KENNETH AUTHOR

This article won’t attempt to answer too many important questions or anything.

I found myself trapped in another internet rabbit hole on Sunday, back to the “Universal Drawing Board” of trying to gain a better understanding of the vast blackness and spots of light that surround  us.  I will never actually understand it of course, but we can always understand it better and I don’t think there’s really any point in doing anything else right now as a species.  Because in the long run, the only way for humans to survive the demise of Earth (perhaps sometime in the future when the Sun becomes a Red Dwarf and says “It’s gettin’ hot in here, so consume the f***ing Earth!” billions of years from now) is to escape Earth.  Stephen Hawking basically says that the escape from Earth is going to happen and to not even worry about Red Dwarves, since we’re doing an awesome job of killing ourselves.

But even if we managed to survive the death of Earth and survive a galactic road trip with our families to colonize another planet, whether it’s Mars or an extrasolar planet, we’ve still got to deal with things like the Milky Way colliding with the Andromeda Galaxy in 4 billion years or just the fact that the Universe itself will one day die out, even if it’s trillions of years from now and even if we think it’s improbable to see humans survive it.  However, even though humans may not make it even another billion years in this universe, it doesn’t mean that we might not be able to leave the universe.  String theorists hypothesize that we live in a multiverse, which is more like being the Russian doll inside of the Russian doll inside of the Russian doll and so on and so on forever.  Michio Kaku, who you might know as “The Asian guy that is literally the guest talking head in every single documentary special about space”, talks a great deal about the simple things that make up the universe and our planet and how we got here in this video.  It’s worth your time.

I’ll wait the 42 minutes until you come back.

Pretty interesting stuff, huh?  I wonder what I was doing in that 42 minutes in my life while you were watching the video.  Probably nothing that important.  Probably not getting closer to helping anyone find out what dark matter is.  Probably- Hey look, Chris Brown is on the Grammys.

Because despite how important it is to find out how to get from here to the next solar system at warp speed, or how we could possibly create a wormhole (which is sort of like Alice’s “Wonderland Rabbit Hole” that got me here in the first place) to find other dimensions (and pray that it’s not like the dimension crossover we saw in The Mist) we would much rather read 50 Shades of Grey.  Or watch Real Chopped Champions of Macon County: SVU.  Or give an award to Rihanna for “singing good and stuff”.  And many other countless things that don’t matter.  Is it wrong?  Well, not necessarily and I am as guilty as anyone else.  But we should still recognize just exactly what entertainment is:

Entertainment is how dumber people cope with the boredom of being helpless to advance humanity.

Not to say that most of us are necessarily stupid, because I wouldn’t want to sit here and tell you that I am an idiot, but I’m certainly a lot stupider than Kaku.  Or Hawking.  Or Newton and Galileo and Einstein and a very large number of people that have done something important for humanity even though those names make up a minuscule percentage of people that have ever lived.  You must understand that literally anyone can have an impact on, or effect the very fate of, humanity.  From me to you to Abraham Lincoln, but only a few of us make important changes directly.  It took us until Christmas Day of 1642 A.D. to get Isaac Newton, some 200,000 years since the first known homo sapiens, some millions of years since we could trace back to our original ancestors, some 6,000 4.5 billion years since we got this planet, and then finally we got the guy that defined the basis for modern physics.  That set the stage for what could finally get us off of the planet.  And yet every domino during that 4.5 billion years still played a role, whether minor or major, in giving us Newton and then without Newton, we wouldn’t have the other geniuses that got us to the moon and continue to travel deeper and deeper into space.  The people that are doing important things for the rest of us, while we sit here and think of new ways to keep ourselves busy – whether it’s Arrested Development or a Carly Rae Jepsen concert (does she do concerts or only YouTube videos?  Who is Carly Rae Jepsen?)  - for hopefully another billion+ years.

Ummm… Thanks, guys!  (And girls.  I’m using “guys” in the general sense here.)

Unfortunately for many of us, we are left with so many unanswered questions.  Not only are they unanswered but we are helpless to find the answers.  Because we’re too stupid or too lazy or too overwhelmed by the question itself.  It’s not an insult, we’re talking about questions like “Is there intelligent life on other planets?” and “Is there a God?”  You almost certainly should not know the answer to those questions, and if you do, please use the contact button on this website to tell me or send me a DM on Twitter!  I’d really like to know, thanks.  :)

Having these questions is sort of like spending every day of your life feeling like you’re a bird even though you are a human.  That nature is telling you that you MUST walk outside, spread your arms, and fly above the clouds because it’s what you are meant to do.  Except that you can’t.  Because you’re a human.  You can not fly and naturally, you likely never will.  At least, not without some help.  Maybe one day you’ll invent a metal box that does put you in the air and allow you to travel in the skies or perhaps even into space.  A workaround, if you will, but an accomplishment of the urge given to you by nature.  There’s still hope yet that we can find intelligent life, cross swords universes, fold space, and maybe even travel through time.  I might not be the one to answer any of the questions but perhaps we all play some small part in that and I know I still have so much left to ask.

Is there life on other planets?  Yes.  Hell yes.  By definition a theory is not a fact if it’s wrong even once.  In this case, I actually have zero facts to support the theory that there are alien lifeforms.  But Jesus, man, there has to be.  There are 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone.  There could be 100 billion galaxies.  Who cares about doing the math at this point, that’s just “a lot” of planets.  Some will support life.  In fact, some may not even have any reasonable reason to support life according to the life-supporting features that we are used to on Earth (water, oxygen, McDonalds) but actually might support some other kind of lifeform.  Even here on this planet there are species that should not survive but do anyway, called extremophiles.  A Tardigrade is a polyextremophile that lives right here on Earth and can survive: Subzero temperatures, boiling temperatures, all kinds of radiation, can go 10 years without food or water, pressures deeper than our deepest oceans and yes… they could live in the vacuum of space.

We might look at a gas planet like Jupiter and think it doesn’t support life but like hell that I’d be surprised if you told me that there were mole people in the middle just livin’ it up!  It’s even easier to imagine that there could be life under the icy surface of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons.  Or on Mars.  Or on Titan, a moon of Saturn.  If we can find just one other place in the solar system where any kind of life existed, we know that life on Earth wasn’t a freak occurrence.

So is there life out there?  Yeah, I think so.  Is there intelligent life out there?  I would like to think so.  One of the only problems with that, whether or not there are people like us out there in the Uni, is that we are rather young.  The Big Bang happened some 9 billion years before Earth formed, twice as long as Earth has been around itself.  Meaning that Earth has been around for only like 33% of how long the universe has been around and yet other planets, solar systems, and galaxies have been around for plenty of time to have bred a human-like species of intelligent life and theoretically, those people would have had the same questions about life that we do.  They would have eventually wanted to meet other intelligent beings and they should be more advanced than us.  Possibly to the point where they have everything we ever dreamed of and so much more.  It’s conceivable that if humans could travel outside of the solar system within 100 years, or even 1000, that other intelligent beings would have already done so since they could have a head start of 1,000,000,000 years or more.

So where are they?

We couldn’t possibly be the first right?  Are UFOs real?  Is Ancient Aliens real?  Are humans themselves the aliens?  Did the aliens find that it was a bad idea to contact other lifeforms?  Are we really the smartest people in the Universe*, or at least, the galaxy?  Please tell me that the smartest lifeforms in the galaxy aren’t also responsible for Honey Boo Boo.  As you can see, even one question, like the one about life on other planets, just becomes its own “multiverse” of questions.  An infinite amount of more questions we must ask, like the child that just says “Why?  Why?  Why?”

*It simply does not compute that we could be the most intelligent life forms in even our own area code of the Milky Way.  You realize that we are failing right?  It makes perfect sense that the biggest cancer killer of Americans is actually the one we knowingly do to ourselves: Lung cancer.  I mean, I smoked for ten years before quitting (still going strong) and I can tell you first-hand that there is absolutely no point in smoking despite the fact that it kills 150,000+ Americans every year.  You could say that “God” gives you every other kind of cancer, and yes also sometimes cancer of the lungs, but most of it is us just saying “F*** it!” because “you’re going to die anyway.”  And so goes the human race, killing the Earth at a faster rate every single day because it’s going to die anyway too.  Hell-to-the-no are we the smartest beings in the M.W. Galaxy and if we are, God help us all.

And so we are left with exploring other possibilities about why we have no record of being contacted by aliens, and then if you subscribe to something like ancient aliens or Roswell, you are branded as a fool.  Hey, don’t lump every believer in aliens in with this guy:

I don’t know if we have been contacted by aliens but based on the mathematical evidence of how many planets there must be out there, shouldn’t we consider it?  I find it interesting that we can know how ridiculously large the universe is, that it’s packed with amazing images like different nebula that you would swear aren’t real pictures but in fact is an actual photo*, that we can live and breathe and think and have no idea why or how we are all here, that the Earth is just one of many literal miracles, and yet thinking that maybe aliens came and chilled on the planet some 50,000 or 50,000,000 years ago or something and then moved on makes you a crazy person.  If you equated the history of Earth to a 24-hour day, the time that humans were alive would be the last few seconds.  What’s to say that aliens haven’t come by a bunch of times but just not in the time that we were either A) here or B) had video cameras rolling?

*Crap, look how crazy the Ant Nebula is:

If we stopped and thought intelligently for a moment, it would be so blatantly obvious to us that we aren’t the only intelligent ones out there.  Hell, we are really only intelligent relative to other Earth species.  Our Sun is big as hell – to us.  It’s more like a medium-sized star relative to other stars.  For all we know, Earth Humans are the Honey Boo Boo’s of the galaxy.  Maybe we haven’t been visited by aliens because they are too embarrassed to be seen with us.  And could we even blame them?  Do you go hang out at the house of the neighbor that doesn’t mow his lawn for 10 years and has two cars on blocks in the front yard?

I didn’t think so.

Which is another good reason that we need to be spending all of our energy on finding a way out of our solar system and being able to reach other Earth-like planets in our relative neighborhood.  It’s the only way for humanity to survive (if it even should) and possibly get the answers we’ve been seeking for the entirety of our existence.  Maybe even the answer to the most important question: Why are we here?  Luckily, while us stupid people bet on the Oscars every year, there are people working to find the answers and possibly escape the solar system.

The James Webb Telescope replaces the Hubble in about 2018, nearly 22 years after the project was set in motion during the Clinton administration.  (Unfortunately, important change takes time but we have to start somewhere, sometime.)  The Hubble’s successor (which is 100x more powerful than the Hubble, the most powerful telescope we had ever invented) will hopefully answer many questions about the formation of the galaxies, planets, stars, and life.  It will be positioned so far from Earth that we won’t even be able to service it and it may only last 5 years before breaking down, but it will be phenomenally important to understanding ourselves and our galaxy.  And yes, this shit is coming while you are probably still alive.  Amazing things should be known in the next 5-10 years.  That’s not all.  The ATLAST telescope is even more impressive.

ATLAST (Advanced Technology Large-Aperture Space Telescope) is Hubble 3.0 and it has one specific mission: Find life on other planets.  That’s a sick freakin’ mission.  Though it is still in the conceptual stages, a potential 16-meter telescope sent out into space could photograph more planets than you could ever believe possible.  The hope is to have ATLAST out there “at last” between 2025-2035.  Just imagine if you gave birth to a baby boy today, he might only be 12 or 13 when we found out that there was life on other planets.  Even if the concept of sending a giant 16-meter telescope millions of miles into space to see light years away and take voyeuristic naked photos of aliens in only 15 years sounded “stupidly ridick” to you right now, try telling a computer technician in 1965 that you carry a computer in your pocket that’s 1000x more powerful than the one that takes up an entire floor of his office building.

Technology doesn’t advance at a steady rate, it advances exponentially.  That’s why it took thousands of years to get from point a to point b and yet it took like ten years or less to go from “everyone finally has a cell phone” to “literally nobody is looking at each other anymore because they’ve got mini-computers – that I guess also have a talking function? – in their hands 24/7.”  We will probably have a mission to Mars in the mid-2030s and it might actually happen after we have found life on other planets.  (Though it’s a longshot to happen that soon.  James Webb was originally supposed to launch in 2007, not 2018.  It also went from a $300 million project to an $8 billion project.  Damn “inflation.”)  To go from Hubble 1 to Hubble 2 to Hubble 3 and possibly Hubble 4 someday, it’s incredible to think about how advanced that technology could be.  A large scale technological advancement version of going from the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad.  Would you have believed that the original iPod could someday be a grandmother of the iPad?

Just imagine if instead of spending any money on wars, humans spent taxpayer money on space exploration.  Just to think that if we could stop spending a single cent on crime prevention, we could funnel all that money into education.  Of course, that’s an “insane” idea, right?

And still, after billions of years of the development of Earth, planetary species, and homo sapiens, you might actually be living at a very exciting time where many questions once thought “unanswerable” will be answered.  We’ve already had the Large Hadron Collider possibly find a Higgs Boson particle that could answer many questions we’ve had for a long time.  The Kepler Mission is deep in space looking for (and finding a ton of) new planets.  We could possibly learn hundreds of answers to how our galaxy and universe was created with the launching of James Webb.  Maybe eight years later we will launch the device that takes pictures of aliens.  Shortly after that we might be walking on Mars.  Maybe within your lifetime we will even be planting the seeds of true space colonization or other “science fiction” concepts like time travel and teleportation.  Black holes were “science fiction” not too long ago and many “crazy” ideas were born out of some truth.

I have to believe that anything is possible just based on everything I’ve already just mentioned on how amazing and complex the universe and life really is.  At some points in my life I find it impossible that a scientist could ever believe in the existence of God, while at other times I find it even more unbelievable that he couldn’t.  Most of us are just lucky to be observers and have the answers given to us by the genius few.  We have had certain questions for millennia that might actually be cleared up within our lifetime, but those answers will probably still only lead to more questions.  That’s actually a good thing because what’s the point of being alive if you don’t have any questions?

Even if most of us are just biding time with stupid entertainment because we don’t have anything better to do, I know for a fact that we are all still bound by the same curiosities and quest for true Universal Knowledge.

It’s funny that during my Rabbit Hole vacation, I also came across a Tumblr site that is just photos of “Awesome People Hanging Out.”  Random famous people that were photographed together.  I started to look at the “Notes” section under each photo that shows you how many people commented or reblogged the photo.  Some were as low as 600 “notes” and others might get as high as 3000.  That’s a lot of people sharing a photo.  And then all of a sudden I saw one photo that dwarfed all the rest as if they were non-descript asteroids orbiting a massive star.  The fact that this photo had over 81,000 notes gave me so much hope in humanity at that moment that even if most of us are relatively stupid, and even if we want nothing more than to be mindlessly entertained because of the boredom of living a dull life, we still respect the hell out of the grand quest to understand this universe and just what the hell we are doing here.  We are mostly just the drones, but we thank and admire the people that have helped get us from a planetary creation 4.5 billion years ago to sitting in front of our TVs or computers today.  These 81,000 notes were proof that most of us all just want answers and respect the hell out of the Newtons, the Einsteins, and even some of our modern day scientific heroes – specifically the ones that have married science and entertainment.  We know you geniuses are still out there, and we support your everyday mission for knowledge.

81,000 notes on Awesome People Hanging Out is my proof:

Now, can we please stop killing ourselves?