Possibilities Staggering and Terrifying
Either we are alone in the cosmos or we are not, but how does that make you feel?
The question of whether or not we’re alone in the cosmos is one of the most compelling of the great deep questions that we humans have been asking ourselves for millennia.
Why are we here? Where does life come from? Can life happen somewhere else? If it does, what would it be like? Do we have reason to want to investigate that life or even come into communication with it? Should the potential for us to be alone or not be a driver for hope, fear, uncertainty, puzzlement, and awe?
All of these questions are part of the grander journey to understand the nature of life and our place in the cosmos.
As Arthur C. Clarke is attributed as having said:
“Sometimes I think we’re alone, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering.”
Maybe you’ve read this quote before. Believe it or not, it might not actually be a quote from Clarke. It comes originally from a 1966 piece in The New Yorker and was actually said by Stanley Kubrick. The famed director mentioned the quote as being something “One of the English science-fiction writers once said…” At the time, Kubrick was working on the script for 2001: A Space Odyssey along with Arthur C. Clarke, so it’s been assumed that the quote from Clarke (and with good reason—Clarke had written in a non-fiction book in 1952, “Whether or not Man is alone in the Universe is one of the supreme questions of philosophy,” which echoes much the same sentiment).
But maybe you also know a different version of the quote. The entire impetus for this writing right now was that I saw on Bluesky where someone use an alternate version of the quote:
“There exist two possibilities. Either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
Is the potential for us to either be alone or to be among a cosmos teeming with life staggering? Is it terrifying? Perhaps dizzying or electrifying or astonishing or frightening or bewildering or disorienting? Or maybe a little bit of all of these feelings and more?
What if we are alone? What does that mean about life and our place in such a vast expanse of space and time?
What if we’re not alone? What if there are myriad worlds populated with diverse biospheres and a variety of alien beings out there? Should we be excited or terrified by the potential that some alien life may have advanced well beyond us, may have different conceptions and perceptions about life than we do, perhaps having much different understandings of morality and good and bad than we do, or even being so advanced to appear as god-like or magical to us?
While many people go about their days on autopilot, living with almost no stillness—no space between stimulus and response, you fine reader are here because you like contemplating deep ideas, finding awe and wonder in the cosmos, and wanting to join in the journey of asking “why?” and “what if?”
Let’s explore why we might be alone in the cosmos, but also consider what if we’re not.
Could we possibly be alone in the cosmos?
“Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.”
― Leonard Nimoy
One of the big bummers about logic is that it doesn’t care about what we want to be true. Our intuitions, beliefs, and emotions don’t get a vote in how it operates.
As Daniel Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow, our brains are wired for cognitive ease—we prefer stories that feel coherent over truths that are merely probable. This leads us to commit logical fallacies like the availability heuristic (assuming something is more likely because it’s vivid in our memory) or the base rate fallacy (ignoring general probabilities in favor of specific anecdotes). So when logic suggests that alien life may be extraordinarily rare—or even that we might be alone—it feels wrong to many of us. But that discomfort is emotional, not evidential. The logic of the situation, frustratingly, doesn’t flinch.
As I have many times pointed out, based on our current knowledge—where we thus far have no concrete nor sufficient evidence for the existence of alien life—we have to admit that we could be alone. There exists some probability that life only ever happened here on Earth. And we can’t know what that probability is—we just know that without some sufficient evidence of alien life that there is still a chance that we are alone.
Certainly, once we start to consider the stupendously huge number of other worlds that likely exist out there in our own galaxy and all of the other galaxies that are out there, it starts to feel almost inevitable that we will someday—perhaps soon—discover alien life and/or alien intelligences out there in the void. But what if we are alone?
If life only ever happened once—here on Earth—then all of the hopes, dreams, stories, intelligence, evolutionary adaptations, culture, and consciousness in the entire observable cosmos are here. If we are alone, then the entire lineage of existence in the universe from the Big Bang to stellar, physical, and chemical evolution to biological evolution has led only to our biosphere as its most complex development.
That would mean that we are the lone candle flickering in an endless night.
That’s staggering because it suggests something monumental and perhaps almost divine about our existence. Life, intelligence, and self-awareness may not be inevitable. Perhaps they are supremely fragile accidents. In that case, what we do matters enormously. We become not just citizens of Earth, but stewards of consciousness itself—a singular flash of meaning in an otherwise indifferent universe.
To be alone would mean that we are not just a species or even just a single biosphere, but a singular expression of the cosmos becoming aware of itself—and with that awareness comes a profound responsibility. If we’re alone in all of this, then our annihilation through the various existential threats we face is not just a potential doom for humanity or the Earth but a cosmic risk to all life.
But the fact that we could be alone—again, based on what we know now—is also terrifying.
If we are alone, no help is ever coming. There are no great elder civilizations or other expressions of consciousness with which to converse. No shared knowledge. No one to mourn us if we vanish. No one to receive or review the messages we’ve sent into the void. It would mean the silence of the stars is not an invitation, but a warning: the entire weight of existence lies on our shoulders, and we need to grow up and act like it.
Could we be alone? Yes. But it very much feels like that just can’t be true. So, what if we’re not alone? What does that mean for us? And how should we feel?
What happens if we’re not alone?
Here comes the fun stuff.
The potential for alien life is something I’ve dreamt about since I was a kid. And I’d be willing to bet you’ve wondered a lot about what aliens might be like as well. Growing up watching Star Trek and Star Wars and playing sci-fi video games and reading novels set on spaceships and alien worlds inspired me in many ways to want to know more about aliens and what they might really be like. And, given what we now know, it seems like there are some wide-ranging possibilities for alien life out there.
But before we imagine galactic federations, alien invasion scenarios, or biomechanical hive minds, we have to recognize one key truth: the discovery that we’re not alone—finding even a simple concrete and sufficient sign of past or present alien life—could be one of the most transformative events in human history.
It could instantly change our understanding of biology, of life’s origins, or of our own uniqueness. But there are also scales of how we might all respond based on the kind of finding it could be.
Some people are less excited about the possibility of finding some fossil of an ancient microbe on Mars or seeing that some organic goop coming out of the ice on Europa indicates a likely biological origin in the ocean deep below. While such findings would be incredible for astrobiologists and for many people out there, they might not be enough to radically alter our behaviors. People might only really get excited (terrified, hopeful, etc) if we find signs of alien intelligence or if some alien spaceship shows up here at Earth like in alien invasion films.
As I mentioned last year on the Universe Today podcast with Fraser Cain, one of my sincere worries is that we might find some definitive signs of alien life that are of the less exciting variety and many people would give it a moment’s thought but then go right back into the 24-hour news cycle and the repetitive processes of scrolling through social media videos and being used by companies as click bait fodder.
Personally, I think any finding of alien life would be remarkable, but perhaps only some would cause us to alter our civilizational behaviors over night. Finding some sign of extinct life on Mars or maybe what looks certainly like an alien biosphere based on the chemistry of an exoplanet atmosphere might not be exciting for everyone, but would still let us answer the question of whether or not we’re alone and may impact us more greatly over a longer time scale (driving us to spend a little more on space exploration, to think a little more about what’s possible, and to narrow our searches to see if we can find more signs of alien life).
But if we happen to find definitive signs of advanced alien intelligence—beings who have passed through their own evolutionary bottlenecks, built technologies, formed cultures—then everything from our philosophies to our religions to our geopolitical and economic systems would likely be challenged.
To not be alone could be an exhilarating finding, but it could also be destabilizing. What if we’re not the smartest, the oldest, or even the most ethical minds in the galaxy? What if other beings have already solved problems we’re still failing to address—climate change, war, proliferation of nuclear weapons, inequality, mortality? Or what if their moral compass is truly and utterly alien to us?
Of course, we have no idea whether alien minds would be kind, indifferent, or incomprehensible. There could even be differences in our biology that cause them to think of us as inherently evil or bad. Their own technologies and capabilities may be staggeringly beyond our comprehension. As Arthur C. Clarke himself suggested, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” That same idea may apply to consciousness, ethics, perception, and more.
Finding definitive signs of alien life could be monumental and usher in a new era for humanity and our biosphere. But it could also be rather terrifying. If we find signs of an advanced civilization and are certain they know of our existence, do we have reason to fear that they may act toward us as we have acted toward others in our own history here on Earth? Would they even care to know more about us or interact with us? Maybe they already know we’re here but have found us lacking for some reason and don’t wish for us to know about them.
And yet, the very idea of not being alone—of someone else looking up at their own night sky and wondering about us—stirs something in the human spirit. It reawakens our capacity for awe and wonder. It humbles us. It offers the possibility that meaning is not confined to this one rock spinning around one star in just one of the many galaxies in the void.
In that way, the possibility that we are not alone is more than staggering or terrifying—it’s expanding and enlightening.
It might just be that the lineages of existence in the cosmos have not only come upon the leaps from chemistry to biology once, but a great many times and in a humongous array of complexities. There may be some similarities between us and aliens, if they’re out there, but there also would likely be many differences. So much so that our universe may be awash in multitudes of forms of life, of evolutionary processes, of unique molecules for encapsulation, information storage and transfer, metabolism, and more. Intelligence and consciousness themselves may be a wide range of behaviors and experiences, some of which we can’t even understand.
If we are not alone, then there could be so much potential for what might lie out there.
Staggering and Terrifying Possibilities Amongst the Vastness of Spacetime
I personally prefer the original version of the quote (that may or may not be from Clarke) suggesting that in either case of being alone or not, it’s all quite staggering. But I also understand why some people have taken to the use of “terrifying” to describe it.
It’s worth it to explore the history of the quote. The use of “staggering” came first in 1966. Later, other descriptions came in through alterations in the quote—descriptors like “frightening” (1974), “mind-boggling” (1977), and “makes me dizzy” (1989).
The alteration of the quote to use the word “terrifying” didn’t come until 1996 (based on the research from Quote Investigator). And perhaps that’s not too surprising. By that time, we were well on our way to building out our cultural mythos of alien invasion scenarios and the possibility for advanced aliens to conquer or destroy us.
Maybe it shouldn’t be a shocker that the use of the word “terrifying” came in an article from 1 July of 1996, just two days before the film Independence Day was released in theaters.
It’s certainly up to you to determine how you feel about the potential for both being alone in the cosmos or not, and especially what either might mean to you.
The Clarke quote—and the concept it conveys—survives and mutates not because it’s neatly attributable to a sci-fi legend (and thus an authority), but because of what it says about our current state of knowledge about alien life. It hits hard. In the simplest of terms, it reminds us that either possibility—universal aloneness or cosmic communion—is enormous in consequence.
We are forced to admit to ourselves the limits of our own current knowledge, while allowing ourselves to imagine and to speculate on what is truly possible out there. Asking ourselves whether or not we are alone is the first step on the path to the discovery of alien life—it’s an act of civilizational preparedness and a call for action. It begs of us to think deeper about ourselves and our values but also to consider how we might find alien life and what that could mean for our biosphere.
I’ve written here in The Cosmobiologist about biosignatures and technosignatures, the Wow! signal and K2-18b, the Pioneer plaques, the paradoxes of consciousness uploading, possibilities for alien life, and more. But many of these concepts all come back to this fulcrum: the staggering, terrifying, dizzying, exhilarating implications of not knowing. As another quote that has a few flavors and may be from Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle says, “the beginning of all wisdom is wonder.” Wonder is part of what drove us to speak to each other, to develop art and culture, to create myths and legends, to evolve the tools of science and reason to sculpt our modern world, and to look out into the cosmos and want to know where we fit within it all.
In the end, it might not really matter which version of the quote you prefer. Maybe it’s staggering or frightening to think of these things. Maybe it’s an experience in awe and wonder. Maybe it brings a variety of feelings and thoughts to you.
Honestly, I just hope that the sheer act of wondering about it all has as much impact on you as it does me. Maybe one key thing we all could use a bit more of to make our world and our future better is a little bit more acceptance of what we know and don’t know and a little bit more compassion for each other because of that.
Whether we could truly be alone in the cosmos or if we are just one small fragment of the larger living universe, we most certainly find ourselves amidst something vast and open for exploration.
For a little more fun, I put up a poll on LinkedIn to ask people about their own feelings toward these possibilities. Check it out here.