HYPOTHESIS
This essay exposes a synthesis of the some current ideas, as well as personal opinions, about the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH): the possibility of existence of other civilizations in our Universe, some of them very old, the possibilities of contact with them, as well as the consequences for the study of the UFO phenomenon and for all of How many civilizations are in the Universe?Now it is accepted that major part of the stars have planets. The spectroscopy assures us that water and the basic components of carbonic life, including aminoacids, are everywhere in Cosmos. More and more specialists admit that the germs of life are travelling throughout the space, "infecting" immediately all appropriate places. If the favorable conditions last several billion years, life can reach the abundance and complexity we see on our Earth.
In some cases such a complex life system can give rise to a "technological civilization", that means to intelligent beings capable to build spaceships to conquer other inhabitable planets.
How many such "technological civilizations" could be in this moment in the Universe, excepting ourselves? Frank Drake proposed in 1961 a well-known formula to estimate this number. Several researchers made, on this base, their own calculations, for our Galaxy - the Milky Way. The results were varying from tens of thousands to zero.
I did again this calculation, respecting more the spirit than the form of Drake equation. Some estimates give 400 billion stars in our Galaxy. Probable around 1.5 billion of them are third generation stars, with sufficiently long life span (minimum 5 billion years), with solid rocky planets, containing heavy elements, with stable orbits.
Probable 20 millions of these planets are in the "ecosphere", that is they have a temperature maintaining liquid water, sufficiently high gravity to retain the water for billions of years, near circular orbit, reasonable day-night and summer-winter alternation etc. Practically on all of them, life will appear, but it will reach the abundance we see on Earth on about one million planets. One percent of such biospheres will give birth eventually, after billions of years of evolution, to a "technological civilization". I hope I am not too optimistic supposing that 9 of 10 such civilizations will destroy themselves or will degenerate, but 1 of 10 will survive for a very long time, maybe millions of years, metamorphosing itself eventually in something we can name a supercivilization. Following our calculation, the Milky Way can give birth to around 1000 such supercivilizations. Several hundreds appeared in the past and are existing now; the rest will appear in future. This is a good average between the figures proposed in literature.
But, if somebody considers that we were too optimistic, and the intelligent beings are much more scarce, we should add that our Milky Way is only one of about 100 billion more or less similar galaxies of the Universe accessible to our instruments. And we have strong reasons to believe that there are other universes too, maybe "parallel" ones, maybe from other states of substance etc. Therefore it is almost absolutely sure that in the Universe there are now many supercivilizations.
What can be a supercivilization?
Unfortunately, we know only one technological civilization - our own - and no supercivilization. Yet, the only more or less rational way to answer the question "what can be a supercivilization?" is to extrapolate our evolution in future, supposing we will avoid self-destruction.
If the pioneers will not disappear, in several decades the planet Mars will be explored, as well as some other bodies in our Solar System. Afterwards we will start to think about other solar systems. There are one thousand stars in the neighborhood of 54 light years. 46 of them seam to have solar systems similar to ours.
In the last fifty years the engineers imagined a lot of starships to travel towards them. We can mention the thermonuclear ships ORION and DAEDALUS, the ionic ship YANTAR, the laser ships STARLIGHT or SUPERSTARLIGHT and so on. Not the technology is missing but the money and the motivation. These very "classical" ships can cover the distance of 4 light-years until the nearest star "Proxima Centauri" in fifty years.
Arriving there, the travelers could build colonies and, maybe in other fifty years, three other starships. These starships, and the next generations of pioneers, would repeat the performance in another century and so on, as in a nuclear reaction. In this manner, the human race could conquer the Milky Way in one or two million years. Of course, supposing the science and technology will stop at the level of XXI century, which is extremely unlikely.
Otherwise the time will be considerably shorter. Some other authors find greater or smaller values. Freeman Dyson us, or Joseph Shklovskii spoke about 10 million years; Stanislav Lem was convinced that this period will be only of several hundreds of thousands years.
But I am strongly convinced that in the next centuries (or sooner) we will discover new principles of physics to avoid the limitation imposed by the speed of light. Theories as the superstrings, the sub-quantum world, the energy of vacuum and many other new approaches, as well as some recent experiments assure us that, in several centuries, all actual prejudices concerning the nature of substance, space, time, dimensions etc. will be changed. Thus the inter-stellar travels will be much simpler and much shorter than we can imagine today.The human race will change too. Research projects are in progress concerning regeneration, extension of life expectancy, genetic engineering, bio-robots, cyborgs, etc. Almost all bigger artificial objects will become "intelligent" in the near future, with integrated microchips, and will be interconnected, through the Internet, with all computers and databases in the world. The wireless command of all those appliances and computers will be made by microprocessors implanted in head, connected directly to the human brain. In less than one hundred years it will be sufficient to think about a topic and in the next moment all the requested information will be in the mind of the person interested. We will see through eyes situated thousands of kilometers away, we will act with robot arms at the same distance, or we will meet each other in the virtual reality, all only through this kind of implant, without the complicated appliances used today in tele-presence. Moreover, we will speak to each other "mind-to-mind", through the digital network, without sounds, and at any distance.
In the XXX century shall we still use words to communicate? Shall we still be bound to our physical body? We can continue with these questions. But all the above is only for the next several centuries. What could bring us the progress in one million years is far beyond our imagination. Therefore it seams almost sure that a supercivilization will have no problems to perform interstellar travels in a reasonable time, and that we could not make the distinction between the technology of such supercivilization and magic.
The time gap If our estimates were correct, the average distance in space between the supercivilizations in our Galaxy is of several thousands light years. But, paradoxically, not these distances give the most important divide, but those in As we accept now, the age of the observable Universe is at least 15 billion years, starting with the "Big Bang". We were lucky, as it was a Universe favorable for life (the Anthropic Principle). At the beginning there were only hydrogen and helium. Stars of first and second generation were formed and burst after some time, creating heavy elements to form third generation stars as the Sun, with some rocky planets as our Earth. More than 4 billion years ago the life began to develop on it. Two billion years ago the first eukaryote cell appeared, after another billion, the first tiny worm, and, in the last billion, the descendants of this worm realized a technological civilization.
In this marathon of more than 15 billion years, of the life and intelligence throughout the Universe, the chances were different in different places. This difference could be of hundreds of millions years or more. As an example, at 37 light years from us there are two stars: Zeta1 and Zeta2 Reticuli, both of them of the same type as the Sun, but older than it with one billion years. By coincidence or not, these stars are often mentioned in the UFO abduction stories as the origin of abductors.
If we accept, for the sake of simplicity, that the several hundred supercivilizations supposed to be in the Milky Way were born, in a uniform way, along one billion years, it results that supercivilizations appear each 2-3 million years.
This is the "normal" gap between two neighboring civilizations in time, despite the fact that, in all SF encounters, the technological distance between two civilizations is only of several hundreds or thousands of years. In 2-3 million years, a technological civilization should be transformed in something else, maybe in spiritual beings, or virtual beings, maybe in something we cannot even imagine. And we have to think also about the oldest supercivilization, which could have one billion years ahead of us. I repeat - our ancestor, one billion years ago, was a small worm. In the next billion the evolution can be faster. What should be now they, the masters of supercivilizations, what shape they have, after another billion? We can only hypothesize that they became a Higher Intelligence.
In this huge time gap, of hundreds of millions of years, between the early supercivilizations and us we can find the key to answer to the most of the problems linked with our cosmic destiny.
Where are they?
Following our estimates, our civilization could have conquered the Galaxy in a maximum two million years. Almost sure, all supercivilizations did somehow the same before us, millions of years ago. Therefore they should know, for long time, a lot about us and they should be here, now. But, at least officially, they are not. The tradition says that Enrico Fermi put first, in the early forties, the rhetorical question: "They should be here; where are they?" Were we wrong? Are we, in spite of our calculations, alone in the Universe?
For most of the people it seems normal that if some (friendly) space travelers come to us, they should land at the White House Loan (why not in Place de la Concorde, or in front of the Buckingham Palace, or in the Red Place or Tien An Men Place etc?). The visitors should ask to see the Big Chief of the Earth, and to offer us some new technologies in exchange for some goods or rights here (e.g. row materials or genetic experiments on humans), and so on. For most of the people it seems normal that a cosmic civilization will send us, by radio, some signals about their existence, waiting for an answer. For many others, a space invasion, as in the "Independence Day" movie, is perfectly plausible (as well as the final victory of USA). All these scenarios about ET contact are false, being mined by serious prejudices.
A list of several ET prejudices
We can start with the prejudice of equal rights. A difference of millions of years, or even hundreds of millions, is so huge as between us and a monkey or a lizard. If they are here (as it is highly probable), they can examine us, monitor our evolution, even contact us in some form, but they will never put them at the same level with us.
The second could be the prejudice of conversation. Even we interact sometimes with a lizard; this will never be a conversation. G. Cocconi and P. Morrison, argued in 1959, that if the difference between two civilizations is of millions of years, the probability they exchange ideas is zero.
Another prejudice is the temporal chauvinism (or temporal provincialism upon J. Allen Hynek). It states that, in opposition with the previous centuries, the last one or the last two hundred years brought us finally to the light of truth and science. In this light, now we can decide what can be real and what will never be possible. If one hundred years ago or so we discovered the radio, some believe it will last the best mean of communications forever. If one hundred years ago Einstein postulated that the speed of light is a limit, no other physical law will be discovered until the end of times to avoid this limit, etc. As a peculiar example, we have the SETI prejudice. According to it, even if the radio signals need thousands of years from one inhabited word to other, some civilizations will consider that these radio signals are the most appropriate mean for cosmic contacts; and we should search for them.For some people (I suspect many of them are linked with the military-industrial complex) it should be normal if a cosmic civilization arrives at the Earth, it will attempt to conquer us by force. They should be "invaders", as in so many SF novels and movies. This can be named the prejudice of the invasion. If we agree with the reasoning in the first part of this article, we should accept that, for almost sure, no invasion will take place in future. That is because the supercivilizations knew about us millions of years ago, therefore they could invade us in those times, and, in a certain sense, we are already invaded by them, for millions of years.
There are some well-known footprints in stone, as in Berea (Kentucky) or Antelope Springs (Utah) as old as 500-600 million years. Inside rocks formed thousands or millions of years ago, very old and unexplainable technical objects were found too, as those of Sch"ondorf (Austria), Coso Mountains (California), Narada river (East Ural, Rusia), etc., even in Romania near Aiud, in the bed of the river Mures. Maybe they are signs that somebody is visiting us for a very long time.
Of the same kind is the prejudice of intervention. The UFO sects hope that the ET will help us (or at least the "chosen") to overcome some future catastrophes. Although it is not a perfect comparison, we can remember that centuries ago, when people arrived to a new place (e.g. a wild valley, an uninhabited island) they settled, building houses, destroying the forest to make agriculture, bringing cows, pigs, hens, killing tigers, bears, wolfs etc. In the name of biodiversity, now we understand that this attitude cannot continue, and in the last decades we witness a strong ecological movement. Now the norm is that if we discover a valuable piece of land, which escaped from the human intervention, a new island or a new valley in the rain forest, we shall declare it a reservation, permitting only a very limited intervention, for scientific reasons. Following these regulations of non-intervention, a researcher cannot help today even a baby turtle to overcome an obstacle toward the sea. This attitude seems to be strengthening in future. A supercivilization observing the Earth and the human technological civilization should act in a similar manner, avoiding to interfere in our evolution, but taking samples, making some experiments, having very limited contacts (not at all as equals) with only some individuals, selected upon their and not our criteria.
With the premises above, we can accept that the Earth could be seen as a cosmic reservation monitored by some supercivilizations (it is close to the so-called zoo hypothesis). There are, in my opinion, some other stronger reasons for non-intervention too, which transcend the zoo hypothesis. I will refer to them later in this paper.
Therefore no settlement, no destruction, on one hand, and no official contact, conversation or substantial help, on the other hand, are to be expected from the advanced cosmic civilizations, even if they are here now.
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