The Sun and the other stars are great balls of fire.
The depths of space, by contrast, are freezing cold.
The distances involved are immense.
The Big Bang that created the universe
was unbelievably violent.
It's perhaps not surprising that many people view the
universe as hostile to life.
The physicist Steven Weinberg once dismissed life as 'a
more or less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents'.
But first impressions
can be deceptive.
Here are some of the laws of nature,
the laws that
governed how the cosmos evolved and govern all that goes around us now.
It turns out that if these laws had been fixed at random,
if the strength of the gravitational force, or the strength of the Electrical force,
or the masses of the sub-atomic particles,
or the violence of the
Big Bang. If any of these had been chosen purely at random
- then the chances of having a world with life, any kind of life, would have been virtually zero.
So the universe appears to have bent over backwards to accommodate life.
This observation goes under the name The Anthropic Principle.
As another physicist, Freeman Dyson somewhat colourfully put it: '’The universe knew we were coming'
So how are we to account for
it - the way the universe is so life-friendly?
Was it specifically designed as a home for life by some Creator? That's one possibility. But
that, of course, takes us way beyond the realms of
science. Some seek to solve the problem by suggesting that our universe might not be alone.
There are other universes. Lots of them.
Perhaps an infinite number of them.
The whole ensemble is called the multiverse.
And the idea is that the laws of nature are different in all the individual universes.
In the vast majority of them,
there is no life because one or other
of the conditions was not satisfied.
But once in a while, there comes along a universe which,
purely by chance, happens to have the right set of conditions
for the development of life. We
being a form of life ourselves must, of course, find
ourselves in one of these freak universes.
Fair enough. That would account for why our universe is life-friendly.
But that simply raises another problem:
How are we ever to prove
that there are universes other than our own and
that they are run on different lines?
Other universes, by definition, are not part
of our universe and so cannot be contacted.
So it could be that the multiverse idea might
also lie beyond the realms of science
When thinking about our universe being life-friendly,
one can't help wondering whether there might be
other forms of life out there.
And if there is life
and it's intelligent,
how does that affect the status of us humans?
Well, as far as our Solar System is concerned, the planets circling our sun,
there might be some forms of very primitive life.
We should have the answer to that quite soon as a result of planned space probes.
But not intelligent life.
No, if ET exists it must be on a planet
going around some other star, what we call an exoplanet.
And there's no shortage of those.
Several hundred have been found and the tally increases weekly.
Most of them will not be habitable.
But from the law of averages, there must be many, many Earth-like planets out
there, planets where intelligent life could flourish.
Which is not to say that it has.
So a big question is whether or not there is extraterrestrial intelligent life,
and if so what’s it like.
Evolution on earth took a very long time,
billions of years.
So, on some other planet, it has only to get
out of step with what happened here on earth to
only a small degree for ET to have reached our level of intelligence, the intelligence
of a Charles Darwin,
to have reached that level
a long, long time ago.
So that means they must by now be way ahead of us.
Except, except the human race has got this far in intelligence
because in the past
there was survival value in having a superior intelligence.
You had a better chance of surviving to the point where
you could mate and pass on your superior genes.
But does that still apply today? Do
the more intelligent people today have more children than the less intelligent?
If anything, I'd have thought it was the other way round.
After all, the more intelligent you are the
better your chances of getting a well-paid job.
And the better-paid job leads to a higher standard of living
and the fewer children you are likely to have.
If that's true of us, perhaps it's also true of ET.
On the other hand, when ET reached our stage of development,
it would know all about DNA and genetic engineering.
For all we know,
they might be heavily into genetically engineering designer babies
with superior intelligence, a case of
directed evolution rather than relying
on evolution by natural selection.
In which case as we previously thought,
they will now be vastly superior to us.
On the other hand, when they
reach our stage
they discover nuclear power,
and in all probability, in a comparatively short time,
they blow themselves up.
Perhaps that's the fate of all intelligent species throughout the cosmos.
They reach the stage we're at, then POOF!
That's it.
No further improvement.
So,
which of these scenarios, if any of them,
which of them is right?
How can we find out?
Simple.
Go and visit them,
as is done
in countless science fiction adventure stories.
No.
Hardly. The distances are just simply too far.
Space travel is not the answer.
The other approach is to search the skies for any signals
indicating that ET is trying to communicate with us.
Such searches have been carried out
for many years by the SETI programme
- the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
But so far without success.
The search will carry on
but there's no guarantee that they will find anything.
Even if ET exists they might not have the
means to communicate with us or
the desire to communicate with us.
The situation is not under our control.
It's up to ET.
Perhaps we're destined never to find out about intelligent
life elsewhere in the universe?
Russell? Russell, sorry slight problem, page 21 of the script.
You say ET might be getting more intelligent when they get affluent.
Then you say 'On the other hand they might
go in for genetic engineering'.
And then you say 'On the other hand they might blow themselves up.
That's three hands.
Well perhaps ET has three hands. You know, it would be very useful
as you’re at a reception and you’re trying to eat.
It’s all to do with survival value,
surviving stand up receptions.