As thousands of Afghans rush to Kabul airport to secure a safe voyage from the now Taliban-occupied Afghanistan, a woman has given birth during an evacuation flight. A statement tweeted by the Air Mobility Command, the mother had been travelling from an Intermediate Staging Base in the Middle East on August 21st. While on the C-17 flight, the woman went into labour, albeit with some complications.
The aircraft commander decided to descend in altitude in order to increase air pressure within the aircraft. This helped stabilise and save the mother’s life. The baby girl was delivered in the cargo bay after the plane landed at Germany’s Ramstein Air base. Mother and daughter were taken to a nearby medical facility where they were both alleged to be in good condition. This story comes as more Afghans are attempting to escape the country after the US withdrawal of troops opened a pocket of power for the Taliban. Gunfire has also been reported in the airport as new information is updated.
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Photo Source: Air Mobility Command Twitter, Nisha Brown PhD
This is called the Fermi paradox. To start off, everything outside our ‘local group’ has become out of reach forever as the universe continues to expand. We would have to already limit our scope to our own galaxy – The Milky Way, which consists of around 400 billion stars.
It is also estimated that a fifth of sun-like stars have planets very similar to Earth and situated in just the right habitable zone. If 0.1% of these planets had life, that would translate to a whopping 1,000,000 planets which can support life.
With the Milky Way being around 13 billion years old, the first habitable planets started to form after 2 billion years. That would give life several opportunities to form on a number of planets. And yet, there doesn’t seem to be anything. One possible explanation has to do with filters.
A filter is a limit which life has to surpass before it can advance to the next stage. What if alien life trying to get beyond its filter was annihilated? Or what it certain filters can never be surpassed by any form of life? Filters could be anything from ecological disaster to war to even a species killing pandemic.
But even if this was the case, there would at least be remains of alien civilisations floating around in space or just sitting on a different planet. Humans have already shaped the earth, with many objects set to outlive us for thousands of years. There is one scary alternative…
We could be the first forms of life. What if the reason why we haven’t detected anything yet is because there wasn’t anything to detect? What if we were the first conscious life in the entire local group, or maybe the universe itself? If this scares you, its okay.
Contemplating such cosmic proportions is bound to make us feel small and insignificant. But we really aren’t. If we are indeed alone, we have each other to experience the universe together. If we aren’t alone and it’s just a matter of time before we make contact, we can explore new ways of life together as well… with some new galactic neighbours.
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