I have wanted to write this essay for a very long time now, and, finally, relieved of the pressure of daily publishing, the time has come. Even if you don't care about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, I still think you'll enjoy this essay — Dave
Despite many years of observation with ever-more sophisticated instruments, humans have failed to find any signs of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). Physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies calls this The Eerie Silence.
If there are extraterrestrial civilizations out there, they don't seem very interested in us. They don't visit, they don't phone, they don't even send radio signals. Not a peep. It is easy to feel start feeling neglected once you become aware of this cosmic cold shoulder. As the eminent physicist Enrico Fermi once put it, "Where is everybody?"
It is not as if we haven't been looking out for them. This year marks 50 years since the founding of SETI — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In his new book celebrating this anniversary, Paul Davies explains that SETI isn't some confederation of UFO-spotters, but a group of serious scientists who scour the skies for any sign that somebody is trying to get in touch. They have deployed every modern technology in search of unusual radio signals, laser pulses or electronic beacons. But so far they have come up empty-handed. There is nothing to hear but an eerie silence.
The "eerie silence" is more generally known as Fermi's Paradox. I wrote a brief introduction to the subject in Are We Alone In The Milky Way? This essay is the first of two on the ETI existence question, and how humans approach that question.
Some knowledgeable people don't think ETIs exist, or occur very rarely (are thinly scattered) in time & space. I will describe the views of these "pessimists" in Part II. This essay is about the optimists.
If there is no intelligent (wise, rational, compassionate) life on Earth, we can not at present answer the title question affirmatively. If Homo sapiens is merely another extinct (or fast-fading) species a thousand years from now, an outcome which is looking more and more likely, then humankind's positive view of itself and its glorious future—The Human Conceit—becomes yet another delusion of our fantasy-prone species.
Astrobiology (formerly exobiology) is the field of study which concerns itself with questions like whether intelligent life exists—or any life exists—beyond the Earth. Astrobiologists, being human, rarely question whether Homo sapiens might not be considered intelligent
Why Should You Care About Astrobiology? I want to address a question some of you may be asking — why should I care about whether extraterrestrial intelligence exists? We are Earth-bound, are we not? And given the vastness of the observable Universe, and the great distances between the stars in our own galaxy the Milky Way, aren't we functionally alone in any case?
The answers to those last two questions are yes and yes. And the simple answer to caring about whether ETIs exist is that you are not required to care. The answer to that question is not going to materially affect your life in any way. It's a matter of being curious about the existence of Homo sapiens in a vast, cold, uncaring cosmos, and the curious fact that you are a conscious, sentient member of that species in this tme and place.
And, finally, at least for me, the ETI question is yet another attempt to escape the all-pervasive, suffocating anthropocentrism of living among humans on the Earth. Regarding this human self-centeredness, there is a compelling reason to look at how the vast majority of scientists approach the question of whether intelligent aliens exist, as I will show you shortly.
In studying the Human Condition, I have found that all roads inevitably lead to the same place. Looking at the ETI question is simply one of the less-traveled roads.
If we humans do in fact detect an authentic signal from an alien intelligence, I think that would be the most amazing thing that has ever happened to our sorry species.
You should not be surprised to learn that astrobiologists qua human beings are divided over the question of intelligent extraterrestrial life in a way which mirrors perfectly the way humans are divided on the question of whether humankind has much of a future. The vast majority of them are confident we will eventually find evidence of other intelligent sentient species elsewhere in the Universe—these are the standard optimists—whereas a very small minority believes that Homo sapiens is alone or unique, or believe that species broadly similar to Homo sapiens are very rare—the standard pessimists.
This has been my observation over many years of reading and study. Such observations are very familiar to and well understood by regular readers of DOTE.
This is a very telling observation, for it speaks to broader and profound psychological considerations. Carl Jung had something to say about this, but I can not remember or find the quote, so we will have to make do with this partial quote from Jung's disciple Marie-Louise van Franz.
Marie-Louise Von Franz extended his view of [psychological] projection, stating that: "... wherever known reality stops, where we touch the unknown, there we project an archetypal image" ...
We can understand Jung's idea of "projection" in another quote from von Franz.
The difference between projection and common error is that an error can be corrected, without difficulty, by better information and then dissolve like morning fog in the sunlight.
Thus Jung defined projection as an unconscious, that is, unperceived and unintentional, transfer of subjective [psychological] elements onto an outer object.
One sees this in this object something that is not there, or, if there, only to a small degree. Seldom, if ever, is nothing of what is projected present in the object [i.e., the object can almost always receive or bear the projection because the projected attribute is also present to some degree in the object.]
All this is most likely new to DOTE readers, so let me take a moment to explain what's going on.
Regarding the first quote, you can substitute "the contents of the unconscious" for the Jungian language "an archetypal image." (Jung's theory of archetypes has little explanatory power as far as I'm concerned.) The idea here is that when little is known about a subject (the outer object), where "known reality stops" in von Franz's phrase, as with the question of the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe, humans project the contents of the unconscious onto the subject at hand (the existence of ETIs).
This essay is somewhat discursive—I will be wandering around a bit, having some fun—but I would first like to explore these typical human attitudes toward the existence of ETIs. Doing so tells us a lot about how human beings function, thus creating another perspective on some of the subjects I covered on DOTE.
SETI Optimism And Techno-Optimists
Optimists believe the Universe is teeming with technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. This attitude follows from the fact that Big Optimism (especially where the future is concerned) seems to be an innate, largely unconscious predisposition of the mind in the vast majority of human beings (>99%). See my post DOTE Has No Natural Constituency for details, and follow the links therein.
Believe it or not, over the years I spent a lot of time puzzling over why astrobiologists were usually optimistic and only rarely pessimistic about finding signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. After all, scientists are not usually optimistic or pessimistic about the subjects they study. Like everybody else, scientists are optimistic or pessimistic about human outcomes. However, in this case there is no data whatsoever which demonstrates that the object of study (ETI) exists. This lack of evidence makes astrobiology a special case.
In particular, I wanted to understand why astrobiological (and SETI) optimism expresses itself as it does. Why are SETI guys like Seth Shoskak so confident we'll find signs of E.T. sometime very soon? This 2011 interview with Shostak in Popular Science explains why. Let's get to the optimistic heart of the matter.
Seth Shostak: ... from the standpoint of SETI, the important argument is that we invented radio around 100 years ago.
In less than a century after the invention of radio, we invented computers, and today computers are very commonplace and they're getting faster. Following Moore's Law, they're doubling in speed every 18 months. By 2020, most home computers will have the computing power of a human brain. That doesn't mean that they are brains, but it means that in terms of raw processing, they can process bits as fast as a brain can.
So the question is, how far behind that is the development of a machine that's as smart as we are? A machine that can take over your job and write articles for Popular Science. We're talking about artificial intelligence.
Maybe that will take 10 years, maybe 50, 100 or 200 years. There are some people who say we'll never be able to do it. I don't believe those people. Whether it takes 20 years or 200 years, the point is that you invent radio and then, within a few centuries, you've invented machine intelligence.
Most of the intelligence out there must be artificial intelligence. We keep looking for critters like us living on a planet like ours, where in fact the majority of the intelligence out there is not biological.
That would be my argument. The timescale to go from being technological so we have some hope of finding you, to going to an artificial-based intelligence is very short.
That would be Seth's argument. Notice that the presumed technological development path of these advanced aliens and the expected future technological development path of humans are exactly the same.
Jennifer Abbasi: So what is the definition of the type of artificial intelligence that you're talking about?
SS: From the standpoint of SETI, we consider something intelligent if it can make a signal we can pick up. Can it build a radio transmitter? Can it build a big laser? If it can, we might be able to find it. Of course, that doesn't say anything about whether they have art or music, if they're peaceable or non-peaceable, or whether they're little, soft, squishy gray guys-billions of them on a planet running around doing their thing-or whether they're thinking machines hanging in space or special places in the galaxy.
JA: When do you think we'll find intelligent life, or it will find us?
SS: Finding us is actually harder, because how could they find us? You could conceivably pick up our television, our radar, our FM radio, but you have to be close enough for the signals to have gotten to you within, say, 70 light-years. The number of stars within 70 light-years is maybe a few tens of thousands, but it's not a very big number. I don't know that they're going to find us until we've been on the air for a lot longer. But for us to find them is maybe not such a problem because, after all, the universe has been around three times as long as the Earth has. There has been plenty of time for other intelligence to get way beyond us, so they might have been sending signals for a long, long time, literally millions or even billions of years. There could be signals washing across our planet all the time that we just haven't found because we haven't done the right experiment.
JA: Is there any way to estimate how long it will be before we come across something?
SS: In a paper I wrote a couple years ago, I looked at the increase in speed of our SETI experiment, and I took some reasonable, or what I thought were reasonable, estimates of how many societies are out there broadcasting [in our galaxy the Milky Way].
I took the range of estimates from 10,000 to a million. Ten thousand is what Frank Drake, the founder of SETI, usually says, and a million is what Carl Sagan said, and those are both guesses.
But if those guesses encompass the right number, then you can combine that with the speed of SETI searches as they will increase in the future. I estimated that it was two dozen years until we detected a signal.
Within two dozen years we'll be able to look at a million star systems. As of today, we've looked at maybe 1,000 carefully in the radio [wavelength]. That was the basis of the argument. But the point of the number was not two dozen years, so much as it was to say that this is an experiment that, if SETI has any merit, will work relatively soon, within a generation, rather than something that might take 1,000 years.
Before I demolish this nonsense, let me make it clear that I support SETI. By all means, look for alien radio signals. In fact, I hope SETI gets a clear, repeatable signal which unambiguously points to an intelligent source. That signal would represent a very slim hope that human civilization will not destroy itself in the next few hundred years in so far as somebody out there avoided self-destruction.
Please recall the psychological projection stuff I talked about in the introduction. There is a massive (unperceived and unintended) projection going on here, and perhaps some of you have glimpsed it. Here it is—
(S)ETI optimists are looking for a highly successful future version of humanity among the stars. Thus they have projected their own unconscious techno-optimism upon the putative aliens whose existence they hope to demonstrate.
Thus, (S)ETI optimists seek the psychological comfort—the affirmation that humans are not complete fuck-ups—which finding these advanced aliens (i.e., future humans) would give them.
Seth Shostak's confidence about finding E.T. derives from exactly the same unconscious techno-optimism which I discussed many times on DOTE. In this respect, there is little (if any) difference between Seth Shostak and Ray Kurzweil, various would-be Mars colonizers, Peter Diamandis, or thousands of other delusional techno-optimists I could name.
Such people are blind to Bad News about the environment (the climate, the oceans) and pretty much everything else (e.g., dwindling global resources like eroding topsoil or the peak in wild-caught fish). In short, such people are oblivious.
Thus SETI is to some non-trivial degree a faith-based enterprise masquerading as a science experiment.
To be fair, SETI is indeed a science experiment, however misguided it might be in the details. For example, Seth (and mutatis mutandis other optimists) assume that these intelligent aliens have discovered science, have a keen interest in it, have built large radio transmitters and receivers, are broadcasting at certain frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum, and so on.
In short, Seth Shostak is looking for a future version of himself among the stars
Full Disclosure: I have talked to Seth Shostak on several occasions. He is (was?) a yearly participant at the University of Colorado's Conference On World Affairs, which I attended as an observer for many years. Seth is a good guy, so my remarks here should not be construed as a personal attack on him. He's merely clueless in the same way that all techno-optimists are.
Finally, these considerations do not preclude the possibility that SETI will succeed. Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and again.
Billions And Billions
The observable Universe is really, really, really, really, ..., really BIG. And so is the Milky Way, which is only one galaxy among perhaps 100 billion.
Outside of their boundless faith in human cleverness and wonderful human futures, the only argument techno-optimists have to support their contention that the Universe is teeming with technologically advanced aliens is their observation that the Universe (or the Milky Way) is really, really (etc.) BIG.
In contemporary times, this largeness argument derives almost entirely from the views of Cornell astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science popularizer Carl Sagan. You will recall that Shostak quotes Sagan's guestimate that there are one million technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way alone.
Do you remember the end of the movie Contact when SETI scientist Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) says this to a group of children?
Ellie Arroway: I'll tell you one thing about the universe, though. The universe is a pretty big place. It's bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before.
So if it's just us... [that] seems like an awful waste of space. Right?
That's the argument of (S)ETI optimists in a nutshell. Don't look for other "persuasive" arguments because there aren't any—at least there aren't any valid ones. The movie of course was based on Sagan's novel.
Nothing I could write would get Crazy Carl's main point across nearly as effectively as this video does, so watch it now. The longer you watch, the better this video gets.
And yet, despite the really, really (etc.) BIGNESS of the observable Universe and the Milky Way within it, there is only an eerie silence.
Makes you think something unusual might have happened on Earth, doesn't it?
More Unconscious Optimism
Some months ago I ran across a remarkable example of the kind of psychological processes I described above. In a lecture called Fermi's Paradox Revisited, Dr. Jeff Kuhn of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy discusses a new way we might detect extraterrestrial civilizations in our neighborhood of the Milky Way (existing within 60 light-years).
I've included the long video (1:26:33) below. I have transcribed the relevant bits below, so you needn't watch it unless you're interested in the details.
Kuhn wants to search for extraterrestrial civilizations instead of extraterrestrial intelligence because he's not sure what "intelligence" is (and neither am I). In particular, he wants to define the fraction of existing civilizations which are successful according to his definition (see below).
Kuhn argues that such civilizations can be identified by their energy footprint, which can be detected by searching in the infrared part of the electro-magnetic spectrum (a global warming signature). So Kuhn suggests that we use heat radiation-based detection to find ETCs.
Instead of listening for radio signals, a group of astronomers is proposing that we search for extraterrestrials by detecting their planet’s exaggerated heat signatures — signatures that could be detected in the infrared. But to do so, we’d have to build the largest telescope this world has ever seen.
Writing in Astronomy Magazine, a team of astronomers, engineers, and physicists from the University of Hawaii, the University of Freiburg, and elsewhere is making the case for infrared SETI. The basic idea is that a sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial civilization will produce more power on its planet than it receives from its parent star. This delta in energy could indicate the presence of an alien civilization.
"The energy footprint of life and civilization appears as infrared heat radiation," says Jeff Kuhn, the project's lead scientist. "A convenient way to describe the strength of this signal is in terms of total stellar power that is incident on the host planet."
In short, Kuhn wants to do what Seth Shostak is doing—he is searching for successful future versions of humanity among the stars. In fact, he's very explicit about the fact that this is what he wants to do. Thus we encounter exactly the same psychological projection which we saw above, this time more literally.
Let's review the Big Picture. Fermi's question encourages to ask why we don't have even the slightest indication that extraterrestrial civilizations exist. Kuhn describes this eerie silence in the early part of his lecture.
This section is now going to get a little bit technical, but the devil is in the details. More precisely, the unconscious optimism is in the details
At some point, Kuhn makes a standard move by appealing to the "non-specialness" of the Earth. Wikipedia is good on the relevant definitions, so I shall quote them. Here's the Copernican principle.
In physical cosmology, the Copernican principle, named after Nicolaus Copernicus, states that the Earth is not in a central, specially favored position in the universe.
More recently, the principle has been generalized to the relativistic concept that humans are not privileged observers of the universe.
In this sense, it is equivalent to themediocrity principle, with important implications for the philosophy of science.
And here's the mediocrity principle.
The mediocrity principle is the philosophical notion that "if an item is drawn at random from one of several sets or categories, it's likelier to come from the most numerous category than from any one of the less numerous categories".
The principle has been taken to suggest that there is nothing very unusual about the evolution of the Solar System, the Earth, humans, or any one nation.
It is a heuristic in the vein of the Copernican principle, and is sometimes used as a philosophical statement about the place of humanity.
The idea is to assume mediocrity, rather than starting with the assumption that a phenomenon is special, privileged or exceptional.
I trust these definitions are clear enough. There are some technical details concerning the Copernican Principle which I will skip (see here and here).
In the context of Fermi's Paradox (or the "eerie silence"), there is a huge problem with the principle of mediocrity which becomes obvious if you take a moment to think about it. The problem is that Fermi's Paradox suggests that there may indeed be something unusual about the evolution of sentient life on Earth due to the ongoing lack of evidence that such beings evolved elsewhere in the Milky Way.
If one simply assumes that "there is nothing very unusual about the evolution of the solar system, the Earth or humans," then one has begged the very questions under discussion—where are the aliens? Or the signals which tell us aliens exist? Yet, that is just the move Jeff Kuhn makes. Here's how he does it.
First, Kuhn uses his own version of the famous Drake Equation. Here is the original Drake Equation in a reader-friendly form with some accompanying text from the linked-in source.
But there are two big problems with the Equation: Firstly, several terms in the equation are largely or entirely based on conjecture. Thus the equation cannot be used to draw firm conclusions of any kind. Worse still, it would seem that the equation is torpedoed by the Fermi Paradox...
Thus, what the Paradox is saying is that if so many planets exist or have existed with intelligent life, why is there a lack of contact between the intelligent life and us and why is there such a lack of physical evidence of said intelligent life here on earth, or elsewhere in the observable galaxy?
The paradox exists in that the Drake equation statistically indicates life should be abundant and yet physical evidence says otherwise. In other words “where is everybody?”
To be fair the Drake Equation was only concocted to promote discussion and interest in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life (SETI) and not to “prove” the existence of abundant life in the galaxy...
Click to enlarge.
The author of that text does not quite get things right. He says "the Drake equation statistically indicates life should be abundant and yet physical evidence says otherwise." No, the Drake Equation does not indicate that (intelligent) life should be abundant. The numbers plugged into the equation yield different answers. And who puts in those numbers? Optimistic humans do.
You will recall that Seth Shostak told us that Frank Drake himself estimated that there are 10,000 "intelligent" extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way. And Crazy Carl Sagan put that number at one million! The Drake Equation is thus a perfect reflection of the innate (and unconscious) optimism of the humans doing the estimating.
And now, back to Dr. Kuhn. Here's his version of the Drake Equation, which can be understood in the context of his lecture.
ND = NS fP nHZ fC fBE fS
where ND = the number of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations (ETC)
NS = the number of stars in the detection radius (60 light-years)
fP = the fraction of those stars with planets
nHZ = the number of those planets orbiting in the habitable zone of their central star
fC = the number of habitable zone planets which develop civilization
fBE = the fraction which warm before Earth has (a global warming signal)
fS = the fraction of those civilizations which are successful
Don't worry about the precise meaning of some of these terms. (They are all explained during the lecture.) Here's the relevant text (transcribed) from Kuhn's talk, which begins at about the 12:40 mark in the video. You now know everything you need to know to evaluate it.
Some of you may have heard of the Drake Equation ... at some point in time we're going to have the technology to detect alien civilizations. An interesting quantity, an interesting fact, is whether or not an alien civilization starts producing a signal ... before or after we turn on our ability to see them. But in general, let's imagine, let's define a successful civilization as one which somehow becomes visible at some point in their development. And if they're successful, they're going to be visible ... throughout their history.
An unsuccessful civilization is one which either never gets to this point, or gets to this point and clicks off because bad things happen.
We can imagine that we are very close to a limit where our planet could be detected [from] near-by or not too far away.
Notice that a civilization is unsuccessful if bad things happen. That civilization clicks off. Think about Homo sapiens (wise man?) and the Earth, and then make the obvious inference.
So, OK, how many detectable extraterrestrial civilizations are there?
Well, that depends on the number of stars ... [etc.]
Yes, that's the question on the table. Kuhn then starts going through his version of the Drake Equation, making optimistic assumptions about each of the terms. Eventually he gets to the all-important variable fC.
What are the fraction [of planets orbiting in habitable zones] which develop a civilization?
[Note — liquid water exists on planets in the "habitable zone" of their parent star; such planets are said to be Earth-like.]
OK, here it comes. Remember the Copernican and Mediocrity Principles.
Well, now I want to appeal to what I said earlier — we're not very special.
There's no evidence from anything we've ever measured astronomically that the Earth or terrestrial life is very special.
I wanna put a number of a half in there [meaning 50% of the Earth-like planets develop a civilization something like ours].
It's a number which is halfway between one (1), a certainty, and zero (0), it never happens.
Did you catch that? The man just estimated that half of the all the candidate planets within 60 light-years of Earth, and that's a big number according to Kuhn, develop a civilization something like ours!
And yet, Kuhn's lecture is entitled Fermi's Paradox Revisited, and he starts off by talking about the eerie silence. Remember, even Crazy Carl said in the video above that "it took nature hundreds of millions of years to evolve a bacterium, and billions of years to make a grasshopper." Maybe there is something special about terrestrial life.
Think of it this way—if there were that many extraterrestrial civilizations in our local neighborhood (within 60 light-years), you wouldn't have to do SETI searches to find signs of them. Just turn on the TV!
If you've got cable, you could be watching alien Jeopardy on cable channel 154. Those of you cooped up in the house all day could switch on an alien version of As The World Turns, which would be always available on channel 212 in the early afternoon.
I'm kidding of course—none of that would be possible unless you had an expensive "alien-enabled" cable box —but you get the idea.
For our purposes, Dr. Kuhn just posited a wildly optimistic answer to the very question he is allegedly investigating. Kuhn is a competent scientist; that's clear from watching the lecture, but he has begged the central question.
What is truly strange about Kuhn's move is that he appears to be fully aware of what he's doing but seems to be equally incognizant of why he's doing it. It is not unreasonable to conclude that Kuhn assumes mediocrity(including the evolution of life) because unconscious optimism drives his need to look for successful future versions of humanity in outer space. A pessimist (or realist?) would question this dubious premise, but Kuhn does not. He also assumes mediocrity because no doubt he is seeking research funding for his pet project, which must be justified.
And then, stranger still, Kuhn assumes that we haven't heard from those ETCs (or can not detect them) because they're all laying low — none of them want to be discovered because somebody (like us?) might happen along and wipe them out. Not only is that an outrageously anthropogenic assumption, but it is also a very flimsy straw to grasp at. But the unwarranted optimism of his initial assumptions must be justfied somehow.
It's clear that Carl Sagan wasn't the only "crazy" person making these kind of guestimates about the abundance of alien intelligence. In astrobiology, you see this kind of behavior all the time if you take the time to look for it. The scientists making these optimistic projections are completely unaware (by definition) of how unconscious processes guide their thinking on these questions.
What Will E.T. Look Like?
Let's further explore psychological considerations. Here's another part of the Popular Science interview with Shostak.
Jennifer Abbasi: So what will intelligent life look like?
Seth Shostak: Does it matter how we picture what ET looks like, as long as they can build a radio transmitter that we can pick up?
The problem is that we tend to picture ET as looking something like us.
Yes we do, Seth. Why do you think that is? (I've already covered the "radio transmitter" bit, see above.)
And I think a lot of that has to do with movies that always portray the aliens as looking very much like us, variations on us that are very anthropomorphic.
Hollywood does that not just because they're naive about this, but I think because they know that the audience needs to be able to read the intentions of the aliens. "Wow, he looks hungry." Or, "Oh, he looks friendly." You know how to read the faces of humanlike creatures. You can read the intentions of chimps at the zoo but not insects when you look at them up close, because they're so different-looking.
Hold on there, Seth! Read the intentions of the aliens?
Seth has made a fundamental error here because he's not psychological (he lives in Flatland). He thinks those Hollywood movies are about aliens. That's the literal interpretation of what's going on. This is another case of psychological projection, as discussed above.
Sorry to say, Seth, but those movies are not about aliens. Those movies are about humans interacting with other humans made up (sort of) to look like aliens who always happen to behave like humans. Once again, we've got another version of ourselves in outer space. That's where the anthropomorphism comes from. This is not rocket science. That's the most parsimonious, simplest explanation of what's going on. So much for reading "alien intentions."
[image left — anthropomorphized "aliens"]
I'm guessing humans wouldn't go see a movie about authentic aliens acting like authentic aliens. God only knows how those aliens might behave! Moviegoers wouldn't be able to relate to truly alien behavior, so they almost certainly wouldn't pay money to see it on the Big Screen.
Perhaps Seth should go see Avatar. That film featured a story line where morally-challenged, more technologically advanced humans with big guns arrive at an "alien" world to exploit a naive, peace-loving "alien" race which inhabits unspoiled land in a kind of paradise. If Seth knows any history, that romanticized plot line should sound very familiar. And so it goes for all the other movies which feature anthropomorphized "aliens", which is basically all of them. (Many movies about alien monsters, like Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), are really horror movies in outer space.)
For that matter, Seth could watch any animated film featuring anthropomorphized animals. There are lots to choose from. Surely he doesn't think Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck movies are about mice and ducks, right?
Let's finish up.
Absence Of Evidence Is...
The SETI people have a pithy phrase they use to justify their optimism. We are not surprised to learn that Carl Sagan came up with it.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
If we apply this logic to the search for E.T., clearly it is correct—we can not conclude that E.T. does not exist because our searches have come up empty. And remember, the observable Universe, and the Milky Way within it, are really, really, (etc.) BIG. Those wily space aliens could be hiding out in lots of places we've never looked.
Generally speaking, it is impossible to demonstrate that something (anything) does not exist, regardless of how many failures we've piled up in our attempt to find it. This is called the Fallacy of Induction. Of course, if physics tells us something shouldn't exist—for example, the never observed "free lunch" where the global economy grows while global energy use and CO2 emissions shrink—then it's a pretty good bet it does not exist.
BUT, "absence of evidence" does indeed tell us something useful. It is not much of a stretch to sum up the techno-optimistic view of the future like this—
Humanity will continue to expand and expand, eventually colonizing the Solar System and finally, after mastering intersteller travel, the Milky Way. If fragile biological beings (us) can't leave the Earth or the Solar System, we'll send out super-intelligent, self-replicating machines instead (von Neumann probes). There are no practical limits to what humanity, or by extention, its wonderful machines, can achieve.
If Seth Shostak, Jeff Kuhn and many others are looking for future versions of humanity in outer space—I hope I have established this point—then there should be a huge number of highly successful species which have colonized large swathes of the galaxy. In some imagined cases, we are talking about very-large-scale alien activity here, extraterrestrial civilizations which can harness all the energy of a main-sequence star like the Sun.
Well, if the techno-optimists are right, then where are these aliens? Where are the machines? That was Fermi's question. Why do we detect no signs of very-large-scale alien activity? If that activity is occurring at galaxy-wide scales, we should be able to see it. But we see nothing.
The main conclusion of this essay, which should be familiar to DOTE readers, is that there is no escape from anthropocentrism and the human conceit on this Earth. I am describing the hard limits of human cognition, including the apparently not-very-imaginative but still overactive human imagination. All of my recent work seeks to demarcate and explain those limits.
It comes as no surprise that humans approach these ETI questions (and all other questions) from the only frame of reference they have. In my terms, humans are completely immersed in Flatland. The real problem comes in when humans can not acknowledge that their cognition is necessarily hampered by their innate anthropocentrism, i.e., they can not escape Flatland, and thus do not even vaguely suspect it exists. My view is that if humans could become even slightly aware of their own limitations, they could to some extent overcome them. Perhaps enough to make a difference?
This essay started with the title question—is there intelligent life in the Universe?
The only true answer is we don't know. We don't know whether extraterrestrial civilizations arise frequently. We don't know whether they are vanishingly rare. The only things we know for sure is that there doesn't seem to be much intelligent life on Earth and there is no evidence of intelligent life elsewhere. Perhaps these negative observations are related—the lack of intelligent life on Earth may be the key to understanding why we see no signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy.
In part II I will look at the views of the lonely pessimists on these subjects.
Dave Cohen
Decline Of The Empire
October 13, 2013
Dave - this superlative piece really gets to the heart of one of my favorite subjects (it comes a close third to Multiple Male Orgasms and the Pink Floyd lyric: Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.)
I've always loved the idea that we weird creatures would one day make contact with others "out there" - if only to receive a swift kick in the nether regions for being so goddam conceited.
But from what you've shown here, we're no doubt looking for evidence in the wrong way, for the very reason that we are stupidly modelling extra-terrestrial intelligence on our supposed intelligence.
In my experience, a great number of Homo callidus couldn't locate evidence of a donut from sugar crumbs in the bottom of a paper bag. Apparent scientists who have suspended scientific rigor owing to their ultra-optimistic anthropocentrism (and anthropomorphism) are unlikely to know what they're looking at if their instruments capture some ET output that is off the scale of these human scientists' "intelligence".
All that being said, I remain extremely interested in the concept of ET life. I work hard to keep alight a little flicker of a fragment of a molecule of hope that there's intelligent (i.e. sapient) life somewhere in this cwazy universe!
Posted by: Oliver | 10/13/2013 at 02:19 PM