by Michel Alberganti
EXTRA-TERRESTIALS, THAT IMPOSSIBLE CONTACT
The universe carries within itself the hope for life. In the last twelve years, more than two hundred planets have been discovered outside our solar system. Among these, Gliese 581c, found a few months ago and potentially habitable. (Le Monde, April 26). Just in our galaxy - and there are billions - one finds 200 to 300 billion stars, and it is fair to think that a good number of these are, like our sun, surrounded by planets, adds Yves Sillard. Formerly director for CNES (Scientific Studies) and formerly director general for armament, he points out that "the objective for the French satellite Corot launched at the end of 2006, which will be followed, in two years, by the American satellite Kepler, is to identify such planets surrounding the nearer stars in our galaxy". So many new hopes for this scientist, who has not hesitated to recently direct a collective work on unidentified spatial phenomena. Indeed it would be the greatest unlucky if one of these planets did not carry, at the very least, traces of past forms of life...
For exobiologists such as André Brack, such a discovery would mark a decisive step. "The existence of a second instance of the apparition of life would be sufficient to demonstrate that this process is not a unique event" he contends. But what kind of life would it be? More or less evolved than that on earth? Will we be able to recognize it, will we communicate with it?
The creation of the universe goes back to 13,7 billion years ago. Our solar system was born 4,4 billion years ago. "Between these two dates, many planets equivalent to ours could have been the site for the apparition of bacteria capable of evolving towards intelligent systems", the researcher believes. What is more, life on earth did not appear right away, but about a billion years after its formation. The existence of a very advanced civilization, because very much older than ours is thus plausible. " It is not impossible to imagine life appearing on some extra-solar planets ten centuries, even one thousand centuries in advance of what happened on Earth", adds Yves Sillard. There are then two venues to an encounter of the third type. Each nonetheless fraught with a few obstacles.
The first has to do with the process of actively looking for an extra-terrestial intelligence as superior as far. The star other than our sun nearest us being at 4,4 light-years, and that of which Gliese 581c is dependent, 20,5 light-years, a radio message (travelling at a speed near that of light) would need respectively 4,4 and 20,5 years to reach the civilization found there. At best, we could hope for an answer nine years after the question.
These difficulties have not discouraged the promoters of many projects, such as the American program SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestial Intelligence) which waits for extra-terrestial events using the Porto-Rican radio telescope in Arecibo. But with nothing to report for the moment. The dream is of the opening sentences form a short story by Italo Calvino, taken from Cosmicomics(1965) and titled Light-Years: "One evening, I was observing as always the skies with my telescope. Suddenly I noticed there was a sign from a galaxy one hundred light-years away. On it, was written: I SEE YOU..."
Should one ten try to get there? "For a human being, it is possible in the medium-term future, touching the limits defined by modern physics, to attain speeds one- tenth those of light, some 30 000 kilometers per second", explains Yves Sillard. Hence a 44 year trip to reach the nearest non-solar planet, and two centuries to make it to Gliese 581c. "It is clear these missions will last longer than a human life-span", adds this graduate of our best schools, that the challenge does not seem to daunt. "It will be the descendants of the initial crew members who will reach destination. But it is not at all impossible." On the condition, of course, of really wanting to do it.
The second option appears as an inverse to the trip concern. Extra-terrestials, whose civilization is much advanced compared to ours, could have succeeded in travelling at speeds higher than those of light, or in curbing space-time - the only two means we can imagine, given the present state of our theoretical understandings, to reduce the time involved in space flight. Back in the 1950s, the physicist Enrico Fermi had stated the paradox which follows from this hypothesis: if extra-terrestials can reach us, we should see them. But we don't see them... And the existence of space-ships capable of carrying them remains highly hypothetical.
Not that we lack testimony on the matter. Since the CNRS created in 1977, in spite of scepticism in the science community, the working group on unidentified spatial phenomena (Geipan), there is nocessation in the flow of reports. Jacques Patenet, the current director of Geipan, tells us that 2 600 observation events have been reported in France in the last thirty years, of which 460are unidentified aerospatial phenomena. of these, for 10 to 20 cases, there is " a very strong presumption" for the presence of a material object such as a vessel. this refers to traces on the ground and on vegetation that could herald the presence of an UFO, radars picking up the object, direct observation by pilots of UFOs with intelligent behaviour.
Why then are there no physical trace of these visitors? "Given our current means of analysis, we should be able to certify - or not - the extra-terrestial origins of these phenomena", bemoans André Brack. The sociologist Pierre Lagrange, a specialist in parasciences, is critical of the anthropomorphism that underlies much investigation of UFOs. While we imagine them small, green, more or less monstrous, extra-terrestials, if there are any, might be very different from us...
"The more capable they are of mastering their environment, the more unlike us they are likely to be in culture, scientific achievement, biology and physics" is his view. That would not stop them from taking the initiative and, secure in the knowledge of their superiority, find ways of communicating with us... "We may well be the baboons to some extra-terrestial anthropologist, whose research program we are far from understanding!", suggests the sociologist. do our scientists really want to communicate with bees or ants, or do they merely want to study them?
If we want to, in the future, feel less lonely in the universe, we should no doubt harness on own capacities for observation. And develop them. "On earth, each and every time we have been confronted with another civilization, we have failed to understand them", reminds us Pierre Lagrange, "Yet differences are not that great between us and Australian Aborigines or Amazonian Indians." In this context, he asks whether "we would be capable of seeing and recognizing civilizations stemming from forms of life that could have taken directions utterly different from ours?" That is the nub of the matter.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The article goes on to cite books from André Brack, Yves Sillard, Pierre Lagrange, Stéphane Allix, François Raulin and Thibaut Canuti.
No comments:
Post a Comment