It is the story of Elon Musk plan to colonize Mars. He thinks that humans have little or no chances to go through the next age, so he's planning to send the first million settlers up there. We'll see. (By the way I encourage him).
What I came across that stuck me was a possible answer to the Fermi Paradox, called the Planetarium Hypothesis. Fundamentally this theory says there is no other intelligent life out in the universe since us, our planet, our galaxy and the stars we can see are closed in a huge box - the Planetarium - separating us from the rest of the universe.
First let's explain what is the Fermi Paradox. In the early '50 in the New Mexico desert-Los Alamos laboratory Fermi asked "Where is everybody?". He means that since high probability of extraterrestrial life were affirmed at the time by theory, there was still - and there is still - not any signs of such life. Here the paradox and the reasonable question.
Many answers have been proposed to the paradox. A entire book tries to summarize all them. From the most skeptical ones like "they do not exist for life is unique to us" or "we are the first intelligent life in the universe", to the mild hypothesis of technological barrier, or as astrophysics (and science-fiction writers) call it the "great filter", which prevent aliens to communicate with us. Reasons for the barrier is a different kind of mathematics, the huge amount of time and space for any signals to reach us or the common cloudy skies.
The painted ceiling
A third group of answers says that they are already here - or at least they exist. And in this last category falls the Planetarium Hypothesis. It was first proposed by Stephen Baxter. Basically he says that a very far more intelligent form of life exists out there and they are basically looking at us, since they've formed us, or at least they've created the astronomical space we see from Earth.
It is like a huge painted ceiling, walls and floor that surround us and we are unable to reach due to the distance. By that mean we will never be able to find other intelligent forms of life.
I am fascinated and disgusted at the same time by this idea. It can be true that a higher form of life has created a fictional sky and universe - but some questions remain, like Why? Do they want to prevent us to discover them? How can we prove it? Have we to look at every inch of our fake sky and find a bug, a scraped paint? What I don't like about this theory is that it gives a reason to give up all scientific efforts to find out more about our universe.
I cannot say our universe is inhabited - others than by us - neither can I refuse it, but I believe it is worth trying find it.
By the way, I am really fascinated by how can we prove that our universe is a planetarium. In other words, how can a man in a "unreal" world find out the reality? This remember me the brain in a vat experiment, but I will discuss it another time.
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