[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]
My opinion on whether there is other intelligent life in the universe is the conventional one: the history of science teaches that there’s nothing unique about our star or planet, so there’s no reason to believe life isn’t common elsewhere. Further, there’s no reason that intelligent technological civilization couldn’t arise on one life-bearing planet out of a thousand, a million, or a billion.
Yet I increasingly find myself mulling a more astounding possibility: what if we’re alone? As physicist Enrico Fermi asked, if the universe is teeming with intelligence, “Where is everybody?”
Skeptics offer rationales. Maybe aliens are ignoring or quarantining us. Maybe advanced civilizations self-destruct. Maybe they’re using technology we can’t perceive.
But it would only take one! One enormous interstellar civil engineering project, one alien artifact, one beacon shining in the night. A pre-contact Amazonian tribe might not know what a lighthouse is, but if one appeared in the jungle they’d know it wasn’t natural.
Why haven’t we seen a lighthouse out there?
The distance-time argument is irrelevant. It’s a numbers game, and it doesn’t matter if the lighthouse exists now or a billion years in the past. The fact is, you can search a million galaxies and not find a single thing that lacks a natural explanation. No lighthouses.
In one science-fiction trope, a race of ancient elders colonized the universe billions of years before humanity evolved. But what if we’re the ancient elders, just getting started? What if we’re the first?
I shudder to imagine it.
* * *
SUBSCRIBE! I am sharing these little "250 Words On" essays via Substack, which will email a new one to your In Box every Tuesday morning. Just follow this link and enter your email address. It's free, and I promise to never use your address for evil purposes.
No comments:
Post a Comment