WHY I THINK THERE IS NO INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE
Since four different people in recent times asked me if I believe there's other intelligent life in the universe, I think the time has come to write a short note on my thoughts regarding this topic.
Once I resist the urge of being a smart-ass and asking "What OTHER intelligent life. Is there intelligent life in the first place?!", this would be my answer:
Me: "No, I don't think there is."
Fellow conversationalist with no life: "But there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in our universe and every one of those has billions of stars, that have billions and billions of planets rotating said stars."
Me: "Sure. I never said life itself is an Earth exclusive kind of a deal. In fact I'm convinced it exists elsewhere in the universe. But you're forgeting one thing. Just how rare is intelligent life in the sense of technological capabilities? Lets be clear here - when we're talking intelligence we're not talking about apes, elephants, whales or dolphins - smart as they may be they'll never design internal combustion engines or space stations. Evolution itself has proven quite clearly - with it's own track record - that life certainly does NOT need intelligence to thrive. Just like it doesn't necessary need elephant trunks. It could be a useful adaptation. But hardly necessary. Life on Earth's been doing just fine for two billion years, while remaining stuck evolutionary in the microorganism stage. It took 2000 million years for some sort of basic complexity to develop- then came the plants, then came primitive animals... then in "recent" history some basic intelligence developed in SOME reptilians and SOME mammals - while it still wasn't the dominant force of survival - reptilians that thrived were genetically nothing but featherless chickens with brains of similar capabilities. If an (extremely unlikely) event hadn't have happened 65 million years ago wiping out dinosaurs and giving our mammalian ancestors a shot at survival, the Earth would more than likely still be reigned by giant reptilians. After that extinction event (which happened in relatively recent evolutionary history) our ancestors the mammals were allowed to thrive in a similar way as dinosaurs did before that. And it still took 60 million years for first primates to evolve and out of many, many species of those only one managed to eventually (after another extremely unlikely event of discovering fire), become technologically advanced. All this was pure chance. Tossing the coin a million times and getting heads each and every time. Thus in my opinion technologically evolved life is such an extremely unlikely event, that it's impossible to happen anywhere else in the universe even if there are almost countless number of planets that could support life. Here's a simpler way of looking at it: throughout 4000 million years in which millions of species of animals came and went, only one subspecies of a species managed to become inteligent enough to develop technology.
Fellow conversationalist with no life: "But isn't the aim of evolution to constantly improve living organisms so they could cope with harsh environments they find themselves in?"
Me: "No. The aim (if one can call it that) of evolution is survival. An organism can survive with various mechanisms, intelligence being one of them - but obviously not a very important one, since it developed so late. Intelligence is redundant more often than not (and in our own case - it might even be detrimental, since it may lead to our demise). Not only that - even complexity of life can be redundant - sometimes simplicity is the way to go and evolution works in a reductionist fashion - like with moluscs, which once were much more compelexed animals than they are today.
Fellow conversationalist with no life: "What about UFOs?"
Me: "UFO is short of Unidentified Flying Object. I see unidentified flying objects in the sky every day. Never do I deduct that they're spececrafts with creatures from another world piloting them. Just as if you see a guy in a big foot costume on the street, your first thought would be, that this is infact a human wearing a costume - you wouldn't take a leap of faith and presume you've just disovered a new humanoid species.
Even if the impossible did happen and technologically advanced life evolved on some distant planet in our galaxy, interstellar travel is pretty much physically impossible - given the speed of light limitation (sure sci-fi writers would make you believe aliens use theoretical worm holes, but no one mentions the fact that they'd be burned, crushed, atomized and reduced to basic physical particles by even getting close to one). There is no possible way for interstellar travel - maybe to near-by stars. But it would take generations and it would mean a suicide mission since it's high probability most of those stars have lifeless planets."
Fellow conversationalist with no life: "What about reports of encounters of the 3rd kind, where people actually claim they've been abducted by aliens?"
Me: "There are people every year who claim they've been possessed by demons, kidnapped by Elvis, levitate in mid air or heard voices from God in their head. People lie and make stuff up. No one ever brought an object back from the alien space ship. Not to mention - a lot of those people claim aliens raped them or they even had consensual sex with them. Of course all these aliens are humanoid by design - two legs, two arms a head and apparently...even similar sex organs. Interesting that evolution on another planet would go for the SAME design as here on earth, despite the fact it's been very creative otherwise in our own evolution (really what's the similarity between a dolphin and a human? And we're both highly related mammals, with a common ancestors as close as a thirty million years ago).
Fellow conversationalist with no life: "Despite the low likelihood there still has to be SOME possibility a life on another planet would reach a stage of technological capabilities..."
Me: "Yes indeed. There always is SOME possibility for anything. Just like there's a possibility I'll win the lottery 100000 times in a row. It's a very small possibility but a possibility non-the-less. You just have to judge if this possibility is enough to warrant any credible scientific notion of another technologically evolved life out in the universe. In my opinion it's not.
