Do they exist? I'm talking about Aliens..

A majority of people have their own fantasy regarding aliens and you also may have once thought of what if there exist another species like us or like something else. But that surely do frighten us or atleast throw us into deep thought of our future. But, have thought of what an alien actually mean? What if we ourselves are alien of some kind? Have we ever encountered them? and many more. Come let’s see where these questions lead to.

Well, who or what is/are an alien?

In human language we call them foreign. But, the term alien is getting used for things that are not of earthy origin, like an alien species refers to a species (in this context), a species which is not native to earth or is not found anywhere on this earth. Similarly, it is also true that species residing in others planet (if they exist and intelligent enough to distinguish their non-selfs).

You may have heard of the term 'Alien species invasion'(more about it on Is Predation that Cruel) extensively in use in ecology, where a species non-native to that area cause harm to native flora and fauna as the 'alien species' got none of its predator there in that new area. here alien doesn't refer to some organism or species that came out of space but is a species of this world itself. But, the thing is that they are species that are 'foreigner' on that particular geological area. 

Hence, the term 'alien' is used based upon the context taken. And here we will take alien as defined in first definition.

Do they really exist?

Well, there comes the controversy. One may directly say they do not exist as there is no sign of them. Yes, we haven't detected any signs of them till now. But it will be a stupidity if we ignore this, science never ignore things just because they have no prove (of either their presence or their absence). 

Renowned Israeli-American physicist Avi Loeb's work point to other direction, consciously. In his work he pointed out that about 25 billion stars (i.e. roughly one quarter of total stars in Milky Way), lie in a habitable zone. He consciously rounded that number off to 10 billion only "And then there are about a trillion galaxies like the Milky Way,” he says, “which means there are about 1022 [10 billion trillion] planets in the observable universe that could potentially host life as we know it.” 

So, there is great chance of their presence as one can easily understand from the above paragraph.

Have we ever encountered an alien (species)?

We have already seen from above that the probability is great but, the question is then where are they? if they are there then Have we ever encountered them?

Well, we might or might not had encountered them. There are many controversy and claiming of sighting alien objects, most famous of which are the UFOs, but till date there are no concrete evidence of claimed objects being UFO, some others are crop circles, Nazca lines, etc.

But logically where are they? We have never consciously met them till date, with solid proof of the meeting.

Many believe that having life is no rare in the context of the universe but having intelligent life and civilization able to start expedition in search of life anywhere else is quite rarer.

The game changer here is an object (unknown and previously undetected) named Oumuamua — Hawaiian for “first scout from a distant place”, which was discovered using Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS telescope on 19^th October 2017, moving past sun at about 315431 km/hr. (depicting its extra solar system origin) evolved from an asteroid to a comet and recently as a chunk of Hydrogen ice by many theories and honestly we still don’t surely what was that? It may be something that its name suggests like the Voyager 2 of human technology.

 

Why Mars is a hot topic here?

Well, Mars is special here in this topic and it is the one that we can reach. Although Venus is closest to Earth but don’t fall in habitable zones defined by calculations and observations, hence is none of our interest. But, Mars does fulfill that condition and hence became a good

source of research and hope.

Adding to the above Mars also got water on it as ice caps on its poles much like our own planet, and very recently a few week ago Rover Curiosity (2014-present) found Methane on Mars’s atmosphere which could have originated as a result of microbial actions there.

And now, you can understand why Mars is special. You may think what is there on those small things when there is no sign of intelligent life at all to chat with.

Yes, that thought is legit, but thing is that if there is life already present there, it will be easy to make it habitable for man. And that’s going to be a new era of colonization, the planetary colonization, which have its own pros and cons, but as the physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison wrote in 1959, one year before SETI began: “The probability of success is difficult to estimate, but if we never search, the chance of success is zero.” we shouldn't stop before giving it a try.