Alien Life May Already Be Extinct

Photo Credit: Big Ear Radio Observatory and North American AstroPhysical Observatory

We look to the stars hoping to find signs of life elsewhere in our universe. Our search includes listening for audio and video signals, and we have entire agencies such as SETI who are dedicated to this search. The problem is we may have already missed our window to meet extraterrestrial life.

Human civilization is approximately 10,000 years old. Sounds like we've been around for a long time, but Earth is estimated to be a little over 4.5 billion years old. Even if aliens have taken the time to explore and/or visit Earth, they may have done it at a time when humanity wasn't even around. Maybe dinosaurs were the species at a time when alien life visited our planet and if this is a possibility it is possibly safe to assume that alien life overlooked Earth because they didn't deem that our planet had intelligent life.

With the advancement of technologies in the past 100 years alone, we ourselves have the ability to destroy ourselves. Crossing our fingers, hopefully this is something we as a species will never do, but one has to wonder...if another alien species developed at a slightly quicker rate than humanity, could they have already destroyed themselves before we ever had the chance to meet? It is possible that intelligent life that has existed elsewhere has already run into their own extinction.

Even if an organization like SETI found proof via a signal, by the time we could send a signal back or travel to the planet where it originated from, that species could be long gone. Signals can travels hundreds and even thousands of years. It's possible that the species could even be extinct by the time we first detected a signal.

This possibly has already occurred. In 1977, Jerry R. Ehman discovered what is now known as the "Wow! Signal" at the Big Ear radio telescope located at Ohio State University. The signal lasted for 72 seconds and is called the "Wow! Signal" because on the printout he wrote the word Wow. Since then SETI has not been able to find another signal similar to this.

"We should have seen it again when we looked for it 50 times. Something suggests it was an Earth-sourced signal that simply got reflected off a piece of space debris," said Ehman who doubts it came from extraterrestrial life. The signal came from a location that is estimated to be 17,600 light years away. While Ehman may be right, it is also possible that the species that created it is long gone. This doesn't mean that intelligent life elsewhere doesn't exist. It just means that it just doesn't exist now.

Another possibility is that by the time alien life does get around to being able to visit Earth, we may have already destroyed ourselves through nuclear war or climate change. Will they find archeological evidence of our existence? Possibly. They may also find a barren planet covered in sand. Maybe this is what happened to alien life if any existed on Mars.

Yet even another possibility that should be looked at is if we are the most advanced civilization in the nearby universe currently. The conditions could be right for alien life to develop into an intelligent species, but we may be years ahead of these aliens. We could be looking for signs of their life when in turn, they should be looking for signs of us.

With a universe that is billions of years old and contains billions of stars and planets, it's hard to believe that we're alone. It's just not hard to believe that other intelligent life may have already lived and died off.