But… seriously, are we alone?
This is the last post in a series trying to answer the question of whether we are alone in the universe. In the previous post we make this analogy, if the universe is like a chat room where all civilizations within certain range can send messages and detect each other’s communications, why then is it that we haven’t detected any signals coming from outer space yet?
The key to the answer, I believe, lays in the fact that technology develops at an ever increasing rate, as we discussed in our first post. If technology advances exponentially it has the potential to magnify small differences at the point in time at which different civilizations might have started to develop technology, to the point where those differences eventually reach astronomical proportions — no pun intended — and they are not able to communicate with each other, nor do they want to do it anyway.
If the idea seems like a hard sell, let’s think for a moment why despite wood being an abundant natural resource, nobody is producing smoke signals today to send messages across the distance. If someone starts scanning the sky searching for smoke signals and concludes there is no intelligent life out there just because he can’t find any messages in the sky, many would dismiss that idea as nonsensical, or even ask what is he smoking.
If we watch the sky looking for intelligible electromagnetic signals coming from outer space, is that any different than if we where looking for smoke signals? …well, I don’t think so, in principle at least, those are cutting-edge technologies used for communication, perhaps the only difference being that one has superseded the other.
From that point of view it seems obvious that reaching any conclusion based solely in the fact that we haven’t detected yet any intelligible signal coming from outer space is a bit rush. In fact if we already had detected something, it would be rather suspicious, to say the least. In that case we will be in the presence of twin civilizations, that practically emerged in the same corner of the universe at the same time, and were able to have the same kind of technology and develop it at the same pace.
But why? …because given enough time, if two civilizations are not at the same stage in terms of developed technology, one would inevitable discover means of communication that are way too advanced to be detected by the other, and they might have stoped using any mechanism for detection of deprecated forms of communication a long time ago.
So, why are we still watching the skies?
To me, that’s just curiosity, and the need for exploration, magnified to the scale of a national (or even international) budget. I mean do we really need to actively search for intelligent live in the universe at that scale, when there are still people dying of starvation on this planet?
Come on!… we collectively have the power to do things at a global scale that are realy amazing, things that could have a real impact in society. I’m completely sure that finding signals of other forms of intelligent live in the universe is not one of them. In fact I’m completely confident that is quite the opposite, if there are other civilizations out there in the universe, we might never be able to find them, and much less be able to communicate with them, nor they do care about us either. Just like we don’t care about any isolated ethnic group or population that could still be using smoke signals for communication.

Did you find this post is worth reading?
…I hope so.
Have you given any thoughts to what we’ve discussed here?
Please let me know in the comments.
Every idea or thought discussed in these posts is mostly product of my free time, and with the intention to have a good time …but still, we might also have been discussing very serious business here ;)
