Are There Intelligent Beings in the Cosmos? Is it conceivable that we world citizens of the twentieth century are not the only living beings of our kind in the cosmos? Because no homunculus from another planet is on display in a museum for us to visit, the answer, “Our earth is the only planet with human beings,” still seems to be legitimate and convincing. But the forest of question marks grows and grows as soon as we make a careful study of the facts resulting from the latest discoveries and research work.
On a clear night the naked eye can see about 4,500 stars, so the astronomers say. The telescope of even a small observatory makes nearly 2,000,000 stars visible, and a modern reflecting telescope brings the light from thousands of millions more to the viewer—specks of light in the Milky Way. But in the colossal dimensions of the cosmos our stellar system is only a tiny part of an incomparably larger stellar system—of a cluster of Milky Ways, one might say, containing some twenty galaxies within a radius of 1,500,000 light-years (1 light-year=the distance traveled by light in a year, i.e., 186,000 × 60 × 60 × 24 × 365 miles). And even this vast number of stars is small in comparison with the many thousands of spiral nebulae disclosed by the electronic telescope. Disclosed to the present day, I should emphasize, for research of this kind is only just beginning.
Astronomer Harlow Shapley estimates that there are some 1020 stars within the range of our telescopes. When Shapley associates a planetary system with only one in a thousand stars, we may assume that it is a very cautious estimate. If we continue to speculate on the basis of this estimate and suspect the necessary conditions for life on only one star in a thousand, this calculation still gives a figure of 1014. Shapley asks: How many stars in this truly “astronomical” figure have an atmosphere suitable for life? One in a thousand? That would still leave the incredible figure of 1011 stars with the prerequisites for life. Even if we assume that only every thousandth planet out of this figure has produced life, there are still 100,000,000 planets on which we can speculate that life exists. This calculation is based on telescopes using the techniques available today, but we must not forget that these are constantly being improved.
If we follow the hypothesis of biochemist Dr. Stanley Miller, life and the conditions essential for life may have developed more quickly on some of these planets than on earth. If we accept this daring assumption, civilizations more advanced than our own could have developed on 100,000 planets.
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