[music]
Are we alone in the Universe?
If we are alone in the Universe, that would
be amazing.
If we are not alone in the universe, that
would be amazing.
The Hubble Space Telescope estimates that
there at least 100 billion galaxies in the
Universe.
Multiply the 100 billion stars by the 100
billion galaxies and you get an almost incalculable
number.
With this number of stars, there are trillions
upon trillions of planets.
So the statistical probability that life as
we know it exists elsewhere is very strong.
Remember that we are only talking about our
Universe - which means the Universe composed
of atomic matter.
Most of this atomic matter is hydrogen and
helium and the rest is stardust in interstellar
space, which has not yet coalesced into matter
or stars.
Cosmologists estimate that the universe that
we know of with its billions of galaxies and
billions and billions of stars and trillions
and trillions of planets is less than .1 percent
of the total universe.
The rest is unknown and quite a bit of that
is unknowable because across the cosmic horizon
Ð 47 billion light years away Ð galaxies
are tumbling into the unknowable.
The reason we call it the unknowable is that
by the time that light reaches from the cosmic
horizon to us on planet earth the stars and
solar system in our galaxy will have exhausted
their thermo nuclear energy and disappeared
into the heat death of absolute zero.
Super string theorists and multiverse theorists
mathematically predict innumerable Universes
Ð approximately 10 to the power of five hundred
Universes in different dimensions of space
and time with possibly different cosmological
constants and different laws of nature.
If there are Beings in these other universes,
not only do we not know it now, we may not
be capable of knowing it with our current
sensory perceptions and the extensions of
those senses, which are our scientific instruments.
But the deeper mystery is not so much the
existence of the Universe or other possible
Universes, but that we have awareness of all
this, that we can ask these questions.
This unique to our species, unique to Being
Human.
At least as far as we know.
