John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JIM AL-KHALILI
“Aliens may not exist – but that’s good news for our survival”
I just cannot accept the study as being valid.
It boils down to speculation with some numbers assigned. It goes against the basic concept that the sheer size of the cosmos guarantees abundance of life, a concept embraced by some of our greatest physicists, including Hawking and Fermi.
This view of the cosmos reminds me of ancient religious people who had the arrogance to say the earth and all its creatures were created just for mankind. And we still have lots of humans who believe that. It is based on the skimpiest bits of evidence, such as our failure so far to pick-up radio signals or to experience any sightings or contacts.
Advanced alien civilizations may well have discovered new forms of communication of which we are not yet aware, including quantum operations.
Our own use of radio waves is only about a century old. It takes four-and-a-half years for a signal to go just one way from the nearest star, and that is truly an infinitesimal distance in astronomical terms. It represents a next-door neighbor, so to speak, considering the billions of known galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions or billions of stars.
I also tend to think that at some point with any intelligent species, machines eventually take over from the biological critters. Brains invent and keep inventing, striving to make life better and more convenient, just as they discover and keep discovering principles which result in still more powerful inventions. This is a basic driving force in human history, which itself only goes back about a fifth of a million years.
And this continuous effort to invent and to discover leads directly to what we are glimpsing the first bits of right now in our own civilization.
Artificial intelligence and associated machines seem likely to be the next great stage of evolution, as when mammals arose and dinosaurs - who had ruled the planet for a couple of hundred million years, even evolving huge varieties of their type over that time – completely disappeared.
Wherever this evolutionary change has occurred in the cosmos, there would then be very little interest in critters like us, critters who still, despite all our pretensions, resemble chimpanzees in so many ways, as in marching out to murder groups of neighboring chimps regularly.
We’re doing it right now on a colossal scale. American now drops a large bomb somewhere every twelve minutes of every day. It spends a trillion dollars, all costs included, a year on destruction and death.
Those who say we are alone in the vastness of the cosmos remind me also of another form of thinking earlier in human civilization. It was a conception in a number of earlier civilizations and empires that there was nothing worth knowing about beyond their borders, just mere barbarians in the far hinterlands. Arrogance has long been a human trait.
I don't see how anyone can think things are radically different in various corners of the universe. The same physical principles and processes appear to apply everywhere.
We haven't even discovered all of the principles yet, and we do not yet grasp the full life-cycle of our own species, but there is no reason to believe things are greatly different in different locations of the cosmos, except to the extent that they are either earlier-on or later along our path.
Where there is water, oxygen, and some warmth – and that has to be in tens of billions of places – there almost certainly will be life in some form. The novas of stars and the collisions of galaxies are constantly spewing out chemicals which in the deep reaches of space form all kinds of compounds, including organic ones. These drift and are picked up by comets and meteors which sometimes deposit them on suitable planetary surfaces. It is all a huge ongoing, stochastic process.
Of course, there may also be forms of life without our same basic requirements.
Readers interested in the topic of alien life may enjoy a little story I wrote many years ago:
http://chuckmanmiscellanea.blogspot.com/2006/11/short-story-cosmic-hum.html
