What if We're Alone

Late last year, the solitude of Voyager 1 struck me - so far away, and yet in cosmic terms, in our own backyard still. But I've had a thought that lingered since then, and I'm expressing it now as sad as it may be.

We know the universe is large, and old. We know that (to the best of publicly admitted knowledge) we haven't yet heard from another stellar body. The nature of what we look at and listen to allows for time travel of a sort, so all we know for certainty is that the farther away something is, the longer back in time we're seeing it. You see light and radiation move at a defined speed (thanks Albert) and so the light we see is therefore not happening in real time from it's departure point. An illustration would be that the radio commands and replies to the Mars Rover - on our closest real planetary companion - take 20 minutes to go back and forth. So, it's feasible that it sends a message, something happens to it, and the Earthbound scientific community listening in don't realize it for up to 20 minutes. Likewise, the Sun in the sky may have 'gone-out' - we wouldn't know it for 9 minutes. (Scientifically, our distance to the sun varies only a little based on the roughly circular shape of our orbit, whereas we can be 'close' to Mars, or it can be on the other side of the sun depending on the time of year). Without going all physics formula on you, distance in this sense is very related to time.

All of which is slightly diversionary to the main point.

What if our explorations and listing and watching the cosmos reveal (or demonstrate by or not revealing) that we are indeed alone. That there aren't any other worlds out there (yet?) with sufficiently advanced capability to engage us in conversation - or that they just aren't there.

What does it say about our own existence, that we might be the only ones in this vast place. Does it imply we're divine, or an accident. Our "being here" certainly can't be the main thrust of the universe's reason to be if we're the only ones. It's unlikely, sure but the possibility does exist. Even more realistic is the idea that someone had to be first. Think about that for a moment..the first civilization to emerge would have indeed been alone. While they may see the same primordial soup that they emerged from in other places, at some point they would have to admit that they were all by themselves for their foreseeable future.

That perhaps is the silver lining here. As time & distance are so closely related, we are given the ability to see back in time - and even though we may discover nothing out there, there's always the present. Who knows who or what may come around the next corner.