But so, the other day I was at dinner with my friend and his Dad and we were talking about all sorts of things about like society and differnet cultures and the universe and alien life and stuff. And as we were talking, I was thinking about how maybe on reason space travel has been so slow going for us, is because there's not much incentive to go out and explore. It seems to only real incentive there is ... is for the sake of exploring.
However, if say Mars did have life on it, intelligent or not, would we not have already gone there decades ago? I mean.. we've gone to the Moon, we've sent robots to Mars, and sure it's new and different and can be viewed as beautiful, but as one of the Apollo astronauts put it when they landed on the Moon... it's a beautiful desolation. And that's just it.. we've gone out and we've sent probes and satellites to most of the planets, and there's nothing really there.
Our moon is a dead moon, Mars is basically a dead planet, the only things that are really interesting are stuff about geology, which most people don't care about.
But imagine if the Moon had an atmosphere, or if Mars hadn't gotten hit by a large meteor, and if there were still water and possibly plants/animals on it? If this were the case, we would definitely have not just small bases, but full thriving colonies on both the Moon and Mars by now. And this would have caused unknown scientific advances which might have given us the ability to travel between stars by now. I mean, we have physicists working on way trying to to that right now, and in some ways they have figured them out, but only on the nano scale. Teleportation for example... scientists have figured out teleportation, but the have only figured out how to teleport photons one at a time. But if we were already living on 3 different celestial bodies by now, there would definitely be many more people interested in physics and science, and there would be a much larger incentive to develop a transporter ... if not for people ... then to be able to almost instantly transport food and supplies back and forth from Earth, the Moon, and Mars for the people living and working there. And we would definitely have had space stations and maybe even entire hotels in space by now.
So when contemplating alien life, perhaps they are not thousands or millions of years ahead of us in their evolution. Perhaps maybe they are only a century or so ahead of us, but unlike us, there were other moons or planets in their own solar system which had life on them, intelligent or otherwise. I mean, if Mars had forests on it, that's one thing .. and if it had animals on it, that would be even more amazing and a bigger incentive to go and explore and live on the planet ... but if by the time we were able to send robots to Mars, we found there were intelligent beings with language and a society of some sort, that would have been revolutionary! If that were true, you can bet that the entire world would unite together to explore Mars and the rest of the solar system and to look for other planets outside our star with new life.
So maybe that is one reason we are not as advanced in space travel, while with all these UFO's and things, there appear to be other civilizations who are. Maybe when they were at our stage, they looked to their moons and planets, and found water and plants and life, which spurred on a revolution in space exploration, that maybe in just a generation or two, brought them to the point of being able to travel between stars with relative ease. And the reason we haven't done something like that yet, is because all we have found outside our planet, are dead, unlivable, barren planets and moons.
We can all say "What If", but that won't do much .. so hopefully despite not having a reason to explore like finding life on the Moon or Mars, we will soon have humans living on the Moon and Mars, and beyond...
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