Other Crap

A tenth of the stars in the Milky Way may have planets that support advanced life, Australian scientists have said. 20 years ago I supported Carl Sagan's argument about the profusion of life in the universe, because of the mathematics involved. But some scientists now think that the argument was incomplete. Although life is undoubtedly nature's mandate, technological life may be the result of massive accidents which distort the natural evolutionary scramble. Non-mammalian life ruled our own planet for more than 200 million years, and developed no technology of any kind. Our own planet would still be completely non-technological if not for some massive and apparently accidental cataclysm which wiped out the 'saurs and eventually allowed mammals to flourish. In other words, Carl Sagan was surely right about the quantity of life in the universe, but may have been wrong to assume that technological societies are the inevitable result of that life. Perhaps there are billions of inhabitable planets, but perhaps an Alvarez Incident is a one in a trillion phenomenon, and we are more alone than we think. Oh, well, enough serious shit. Back to the jokes.