Nine Years Ago Today: Rare...or frequent but not long-lived?

By Moristotle

[Originally published on October 22, 2008, not a word different, but with an image added and a bracketed phrase revealed at the end.]

Richard Dawkins, in the penultimate chapter of his 1996 book, Climbing Mount Improbable, addresses the general question about how and to what extent life may have arisen in the universe.

...[O]ur island planet in the universe has never, so far as we know from properly authenticated accounts, been visited. More significantly, for the last few decades we have been equipped to detect radio communications from far away. There are about a million stars within the radius that radio waves could reach in a thousand years. A thousand years is a short time by the standards of stars and geology. If technological civilizations are common, some of them will have been pumping out radio waves for thousands of years longer than we have. Shouldn’t we have heard some whisper of their existence by now? This is not an argument against life of any kind existing elsewhere in the universe. But it is an argument against intelligent, technically sophisticated life being spaced densely enough to be within easy radio range of other islands of life. If life when it starts has anything other than a low probability of giving rise to intelligent life, we might take this as evidence that life itself is rare. An alternative conclusion to this chain of reasoning is the bleak proposal that intelligent life may arise quite frequently, but typically only a short time elapses between the invention of radio and technological self-destruction. [emphasis mine; p. 284]

    Why necessarily technological self-destruction? Technology provides only the means, but not the motive. To me, the most striking thing about our technological age is that technology coexists with a prevalent tide of religiosity. There are a few minds who contributed to the pivotal discoveries and inventions that led to present-day technology, but there are so many more minds still stuck in animism and tribal animosity. If a nuclear device were detonated anytime soon, the chances are that it would be set off by religious zealots.
    The “rise of intelligent life” is more the rise of the potential for intelligent behavior than of its actual realization in significant numbers of “intelligent beings.” The sad reality of pervasive unintelligent behavior is well illustrated by the 2008 political season in America [where lies and innuendo are exploited freely to ignite racial and religious prejudices].

Copyright © 2017 by Moristotle