I had a professor at Biola University respond to a student’s question about extraterrestrial life that we were the only creatures made in God’s image or “intelligent life” in the universe. This was around 1980, at least a decade before there was scientific proof that there were any “earth like” planets orbiting around any star in the observable universe. Just like the girl in the video, the student responded with disbelief that we would be the only ones in such an enormous universe. I don’t remember his exact words but it was along the line that this was incredibly egotistical and/or mathematically improbable that we alone were the only intelligent life in existence. It is something to ponder that thus far we’ve failed to detect any evidence of human-like intelligence out there.  

The Polish writer, Stanislaw Lem proposed in his novel, Solaris, that maybe alien intelligence is so different that we wouldn’t recognize it even if we were staring at it, right in front of us. I almost said, “right in its face,” but what if it didn’t have what we would call a “face”? It’s hard to find something when we don’t even know what we’re looking for. Yeah, I know we’re generally looking for evidence of industrial or technological traces that wouldn’t naturally occur. But when the first European settlers came to North America they didn’t recognize the evidence of civilizations and cities left behind by indigenous Americans because these “mounds” were overgrown and didn’t resemble anything they knew about European cities. I wonder if we can’t help but be making that mistake again.

Or maybe it’s something that the woman in the video doesn’t even mention but is a plot point in Chinese writer, Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem trilogy, that we can’t find evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence because they’re hiding. This is called the dark forest scenario, and like a dark forest, most of the inhabitants spend their existence trying NOT to be detected because, while they are many, the few predator species are driven to eat them and that’s not very good for their existence. So, one of the first thing an intelligent species learns is to hide, unless they are sure of their dominance of a given region. That’s kind’a dark, but it does answer the question why we have never found obvious evidence of extraterrestrial life. 

Or maybe they are all around us, observing and interacting with us, but we’re so immature as a species that we don’t see them. And the revelation of their existence would rip our uninformed belief that we alone are the epitome of God’s creation from our feeble immature minds and culture. Why do you think we haven’t “found” them yet? 

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Tags: extraterrestrial aliens, meditations on, the Dark Forest, the Fermi paradox, video Mondays

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