Chapter 2 - Who is in the Universe?

 Our universe is literally packed with a billion trillion stars within 100 billion galaxies.  It is really unimaginable as to how massive the universe is and how many planets there are with intelligent life forms.  As the father in the movie Contact said when his daughter asked if he thought there was intelligent life in the universe, "If there isn't, it would be a great waste of space."

The only logical conclusion is that there has to not only be intelligent life but intelligent life in the universe is very abundant.  Think about Star Trek and how the Enterprise traveled from one star system to the next and they encountered all types of life forms.  Perhaps that idea is not so much science fiction but it is rather close to reality.  Reality might be more unbelievable than any science fiction ever written.

Go back to when humans on Earth were living in small tribes, say 10,000 years ago.  This is a very short time in our world history of 4.5 billion years.  What did the average person believe about the size of the Earth or how many other people existed on Earth?  They usually lived in a relatively small area of land and were not aware of anything more than a few miles from them.  They might be aware of another tribe or two but that was it.  They had no concept of being on a continent and how large their continent was.  They had no idea that there were hundreds of tribes throughout the continent.  They had no idea there were several continents with hundreds of other tribes.  They could not conceive that they were on a large planet and it was round.  So, they obviously had no concept of our solar system or our galaxy.  

Relative to universal time, 10,000 years is a blink of the eye, but in that short amount of time, we have realized that there is a whole planet full of humans and those people 10,000 years ago would have never believed us if we told them how many people were on Earth and how large the Earth was.

As you know, it was as recent as 500 years ago that humans thought the Earth was flat.  We didn't know there were two very large continents with people, and this was such a short time ago.  We still were unaware of what a planet actually was or much at all about the stars we saw in the night sky.  People could come up with theories about the stars, but the theories were not reality.  We just made guesses based on very limited knowledge.  When you have such limited knowledge, it is nearly impossible to make up a valid theory.

Over the next two to three hundred years, we traveled and learned a lot about our planet and then telescopes finally provided us a glimpse of the skies.  But, we still had a limited understanding of what we found.  It has only been in the last 100 years that we have gained our knowledge of the size of the universe and we still have a lot of questions.  Is this the only universe?  Are there multiple universes co-existing simultaneously?  We still have very limited knowledge of consciousness, time, and space.  

Today, we think we are so advanced, but we are still in our infancy with our knowledge of the universe.  Again, we try to develop theories to explain things but our knowledge is still too limited so our theories are far from reality.  

Just like the primitive tribal humans who were so unaware of other humans on Earth or the size of the Earth, we are also unaware of the tremendous population or size of our universe.  We continue to live in our own limited space while there are billions of life forms and around us.

Most people today are aware of the many cases of UFOs and theories of how aliens from other planets have been visiting and influencing humans on Earth for centuries.  Skeptics say, "If there are aliens, why don't they just land and show themselves?"  Actually, they have.