: — Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some
forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.


Next time you are in the country somewhere, look up at the milky way in all its awe and wonder in the night time sky. Know all what you see is waiting when you beam off our roller coaster ride here on earth. All the planets to galaxies, past, present and future will be your eternal domain. But for now all self-aware intelligence has been intentionally made inaccessible to one another by the same Person that so perfectly engineered the universe in the first place. Maybe all planetary sentients must be tested in one way or another. Some might have passed, some still in the testing process, like us.


So what do you have planned for eternity?  Have you ever thought about it, as have I.  What could one do for eternity with out getting Bored, no matter your favorite hobby or pleasure. How much Ice cream can you eat after all? Thes answer to the question that always mystified me. 


I feel in the afterlife our soul will be free to meander an eternity of time and space in an infinite universe in another dimension, and “at will”, in an "Quantum Instant". Free to meet all those other folks on other planets in other galaxies on your own time. Free to see what the folks did on earth before we were born and in your current time too. You could head back to earth to see how we humans are running things in the year 2460. I know I would head back to walk with the son of God in His days in Bethlehem and Judea. Maybe even Adam and Eve, Alexender the Great, even sail with Columbus, hang out with Abe Lincoln and Einstein, watch the dinosaurs roaming our earth. One fantasy I've always dreamed about would be sailing with Captain Cook when he arrived at Tahiti being greeted by the south seas islanders, especially their good natured and most amicable topless women. What fun! And far as the future goes, we'll be able to watch the collision of our milky way with the Andromeda galaxy. Sometimes I’d share the fun and travel with a friend, spouse or family member.  


Lastly, I realize that Quantum Physics (see below) is now making a big impact on the esoteric scene of reality in science. This is not only in theoretical but real life application such as computing and communications. There are those who will no doubt extract ‘faster than light travel’ from possibility to reality here, but I say not so. We will no doubt go farther in the quantum world than we are now. Quantum physics is actually strengthening to boost the connection of man and the supernatural as best explained in the Bible. Conclusion: There is something more out there that remains a mystery and eventually comes down to perspective, and some form of faith. If in the meantime you are hoping quantum physics or dimension jump will allow a geometric progression of light travel, I suspect that if it where within reach reach, the chief engineer will hit the power down button. Until then, you can enjoy warp drive under the control of Captain Picard and Han Solo.


Astronomer Stephen Webb concludes we are alone. I do not, just too far for contact.