While Tom Cruise was recently taken to task in the blog, media and talk show circuits for his expressed belief that alien life exists in the universe, look beyond the tone of his remarks and his outspoken support of the controversial philosophy of Scientology and evaluate his assertion on its merit. You might be surprised.
When a German newspaper reporter asked Cruise, the star of Steven Speilberg’s remake of the H.G. Wells classic, “War of the Worlds”, if he believed in alien life, he replied, "Are you really so arrogant as to believe we are alone in this universe?
"Millions of stars, and we're supposed to be the only living creatures? No. There are many things out there, we just don't know."
While Cruise’s abrasive, borderline narcisstic, manner might be offensive to many and convenient fodder for the easily offended, at least, as a society, we’ve moved beyond the stage where such views earn a death sentence. In 1600, Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno publicly expressed the then-heretical notion that there were countless other worlds out there containing life. He was burned at the stake.
Then, in the 18th century, conventional wisdom swung markedly in the other direction. Many astronomers confidently speculated that every star—200 billion alone are estimated to exist in the Earth’s galaxy, the Milky Way--had planets with life. Will Herschel, who discovered Uranus, boldly cogitated that the sun was populated with life.
While we know our sun does not possess life, with an estimated 80 billion to 120 billion galaxies in the universe, more than 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (pronounced 20 sextillion) stars—or suns—likely are present.
The statistical probability that even a few of these stars (when you’re dealing in sextillions, a few could be millions!) might possess planets that can harbor life as we do or do not know it is highly likely.
But, as Enrico Fermi supposedly mused one memorable day in the 1940’s while talking with a group of atomic scientists, “So? Where is everybody?”
His simple allusion to the absence of contact from other life forms morphed into Fermi’s Paradox. To conclude that life must not exist simply because contact has not been made in a form that we understand, in scientific terms, is a radical inference.
While we can see stars in the universe because their light is bright enough to travel across galaxies to be visible in our sky, planets do not emit but merely reflect illumination. We cannot see planets outside our solar system. Thus, the presence of planets must be inferred based on aberrations in the fluidity of rays.
Our telescopes, while progressing at an incredible pace, are still very limited when viewing the universe. At one point, scientists thought five moons circled Uranus. When Voyager sailed past in 1986, ten more moons were discovered.
Uranus is only 1.7 million miles away. The nearest star is 24.7 trillion miles away. So, the nearest star is nearly 10,000,000 times further away than a planet that we thought, at one time, with our most powerful telescopes, only had five moons. Even at our astounding technological pace with telescope development, we have so far to go.
The Greenbank Equation—developed by Frank Drake in the 1960’s-- attempts to quantify the probability of extraterrestrial intelligent species (ETIS) in the universe. While assumptions factor into the complex equation, optimistically, 25,000 ETIS exist in the universe. Conservatively, two are present. Carl Sagan conjectured that millions of technologically advanced civilizations may be present in the universe.
Take Cruise to task for his tenor. But, don’t burn Hollywood’s most bankable star at the veritable public opinion stake for expressing a thought that just might have signficant merit.
After all, 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars might not be mere stars. Who knows how many might be suns.
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