Are We Alone in the Universe?

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER 17, 2014

People often confuse ideas between what they want versus what is probable.  Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi asked the question back in 1950, ‘Where is everybody?’ meaning if there is intelligent life out in the deep of space, where is it?  Why haven’t we picked up some sort of long range signal sailing across the universe from their distant civilization?

Entertaining the proposition of ‘want’, we find ourselves believing in all matter of scientific fiction.  Movies, stories, radio broadcasts and imagination have most of us all believing in some sort of life on other planets.  Most of us think it would be cool if there was something out there.  Somehow Aliens could solve all our problems clearly because we are unable to.  The sad state here is the answers to our own existence is right here on earth but most of us are too stupid to investigate ourselves.  Instead we seek outside answers because we delude ourselves into thinking that our problems can be solved, but not by us.  Anybody that has opened a psychology book and understood it knows that our problems are within us.  We must look inwardly in order to healthily live outwardly.  We live in a society that breeds drone people that are trained like pets to believe they are free.  The likelihood of a mass enlightenment that pulls dumb-downed people out of their own dumb versions of reality is unfortunately unlikely.  We will still believe that fantasy and reality are one in the same.  We will still believe that our way of looking at things must be the only way and anyone who challenges that, excommunication or death for them.  So many of us that are commonly blinded by truth all around us look to the stars, we look toward space.

The problem with our concept of space is our attraction to fill it.  We buy a house and what do we do, we fill it with stuff, some practical like a bed and couch, and some not so practical like ornaments and pictures.  We buy boxes to put things in them so it’s understandable that when we look at space we think of it as something that should be occupied by something.  The problem here is we take this same practical sentiment and apply it to the universe.  Without considering reality and the Fermi Paradox, it seems reasonable that life must exist on other planets.  Most of us don’t really know what we are talking about so seek culture for guidance, we then rewrite, reconstruct our own reality to fit into our fabricated belief system of our limited worldview.

Now when you factor in evidence and probability, intelligent life on other planets starts to become less likely.  The number one thing to consider when hypothesizing about extraterrestrial life is this; if they are out there why on earth would they care about us?  We would be ants to them, self-destructive ants; we would be this early civilization of beings that barely have left their own home world.  Then there is the chance that they might be intelligent beings but have never developed technology to even achieve interstellar travel.  We have such an intelligent species on this very planet, Dolphins. 

Then the most likely case, just because there is 10,000 billion billion planets in the Universe, that doesn’t necessary mean that intelligent lifeforms with technological capabilities live on them.  Our species itself was a fluke.  There were so many sets of circumstances that nudged us from nothingness to the most intelligent(?) species to exist on this planet.  For a planet to be the correct distance from its Sun, for the thermodynamic properties to just be right for complex life to occur, make the odds dubious.

This fantasy that we have built upon over the years still goes back to humanities number one problem; it can’t get over itself.  Our solipsistic species is under the illusion that we are special, so special in fact that we created a make believe father figure that is the architect of us all.  We did this because we are scared of the dark, the darkness of loneliness, the darkness of outside forces such as weather, animals and other people, the darkness of death and the finite nature of existence, and the darkness of space, time and the universe, and most importantly the darkness of our own inner minds.  We are all on a ball spinning around in a universe that is endless and cold.   We as a species define our reality through fantasies, concoctions that we over many centuries made up so we could mean something.

The idea of extraterrestrial life falls under the illusions we tell ourselves in order to get through the cold existential bleakness of our daily lives.  We want to mean something without really knowing why we want to mean something.  We are drifters in our minds searching for a home that we can call our own.  We are the aliens we seek; we are the enablers that keep us back from whatever it is we want.  We are the blamers that convince ourselves that the problem with our world isn’t us but rather everybody around us.  We are the deniers that don’t want help from other people because our massive egos couldn’t survive it.  We are desperately floating in the space of our minds seeking assistance.  As a consequence, the fantasy of the mind fabricates realities that don’t exist in the world outside the complexity of the mind, like religion and this notion of life out there somewhere looking down on us.  We will remain alone until we wake up, or are woken up to the realities of existence and death on this very planet.  We will suffer if we don’t travel down that road and face our fears by telling them that they were the lies all along.