November 17, 2019 Julian Jungel

Did you ever wonder what’s out there, what even exists? Lots of people asked themself this question. A brief anecdote: When I was in 8th grade I hold a presentation concerning our universe. The main question was “is life out there?” and by the end of my cute 10-minute-talk I made clear that there are quite a bunch of stars out there and almost every star has one or more planets just like our solar system.

When I, romantically, in a warm summer night, gazing at the stars, talk to another person next to me, I often realize that lot of people don’t know that all the stars we see are suns like ours (more or less). Lots of these dots are also galaxies, each one again containing billions of suns. And it wasn’t until 1990 that we discovered that each one of these suns has planets like ours. There are more stars out there than planet earth has sandgrains on all it’s beaches and each star has planets. What’s the chance that at least one of those planets also has “life” on it?

Quite sure you know that our solar system is part of a galaxy called the Milky Way. You can cleary see Milky Way during one of these romantically warm summer nights mentioned earlier and our solar system is somewhere in the outer spiral of this galaxy. Milky Way however is part of a supercluster called Laniakea. A superclaster is a bunch of galaxys. Some weeks ago I found this video about Laniakea:

YouTube

By loading the video, you agree to YouTube’s privacy policy.
Learn more

Load video

Sorry if your ego just got a little smaller, at least mine did when I watched this video.

As I can see on OK Cupid, travelling seems to be one of the most important things for people like us. We all should have become astrophysicists because they travel the most – or at least the things they build do so. From superclusters we now go back to our galaxy and back to our own solar system. The end of the solar system is the greatest journey humans took so far with a space probe called Voyager 2. It took 42 years to reach the end of our solar system (and get into interstellar space) and was worth every second:

YouTube

By loading the video, you agree to YouTube’s privacy policy.
Learn more

Load video

So there are uncountable other planets in our universe, unreachable for us with our current state of technology, and we wonder if there is another – or even intelligent – form of life out there. What I hardly understand: we’re checking the sky for alien signals, but it seems like this question forgets the time-issue so very often (in fact there is no such thing as time in quantum physicists vision, but that’s another story). Maybe there was a highly intelligent alien life only 10.000 years ago, that sent radio signals to planet Earth. The aliens extinct because of climate change on Planet Alien or something, but their radiofrequency signals passed planet Earth unrecognized like a fresh breeze of air. We just weren’t able to receive these signals back then. Maybe there was alien life two hundred billion years ago and they watched our dinosaurs with intergalaxy-cctv-cameras? Let’s take a look at the cosmic calendar to get a feeling of time in our universe. The Cosmic Calendar does something like this:

map(time, bigbang, now, 01.01.2019, 31.12.2019);

Cosmic Calendar

Now back to planet Earth. We’re living here like a cancer on it’s host thinking about how important we are. When I get in the mood to see this big cosmic picture of where we are, I often start to question the importance of human life. But enough of that now. It’s weekend and weekend means happy feelings!

So the answer for the simple question “is human life worth living?” is Hell, Yes!! Let’s go full circle with this life and realize for a minute that this universe created something like a “self” for matter! We humans have a “self”, a consciousness, how crazy is this! It’s the best drug a carbon based life form could ever get. Science still doesn’t know where this self awareness comes from, but let’s just breath in deep and take it to the max! I AM and for this gift we all should be so very thankful. But I’m also responsible for what and who I am. So I’ll end with a TED talk by Shannon Lee talking about her father Bruce Lee:

Click on the button to load the content from www.ted.com.

Load content

Thank you.

Impressum