The article I should have sent last week on humans in the universe

After 15 years of writing this column, I was bound to make a blunder. Last week’s article was a re-run of the piece I wrote in the World of Figures in October 2005!

I was revisiting the question of life in the universe from a different angle and I needed to refer back to the 2005 article to avoid repeating myself.

Unfortunately, I sent the older article by mistake!

This is the second time that I have made this kind of mistake: The first repeat happened in April 2010; the current one in April 2018. So, can we expect another blunder in April 2021?

Well, this is what I wanted to say last week...

It is difficult to understand why there is any life on Earth.

Think about it: Our kind of life depends on oxygen (animals) and carbon dioxide (plants). But these are quite rare on this planet.

The largest component in our atmosphere is nitrogen (78 per cent). Oxygen is just 21 per cent while carbon dioxide is a mere four hundredths of a per cent! That is, four parts out of 10,000.

Why, then, is there life on Earth yet the two most crucial ingredients for it are so rare on this planet? I have no answer.

But that leads me to suspect that there must be life elsewhere. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to find other humans — exactly like us!

Four hundred years ago, people assumed that the Earth was a special place — the centre of everything. Those who did not subscribe to this belief were punished heavily.

HOUSE ARREST

Galileo Galilei was put under house arrest for life in 1663 for saying that the sun was at the centre of the solar system. He was only pardoned in 1992 — some 329 years later!

Since then, astronomers have discovered that we are actually not the centre of anything.

We are not at the centre of the solar system; the sun is not at the centre of the galaxy; and the galaxy is not at the centre of its local group; and so on and so forth.

Consequently, when astronomers discovered that all the galaxies appear to be accelerating away from ours, they were careful not to repeat the mistakes of the past: making the assumption that we are at the centre of the universe.

Now the universe started taking its current form some 13.7 billion years ago.

Our sun was formed about seven billion years afterwards and the earth “only” 60 million years after the sun.

It took another 700 million years from the formation of our planet for the first life-forms to start appearing on Earth. Humans started appearing just 200,000 years ago.

Looking at the immense amount of time that has been available and the estimated large number of life-supporting planets (1.5 billion) out there, I am convinced that there ought to be other human-like life elsewhere in the universe.

Otherwise, it would be a large waste of space!

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