In Search for a Black Cat in a Dark Room
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is essentially metaphysics and has been described as looking for a black cat in a dark room where there is no cat. Is SETI therapy for space nerds or something that will eventually get us in contact with other civilizations?
So far we have found nothing, but become wiser
SETI-scientists want us to believe that we are variations of the same basic cosmic chord. That intelligence is a necessity as long as evolution has been given enough time, that we all have something in common. This reminds us about the religious view that we are all the creation of God.
But reality always seems to surprise us by being more ingenious and more complex than we could ever imagine. Perhaps we are still repeating the old mistake of making humans a yardstick for the universe when we search for ghost-images of our own civilization by analyzing radio signals from space.
We don’t really want to believe that we are alone in the Universe. One single planet with advanced intelligence among billions and billions of stars would be nothing more than an absurd joke. Basic probability theory tells us that this cannot be the case and this is why we keep looking.
But so far we have found nothing. Are we searching for the wrong things at the wrong place? Are we using inadequate tools and pointing them in the wrong direction? Perhaps we are looking in vain. Afterall, the world was not created to fulfill our dreams.
Both Tesla and Marcone believed that they had captured messages from space some 100 years ago. Kardashev, Drage and Sagan continued the search 50 years later with new technology. There must be something out there in this endless universe and space is definitely not silent, it is a cacophony of signals and noise.
Photo by Thanh Nguyen on Unsplash
During the 80s project Sentinel was launched and in the 90s it was joined by SERENDIP III and other programmes. Every day they found tens of thousands of signals that did not appear to be normal. In almost all cases it turned out to be simple and earthbound explanations to the signals.
21st century technology and methodology have advanced the search for extraterrestrial life. Today we do not only look for radio signals from Earth, now we have advanced telescopes, we look for laser beams, artificial structures and bio signatures. Shared databases and new software helps us analyze the sky and search for patterns.
But so far we have found nothing. Zero. Are we alone after all?
Zoologist Ernst Mayr reminded us that it took almost 3 billion years before simple organisms (eukaryotes) evolved on Earth. This could indicate that such a life changing event was very unlikely to happen. But we don’t know if life came into existence as a necessity or by coincidence.
Nature has then created and destroyed enormous amounts of species during hundreds of millions of years (some scientists estimate that as much as 99% are gone) and only one line evolved into us — a species intelligent enough to understand what happened to them.
We have only recently learned about the structure and composition of the Universe and SETI research is merely 60 years old, not even the length of one human life. We have searched for alien life during a brief moment of our human history. Wouldn’t it be strange if we had already discovered something? Do we even know what to look for?
What have we learned so far?
Life, as we know it, has aroused out of something that appears to be dead — basic particles of materia. We were built out of materia from our own planet, the same molecules of water, carbon dioxide, methane, ammoniac etc, that once came from stars and nebulas drifting in empty space. Alien life does also come from stardust and carry some kind of DNA-code.
The universe looks the same everywhere. The unobservable universe should be no different than the universe we can observe. It obeys to the same physical laws and is made out of the same building blocks. This means that the basic conditions for life should be the same everywhere.
There are unimaginable numbers of stars and planets in the universe. Even if only a tiny fraction of these planets are suitable for life (as we know it) there would still be billions of candidates like ours, that should support life.
Scientists also believe that alien life forms could possibly evolve during very hostile environments, for example on planets and moons around red dwarf stars and in interstellar space, on rogue planets and in nebulas, in methane atmospheres and in acid oceans.
Most scientists seem to agree that simple life is common throughout the universe, but intelligence may be rare. This implies that, even if intelligent life exists everywhere on a grand scale, it will most likely not be found in our own backyard due to the immense distances. It is also possible that we have mixed up two different concepts: we cannot know for sure that intelligence means life in the same sense that we cannot know that life means intelligence.
And if we, against all odds, actually do find an intelligent life form next door, it does not mean that we can communicate with it. Humans are a unique product of evolution on our planet, and we couldn’t exist elsewhere in the universe. But this is also true for any aliens we would come across, they couldn’t exist anywhere else. The only thing we can know for certain is that we will never find humans outside our own planet.
But finding intelligence in our neighborhood is extremely unlikely and we will probably not find it with radio signals. Old school SETI is like sending smoke signals across the ocean and waiting for someone to respond with the same smoke signals. We understand this now because we are wiser.
It is also reasonable to assume that no advanced civilization can be exactly the same age as our own. The few hundred years that have passed since natural science drastically changed our view on the world, is like a second during a cosmic year. No cosmic neighbors will be younger than us.
This means that, if we ever find intelligent life forms out there, it will be incredibly old and advanced civilizations to which we, Earthlings, are nothing more than primitive creatures. And if intelligence is very rare, we will most likely never know what is out there right now, or what existed in the past. The universe is simply too big.
What could we hope to find?
21st century science seems to tell us that extraterrestrial life is omnipresent but at the same time it is unlikely that we will ever be able to communicate with it. It is either too simple, too advanced, too strange or too far away. But could advanced civilizations find Us?
Coexisting civilizations that are thousands or even millions of years older than our’s must have known about Earth for a long time. An atmosphere with oxygen should be a certain sign of life. By sending a fleet of small space probes it is possible that they have visited us in the past. If so, what did they see? Did they see unicellar organisms, dinosaurs or cavemen?
Unless they visited Earth during the last few thousand years, they wouldn’t have found signs of civilizations. And if they left probes or robots in our solar system until they could send back a message that a new advanced civilization is slowly coming alive, it could take thousands of years before that message was received back home. If there was anyone left to read the message.
This is perhaps what we should be looking for; tiny alien space probes. Not huge interstellar space ships filled with thousands of creatures as in the movies, instead networks of small space robots. They could reproduce and spread across the star systems, sharing information in a gigantic cosmic network.
In theory it could become an indestructible star-web, containing a galactic memory, spread out in thousands of nodes in thousands of star systems. Perhaps we should be looking for this network instead of messages sent to us from other planets? Maybe we are already part of the network without knowing it?
