I remember the event as if it happened yesterday. In the early 1950s, George Singleton, my next door neighbor in Nashville, Tennessee, where I grew up, who was 12 years old, told me about his eyewitness account of seeing aliens landing in his back yard. I was eight or nine years old at the time. A large space craft that looked like a saucer hovered over his back yard, then landed, a door opened, and about a dozen creatures came out. I recall his saying that they were only about three of four feet tall and looked a little like chubby giant lizards. Terrified, he jumped backed into bed and tried to go back to sleep. When he woke up the next morning and looked out his window, there was a large black circle of burned grass but no spaceship. I carefully examined the site the next morning and George was exactly right. A large circle in the grass had turned black and was still smoldering. I carefully examined the circle and all the details he had described about the landing site were true.
I did not ask whether his dad had been burning leaves the day before.In a blog post last week, I wrote about seeing mysterious lights in the 1990s following our fleet of four sailboats crossing in the middle of the night from Saint Martins to the British Virgin Islands. And there are many accounts of unexplained UFO sightings on the web. AI lists the ones described below as the most important but there are many dozens more listed on Wikipedia:
- The “Kenneth Arnold Sighting” happened in Mount Rainier, Washington when pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine high-speed, disc-shaped objects flying past Mount Rainier. He described their movement as like “a saucer skipping across water.” This event popularized the term “flying saucer”.
The “Roswell Incident” occurred in Roswell, New Mexico, also in 1947. A rancher discovered debris on a property near Roswell. The U.S. military initially announced they recovered a “flying disc,” but retracted it the next day to claim it was a crashed weather balloon. It remains the most famous alleged UFO crash in history. - The “Rendlesham Forest Incident” occurred in Suffolk, England in 1980. Often called “Britain’s Roswell,” U.S. Air Force personnel stationed at an RAF base reported seeing a glowing, metallic, triangular craft in the nearby woods over multiple nights. Witnesses recorded unusual lights, and some reported high radiation readings.
- The “Belgian UFO Wave” happened in 1988-1989 when thousands of citizens and police officers reported seeing a large, silent, black triangular craft with bright lights. The Belgian Air Force scrambled two F-16 jets, which locked radar onto an object that performed rapid, extreme maneuvers beyond standard aircraft capabilities.Of course, there are more questions than answers, the most important being why we haven’t been able to capture one of these objects or at least been able to make contact with its occupants. Some believers in aliens claim that we have, but governments are keeping the encounters secret.
But aliens and UFOs are not the primary subject of this post. The question of the day is whether advanced life exists anywhere else in the universe besides on the planet Earth (though people could argue about whether “advanced” life really exists here.) The answer to that question is yes. Of course it does. Here are the basic facts:
Scientists tell us that the laws of nature apply everywhere. For life to exist on a planet, it needs to be a rocky planet like Earth and requires these seven conditions:
- Liquid Water: This acts as a medium to let organic chemicals mix, react, and transport nutrients over time.
- Energy Source Available: This powers the chemical reactions needed for metabolism, whether from a star via photosynthesis or from geothermal heat (like deep-sea vents).
- Nutrients and Chemical Elements Present: Building blocks like carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur are needed to form complex molecules like DNA, RNA, and proteins.
- Location in the Habitable Zone (“Goldilocks Zone”): The planet must sit at the right distance from its star, so it is neither too hot nor too cold, allowing water to remain liquid on the surface.
- A Protective Atmosphere: Traps heat to stabilize surface temperatures (the greenhouse effect) and shields living things from harmful cosmic and solar radiation.
- A Magnetic Field: Generated by a rotating molten core, it deflects dangerous solar winds and cosmic rays that could strip away the atmosphere.
- Right Size and Gravity: The planet needs enough mass and gravity to hold down a stable atmosphere, but not so much that it becomes a crushing gas giant with no solid surface.
So there you have it: if a rocky planet is in the goldilocks zone of the star that it is circling, has the basic building blocks in place, is big enough and—I would add—is at least one or two billion years old, there is a very good chance that some form of life will emerge. It is just a matter of our finding that planet or “them” finding us.
But what about advanced life? If the history of our planet is typical, it takes a very long time, billions of years, for advanced life to happen, and probably involves numerous mass extinctions as has happened here on the planet Earth. And how likely is it that there are other rocky planets about the same size as our planet and are about the same age and that are positioned in the Goldilocks Zone around their star, keeping in mind that there are billions of solar systems in each galaxy and there are believed to be trillions of galaxies? Well, I would guess the odds are high, probably 100 percent.
The challenge of a celestial encounter with advanced life on other planets is distance. Of course, there is life elsewhere in the universe—probably advanced life–but unless we humans can figure out how to exceed the speed of light (by a lot), we will never get there nor are they likely to get to us.
According to AI, astro biological calculation indicates that the odds of humanity being the sole “technological species” in the entire universe are less than one in 10 billion trillion—10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (a 1 followed by 22 zeros). In other words, it is close to zero. Surveys also show that a large majority of scientists and astrobiologists believe extraterrestrial life exists.
No brainer, if you ask me. But what does it all mean? Here are some other questions: If there is a heaven, where is it? If God is the creator of the universe, not just our small planet, as most major religions stipulate, what is He up to in other locations? And if scientists agree that the universe will give out of hydrogen and die after a few trillion years, what is eternal life? And what is happening in other universes in the multiverse, if there is a multiverse.
Above our pay grade to figure out or to comprehend. But it should be enough to make us profoundly grateful that we are here on this beautiful blue planet, and how rare planets like the Earth are in this vast universe—or at least how rare we think they are. It should make us thankful that we humans are here now—a situation that in my view falls in the category of a miracle.
And it should put fire in our bellies to cherish and protect what we have. If we humans are not more careful and diligent, we could lose it.
Embry and I are headed to Morocco next Monday for a two-week adventure so the next few posts (including photographs ) will be about our trip. Stay tuned.