Donald Trump is everywhere. As an Indian living in India, I recently had a conversation with a tuktuk/auto-rickshaw driver who’s worried about Trump. And of course, Trump is the elephant in my living room as well.
This is my second ever post, and I’m going to be experimenting with a few diverse topics in these early posts. I don’t want to create any further political divide of any sort. There’s plenty of that without my help.
The Fermi Paradox
There are 100 billion galaxies in the Observable Universe, 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the Goldilocks Zones in Milky Way alone, of which 11 billion are orbiting Sun-like stars. Lots and lots of planets to host life, huge probabilities for intelligent extraterrestrial life. If intelligent life had formed on some other planet in our galaxy a few million years before us, it’s high time that they’d visited us with on their interstellar spaceships, or at least we’d detected their mega-structures on far off solar systems with our telescopes.
But it’s the case so far, and this what is called as the famous Fermi Paradox.
Kardashev Scale
One of the explanations for this paradox include what is called as the Kardashev Scale. It divides hypothetical civilizations according to their technological complexity, on their energy consumptions to be exact. A Type I civilization utilizes all the energy that falls on the planet from its star, a Type II civilization harnesses all the energy of its host star, and a Type III civilization harnesses the entire energy of the galaxy it’s in.
We’re currently.. well, we’re currently Type 0.
Now, an explanation for the Fermi paradox is that there might be/might have been many intelligent life forms dispersed over the galaxy and the universe, but none of them have become a Type II or Type III civilization. That all of them perishes before they can do interstellar travel. The reasons for it might be varied, between large cosmic/environmental calamities to civil war.
Although there’s not much we could do about cosmic calamities at the moment, we can think about the possibility of civilizations wiping themselves out with war and other irresponsible/short-sighted acts.
The Law of Nature
Trump might be such a force centuries in the making. One country among many gets increasingly wealthier and more powerful, positions itself at the center of civilization, and then elects a leader who has no regard for the rest of the civilization, and questionable commitments towards his own people.
I won’t be criticizing anybody now, because there’s no point in pointing fingers for a past event till we invent a time machine.
But the future, that could be something worth pointing fingers. At ourselves at first, of course.
The real wall that Trump might build could be between us as a civilization and our future Type I selves.
This could be a rite of passage for the species, the task that the Universe throws at us. That in order to gain our seat among the stars, we need to stand together and solve this. Hercules or any of the demigods never had it easy. Nor will we.
It could also be that such a phenomenon is unsolvable, the energy barrier too high to overcome. That the Universe is bound to be this way. But we don’t have the luxury to debate this. We try to overcome it, we try to solve it. No matter what.
As the US and the rest of the world gets increasingly divided on whether to love or hate Trump, it gets increasingly evident that Trump might be the natural phenomenon that’s bound to happen. The great wall. It’s just entropy, nothing good or bad.
But remember that entropy is, and always have been, the end of life. Life was always about fighting entropy. That when you see entropy creeping up, you know where you need to focus your energy. Till the last breath.
Image source: Wikipedia