We may think we’re smart, but there’s a whole universe out there that begs to differ
In 1950, Enrico Fermi went to lunch with fellow physicists Edward Teller, Herbert York and Emil Konopinski. If you are drafting a nerd fantasy team, this would pretty much guarantee you a Top 3 finish.
As the talk turned to a recent, and typically unpromising UFO sighting, a semi-frustrated Fermi asked, “Where is everybody?”
The inference was that with billions of stars in the Milky Way there was almost assuredly life, and a lot of that life would have developed long before us. So odds were, a civilization that might have pre-dated us by even a few thousand years should have mastered interstellar travel by now, or at the very least, mastered interstellar communication skills.
Indeed, the odds of us being a universal one-off would be the same as hitting the Mega Millions lottery 12 times in a row. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but truth is so 20th century.
And it’s not like we’ve hidden the fact that we exist. Like the loudmouths that humans are, we have blasted the heavens with all sorts of “We are here!” messaging, a la “Horton Hears a Who.”
Whether this is smart or not is a different story: We may be like a bunch of mice inviting a world of eagles to our gender-reveal party. But the bottom line is that all our entreaties have been met with stone-cold silence.
There have been all sorts of theories why this is so: Maybe space travel is even harder than we imagine; maybe other civilizations aren’t interested in searching for life; maybe they never became advanced enough for space travel because they killed themselves off in wars, environmental disasters or acts of self-destructive cruelty before they advanced to the space-travel stage.
Admittedly, that last one has a ring of truth to it, although it would assume the unlikely odds that twice in the same universe a hydrogen molecule, over time, would evolve into Greg Abbott.
But now there’s a new theory that sounds even more plausible: Other civilizations are indeed on the lookout for intelligent life, but by their criteria, we don't fit the definition. Amri Wandel, an astrophysicist at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote that life in our galaxy may be really common, and if that’s the case, super-advanced civilizations aren't going to waste their time on newly evolved life any more than we would try to communicate with a planet populated by single-cell organisms.
Makes sense to me. Really, if your first probe of earth hit on, say, a Verizon call center, how likely would you be to ask a follow-up question?
According to LiveScience, “If many of the rocky planets orbiting in the habitable zone of stars host life, aliens probably aren't going to waste their resources sending signals to every one — they'd likely end up trying to communicate with alien algae or amoebas.”
It is true that we have been sending out electronic signals for decades and have received no response, but Wandel doesn’t put much stock in this because even at the speed of light they would have only reached a relative handful of stars by now.
I’d go Wandel one better and suggest that aliens might not find our electronic pulses any more interesting than a coral feeding on a plankton. They were entertaining at the time, but our early transmissions were nothing to suggest higher intelligence. How many aliens are going to hear “You can call me Ray, or you can call me J.,” and think, “Oh boy, let’s get a message back to that guy right away!”
Remember Spock’s bewilderment at “a simple binary code transmitted by carrier-wave signal — radio.” And Kirk responding, “Radio?” like a graphic designer who’s just been handed a mimeograph machine.
In other words, we may think we’re smart, but there’s a whole universe out there that begs to differ.
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Aliens might view earthlings the way we view an ameobia
