More than This

Earth can not be the only place with life on it’s planet…

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By Alexis Grimaldo, Design Editor

There has to be more than this. 

There has to be…. 

I was sitting in astronomy watching some video the teacher put on, not really paying much attention to it until I saw an image. A model of the celestial sphere dominated the screen where we were just a speck barely noticeable unless you were looking for it. We are just a speck in this greater whole and yet some people believe that we are all there is, that we are the only living things. In a whole this great… how can we possibly be all there is? Outside of our galaxy, outside of all the known galaxies, there must be something out there. We can’t be all alone.  

When our planet ends, and it will because like all living things, it will die at some point, we can’t be the last life out there. “Well then if we’re not the only life then how come no one has contacted us?”  

…we can’t be the last life out there.

I have three theories about that, at this moment at least. One is that, like us, they can’t communicate that far away. We can barely travel to planets in our own solar system, imagine trying to go beyond that. Trying to communicate through some sort of signal or even travelling might not be possible unless they have different properties that allow them to survive that long. 

Another theory is that maybe they are trying to communicate, but because they’re so far away, it maybe years or centuries before we receive something. Maybe the other life force is sending a signal or maybe they’re coming themselves, but again due to distance or time itself, it is taking a long time. There are people who believe that time works differently the farther you travel or the planet that you’re on. Interstellar touched this theory and showed the implications of traveling to a far-out planet and then coming back. One hour on this planet was seven years on ours. So maybe they’re coming and it’s just a few hours to them but years to us. 

The last theory and the most obvious one is that they don’t want to communicate with us. Maybe they hate us and possibly our simplicity. Maybe they think we’re savages that are destroying our planet and will destroy others if humans decide to relocate. Maybe they think we can’t handle the knowledge of other living things, and they don’t want war. What if they’re extremely peaceful creatures and are afraid of us and our technology. There are so many theories about why they wouldn’t want to communicate with us and I could possibly write another entry about it, but the idea of this long paragraph is that maybe we’ll never know if there are other living things out there unless we are the ones to find them. 

All I know is that we can’t keep pretending like Earth is the center of the universe. We are very wrapped up in our own world and aren’t looking at the bigger picture. We aren’t trying hard enough to find more life. If we found another living thing that we could communicate with, it would change life as we know it.