We've already told a chunk of universe that we are here...

HUMAN beings are fascinated by the idea of alien life. Me included. So the discovery, albeit a bit hypothetical so far, of a rocky, earth-like planet orbiting our nearest celestial neighhbour inevitably caught the headlines and the imagination.

Proxima Centauri is, as the name implies, quite close to our star, Sol. A mere 4.3 light years away. And inevitably the speculation has been about 'going there' or 'sending a probe'.

Thing is we have already arrived in a sense. In fact we have been arriving in increasing strength every year since the first radio transmission on earth (in the 1890s thanks to Marconi and a shack in Chelmsford, Essex). Whether Marconi's signals had the strength to reach Proxima is not clear.

But by now we are at the centre of a bubble of radio waves some 200 light years in diameter, and this is 90 plus light years beyond the new planet. Does that tell us anything?

Well maybe that the planet does not contain any advanced technological creatures since they would probably have heard us and responded by now. Or of course that it does and they are so smart and so appalled by what they hear and see that they have, perhaps wisely, decided NOT to pick up.

The point here is that what we ordinary mortals think about as alien life is very, very different from what our learned scientists expect. We might have little green thingies in mind; they have anything remotely capable of replication in their minds.

For that surely is the nature of life – replication to survive in the given environment. In fact when dear old Darwin postulated 'evolution' as the cause of all we see he had no idea what the mechanism might be. It took a long time and a lot of science to arrive at the gene and DNA. And oddly the idea of bits of something being passed from generation to generation had been talked about 2,000 years earlier by the Greeks. But nobody listened because, to be frank, the idea was, let's face it, preposterous!

So what do we really know? Well that lots of stars have planets. Frankly that should not be a surprise as our best theory of early celestial conditions virtually guarantees stars have planets and asteroids, stuff collides, some planets have satellites. And our chemistry tells us that things happen in an ordered way. So if just once out there the conditions are right then life is a given. Of course then it has to survive but that's a whole other ball game. Literally.

So some 4.3 light years away there is a red dwarf (not the best candidate for life giving properties) which is being orbited by a large lump of earth-like rock that is very close and may be so close it is trapped into having one face permanently facing the dwarf. While the other faces bleak, silent and very, very cold space.

Frankly it is not the best candidate for little green, brown or even grey men. But life? The kind scientists talk about? Maybe. After all it has twilight zones, between the scorch and the freeze. And scientists can theorise how good conditions can propagate there.

But get there? Send a probe? Its 4.3 light years away. It is just possible to imagine travelling at 1% of the speed of light. That's about 1,860 miles a second or 2,991 kilometres per second. But that's still going to be 4,300 years. When it arrives it will take 4.3 years for a signal to tell us it has arrived. Or did arrive. Anyway...

The problem is not whether we could accelerate to that speed. Or control our ship that long and that far. Given the right propulsion and long enough the answer is simply yes. But space is not empty and at those speeds it is actually quite crowded. Not big stuff (maybe?) but lots of dusty stuff. Fancy hitting a grain of dust at that sort of speed? Reckon we could build something to survive it? And do it again, and again, and...

So I'd say we are not going and indeed cannot, short of finding the wormhole solution (Mind you I keep reading about cranky stuff in the quantum physics environment and sometimes I do wonder...)

If we are not going then: Do we need to worry about 'them' coming to us? Well let's put it this way – if they are coming shouldn't we get some interesting radio stuff ahead of their arrival?

And won't they be batting off the 'stuff' of the universe all the way? I'm cool on this one. Our earth-bound problems are much more immediate.

Anyway, what do we do when they turn up in a burkini?

Evolution - or devolution...

Inspiration is a two edged sword. The more I have been inspired by Prof Alice Roberts, in every sense, the more I have found myself wondering if her discipline of Anatomy and her developed skill in Anthropology is not spoiling my downtime. You see she has set me off on a puzzle about evolution and the idea that it might have come to an end point. And it is not comfortable.


I am not saying this is what she believes and still less that it is my wholly considered view either. But the problem is that we are in a totally new environment today compared to any that has gone before. For the very first time in all of organic history we live in a period when the norm has been changed. Until now, or at least until quite recently in geological terms, every replicating organism mindlessley, accidentally, relentlessly experienced the environment without any ability to direct it or change it intentionally. But not now. We, the human organism, can and do change our environment deliberately or at least we think we do. Certainly, we make changes with intent.


Consider the world of the single cell organism. Evolution tells us, or at least we accept that it implies, these creatures will only survive if their requirements for life and replication suit or are suited to the environment in which they exist. Some will die, some will live and some will prosper. The relative numbers will be determined by the environment. If it changes the proportions will change. Thus it may be that very few survive after a change but those that do are unusually well adapted and prosper. If their adaptation allows inter-replication with another successful organism then a new organism, cross-bred, will occur. Evolution moves on. Meanwhile of course the implication is that one or other of the contributing organisms may perish. Indeed, both may perish that the new one survive.


Move on in time and the dinosaurs may have eaten themselves out of hearth and home. Or they may have been victims of an enormous cataclysm. Either way, however, something did survive and somehow we are the beneficiaries of that - along, we understand, with the birds, sharks and a few others. The point is however that so far as we can make out these dinosaurs did not deliberately eat themselves into oblivion nor did they go out of their way to invite a solar catastrophe to annhilate tham. Indeed, taking yet another theory they did not intentionally fart their way to extinction. It just happened.


Consider then the human condition. At first it is possible to consider that early man merely slashed and burned his way from forest to savannah in the pursuit of agriculture. He did not set out to change the world although he certainly did. More recently we did not intentionally begin to pillage the mineral and organic and fossil resources of our planet with the intention of running them down to a dangerous zero point. We just did it in the name of survivial.


But now? Well you see faced with the probability that there are simply too many of use we have to act. Aware that we have run our resources close to empty we need to do something. Given that we cannot grow enough to feed ourselves we must have a plan. Shocked at the fact that we have simply begun to run out of water, air, space, energy, food we know only too well that salvation lies in our own hands. And so we begin to rescue ourselves from, well, from oblivion.


But what we change in this process, I fear to suggest, is evolution itself. That we change the way it happens or would have happened and that we do so without even knowing we are. 


I believe that man is not an end of the process of evolution nor ever would be. Nor indeed is there any creature or organism on the planet today that is an end of the process of evolution. Indeed I happen to think that the real end of evolution should have been entropy - that there would have come a time when the very last Lonesome George crawled, or fluttered, or strode or flapped, or merely dribbled across a desolate landscape in a fruitless search for anything - anything at all - with which to replicate.


Were it not for man I believe that this event would be different from what may now be the case. That in a vacuum, evolution would have been different from evolution in a human environment. That the arrival of the human being, with our thought, imagination, deliberation, means that nothing, not even evolution, can be the same again. Ever.


PS - Yeah, I'm back.