Huge excitement. Two Earth-size planets found orbiting a sun-like star less than 1,000 light-years away. This comes two weeks after the stunning announcement of another planet orbiting another star at precisely the right distance — within the so-called “habitable zone” that is not too hot and not too cold — to allow for liquid water and therefore possible life.
Unfortunately, the planets of the right size are too close to their sun, and thus too scorching hot, to permit Earth-like life. And the Goldilocks planet in the habitable zone is too large. At 2.4 times the size of Earth, it is likely gaseous, like Jupiter. No earthlings there. But it’s only a matter of time — perhaps a year or two, estimates one astronomer — before we find the right one of the right size in the right place.
And at just the right time. As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy — a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.
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That silence is maddening. Not just because it compounds our feeling of cosmic isolation. But because it makes no sense. As we inevitably find more and more exo-planets where intelligent life can exist, why have we found no evidence — no signals, no radio waves — that intelligent life does exist?
It’s called the Fermi Paradox, after the great physicist who once asked, “Where is everybody?” Or as was once elaborated: “All our logic, all our anti-isocentrism, assures us that we are not unique — that they must be there. And yet we do not see them.”
How many of them should there be? Modern satellite data suggest the number should be very high. So why the silence? Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the answer is to be found, tragically, in the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.
In other words, this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness but a tragic story about our destiny. It is telling us that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe — an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, near instantly so.
This is not mere theory. Look around. On the very same day that astronomers rejoiced at the discovery of the two Earth-size planets, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity urged two leading scientific journals not to publish details of lab experiments that just created a lethal and highly transmittable form of bird-flu virus, lest that fateful knowledge fall into the wrong hands.
Wrong hands, human hands. This is not just the age of holy terror, but also the threshold of an age of hyper-proliferation. Nuclear weapons in the hands of half-mad tyrants (North Korea) and radical apocalypticists (Iran) are just the beginning. Lethal biologic agents may soon find their way into the hands of those for whom genocidal pandemics loosed upon infidels are the royal road to redemption.
And forget the psychopaths: Why, just 17 years after Homo sapiens discovered atomic power, those most stable and sober states, the United States and the Soviet Union, came within inches of mutual annihilation.
Rather than despair, however, let’s put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence and on humanity’s own short, already baleful history with its new Promethean powers: Intelligence is a capacity so godlike, so protean that it must be contained and disciplined. This is the work of politics — understood as the ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing while simultaneously restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts.
There could be no greater irony: For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics, and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty — statecraft). Because if we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction.
We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics — in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations — is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it.
Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history. It will determine whether we will live long enough to be heard one day. Out there. By them, the few — the only — who got it right.
Read this at LJ world.com. You are 'parti pris in the struggles' of this age. No Montesquieu but more in the line of a Hobbes or Spinoza. And so far unconvincing. belied by your other essays.
I used to think that with an infinite universe (now of course we know it's not infinite) that the probabilities tell us that there must be other life out there. Then I came to realize that life is not a matter of probability. After a century or so of trying, the most brilliant scientists have failed to create anything more than amino acids in their attempt to create life. It just doesn't make sense that DNA and the complexities of life happened by chance.
So to answer your question Dr. K., no, we are not alone. There is a God who created us, and who tells us that our salvation from a destiny of destruction is not by might, nor by power, but by His will. And by that will He made that salvation possible by entering our planet 2012 years ago.
This is an excellent article posing a fundamental question, namely the growing gap between human capability to influence its future, including self-destruction, on one hand, and its limited moral, cognitive and emotional capacities to use that capability for the better.
However to trust politics in its present form to cope with this gap is a delusion. Needed is a radical reform of politics, including the qualities to high level politicians.
Professor Yehezkel Dror
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Author of THE CAPACITY TO GOVERN: A REPORT TO THE CLUB OF ROME (2002)
Mr. Krauthammer may be asking something of contemporary politics that it is ill-equipped to provide. Making politics the central focus of life does not address the essential need to come to grips with mortality, both individual and cultural.
Fortituously, someone recently chose to hold forth on this topic in depth. See Spengler's piece, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.
Jumped off the page for me as well.
Our last best hope is politics? If that's the case, we're certainly doomed.
Though I don't think the fact that religion preceded politics in time proves it superior, I'll offer another argument: politics has nowhere to go without some kind of transcendent moral code, at the very least. Without a source of convictions about human nature, the role of government and the meaning of life--politics can only be a mechanism of consensus.
I'm for the old, old idea that only revealed truth can give us the proper goal of politics.
As for why we have not heard from "Them," it's an interesting curiosity but nothing more.
If you think about it, it didn't. If one goes by the the Bible, the very first act of disobedience was based on politics. Satan the Devil connived Adam and Eve into eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, even after God commanded them not to do so. That act was blatantly political; Satan was jealous of God's power and wanted it for himself.
Politics is the ruin of a civilization. I can entirely believe that politics destroyed other civilizations, but I don't think it would be because of destructive war. Instead, I think other civilizations no longer exist because the state eventually craved too much power and ended up imploding, taking along its citizens with them.
My, my, the curious wanderings of those who refuse to believe in creation. The reason we do not see other intelligent life forms out there is because those life forms were never created in the first place. There is actually an intelligence out there separate from our own, and he has left tell-tale signs everywhere, from the the intricacy of DNA replication to the unexplainable existence of two sexes which function perfectly together (yet evolved separately?). We are not alone due to the failure of politics, I can tell you that for sure!
of all the proposed answers to the fermi paradox, my favorite is, that to make an interstellar trip worth the effort, a civilization must invent three things
The failure to catch signs of life from elsewhere in the universe is grossly exaggerated. It is also a blessing.
To perceive an alien signal of some sort would require that it be aimed at us. Remember that electromagnetic transmissions fall off as the square of the distance. Why would an alien civilization say, 1000 light years away, have sufficient electromagnetic noise to carry across light years of space at sufficient intensity to reach us? Even if beamed directly at us--which would require that they know we are here--such transmissions would have to be impossibly powerful. So it is unlikely that we will ever encounter alien "noise".
It is also a very good thing. When in the history of Man has the discovery of a less-advanced civilization by a technologically superior, exploring race, led to a happy fate for the newly-discovered peoples? Are the Lucayan, Taíno or Arawak peoples better off for Columbus? For life on Earth to be discovered by aliens would almost certainly end poorly for us.
For our own best interests, we should abandon SETI, send no more probes out of the solar system and accept ourselves as being alone with God in the universe.
Abandoning SETI is stupid - sort of like an ostrich putting its proverbial head in the sand. You should think of SETI as an intelligence program. Its purpose is for us to learn as much about others as possible, not the reverse. A very large antenna should be able to see some leakage from other civilizations without those signals being deliberately beamed at us. And nobody is going to see our space probes unless they are already in our solar system. The way to stop advertising our presence is to stop high powered transmissions, and this is already happening slowly. As broadcast frequencies are sold off for cell phones, internet, and other distributed low power uses, and militaries rely more on passive detectors to avoid advertising their positions, powerful, detectable broadcasts are slowly being turned off. Other civilizations have probably done these things already, and what we would observe in SETI is just an elevated amount of high frequency radio noise near their stars.
Darth, your rationale for SETI I can understand, but certainly we ought not be reaching out to the universe with a Pioneer or Voyager showing our location. Any beings capable of responding to our outreach would be as Columbus was to the Arawaks, to us.
The first paragraphs of my note, regarding the unlikelihood of detecting random signals, remain unassailed. What will the power density be of a cell phone tower's signals at a distance of 1000 light years?
We are close enough to build massive telescope systems in space that could easily detect oxygen in the atmospheres of exo planets. A non terrestrial intelligence that is only a few centuries ahead of us could easily have telescope systems monitoring their own neighborhood.
I would imagine they would have computers monitoring thousands of systems that have oxygen atmospheres on a planet and send out a message whenever it detects nuclear bombs exploding which would be a sign that a planet has learned to split the atom.
It would be that point a species is interesting and start sending out probes.
Like on earth, we started blowing up nuclear bombs in the early 1940's and by 1947 we had reports of flying saucers and a flying saucer crash right next to the only spot on the planet that had a nuclear bomb.
Why is God mutually exclusive from life outside of Earth? C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy explores relationships with theology and alien life. Interestingly enough, in the first two books of the sci-fi series, the alien races turn out to be more pious than humans. Fun stuff!
For us to receive a signal beamed at us from 1000 light years away, the signal would have to have been sent 1000 years ago. And the observations made by the one who sent the signal would be of the Earth as it was 1000 years previous to that. As it has been only about 200 years since we first generated any electromagnetic signal at all, we could not hope to receive any such signal for at least another 1800 years. Thus there is no possibility for any real interaction with civilizations on other planets.
Thank you, Lord, for the understanding you give those who call on you. Thank you for the release from the despair of relying on politics as our salvation. And thank you for your word which answers the questions of life with insight, beauty and hope.
Dr. Krauthammer,
I’d be wary of quoting Dr. Sagan. He was a good astronomer and I enjoyed Cosmos as much as the next guy. He's written some great books but much of his non-astronomical oeuvre is biased by his extreme liberalism. Of course he would hypothesize other world intelligent species wiped themselves out. Ardent liberals are always preaching gloom and doom scenarios based on their social-political worries and agendas of the day (although apocalyptic prophets do range the political spectrum…surely if life existed on other plants they too would have crackpots preaching about the end).
Of course nukes are scary and an EM pulse would destroy this country but human life (unfortunately for us) elsewhere would continue.
The reason we do not hear from other intelligent species (if they exist) is much more mundane.
Let’s say human like life exists on a planet 1000 light years away. This means if they have radio communication, it will take any message they send 1000 years to arrive here. If they are like us and evolved similarly…then like us they developed radio 100 years ago. Alas we need to wait 900 more years until we hear from them.
The volume of assumptions in your last paragraph is impressive - so many big "IF"s. "human like", "radio communication", "evolved similarly", "developed radio 100 years ago" .... that's a LOT of similarity being projected for what is routinely claimed to be a completely chaotic and random set of circumstances, eh?
William Buckley once said (paraphrasing) that believing in unguided evolution is akin to believing that a bunch of letters of the alphabet could be dropped 30,000 feet from an airplane and would fall to Earth in such a manner as to duplicate Webster's dictionary. Random chaosists would have us believe that it happened not just once, but multiple times?
Of course I make a lot of assumptions; this is an NRO comment page not a scientific journal submission.
Dr. Krauthammer’s entire article is based on the assumption that there may be intelligent life out there.
My point is that Dr. Sagan’s assumption; if there is life out there…we have not heard from them because they destroyed themselves… is based on liberal ideology and dwarfed manifold by more mundane and science based assumptions.
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