Do you believe in UFOs & flying saucers ?

EmmetSpiceland wrote: »

Brian Cox was just on Pat Kenny’s show, his “issue” isn’t with life being prevalent throughout the galaxy but with intelligent life. He reckons it’s all slime.

Well the problem is we've only one example of life and it's here. And it's only one kind of life. Now looking at the history of life on earth for the first few billion years it was just "slime", complex animals and plant arose late enough in the game and even today there's a lot more slime than complex life. So then you get to complex life. Most of it is pretty passive and not particularly complex.

Animals are more interesting and over the billion years of fecking about have come up with all sorts of novel survival adaptations to different environments and stressors. Swimming has evolved many times across many different species, though Fish Shape seems to be a charm for it. So ichthyosaurs looked like "fish", as do dolphins as do, well, fish. Flight has also evolved a few times across insects, dinosaurs, birds, mammals and again to generally similar outcomes.

However the evolutionary game changer that is intelligent life, in particular the human type has arisen just the once. And even then it didn't do much for about a million years. Previous humans remained in small numbers in the landscape, intelligent, with the occasional tantalising hints to come, but otherwise changing little over time and a passing space probe could very easily miss them. This included ourselves, anatomically modern humans for much of our journey. Then something shifted about 90,000 years ago and really took off about 50,000 years ago that left all the other previous humans in the tuppence ha'penny place. Symbolic thought, art, religion(which becomes philosophy and science), complex culture, more rapidly evolving technology etc, Whatever that something was could very likely be a fluke*, a fluke that may not happen elsewhere, even if intelligent hominid types evolve. Or they evolve and then get wiped out by some natural disaster(as we nearly were 60 odd 1000 years back).

So life could be common enough, as it was here, complex life could be common enough too(or maybe not. Complex life wasn't very complex here until earth turned into an ice bound snowball and after that cleared there was a massive burst of diversity), but intelligent life, of the sort like ours? Could be vanishingly rare, Plus stars grow and die at different times over the life of the universe so they could be long gone, or could be far in the future. You might only have one maybe two intelligent species per galaxy at any one time. Or maybe one every two or three galaxies. That would still leave many hundreds of thousands, but too far away to ever find out about them.




*For my money the fluke was networking. Neandertals et al could have been bright, but their groups stayed small and inter group contact appears to have been limited(like apex predators tend to be). The fluke could have been something as "simple" as a slightly increased level of friendliness in us, maybe because of external stressors those who forged bonds with strangers were more likely to survive and have more kids, who in turn were more friendly to strangers and strange ideas, so our groups got larger and contacts between groups became more complex. To take the home computer analogy. They were around since the late 70's and by the mid 80's lots of households had them. But they were mostly for games or as glorified typewriters/bookeepers. They weren't connected. Then the internet comes along and by the mid-late 90's they became ever more useful and important. Today the computer tech is so much more advanced than 20 years ago, they're more "intelligent", but for a weekend switch off the internet connection from your laptop, tablet or phone and see how much more of a useless thing they become. By the end you'd be happier connecting a late 90's PC to the web, than have the latest iPhonDroid with it's network disabled and the late 90's PC would actually be more useful.

flanna01 wrote: »

Yet History tell us, we only get so far before we implode as a people.

Well not really. Individual civilisations can implode and fail, mostly gradually, but new ones, more advanced ones come along to replace them, sometimes out of the ashes of the previous.