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David Harcourt
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Posted: 25 Jan 2011 10:56 pm |
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Here is something which every sensible person knows:
Alien life exists elsewhere in the universe.
It’s only a matter of time before we find it.
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David Harcourt
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Posted: 25 Jan 2011 11:13 pm |
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The Search for Extraterrestrial Life (SETI for short) was established many years ago to find alien life.
So far it hasn’t been successful in this endeavour, despite the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Of other people's money.
It’s only a matter of time, however.
Just a matter of time.
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David Harcourt
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Posted: 25 Jan 2011 11:14 pm |
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But how, I hear you cry, does every sensible person know that alien life exists elsewhere in the universe, and that it’s only a matter of time before we find it?
Simply because the number of planets in the universe is incredibly vast.
This number is so vast, in fact, that it is a mathematical certainty that there must be not one or two but many, many planets where conditions are sufficiently similar to those which gave rise to life on Earth to ensure that We Are Not Alone.
This, apparently, is how mathematics works.
This, apparently, is how most sensible people think.
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David Harcourt
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Posted: 25 Jan 2011 11:14 pm |
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It's certainly not how I think.
And there is another point. No less a person than Stephen Hawking considers that it’s dumb to go looking for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
Why?
Because if you find this intelligent life, and it can find you back, it will almost certainly come and kill you.
Hawking bases this view on the experience of every species we know of. All species have, without exception, sought to assert their dominance and then eliminate - or at the very least marginalise - any and all weaker species which get in their way.
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David Harcourt
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Posted: 25 Jan 2011 11:16 pm |
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This is a very, very good point, but the SETI people aren't listening, course.
No, they're staring into the sky, hoping for the day when the Vogon fleet will arrive.
Now someone - apart from me (for I have been arguing this to rapidly emptying rooms for years) - has suggested that, and I quote, "there is no hope of finding alien life in space, because conditions on all other planets are too hostile".
Here's the story, in full:
There is no hope of finding alien life in space because conditions on all other planets are too hostile, a leading astronomer has claimed.
Howard Smith, a senior astrophysicist at Harvard University, claims we are alone in the universe after an analysis showed all of the 500 planets discovered so far could not support life. Smith said the extreme conditions found on planets outside our solar system were likely to be the norm.
"We have found that most other planets and solar systems are wildly different from our own. They are very hostile to life as we know it."
He pointed to stars such as HD10180, orbited by a planet of similar size and appearance to Earth, but roasting hot with radiation.
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David Harcourt
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Posted: 25 Jan 2011 11:19 pm |
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So there it is.
This is no life outside this world.
There is no Mekon, let alone a Captain Dan Dare.
No little green men going "meep meep" have been visiting the Earth and probing the anuses of susceptible members of the population; especially - an odd choice, this - those residing in trailer parks.
(Why, I have always wondered, would anyone imagine that aliens would be inclined to travel tens of millions of miles to look up the butts of morons? Surely they would have much better things to do with their time? But I digress...)
It's just us, folks.
We are entirely alone in the universe.
We is all there is.
Hooray for us!
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David Harcourt
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Posted: 31 Mar 2011 10:04 pm |
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Since writing this I have bought a book, first published in 2010, about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
It is THE EERIE SILENCE: ARE WE ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE? by Paul Davies, who is a professor at Arizona State University. Davies's answer to his own question is this:
As a scientist, my mind is open to new evidence and therefore not yet made up. I can assign some sort of probability for aliens to exist, based on sifting all the facts, weighted in turn by the relative importance I attach to the various arguments. When all that is put together, my answer is that we are probably the only intelligent beings in the observable universe, and I would not be very surprised if the solar system contains the only life in the observable universe. I arrive at this dismal conclusion because I see so many contingent features involved in the origin and evolution of life, and because I have yet to see a convincing theoretical argument for a universal principle of increasing organised complexity...
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