Over the last few weeks I’ve seen two reports of UFO’s, which refueled the debate about whether we are alone in the Universe. Carl Sagan famously pointed out that with so many
galaxies and potentially earth-like planets out there, the odds were good that there is life somewhere else in our galaxy, if not in our solar system.
Also, there has been renewed curiosity about strange radio signals that were picked up, ostensibly, from a faraway star. Many do not know that a non-profit organization known as SETI is always attuned to possible radio transmission from life on other planets. In their own words. . .
“SETI is an acronym for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. It is an effort to detect evidence of technological civilizations that may exist elsewhere in the universe, particularly in our Galaxy. There are potentially billions of locations outside our Solar System that may host life. With our current technology, we have some ability to discover evidence of cosmic habitation, and, in the specific case of our SETI experiments, to find beings that are at a technological level at least as advanced as our own.” https://www.seti.org/history-seti-institute
It’s all intriguing to me because the distances between us and our closest potential galactic neighbors are staggering. Proxima Centauri (one of the stars in the Alpha Centauri system) is approximately 4.25 light years away, so if you could ride a beam of light, you could be there in about four years and three months. At the fastest speed available for today’s space traveler, you would be there, are you ready, in about 80,000 years.
Since it would take just as long to get here as it would to go there, doesn’t that mean that they, the aliens, would have left tens of thousands of years ago, perhaps even before today’s humans were here, or at least before anything remotely resembling a human civilization? After all, the oldest civilization seems to be the Sumerians, who inhabited the southern Mesopotamia about three thousand years before Christ. Call me skeptical, but I doubt if E.T. would have wanted to go anywhere from where he couldn’t phone home. Of course the hope is that he would have developed a mode of transportation which traveled near the speed of light, but that’s a subject for another day.
Please don’t get me wrong. I love what SETI is doing, and think we should learn all we can about the universe. It does show forth the glory of God, as Psalm 19 reminds us. But when we forget that this very planet is the place in which the God of Creation chose to place humans, the stewards of Creation, it’s easy to get off track. For it was these very frail humans to whom the Son of God came, in the form of an infant born of a woman, to complete Adam’s unfinished stewardship task. It’s not being prideful, as the psalmist acknowledges, but humbling. There has been an Alien Invasion, by God Himself.
So as far as life on other planets goes, forgive me for remaining an agnostic. Besides, if you were from a technologically advanced civilization, would you move to Baltimore?
It’s just a rhetorical question.
“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
You have put all things under his feet.”
Psalm 8:3-6