What If Aliens Make Contact?
What would we do as a civilization if we found evidence for intelligent aliens? How would we deal with it? Neil deGrasse Tyson explains why alien civilizations may be rare, even though life in general may be ubiquitous throughout the galaxy and beyond.
Neil deGrasse Tyson also explains how intelligent alien life might not think of us as intelligent given the fact how we think of chimpanzees. We share around 99% common DNA with chimps, yet we cannot communicate with them. Is it hubris to even imagine we could communicate with an alien species billions of years ahead of us?
The cosmos is filled with trillions of stars. There are about 100 thousand million stars in the Milky Way alone. Many of them, are just like our own sun. Based on that number, it would seem we are most certainly not alone in the galaxy let alone in the universe. So where are all the aliens?
As far as our civilization has come technologically, we are nowhere near of reaching the stars. It takes light, the fastest thing there is in the universe, about 4.2 years to reach the nearest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri. And there lies the problem Space v is very vast. If our descendants want to venture to the distant stars, they will have to invent new means for space travel.
In physics, a tunnel with two ends at separate points in spacetime is known as a wormhole. But the lack of evidence for intelligent aliens is either saying that they are extremely rare if not non-existent, or that wormholes are not physically possible.
Even with our current technologies it is estimated that our galaxy the milky way can be colonized within less than a billion years. So, if an alien civilization with our current capabilities started colonizing the galaxy a billion years ago, we should be seeing signs of their presence by now.
And if that was the case then with the words of the famous physicist Enrico Fermi, where is everybody?