Contacting other life forms

The only result from contacting aliens who can reach the Earth is to be presenting them with the choice of having us for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

There is no reason to assume that they will not be millions or billions of years more evolved than us and they will have the same opinion of us as we have of oysters.

The universe has been around for over thirteen billion years. In that time stars have been born and died. Our sun is four and a half billion years old and is at the middle of its life cycle. Other suns can live longer or shorter lives but I cannot see why we would assume that there is not a life form out there that would feel that we were very primitive should they meet us.

Life on Earth started about three and a half billion years ago but did not do much for a long time and it is only in the last two thirds of a billion years that life on Earth has had a skeleton of sorts. Mankind as such has been around for a few million years. The Aborigines had been here in Australia for forty thousand years and were still as advanced as when they arrived and were still using stone axes.

In the Universe scheme of things a million years is about two days of your life. An Australian lives 78 years, or 28,470 days, or 683,280 hours.

So an hour of your life represents a year of the time since organisms on Earth developed a skeleton.

When I studied astrophysics in 1985, it was necessary to remember the number eleven. The number of stars in a galaxy on average is ten to the power eleven, and the number of galaxies is again ten to the power eleven. So the number of stars in the Universe is ten to the power twenty two. That is

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars.

Checking on the Internet the number is still around that.

Every now and then on the news on TV they mention another far away star has been found to have a planet revolving around it. These planets are not uncommon. Thousands have now been discovered and it is assumed that a fifth of them will be in the zone around their sun that makes them habitable.

In the Universe it is estimated that there must be millions of possible homes for life forms. It is not sensible to expect them to all be less evolved than our life form. On Earth life forms which developed in isolation from the rest of the Earth's life forms, such as happened with the marsupials of Australia, still had the basic form of the rest of the world. We could possibly expect the dominant life form of other planets to be like us.
Now that would be a problem.

What will we be like in a million years? Ten million years. What about in a billion years? The other life forms could be advanced that far, or more, than our current state of evolution. Do you think twice about a prawn's feelings as you boil him for lunch? Or wonder what a lamb thinks as he is fattened for chops. We are likely to be on the barbecue when we encounter other life forms.