Intelligent Life In The ...e, Dammit! | IFLScience

15/6/2015 Intelligent Life In The Universe? Phone Home, Dammit! | IFLScience

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Intelligent Life In The Universe? Phone Home,Dammit!June 15, 2015 | by Robert Scherrer

photo credit: Who wouldnt want to hang with this guy? JD Hancock, CC BY

Weve been conditioned by television and movies to accept the likelihood of intelligent life

elsewhere in the universe. Of course theres intelligent life out there; I saw it last week on

Star Trek. Weve seen it all, from the cute and cuddly ET to the fanged monstrosity of Alien.

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Not cute and cuddly. Artur, CC BY-SA

But is it likely that were not alone in the universe? And if intelligent life is out there, why

havent they contacted us yet?

The first person to address this question in a systematic way was Frank Drake, who

invented the Drake equation to predict the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the

galaxy. His equation is rather complicated, but heres a simple version of his argument.

First, lets count how many stars are in the galaxy. To quote one of my predecessors,

Billions upon billions! And how many of those stars have planets? Until recently, we really

didnt know. But over the past 20 years, astronomers have made remarkable progress in

discovering planets around other stars. We now know that many stars have planets orbiting

them.

Looking for a planet thats juuuuust right. Arthur Mee and Holland Thompson, eds.

The Book of Knowledge

Could creatures actually live on any of those planets? Many of them are just giant balls of

gas, or else too hot or too cold to contain liquid water, which is the basis of all life on Earth.

But a few of them do seem to be at the right temperature. These are the Goldilocks planets:

not too hot and not too cold for liquid water. (And thats without even considering the

possibility that exotic forms of life could survive without water.)

Now we enter murkier territory. How likely is it that life will develop on a potentially habitable

planet? We dont know the answer, but life on Earth got going very shortly after the

formation of our solar system, and it has wedged itself into every available niche, no matter

how hostile.

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The tardigrade microscopically cute and cuddly. Willow Gabriel and Bob Goldstein,CC BY-SA

Colonies of bizarre creatures flourish in perpetual darkness near deep ocean vents, where

superheated sulfur-rich water spews from under the ground. Radiation-resistant bacteria

bask happily in levels of radioactivity that would instantly kill a human being. And then

theres the tardigrade, which looks like a microscopic eight-legged teddy bear, that can

thrive in liquid nitrogen or boiling alcohol. So the probability of life developing on habitable

worlds seems very high.

And how likely is it that this life will develop intelligence? This remains an open question

(which is scientist-speak for we havent got a clue). But many scientists consider

intelligent life almost inevitable, in which case the galaxy should be teaming with alien

civilizations.

If the galaxy is crawling with aliens, where are they? Interstellar travel is limited by the speed

of light, so maybe its no surprise that no one has visited us. But we should at least be able

to detect alien radio signals, either from attempts to contact us directly, or in the form of

alien TV reruns. Why havent our alien friends contacted us? This question was famously

asked by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, so its called the Fermi paradox: all of our

arguments suggest that alien civilizations should be common, yet weve seen no sign of

them.

One possibility is that intelligent life really is rare. My own personal opinion (and its just an

opinion) is that life is common, but intelligent life is rare (something many of us suspectbased on our own experience). While life developed in the relative blink of an eye after the

birth of the solar system, it took billions of years before we smarties showed up on the

scene. And remember that survival of the fittest doesnt always mean survival of the

smartest. While intelligence is certainly a useful survival trait, it seems far from inevitable. If

not for an errant asteroid, the dinosaurs might still rule the world.



Is it cosmic luck these guys are gone and were on top now? Marcin Chady, CC BY

Another possibility is that intelligent life inevitably destroys itself. Until recently, our optionsfor total self-destruction were limited to nuclear weapons. But we are on the edge ofexpanding our armada to include genetically engineered viruses (think: Ebola meets thecommon cold!).

And consider the dangers posed by nanomachines, tiny self-replicating robots programmedto convert matter into more robots. Imagine a tiny robot, no bigger than the width of ahuman hair, designed to provide some useful function, programmed to build a copy of itself,using materials from its environment. Now you have two machines, and both can createduplicates, giving us four machines. But what if this process got out of control? Thenanomachines could rapidly consume the entire Earth, converting it, along with everyone onthe planet, into grey goo. British astronomer Martin Rees discusses these and othercatastrophic possibilities in his book, Our Final Hour. Have all our potential alien visitorssuccumbed to self-destruction?

Friends or foes? Interdimensional Guardians, CC BY

Or is it possible that the galaxy really does contain other forms of intelligent life, butsomething prevents contact with us? Here we enter the realm of more speculative ideas.(Translation: when a scientist says speculative, it really means a very interesting ideathats only one step removed from complete nonsense.)

Among the more speculative possibilities: maybe the galaxy is a dangerous place, full ofrobotic probes sent out by hostile aliens to wipe out any competition, so everyone else is inhiding. Perhaps we really shouldnt have put a detailed description of the location of our



solar system on our own space probes. Its a bad idea to reach out and try to touch ETwhen we might get a call from the Alien instead.

An even more bizarre suggestion is that superior civilizations have decided to avoid contactwith lesser beings such as ourselves, so that we live in a kind of cosmic zoo, complete witha Do not talk to the animals sign.

Were IN the computer. Warner Bros.

Some have even suggested that we live in a gigantic computer simulation, a la The Matrix.

A longer list of possibilities (along with a skeptical discussion) has been compiled byastronomer Milan irkovi.

Without more data, the Fermi paradox will remain, for now, unresolved, and many of theproposed solutions will have to be classified as speculative. And now you know exactlywhat that means.

Robert Scherrer is Professor and Chair of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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