Posted on Aug 8, 2018
“I wonder if giving up gods and aliens will lead people to the weird singularity of the human mind. Our species hosts what is probably the only example of technological intelligence. The human brain will most likely remain the most complex organization of matter in the universe. And all of us manifest this intelligence—this entity alien to the rest of space and time. The weird thing, the mysterious and story-provoking thing, isn’t that we have too little meaning. It’s that we have too much of it. It seems out of place in a silent galaxy. That’s the idea we’ll have to get used to. Newly rich with galactic meaning, humankind is finally free to see its loneliness as awe-inspiring rather than tragic.”
Ever since the Renaissance, continues Michael W, Clune in The Atlantic, the sciences have dealt human beings a steady stream of humiliations. The Copernican revolution dismantled the idea that humanity stood at the center of the universe. A cascade of discoveries from the late-18th to the early-20th century showed that humanity was a lot less significant than some had imagined. The revelation of the geological timescale stacked millions and billions of years atop our little cultural narratives, crumbling all of human history to dust. The revelation that we enjoy an evolutionary kinship to fish, bugs, and filth eroded the in-God’s-image stuff. The disclosure of the size of the galaxy—and our position on a randomly located infinitesimal dot in it—was another hit to human specialness. Then came relativity and quantum mechanics, and the realization that the way we see and hear the world bears no relation to the bizarre swarming of its intrinsic nature.
Literature began to taste and probe these discoveries. By the 19th century, some writers had already hit upon the theme—meaninglessness—that would come to dominate the 20th century in a thousand scintillating variations, from H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu stories to Samuel Beckett’s plays. But by the turn of the new millennium, it had become clear that this sense of meaninglessness was no longer up to date.
In 1961, Frank Drake developed an equation with a string of variables to try to determine the frequency of intelligent life. Over the years, some of the variables have been plugged in. Maybe planets are just very rare? They’re not. Perhaps few planets orbit their star in the “Goldilocks zone” where it isn’t too hot or cold? No, it seems that lots do. This may sound like another round of Copernican humiliation: In a galaxy with up to 400 billion stars, many with orbiting planets, surely there’s some other intelligent, technological species. But humans have been scanning the spectra for decades and have found nothing.
Earlier this year, a group at the University of Oxford released a paper arguing that our knowledge of the universe and of math should lead us to assume that intelligent life is most probably an extremely rare event, depending on a series of fortuitous circumstances—like the weirdly large size of our moon, perhaps— that are so unlikely as to almost never happen. Humanity shouldn’t be surprised that we haven’t found aliens, because most likely there aren’t any.
It’s important to note that these arguments depend on probabilities, and that our search for intelligent life in the cosmos is still woefully incomplete. But even so, it looks increasingly possible that humans may indeed be alone, or that we might have some mind-bogglingly gigantic region of the cosmos to ourselves. As this idea slowly seeps into our consciousness, it’s going to have deep cultural consequences. The mental habits of two centuries will lead us to strenuously resist this new picture of the galaxy, especially since, from ancient myths to postmodern sci-fi, humanity has almost always understood itself in relation to a nonhuman or superhuman Other.
If the revelation that humans are probably alone in our universe stands, and as that revelation sinks into our collective psyche, it could effect a second, weirder Copernican revolution in culture. To begin with, it’s really hard to square humanity’s status as perhaps the only intelligent species in all of time and space with the idea that we are insignificant. To the contrary, the everyday breath of the least of us contains meaning in so concentrated a form that a cup’s worth of it could be doled out to a dozen star systems, transforming the arid matter into a garden of significance.
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Top 10 Most Viewed Space & Science Headlines (2018)
‘Ghost Signals’ of Extraterrestrial Civilizations Haunt the Milky Way –Suggests the New Drake Equation (WATCH Video)
“Odds That There has Never Been Another Civilization in the Universe One in Ten Billion Trillion” –A Joe Rogan Interview
Stephen Hawking’s Great Question –“Why Isn’t the Milky Way Crawling With Mechanical or Biological Life?”
“We’re Entering Uncharted Territory” –The Exoplanet Revolution May Reveal that Rise of Civilizations May Not be Unusual
“The Big Rip” –When Matter and Spacetime are Gradually Torn Apart Through Expansion of the Universe
Alien Ocean Worlds–“There May be Life There, but Could It be Technology-Based”
“Game Changer” –Earth’s Orbit Shifts Every 405,000-Years: ‘Cycle Provides New Insights Into Dinosaur Evolution and Climate Change’
“Humans are the First to Arrive at the Interstellar Stage” –Physicist Answers the Fermi Paradox
Eco-Apocalypse –“Technological Civilizations in the Cosmos May Collapse from the Climate Change They Trigger”
NASA Scientists Seek Fossils of Ancient Mars’ Life –“Was There a Common Ancestor? Maybe We’re All Martians”
