WITH AGE COMES WISDOM AND UNDERSTANDING

As for individuals of the human species, it is safe to say that with age and experience comes an increase in our own personal wisdom and understanding. I believe that it is fair to say that we can say the same for our species/society as a whole. The evidence for this can be seen by simply looking at how far we have come with technology and how we continue to grow. If growth in wisdom and understanding occurs with us as a species, it is reasonable to presume that it occurs with ETs also. There is no way that we can know how old an ET species may be or how much knowledge and understanding of the universe they may have. However, it is possible to make some age estimates based the age of the universe and what we know now. Specifically, the age of the universe puts limits on the age of life in the universe, and we can use our timeline of life as a basis.

The following are the current best estimates;

Age of the Universe, about 13.8 billion years old

Age of our own galaxy about 13.5 billion years old

Age of oldest star (sun) in our galaxy, about 13.2 billion years old

Age of our sun about 4.6 billion years old

Age of earth, about 4.5 billion years old

Age of intelligent life on earth, about 7,000-10,000 years old

Age of human technology about 250 years old

For comparison and additional information the following is for our nearest neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy;

Age of Andromeda, about 10 billion years old

Distance from Milky Way Galaxy (earth) about 2.5 million light years

Number of stars in Andromeda Galaxy, about 1 trillion

Number of stars in Milky Way Galaxy, about 250 million, (25% of the number of stars in Andromeda)

Diameter of the Andromeda Galaxy, about 220,000 light years

Diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy, about 100,000 light years

A brief explanation is necessary, a light year is primarily a measure of distance, how far light travels in a year, about 5,878,499,817,000 miles. However, it can also be thought of in terms of time with respect to a specific distance. That is, traveling at the speed of light, it would take 250 million years for the light of stars in the Andromeda galaxy to reach us here on Earth. In other words, the Andromeda Galaxy is a really, really long way away from earth in both time and distance. This is the argument used by UFO and ET skeptics to say that UFOs and ETs simply cannot exist. The caveat to this skepticism is that it is based on the limits of the physics we know today. This is why I am going to dig a little deeper into age.

The biggest question that you have to ask yourself: is the physics and science we know today, or are currently working on, the end of physics and discoveries? That is, once we have the current theories solved we will be done because there is no more science to learn. I do not believe anything remotely like this to be true. I believe that there is so much more for us to learn in physics and the sciences, and I strongly believe that today’s scientists are mired down in narrow historic beliefs. This is actually a discussion for another paper, but it is important to say this as often as possible. Continuing on.

More and more potential life supporting planets are being found almost every day. As a result of these findings, more and more scientists believe that life exists elsewhere in our galaxy and the universe. And, for us today we only have to look at a couple of things to know that there has to be more physics and science in our future. There is the issue of dark matter and dark energy. Nobody has a clue on what this stuff is, how it came into being or how to study it. There is another significant reality of our universe that nobody has a clue about, anti-matter. It has been created in experiments so it is a fact that it exists. So why does our universe not have free anti-matter? Many scientists and physicists believe that as our society continues to age, there will be a lot more science and physics learned. There simply has to be in order for us to even understand the universe we live in today.

So, if age can bring about new discoveries in science and physics how much age are we looking at for other life in the universe? As listed in the beginning, the estimated age of the universe is close to the estimated age of our galaxy. This makes it possible to relate conclusions for our galaxy to the rest of the universe. The available estimates show that the first star (sun) in our galaxy is about 13.2 billion years old. Using this as a starting point and the age of our solar system with life here on earth, about 4.6 billion years old, this means that there has been about 8.6 billion years for life to develop and age in our galaxy before our own existence. Same calculation for the Andromeda galaxy, our next door neighbor, shows that it had about 5 billion years for life to develop. And recall, it is 4 times the size of our galaxy.

A simple evaluation of age shows that there have been billions of years for ET civilizations to come into existence and flourish before us. How many other civilizations could be in our galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy or the universe that are millions of years older than we are. How much knowledge and understanding of the universe could some of these older species have?

Could it be a universal trait that as we as a civilization grow older we gain knowledge and grow a little smarter? Given the number of civilizations that could be hundreds, thousands or even millions of years older than we are, isn’t it a bit naïve to believe that we are close to learning all there is to learn?