Just last Friday, scientists from NASA announced they discovered a significant amount of water on the surface of the moon. This marks a new chapter of our lives.
The news is exciting because it opens so many opportunities for us. So many questions are being asked about the discovery and its implications on the way we perceive the universe.
It is huge. They did not just find water, but a significant amount – about 24 gallons. Such news should be surprising to everyone, except those few who had faith we would find water on the moon after we discovered ice on it.
I was really surprised, the same way I was when our basketball team lost its first big game this season after receiving their rings for winning last year’s conference basketball championship, when a penguin and a green man won the biggest student fan of the game, or when everybody left the football stadium before the game ended.
But a big question emerges: Do other forms of life exist on the moon or anywhere in this universe?
Think of all the movies promoting space exploration. Scientists sometimes go to the moon and find it empty and sometimes they hit another planet to find smart creatures trying to destroy the inferior humans.
And since aliens have not tried to overtake Earth so far, we still cannot deny or prove life exists elsewhere. And that’s why scientists at NASA don’t talk about life existing on the moon or on other planets, but they are working on a more practical and achievable part of the space research: uncovering the mysteries of the creation of our solar system.
But how many people are actually aware of this truth? How many novels will be written in the next few months that unravel a new life on the moon just because they discovered water? How many of them would fail to make it clear the fictional story is based on a fictional hypothesis (that water existence is related to existence of life)?
Water is very important for humans, and most organisms here on Earth, but we know some organisms survive with the absence of both water and oxygen, two important necessities for our survival. We live on this planet, and we are by far more superior than many of the creatures on this planet. That just means we are very different.
The question of intelligent life existing elsewhere is a serious one, especially when you consider other creatures may be different from us and not rely on air and water for their survival.
They might not be sharing the same DNA structure that all creatures on this planet have. And why did these intelligent creatures not make contact with us so far? Why do we have to go and look for creatures outside our universe?
Most importantly, how are we going to communicate with creatures we are meeting for the first time? Not everyone in the world speaks the same language, which makes it a little bit harder for people to communicate with each other. Definitely not everyone speaks English and even though we may learn two or more languages, sometimes we still get lost in translation.
A typical average everyday human would come to an alien and say, “I come in peace.” But how do we know the word “peace” itself is not a word in their language having a bad meaning or a different connotation?
We as humans need to get ready for such a moment when we have to meet different creatures. If you look around, you will find you live in a world full of aliens.
Before we travel to another planet trying to meet new lifeforms, we better try to connect with other humans first, those we know rely on air and water just like us.
There are approximately 6.8 billion humans on this planet who have various different beliefs, traditions and who look and speak differently. These are the aliens our attention should be focused on, the aliens who are not thousands of light years away from us. These aliens live across the same planet we live on. We all share the same planet, but we know so little about each other. We are not sharing the unity living on such a small planet should enhance.
Abdallah Abu Ghazaleh is a freshman majoring in electrical engineering. He can be contacted at [email protected].