Richard Dawkins’s Argument That We May Be Alone In the Universe Is Wrong

Here’s why we almost certainly aren’t

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

Here’s a story. You are standing outside a large building — not a skyscraper but something considerably larger than a house — completely full of sand. A small amount has spilled out near your feet. You bend down and pick up one of these grains on your fingertip and notice it looks unusual. Examining it under a microscope that you serendipitously happen to have handy you find that it is, in fact, a block of even tinier grains of sand, so many that if each grain were blown up to the size of a normal grain of sand, that sand would itself fill a whole room of that building you’re standing in front of. Each of the grains of sand in that building is the same.

As you look at one of these sand grains in your microscope, one of its infinitesimal sub-grains comes loose — any old one — and floats through the air. You find yourself shrinking, shrinking, then tumbling through space towards the grain that, as you draw near, turns out to be a star. Around it some planets are orbiting, and you fall towards one, a lovely little blue planet that looks much like the earth…

Here our wistful adventure ends. I apologise for cutting it short before you could discover what type of life may be found on that planet you stumbled on. It…