Explanation Of Extraterrestrial Life
What kind of image comes to your mind when you think of aliens? A person traveling in a flying saucer with two big eyes, a big head, and a thin body? Such a thing can be created in the minds of many people. However, the topic of extraterrestrial life is much more complex than that.
First, I will explain a little about this article. What I am doing in this article is to analytically present the data of several cases suspected to be related to extraterrestrial life. Before starting this analysis, the word organism must be properly explained. This may seem like a simple problem, but when considered biologically, this is quite a complex problem. Therefore, I will explain the word living being through the Western scientific knowledge system.
There are many different opinions among scholars about what life is. Among them, let’s consider a definition of totality generally agreed upon by most scholars. According to this definition, life is a combination of several characteristics and actions. Also, life is not a raw material. To identify something as a living being, it must have the following characteristics and actions.
1. Breeding
2. Organization (made up of basic building blocks such as the cell)
3. Ability to respond to external stimuli
4. Ability to grow within certain limits
5. Metabolism (the process of the digestive system is an example of this.)
6. Adaptability (ability to adapt to the environment)
7. Heredity (the ability to pass on one’s characteristics to future generations through genes)
8. Homeostasis (the ability to maintain a constant internal state of the body)
In addition, there are other additional points. But if the majority of the above facts are present, it can be called a life. I would like to highlight the word majority in the above sentence. According to Western biology, it is not necessary to have all the above-mentioned facts to be called a life. If there is a majority of facts, it is called a life. This is why there are many debates about what life is.
In some cases, it is hard to explain whether it is a living being or not. A virus is a good example of that. Out of the eight characteristics mentioned above, viruses do not have the two basic characteristics of an organism which are metabolism and homogeneity. Then we have a question whether the virus is an organism or not. Some scholars say that the virus is an organism. Some scholars say that viruses are non-living things.
Before looking for answers to the question of whether there are living things elsewhere outside the earth, we need to have some idea about how to identify a living being. Therefore, if the characteristics and actions I mentioned above are seen somewhere outside the earth, it can be a clue to the presence of life.
Scientists use these compounds to identify extraterrestrial life. That is one of the main reasons why this topic is more complicated. There is a huge amount of data, discourse, and debate about extraterrestrial life. I will divide this data into several parts according to the nature of the data and the people presenting it. Those parts are shown below.
1. Hypotheses and tests developed by astronomers.
2. Research done by NASA.
3. Historical sources and archaeological sites.
4. Disclosures made by retired state officials.
5. Research and information done by independent people.
6. A single incident which said to have been seen by a group of people.
7. Cases where only one person is reported to have been seen.
This article discusses the first 3 points. I will discuss the other 4 points in another article.
We discussed earlier that there are 8 main characteristics and actions to identify an organism. Imagine that an animal like a small beetle with these 8 points is crawling on another planet. How important do you think it will be to scientists? I can assure you that it will be a great discovery for many scientists including astronomers. But that discovery will not be of much importance to ordinary people. Because ordinary people are not interested in the concept of living beings. They are interested in knowing details about extraterrestrial intelligent beings. In other words, living beings with advanced technology can travel through space or communicate through space.
The Drake equation introduced by Dr. Frank Drake can be used to explain this. Dr. Frank Drake presented this equation in 1961. With that equation, he tried to calculate the approximate number of civilizations with living things that have enough technology to communicate with other planets in the galaxy we live in called the Milky Way. See the equation he presented from this link.
But there are arguments against this equation. Because it is quite difficult to determine the values of some variables in this equation. Depending on the values given to some variables, there are big differences in the answers obtained from the equation. The values obtained in different cases are between 0 – 15600000.
So how do we check if there are intelligent beings outside the earth? We can assume it like this. If there are civilizations with advanced technology, they must emit various signals into space. According to that hypothesis, scientists are trying to capture such signals from space. Also, if there are advanced beings outside the Earth, man sends signals to space in the hope that they will receive them.
Several space listening programs have been in operation around the world since the 1960s. The common name for these programs is SETI. SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Also, the program called Breakthrough Listen, which Dr. Stephen Hawking started with another company, is another example of these programs.
In this way, listening to the universe for many years, there are some incidents when signals were received that could be thought to have been issued by extraterrestrial beings or some technical equipment. It was later discovered that some of these signals were caused by errors in the equipment. Some scholars argued that they were unusual signals issued by some devices on Earth.
For example, the signals received by the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia in 1998 can be introduced. This signal had all the characteristics of an advanced signal from space. But later some scholars argued that this signal was caused by a microwave oven in the laboratory. After checking this, they even issued an inspection report. Anyone who wants to find out more about it can read the report here.
Research paper link –> Identifying the source of perytons at the Parkes radio telescope
It is mentioned in the book named Pale Blue Dot written by Mr. Carl Sagan that from 1980 to 1997, at least 8 unexplained signals were received. A very famous signal among them is the wow signal. On August 15, 1977, this signal was observed by Jerry R. Ehman, an astronomer who volunteered at Ohio University’s space observatory in the United States. He was surprised by it, so he wrote wow on the paper on which the data was printed.
But Antonio Paris and Evan Davies, two academics who worked at the Washington Academy of Sciences, presented a research paper in 2015, and told a different story about this wow signal. They say that this wow signal may be caused by the hydrogen clouds of two comets. Anyone interested can read the research paper they submitted here.
Research paper link –> Wow signal explained
I am not saying that this research report explains exactly how the wow signal was created. But I think it is better to try to explain it with the things we know before suddenly coming to a hypothesis about any event. This is what I meant by that. If the concepts used to explain an incident that is difficult to explain are also unclear, the incident becomes more complicated.
I will give an example of this. You leave the mobile phone on the table at home and when you go to the yard and come back to the table, your mobile phone is missing. If you make a hypothesis involving extraterrestrials to explain this phenomenon, the possibility of that hypothesis being correct is very low. But with what we know, we can use more reasonable hypotheses to explain this phenomenon. For example, it may be more accurate to assume that your brother took your cell phone to make a call.
Now let’s see if humans receive an advanced-level signal from extraterrestrial life and our ability to correctly capture and understand that signal. My opinion is that for that, the technological advancement of man should be somewhat similar to the technological advancement of the extraterrestrial beings that emitted the signal. Let me explain this a little more. There can be many beings in this universe that use different energies and mechanisms that are not the energies and mechanisms that humans currently know how to use. In such a case, the technical signals of man and those creatures may not connect with each other.
Now let’s focus on America’s NASA. They claim that their tests so far have not found evidence of extraterrestrial life. But they have said that they have found clues about who may be alive or thought to have been extinct before. For example, in 2018, the Curiosity rover on Agaharu found organic matter in the Gale crater of Mars. They also issued a research report on those substances. The research report can be read here.
Research paper link –> Mars carbon matter research
Now let’s focus on the civilizations that existed on Earth in the past. This is the reason to focus on this. Some scholars argue that according to the ruins and documents of past civilizations, there have been clues that indicate that those civilizations had contact with other intelligent beings in the universe. I would like to highlight the word “clues” in the above sentence. Because no one has proven those things. The reason why some scholars think this way is that we cannot explain some of the creations of past civilizations from what we currently know. There are many such inexplicable creations in past civilizations. Let’s talk about some of them in this article.
1. Puma Punku Archaeological Site of Bolivia
2. Sirius in art and astronomy of Dogon
In the year 1931, two French anthropologists conducted research on the Dogon tribe in West Africa. They aim to study the history, social patterns, and cultural characteristics of the Dogon population. The Dogon tribe is an isolated tribe separated from other tribes. The anthropologists who conducted this research observed something surprising. Being a very undeveloped growth in all other respects, they have known some special astronomical facts for thousands of years. I will tell you those facts now.
* The Earth moves in an elliptical orbit around the Sun.
* Earth rotates around its axis.
* Jupiter has moons around it.
* Saturn has a ring around it.
So, curious about the knowledge possessed by the undeveloped Dogon tribe, these two anthropologists studied them for many years. Years later, the priests of the Dogon tribe reveal the secrets of the tribe to these two anthropologists. Pointing to a bright star in the night sky, the high priest says: “This star looks like one star to the naked eye, but it is not. It is a system made up of 2 stars and another planet. It was the powerful guests named Nummo who came here from that star system thousands of years ago and told us these things.”
According to the reports of the two anthropologists, the priest is talking about the Sirius star system. It looks like one star to the naked eye. In 1862, using a powerful telescope, scientists learned that there were two stars. So how exactly did the Dogon tribes know from thousands of years ago what scientists have only recently learned using telescopes and mathematics? There is a report published by a professor at Athens University about this research. Anyone interested can read the report here.
Report link –> Sirius in art and astronomy of Dogon
3. A helicopter showing in hieroglyph of the Egyptian Temple of Seti
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