Other Crap

Hawking: unintelligent life is likely on other planets

Shit, we have enough of that here. Washington and Hollywood alone have enough to populate the galaxy.

Scientists once thought that the universe must be filled with intelligent life because of the overwhelming number of stars. With so many billions of potential star systems, the argument once went, the basic laws of probability dictate that there must be a billion places where life has evolved.

But the most recent thinking is that Sagan's Law only applies to non-technological life. Yes, the mathematics suggest that life must exist in many places throughout the universe, but it may be exceedingly rare for that life to evolve into technological societies. In fact, there would be none on earth if the dinosaurs had not suddenly disappeared, allowing mammals to flourish and become larger.

Non-mammalian creatures ruled the land surface of our own planet for some 230 million years, and they made absolutely no progress toward developing any technology. Nobody is completely certain how that era ended, but the theories center around a great cataclysm, possibly involving a collision with another astronomical body. But whatever that great accident was, it is the one and only reason why we have technology on our planet. Before the catastrophe, the only mammals to survive were those small and insignificant enough to remain inconspicuous. Had it not happened, it seems probable that mammals would have continued to be insignificant. But after it happened, mammals found themselves with no significant competition for dominion over the land, and shit happened rapidly! (Well, rapidly in cosmic terms. 65 million years.)

To simplify the argument, the development of technological life on Earth may have been a one in a billion shot. Given that, the existence of a billion other earths no longer seems to suggest an overwhelming likelihood of flourishing technological life throughout the universe. I suppose we're not alone, not the only lucky accidents in the cosmos, but the universe may not be very crowded with technological societies.

If you like to take it from science to science-fiction, think about this: in cosmic terms, 65 million years is nothing. If you imagine the existence of the universe as one 365-day year, as Sagan liked to for illustrative purposes, the last 65 million years comprise only the last two days. Therefore, if some highly advanced alien society had checked out our planet on December 29th in that cosmic year, they would have found no intelligent life and no strong likelihood that any would develop, since the dominant life-forms had made zero progress towards that end in the previous 200 million years! The wise visitors might have concluded that Terra was just another of the billions of planets with some form of life which was unlikely to develop technology. Perhaps they resolved to check back again in a cosmic month or so - a billion years in real time! The saddest part of the metaphor is that if they do return in a billion years, they may find the very planet their mathematical models had predicted - devoid of technological life. Will we leave a large enough footprint for them to realize that we once existed?