Was watching "Is It Real" on Okto (that's the channel that used to be Arts Central. It's a sort of arts, culture and documentary channel). It's pretty much a documentary that asks if some popular beliefs and claims are real. Topics range from faith healing to vampires, bigfoot to aliens. This week's episode was about life on Mars.
Since I was a kid, I never had any doubt that there is life out there in the universe. As a child, I would point up at the little pinpoints of light up in the night sky and ask what they were. An adult, sometimes a parent or teacher would say thay are stars, stellar bodies just like our sun. Now, in the mind of a child, if there's great big sun-like spheres in space, there should also be great big planets with life on them. There was no question about it.
Of course, when I got to be older, skepticism, the current method of "scientific" inquiry and the crowd I hung around with, got in the way of simple child-like logic. And honestly, I hated believing in a universe where there was no life other than on earth. Actually, I hated the notion of there being no sentient life except on Earth. What a cold, lonely and scary thought. Now, all my life I have subscribed to the notion that some intelligent being probably made all of this. I simply cannot imagine why a creative being would not only stop at only creating life on 1 planet but then go on to make the entire magnificant cosmos completely devoid of any other form of organic sentient intelligence.
However, what really made me sit up during "Is It Real" was not the evidence of some kind of life on Mars or on another planet, it was the stalwat proclaimation of a particular biologist. I can't remember his name, but I know how he looked. He didn't look like a typical academic. He was rugged, craggy-faced (probably from spending a lot of time in the desert sun) and reminded me a little bit of the rough, pioneer-type cowboys of the Old West. He is a believer in finding microscopic organisms on the red planet, but he did mention that in the event that we don't find ANY evidence of life on Mars, past or present. We shouldn't feel discouraged, but go ahead and colonise, terraform the planet - introduce life.
I mean, what have we got to lose?
He later went ahead and said that in the event, we as a race find out that we are indeed alone in this vast universe, we should go forth and introduce life. After all, we don't need the presence of other intelligent life to create for ourselves a meaningful role in this universe. If there is indeed no other like us, and we are unique spot of life in a lifeless void... he concluded that perhaps our role in the great cosmos is to spread life all over the vastness of space.
Somehow, its really really hard to feel discouraged after hearing that statement. To be honest, after years of not seeing any hard evidence of aliens (I also read up the books written by UFO skeptics, it gives a good reality check on the evidence ) I am just a wee bit disappointed.
I guess, sometimes if you get lemons from universe, you might as well make lemonade, maybe you can make a few bucks off it in the long run.
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