The issue is so endlessly repeated, it’s scarcely interesting. But dive deeper and you can still be amazed. For decades I’ve personally been in touch with Seth Shostak, the head of SETI, who tells me they get dozens of letters a day that mostly suggest specific radio frequencies they ought to be listening to. On which of the almost limitless channels would you broadcast if you were hoping someone out there would tune in and listen? The most common ideas are the digits of pi (a few of them, anyway, such as 314.159 Mz), or the 21 cm wavelength emitted by hydrogen. Logically, intelligent beings would probably know these, throughout the cosmos.
But it all starts with an even more basis issue: is there life out there? You can think of it two ways. First, once you ponder the unimaginable complexity involved in proteins turning into DNA or any of the other basics that characterize life, and if you also believe it can only happen chemically by random accident, you’d end up saying it’s so unlikely that Earth really could be the only inhabited planet.
Alternatively, if you believe in panspermia — that primitive life or its precursers lurk in protected cracks in meteoroids that roam the cosmos, to establish themselves on every hospitable planet they crash-land on — then life ought to be common.
If life is routine and old enough to have developed intelligence, then you might echo atomic energy physicist Enrico Fermi’s famous off-hand remark from the early 50’s: “[If alien life is commonplace] then where are they?” Meaning, we’ve never even detected a single alien radio signal. Only silence. If the universe teems with life, where are they all, and why no sign of them?
If one goes even further, things get truly interesting. As I pointed out on this page a year ago, the founders of quantum mechanics believed that consciousness or awareness is a fundamental property of the universe itself. Meaning it’s all alive, even though modern science regards conscious life as being limited to bodies, especially those with brains or nervous systems. This is deep stuff, since if you believe you are your body, then you will indeed die, since bodies die. But if, like them, or like most practitioners of Zen Buddhism and other Eastern views, you regard your true identity as awareness itself, meaning an unbroken parade of experiences like thinking, feeling, or hearing, then (according to Heisenberg, Schrodinger and the others) you are in sync with the essence of the universe and will know neither birth or death. If that’s the case, then any search for life is like a school of fish searching for water.
Many are excited about the new Webb Space Telescope because it will aid in the hunt for Earthlike exoplanets. And we care about those because we care about finding life. Except, those who assume life to be a “given” have different reasons to find a life-search fascinating.
I’ll share mine. For decades I’ve perceived a widespread overreliance on “chance” as the scientific ‘explanation’ for everything we find mysterious. I’d like to see the public — and especially science educators — wake up to the actual limitations of randomness. Chance works to produce things like evolution that explain many aspects of life’s amazingly multifaceted nature. But ever since the “monkeys and typewriters” thought experiment became widely known (that a million randomly typing monkeys operating a million keyboards for a million years would eventually produce every page of the Encyclopedia Brittanica) most science educators have applied ‘chance’ when trying to explain all puzzling aspects of nature.
I’ve previously mentioned that I did a piece on this in Discover magazine, showing mathematically that the million fast-typing monkey set-up would require 30 times the age of the universe to merely someday type the short opening line of one book. (I’d chosen Moby Dick’s Call me Ishmael). And that’s if each simian only required four seconds to type 15 random characters including spaces, and never stopped to sleep, eat or rest. Conclusion: We all hugely exaggerate the power of random action to accomplish tasks. And when it comes to creating the complex machinery of even the simplest life, random chemistry turns out to be a silly and lazy non-answer.
That doesn’t mean the alternative is religion of some kind. We’ve got genuine mysteries all around us. The nature of awareness and especially how it arises from insentient elements like carbon is particularly perplexing. Truly understanding such common things as unselfish love may ultimately prove beyond the capability of logic’s tools of reason and math, let alone lesser imponderables such as why the majority of adults are more attracted to shades of blue than other colors. There are lots of mysteries, and enjoying them is one of astronomy’s lures. It explains why I’m in my observatories so much. Savoring complex visual patterns even when we don’t understand them is more fun for this writer than re-tackling “are we alone?” type questions, which always terminate inconclusively.
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