Alien
| “ | We live in a world where extraterrestrials could be everywhere and you would never know. A world driven by gods, unexplained structures, countless stories and extraterrestrial occurrences. There is proof that our planet has been and still continues to be visited by extraterrestrial life for the universe is like an endless ocean filled with droplets. These droplets are planets. And some of these droplets are more special than others. They contain something called life. | „ |
| ~ Trevor Bruttenholm |
Aliens are extraterrestrial life forms that exist and originate outside the planet Earth, the only place in the universe currently known by humans to support life.
Description[]
The term "alien" is generally reserved for beings that arrive from otherworldly places. Two of the most prominent ones are extra-terrestrial, which describes being that came from other planets, and ultra-terrestrials, which describes those that came from another dimension. Interestingly, like humans in particular, the supernatural is also believed to have existed in other alien worlds. However, other supernatural beings like angels and gods have hinted at their existence but curiously barely ever acknowledged them as a whole.
Aliens were revealed to have originated from two sources that are separated into branches similar to humans. One branch is the extraterrestrial which evolved on a foreign planet from Ubbo-Sathla whilst the second branch that being ultraterrestrial spawned from Abhoth. Most scientists believe that if extraterrestrial life exists, its evolution occurred independently, in different places. An alternative hypothesis, held by a minority, is panspermia. This suggests that life could have been created elsewhere and spread across the universe, between habitable planets. These two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive.
Overview[]
Since the mid-20th century, there has been an ongoing search for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, from radios used to detect possible extraterrestrial signals, to telescopes used to search for potentially habitable extrasolar planets. Over the years, science fiction works have increased the public's interest in the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Some encourage aggressive methods to try to get in contact with life in outer space, whereas others argue that it might be dangerous to actively call attention to Earth.
Alien life, such as microorganisms, has been hypothesized to exist within the Solar System and throughout the universe. This hypothesis relies on the vast size and consistent physical laws of the observable universe. It is said that it would be improbable for life not to exist somewhere other than Earth.
This argument is embodied in the Copernican principle, which states that Earth does not occupy a unique position in the Universe, and the mediocrity principle, which states that there is nothing special about life on Earth. The chemistry of life may have begun shortly after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, during a habitable epoch when the universe was only 10–17 million years old. Life may have emerged independently at many places throughout the universe, but at different times, meaning that even if other life exists, humans might not exist within the timespan needed in order to be able to observe it.
The existence of aliens remains hypothetical as there is currently little, if any, evidence to indicate that other planets can support life, and there is no evidence of extraterrestrial life that has been widely accepted by the scientific community. Some, however, point to moons of Jupiter or other celestial bodies that might conceivably have some forms of life (bacterial or otherwise).
Kardashev Scale[]
The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it is capable of harnessing and using. The measure was proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev (1932–2019) in 1964 and was named after him.
The scale is hypothetical, and refers to energy consumption on a cosmic scale. Various extensions of the scale have since been proposed, including a wider range of power levels (Types 0, IV, and V) and the use of metrics other than pure power (e.g., computational growth or food consumption). Starting from a functional definition of civilization, based on the immutability of physical laws and using Human civilization as a model of extrapolation, Kardashev's initial model was developed. He proposed a classification of civilizations into three types, based on the axiom of exponential growth:
- A Type I civilization is able to access all the energy available on its planet and store it for consumption. Hypothetically, it should also be able to control natural events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc.
- A Type II civilization can directly consume a star's energy, most likely through the use of a Dyson sphere.
- A Type III civilization is able to capture all the energy emitted by its galaxy, and every object within it, such as every star, black hole, etc.
