The Quran's Cosmic Vision: Life Among the Stars
On alien intelligence, wormholes, and divine gatherings across space-time
"And among His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the creatures He has dispersed throughout them. And He is capable of gathering them together when He wills." - Qur'an 42:29
This is the clearest verse. It says living beings (دابّة / dābbah) exist throughout the heavens and the earth — and that Allah can gather them.
But, absent a shortcut like a wormhole, science says the likelihood that alien life has reached Earth is incredibly slim. The cosmic challenges are staggering: life cycles are relatively short in cosmic terms, organic life forms are fragile when traveling at incredible speeds, they require vast resources to sustain life and shield from radiation.
Add to this the communication barrier — any visitors would be cut off from their home world by sheer distance. Messages taking years or centuries to travel back and forth would make all decision-making local to the ship's occupants, excluding experts on the home planet. It would be a multigenerational effort where those who launched the mission would likely be long dead before seeing its end. The same sobering issues our species would face.
Most scientific thought now suggests something fascinating: our planet is more likely to be visited by Alien Artificial Intelligence than biological beings. Independent intelligences capable of safely exploring at speeds and in the hostile environment of space far exceeding anything their biological creators could endure.
The Quran also hints at the possibility of cosmic shortcuts — what we might call wormholes:
"From Allah, Lord of the Ways of Ascent (Maʿārij). The angels and the Spirit ascend to Him in a day, the measure of which is fifty thousand years." - Qur'an 70:3–4
The key word: Maʿārij — literally "ways of ascent" or "ascending paths."
This verse speaks of angels traversing immense cosmic distances in a time frame radically different from our own — suggesting a relativistic time scale or nonlinear travel.
50,000 years by human measure — yet for angels, it's one "day." Whether this number is literal or symbolic of an even vaster timescale, it represents a textbook example of time dilation, as described in Einstein's relativity — and wormholes are one proposed means of achieving such asymmetric time traversal.
Traditional scholars have long understood the gathering mentioned in 42:29 as referring to the Day of Judgment, when all creatures across the cosmos will be brought together. But could it also hint at something else — perhaps a cosmic consortium of intelligences meeting across the vastness of space through means we're only beginning to imagine?