Solitude in the vastness

Throughout the 20th century, space exploration has been a constant source of scientific discovery, wondering, speculation and revolution of our knowledge. Whether from the first artificial object placed in the Earth’s orbit or the footsteps of mankind on another world, or visual close-up images from distant bodies of our solar system or on our home planet; space exploration has been the subject of human fascination and imagination like no other domain, leaving a very important imprint on people’s consciousness and imaginations. With the first flight in outer space of Yuri Gagarin in 1961, men and women have begun venturing out of their planetary cradle and initiating a new relationship with the universe.

For millennia we have been seeking to understand our place in, our role in and the nature of the universe that we belong to. Gazing up the night sky has always been breathtaking, an unalterable source of deep interrogation, a subtle mix of fear and unstoppable need for expanding our knowledge of our origin and destiny. One of the most fundamental motivations for exploring and comprehending this "terrae incognitae" has always been, and still remains today, a search for answering an age-old question of humanity: "Is anyone there?" or "are we alone?" The idea of extraterrestrial life has captivated the imagination of people across the world since time immemorial, and certainly has taken a new dimension during the last century.

This quest will keep haunting us as long as no sign of other life is discovered, travelling along each of our future space endeavours, making us frequently wonder if someone is gazing back at us, somewhere in the dark. Scientist D. Grinspoon perfectly illustrated the permanent intellectual obsession: the question persists, ringing through the void like an electromagnetic prayer. It may be an innate instinct for self-discovery built into the cosmos, a reflex reaction to conscious awareness, springing automatically to mind like air drawn into a lung s1D. Grinspoon, Lonely Planets, The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life, Harper Collins Publishers, 2004 p. 7..

During the last 40 years our inner speculations and hopes of discovering extraterrestrial life in our close neighbourhood have gradually been reduced to practically nothing by space exploration. Before Sputnik, scientists realistically thought that some signs of other life forms could be found in our solar system. Disappointment came quickly. The exploration of our solar system and the streams of images and data received from our interplanetary spacecrafts spectacularly revealed the non-hospitable environments of the Earth’s neighbourhood worlds: Moon, Mars (Fig. 1) and Venus.

Not a single trace of life, not even promising potential life-supporting areas. Sadly, it should be recognized that our initial dreams of an "encounter of a third kind" s3Term popularised by the Spielberg’s movie ‘‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’’. It was originally coined by Dr J. Allen Hynek in his 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. Hynek served 20 years as a consultant to the official USA’s UFO research programme Project Blue Book. have progressively disappeared and been substituted by the new scientific field of exobiology, the study of life in places other than Earth or its close environs. This discipline has reduced our hope of discovering advanced extra-terrestrial life with whom to communicate to the search of micro-organisms, carbon rich molecules or gaseous signatures of life, probably inactive for millions of years and in some non-hospitable locations: underground in some subsurface niches of Mars, beneath a 10 km thick ice layer of the surface of a Jupiter’s moon, or evolving inside a sea filled with liquid methane or ethane on one of Saturn’s moons.

Since the 1960s and in parallel to this is the failure of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) projects to detect radio or optical transmissions from other civilizations. Despite the fact that SETI has investigated only a tiny range of frequencies/targets and that its pace of exploration is increasing very rapidly, the total silence heard until today is also progressively and steadily reinforcing our overall feeling of cosmological isolation and solitude. Ultimately our refined knowledge of our cosmological positioning and the realization of our remote location in the universe’s vastness also reinforced the unlikelihood in the near future of an encounter with a non-human intelligence.

Throughout the 20th century, both this change of perception and the transformation of our initial visions of close extraterrestrial encounters to modern scientific images of faceless, microbial, non-intelligent life forms have surely contributed to the growing disaffection of the public for the overall space exploration. Schrogl from the European Space Policy institute pointed out in 2007: The European public not only needs, but is also ready, to be moved by a new vision for space. This vision can not be based on technology alone, but must also answer to a longing for an emotional and cultural crystallisation point s4"European objectives and interests in Space exploration", november 2007. Document published on the occasion of the International Space Exploration Conference in Berlin, Germany, 8–9 November 2007.