What does it matter if we're alone?

Carlos Alberto Montaner

The discussion has landed on newspapers and universities like the spacecraft Phoenix on the surface of Mars. Is there life in that inhospitable place? If there is life, and if the life scientists find resembles our planet's, even in a very basic form, it is possible to assume that it also exists in other parts of the universe and that it may also have evolved as it did on earth. The Vatican's theologians, who finally have accepted Darwin, have pointed out that evolution (something that, at this point in time, is very difficult to oppose) does not deny the existence of God. In this new theology, God simply unleashed the process. What for? Nobody knows; not even the theologians, amazing people who -- like some politicians -- do not know uncertainty.

Maybe that's the absurd question -- what for? So far, life seems to be a rare process of oxidation that matter undergoes under certain exceptional conditions. For reasons we do not understand, some molecules, under very special circumstances, undergo a chemical process that, with the passing of sidereal time, evolves capriciously until they become sponges, tulips or people, just to mention three odd creatures among the millions of beings that populate our world. Nobody knows if behind that slow mutation into living beings lay either randomness or the “intelligent design” of a divine will, but it is hard to understand what compelled the Creator to intelligently design, for example, the 200 viruses that cause the common cold. These troublesome spawns of evolution have kept our noses running for millennia. What for? Nobody knows, either.

Not everything is unknown, however. Science believes two things that complement each other, on one hand, and clash, on the other. The first certainty is an old observation that nobody argues against: life, that process of oxidation, is always destined to die. It ends. But matter, the source of life, as Lavoisier proved in the 18th Century, does not disappear; it transforms. It becomes something else. Energy, for example, because mass and energy, as we were taught in our teens, are two expressions of the same phenomenon. In other words, the fate of everything that lives is to disappear, but the fate of everything that does not live is to live on.

There is something slightly pathetic in our psychological need to find life in space, as if the occurrence of this phenomenon had a special transcendence, without realizing that much more remarkable than the appearance of any vital feature on Mars is the mere existence of that huge ball of inorganic matter, subjected to the mystery of gravity, today compact, yesterday gaseous, today frozen, yesterday igneous, put together by the prodigious mystery of subatomic particles, organized in atoms and integrated in molecules, that travels and spins blindly in space, within a solar system that is, in turn, merely a tiny corner of an insignificant galaxy. Compared with that incredible spectacle of fire, speed and space, what importance might have that minor issue, that small anecdote we call life, which is, in any case, destined to disappear?

When I was 8 years old, my uncle Pepe Jesús took me to see a movie that almost caused me a bladder accident: “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” It was about a spacecraft from Mars that landed in Washington, near the White House, on a mission of peace. At that point, the Americans made a mistake (like they did in Iraq) and started a godawful pandemonium. At that time, almost everyone was sure that the universe was populated by beings that were very developed and wicked and were here to crush us to a pulp. Every week, a UFO showed up in Mexico, and there was no shortage of earthlings lifted into spacecrafts -- our first astronauts -- and later returned gently to earth by some small beings with big heads, after enjoying a tour of the stars in a sort of intergalactic taxi ride.

Many years later, while I taught at a university in Puerto Rico, I learned that the city of Arecibo, on the island, was the site of the world's most powerful radio/radar telescope antenna, feverishly sending signals to the ends of the universe in an effort to elicit an intelligent response that might confirm we were not alone in space. Evidently, the messages never were answered, probably because no one or nothing was able to detect them.

So far, the lesson seems very clear. We're alone. So what?

Mayo 30, 2008

Imprimir esta página