What if the Aliens Think We’re Dinosaurs?

A question with more merit than you may think

Photo by Leo_Visions on Unsplash

When we look into the night sky, we find ourselves face to face with a distant past. Stars and planets that appear to us as plain as day may no longer exist at all. It takes that long for the light from those distant nebulae to reach our planet; what looks as tangible as the ground beneath our feet may have evaporated a billion years ago.

That’s the scale of our universe.

The stars in the night sky tell stories of bygone times. Every corner of the cosmos comes equipped with an ineffable history. But what stories might our planet tell to the universe around us? What would a prospective civilization see if they were looking in on us from afar?

It’s hard enough to grasp that the stars we see before our very eyes may no longer be there, but the inverse of that reality is arguably even stranger to grapple with. From most vantage points in our universe, whatever aliens would see looking toward our planet would hardly be the world of neon, skyscrapers, and airplanes we’re familiar with.

Within a few hundred light years of our home star, they might be able to make out some semblance of an earlier civilization. They might gain a clear glimpse into our industrial revolution.

At a distance of over a thousand light years away, humankind would appear to be in the Dark Ages — or earlier still. Add another zero and we’d be Neanderthals in caves cooking now-extinct creatures over the very first fires.

65 million light years away, and aliens would see not a planet of people, but one ruled by giant, terrible lizards.

The point in time into which those potential aliens might be seeing could be the deciding factor in whether or not they attempt contact. Some think that aliens have discovered us and have astutely decided to avoid making their presence known. But it’s insurmountably more likely that if they’ve found our tiny blue dot at all, they’ve only seen its distant, distant past.

There are places in our universe so far away that our planet would look like little more than a churning ball of molten rock. Even further still, our very galaxy would have yet to even come to fruition. A glance toward our corner of the sky would reveal an empty black void, a liminal space for an inconceivable 80 billion years to come.

That’s the scale of the universe we call home.

In fact, if an advanced alien civilization were looking toward us from over 99% of the possible perspectives in our gaping sky, they’d see a world of dinosaurs — or earlier. The chances that they’d see even a vague semblance of who we are as people today is astronomically unlikely. They would need to be our cosmic neighbors in an expanse that stretches possible infinities for us to even appear as cavemen around fires. The sheer multitude of planets on which intelligent life could be hiding stretches the mind to its very limits.

Throughout the known universe, only about 0.00000000000269% of it would be close enough for alien life to look toward Earth and see humans at all. And even then, the “known” universe is called that for a reason. There’s no particular cause to believe that the little we’ve made out of our night sky is all that there is to it. After all, we’re reasonably sure it’s still expanding.

Making contact with an alien civilization is every bit as much a matter of coinciding calendars as it is looking toward the right star or planet. It’s probable that throughout our universe, life is plentiful. But locating that civilization isn’t merely a matter of combing inconceivable distances, but inconceivable lengths of time.

One of the strangest ideas about the scope of our universe is that it blurs the very line between distance and time. When we look up toward the stars at night, it’s the only time in life that we see with our naked eye — not just into other places — but into other times.

The period of time in which humankind has had access to tools like telescopes and satellites is an infinitesimal blip in an ocean that spans every conceivable direction. Even the most nearby life in the universe probably amounts to little more than a lone raft in the Pacific Ocean. If you turn away for a celestial second a fiery squall could obscure the sight.

In the search for extraterrestrial life, commonly abbreviated as SETI, this raises interesting questions. For example, how do we account for the fact that any signals we might receive today are from a distant point in a civilization’s past? And conversely, how do we decide what to broadcast, knowing others might only receive our distorted signals eons and eons in the future? These are questions that transcend borders and have far-reaching implications. And there are no simple answers.

There’s a general cloudiness in the public attitude toward extraterrestrial life. Too often, our perceptions of these faraway species are confined to the tall green men in saucers depicted in sci-fi movies. But there are few films that manage to reasonably portray the sheer versatility of forms life may take, let alone the unremittingly huge variety of places those creatures might occupy. To fairly depict the voyages between the planets of our own solar system would involve droning waits unbecoming of good television.

But that’s the universe we live in — the one so inconceivably large that only our next-door neighbors can look toward our planet and see beyond single-cellular life. It’s a near certainty that other life is out there, but it’s hard to fathom the sheer unlikelihood they’ll be in the right place and the right time for us to make that momentous first contact.

Simply put, the aliens might really believe that we’re dinosaurs. But far more likely is the hair-raising reality that they’re not even that close.

---

This article was originally published on Medium.

---

If you enjoyed this article, you can support my work on here for under $2.00 a month. It would make an enormous difference in helping me to bring you the quality writing you deserve during these times when journalism is under attack.