Are there any scientists interested in extraterrestrial life?

Yes

In ancient times, people’s concept of the world consisted of two parts: the human earth and the divine heaven. The earth carried mountains, rivers, and living things, and the sky was inlaid with all kinds of things. The sun, moon and stars where God dwells. God is noble, supreme, and omnipotent, while humans are humble. God’s world is full of light, happiness, and joy, while the human world is full of disasters and misfortunes. God has saved mankind once, and God will save mankind again. It can be said that the formation of the concept of God is the origin of the concept of extraterrestrial intelligent creatures. In the era of ancient Greece and Rome, with the progress of society, the development of transportation, and the expanding scope of people's activities, people saw stars in different areas of the sky in different geographical locations. When people are sailing, they find that the first thing they see from a ship coming from a distance is its mast. More importantly, people noticed the round shadows of the moon and the earth during solar and lunar eclipses, all of which made people rethink the shapes of the sun, moon and stars and their relationship. At that time, people's world picture was equivalent to the meaning of the Ptolemaic universe model, which was centered on the earth where humans lived, and included a moon, a sun, five planets and numerous stars to form the entire world. There are many such worlds in the universe, and at the center of each world there is a planet that is as suitable for biological survival as the earth. In this way, there are infinitely many intelligent creatures like humans in the universe. At that time, the Pythagoreans, atomists such as Democritus, Epicurus and his disciple Lucretius, Thales, Heracles, etc. all held this view.

Before Plato, world pluralism was very popular, but since Plato's time, this situation has changed a lot. Because this great ancient Greek philosopher opposed world pluralism, he was convinced that the earth was the only world suitable for the survival of intelligent creatures. As for whether other planets were suitable for the survival of biological creatures, it was undecided. By the time of Aristotle, Plato's student, humankind's technological level had developed considerably. People built telescopes and began to use them to observe and study the moon and other planets. At the same time, people have also become accustomed to using some experimental methods to explore the objective laws of nature. Aristotle inherited and developed the ideas of his teacher and proposed that the universe is limited and the earth is the only one and the only celestial body suitable for the survival of living creatures and the existence of intelligent creatures. In this way, the earth where human beings live is placed in a special position, and human beings are elevated to a supreme position, which lays the foundation for the formation of the medieval theological cosmology.

The group represented by the scholastic philosopher Albert Magnus, the theologian St. Bonabantura and the German philosopher Nicholas of Moses, the cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, insisted on the world of infinity and pluralism. They believe: If God's power is infinite, then why did He only create a limited world? Infinite creativity can only be displayed by creating all possible worlds. If God pleased, He could create a hundred worlds. All these worlds, like the human world, are God's masterpieces and need God's salvation. The existence of extraterrestrial intelligent creatures is not only possible, but inevitable, because in fact God will do that. The group represented by Thomas Aquinas, a student of Magnus and a famous Italian economic philosopher, believes that the world is unitary, that the world was created by God for mankind, and that mankind is God's only masterpiece. They say that if God created other worlds at the beginning of creation, then these worlds would be either similar to our world or different from ours. If it is similar, then God’s creation is futile and tasteless, which is inconsistent with God’s wisdom; if other worlds are different from ours, then our world is not the only perfect one, and there are also There is no such thing as an all-encompassing, perfect world. Likewise, this situation cannot be the work of a perfect Creator. Therefore, human beings can only be unique.

Copernicus ushered in a new era. His heliocentric theory completely broke the geocentric system that had long imprisoned people's thinking. His theory transformed the earth from the center of the universe into an extremely ordinary planet, and the humans living on the earth were no longer the central purpose and inevitable reason for the existence of the world. The status of human beings in the universe seems insignificant, and there is nothing special about human beings. Looking back, we find that human beings are actually just self-deceiving and arrogant animals. Like a strong earthquake, this destroyed mankind's previous beliefs and the foundation on which faith existed. Human beings felt unprecedented emptiness, loss and confusion. The discovery of the American continent greatly stimulated human curiosity and inspired people's strong desire to continue searching for unknown continents on the earth. At the same time, it also made people who are good at association look at other planets with the same mood and regard them as distant planets. A "New World" that is also suitable for the survival of intelligent creatures. The development of telescope technology has revealed that there are mountains on the moon, Jupiter has satellites like the moon, there are countless stars like the sun in the universe, and the structures of other planets are roughly similar to the earth. This reminds people that all those things are similar to the earth. It is very likely that there are other intelligent creatures existing on similar planets. People also speculate that all planets and stars must have been created for some non-human purpose. Just like the earth is the home of humans, other planets are the happy homes of extraterrestrial intelligent creatures.

During this period, many scientists, represented by Kepler, Huygens, and Durham, agreed with world pluralism and firmly believed in the objective existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. By the beginning of the 19th century, the nebula theory had been generally recognized, and world pluralism was also considered correct. Life is just a special form of organization and movement of matter that is produced regularly on our earth. It is the result of the evolutionary development of carbides at a certain stage of this development.

S. Miller's experiment provided evidence that life can occur naturally on other planets. The experimental conditions are very primitive and simple, among which water is the most important condition. This is also the reason why many scientists today are struggling to find the existence of water in the universe. Many scientists enthusiastically believe that there are creatures scattered everywhere in the universe. Some of them are far more civilized than humans, some are less civilized than us, and some are still in the process of generation and evolution. Herschel even thought the sun could be habitable.

At the end of the 19th century, American astronomer Lowell claimed to have discovered a grand canal on Mars dug by intelligent creatures. Although this discovery was later criticized by many scientists, it made people feel that extraterrestrial intelligence The existence of living things is far away and close before our eyes. Interstellar contact between intelligent beings is considered inevitable. The problem is only, first, how should we contact them so that they know the existence of human beings, our level of civilization, our exact position in the universe, and our friendly attitude; second, if extraterrestrial intelligent creatures have ever arrived. The earth has been here, so what is their purpose? How should humans respond? This mentality is vividly displayed in the American movie "Earth Strikes Back". During this period, modern scientists also accepted the view of world pluralism. They rejected the view that the historical process of the earth is the only phenomenon, and believed that this phenomenon may reappear on other planets. The universe is habitable, the process of human history is cyclical, and interstellar intelligent biological connections are achievable. Bishop Banas first proposed the use of radio for interstellar communication in 1931 in the magazine Nature. With one stone striking a thousand waves, Banas's bold idea greatly stimulated people's imagination and creativity. Galton, a British statistician and pioneer in studying the inheritance of human intelligence, carefully compiled a code for communicating with extraterrestrial intelligent creatures. American astronomer Frank Drake proposed the famous "Drake Equation". To estimate the number of civilizations that exist at the same time as humans on Earth in the Milky Way.

At the end of 1959, Cocconi and Morrison published a plan to use radio to contact extraterrestrial intelligence in the magazine Nature, which triggered a great modern discussion about extraterrestrial intelligence. For a time, there was an unprecedented upsurge in research on extraterrestrial civilizations. Almost all interested scientists pointed their radio antennas at areas in the universe where they believed intelligent life was most likely to exist. They used the most common radio frequencies in the universe, hoping to receive Radio signals that escape from planets where extraterrestrial intelligence exists or are actively emitted by extraterrestrial intelligence. Subsequently, the "Ozma" project, the "Ozma II" project, and the symposium on systematic analysis of the issue of intelligent life in the universe held by the United States and the Soviet Union at the Biragan Observatory of the Armenian Academy of Sciences in the autumn of 1971 have made humankind's research on extraterrestrial life possible. Reached a new climax. In addition to passively receiving signals that may come from extraterrestrial intelligent beings, humans also actively transmit various radio signals and cosmic "letters" into space, hoping that extraterrestrial intelligent beings can receive these signals and respond. However, due to various reasons, humans have not received any "reply" yet. Now, people no longer have much hope for the possibility of other living things in the solar system, because human detectors have visited there one after another, but preliminary detection results show that the natural conditions there are not suitable for biological survival. So humans have placed their hopes on other star systems outside the solar system. Human probes have already flown out of the solar system and headed to the star system closest to the earth. This is a long wait. So far, the only exciting thing is that scientists have found the existence of interstellar organic molecules and water in the interstellar space. In other words, the existence of extraterrestrial life forms is very possible.

It is also worth mentioning that although world pluralism has been generally accepted by people since the 19th century, there are still a considerable number of theologians and scientists who oppose world pluralism. Whewell, dean of Trinity College, Cambridge University, believes that all possible evidence indicates that conditions on other planets in the solar system are very different from those on Earth, and therefore it can be considered that these planets are not suitable for the existence of various life forms as we know them. There is also no evidence that objects similar to the planets in our solar system exist around other stars. Evolutionists represented by Darwin, Wallace, Dubzhinsky, Simpson, and Meyer criticized those who supported the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial beings for lacking the historical concept of evolution. They believe that each species is produced by one and only one parent species. Any existing species can be traced back to the original life form, and its entire lineage relationship is fixed. Therefore, if one of the millions of species in a line of descent becomes extinct before it becomes the next species in that line, the particular species that forms the final link in that particular line will never exist.

The development of mankind has depended on roughly a million unique changes, each of which has had a specific form, each of which has depended on some previous change in the organic and inorganic environment, even on the same planet, on The long river of change composed of many individual changes in different places that are isolated from each other has an almost unique possibility of recurrence, especially among the stars. Therefore, human beings are the only lonely species in the universe. The American Paine said in "The Age of Reason", why did God put thousands of worlds under his protection equally, but left them alone and only went to die in our world.

On the other hand, can we imagine that in the process of creation, every world had an Eve, an apple, a green snake, and a redeemer? In this way, God can only rush from one world to another. Worlds run from world to world and die again and again, while his life exists only in the fleeting moments of death and death. Humans may be the only fallen intelligent creatures in the universe. With the expansion of population, pollution of living environment, deterioration of natural environment, and increasing scarcity of resources, coupled with the shadow of nuclear war and the possible impact of uninvited guests from the universe, the earth is no longer the Garden of Eden for mankind. The earth is facing There are more and more crises, all of which may directly threaten the survival of mankind and the existence of the earth. Uneasy, mankind once again turned its attention to space, hoping to find a Noah's Ark and a space aircraft carrier before mankind and the earth suffered real disaster, and leave the earth, its no longer peaceful home and a place of right and wrong, to emigrate into space. , so that humans can continue to survive and reproduce in the universe.

Finding extraterrestrial intelligent creatures, finding a planet suitable for human habitation, and determining the destination of this very likely human interstellar migration are the first problems that must be solved