Gwynne Dyer
And even intelligent life must be pretty common in the universe.
Maybe only one planet in a million has intelligent life, you say? Okay, then there are at least a hundred and forty million planets with intelligent life in this galaxy alone. And there are at least a hundred billion galaxies.
I started reading science fiction when I was quite young – maybe 10 or 11 – and my parents knew an old guy a few streets away who was an amateur astronomer, so they sent me along to see him. He showed me his telescope, and pictures he had taken, and even an exercise book where he had done sketches of our own solar system and the entire galaxy with coloured pencils.
But he couldn’t tell me whether there were any planets beyond our own system, let alone whether there was life elsewhere in the universe. Nobody knew, and he was being properly scientific in his caution. So I returned to my science fiction, and never went back to see him again.
I am probably now at least as old as that “old guy” was then. We live in a truly marvelous time, when the whole universe is opening up to us, and I wish he could have lived long enough to know what we know now.
And now for the next perplexing question. If life is as common as dirt, and intelligent life only maybe a thousand times less common, then where is everybody? Is intelligence so counter-productive that an intelligent species automatically self-destructs within a few dozen generations of developing a scientific civilization? Or is there something so terrible out there that everybody who survived is observing radio silence?
Questions for another day. But Trappist-1 is so close that in a few hundred years we could probably get there in a generation ship. Meanwhile, a private consortium led by the BoldlyGo Institute and Mission Centaur is working on an orbital telescope that will look for planets around our closest stellar neighbour, Alpha Centauri, only 4.4 light-years (40 trillion kilometres) away.
It’s called Project Blue, after astronomer Carl Sagan’s famous picture of our own “pale blue dot.” But there are a gazillion other pale blue dots, and maybe Alpha Centauri has one too. Hallelujah!