dlovell, Wed, October 22nd, 2008
I've always been intrigued by the thought of life on other planets. That very question turned the A I should have received in a college history class to a C, and I still maintain, about 15 years later, that I was on the right side of the argument.
My esteemed professor had begun an off-topic monologue, chastising anyone who believed in aliens or UFOs (how it related to global history, I've yet to determine) and said man has made up the idea of extra-terrestrials as hope that some day we'll all be rescued by aliens. It was stupid, he told his rather dumbfounded class, to even entertain the idea that there was intelligent life on other planets.
I couldn't keep quiet.
"Frankly," I told him, "anyone who believes that the miniscule speck of brain they have on this miniscule speck of a planet in this tiny galaxy has enough knowledge to categorically deny the existence of life on other planets is both ignorant and arrogant."
That was all I had to say. And it was enough. Though I aced every test and project, I got a dreaded C. I asked the professor about it later, and he admitted -- proudly, I'd add -- that my grade was the average of my test scores and my insolence.
Flash forward to today, long removed from the classroom, I must admit my thoughts haven't changed on the subject. We know so little, and yet our arrogance allows us this blanket of comfort, as if nothing is too large for us to comprehend.
Look, we can't even agree on where WE came from. How can we believe there's nothing else out there?
I bring all this up because I've seen some new, recent calculations from the Drake Equation, which show there could be 361 civilizations in our galaxy alone that are more advance than we are. And that's just one galaxy. Is this number correct? Who knows. I can tell you who doesn't know, though: my college history teacher.
