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Ice-Cold Water on Past Alien Civilizations Thesis

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Astrophysicist Adam Frank at the University of Rochester and astronomer Woodruff Sullivan at the University of Washington have been getting some mileage out of their thesis that past alien civilizations are a near certainty.

Frank and Sullivan reported their research in Astrobiology last month — I commented here (“Cosmic Archaeology: Taking the Sting Out of the Drake Equation“) — and Frank followed up with a New York Times op-ed, “Yes, There Have Been Aliens.”

Yes, we have no bananas, but we do have dead aliens. Or do we? Ross Anderson at The Atlantic pours ice-cold water on that one (“Fancy Math Can’t Make Aliens Real“). The key lies in all the mega-assumptions that Frank elides concerning abiogenesis and evolution. Note the refreshing frank talk directed at Professor Frank by Ross Anderson (emphasis added):

It is precisely this profusion of planets that gives Frank confidence that ours is not the first intelligent civilization. “Given what we now know about the number and orbital positions of the galaxy’s planets,” he tells us, “the degree of pessimism required to doubt the existence, at some point in time, of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization borders on the irrational.” Most of us have heard a version of this argument, late at night, around a campfire: Look at all the stars in the night sky. Is it really possible that all of their planets are sterile, and all of their predecessors, too?

These arguments have their appeal, but it is an appeal to intuition. The simple fact is that no matter how much we wish to live in a universe that teems with life — and many of us wish quite fervently — we haven’t the slightest clue how often it evolves. Indeed, we aren’t even sure how life arose on this planet. We have our just-so stories about lightning strikes and volcanic vents, but no one has come close to duplicating abiogenesis in a lab. Nor do we know whether basic organisms reliably evolve into beings like us.

We can’t extrapolate from our experience on this planet, because it’s only one data point. We could be the only intelligent beings in the universe, or we could be one among trillions, and either way Earth’s natural history would look the exact same. Even if we could draw some crude inferences, the takeaways might not be so reassuring. It took two billion years for simple, single-celled life to spawn our primordial lineage, the eukaryotes. And so far as we can tell, it only happened once. It took another billion years for eukaryotes to bootstrap into complex animal life, and hundreds of millions of years more for the development of language and sophisticated tool-making. And unlike the eye, or bodies with legs — adaptations that have arisen independently on many branches of life’s tree — intelligence of the spaceship-making sort has only emerged once, in all of Earth’s history. It just doesn’t seem like one of evolution’s go-to solutions.

Frank compresses each of these important, billions-of-years-in-the-making leaps in evolution into a single “biotechnical” probability, which is meant to capture the likelihood of the whole sequence. For all we know, each step could be a highly contingent cosmic lottery win.

Or intelligent design.

So much hangs on the question of human exceptionalism. No wonder, as Wesley Smith often reminds us, it is constantly under attack from one angle or another, not least by the New York Times. What human beings are — cosmic flotsam or creatures potentially in a designer’s image — is the background dilemma to all discussions of evolution.

Intelligent aliens are a requirement for materialists since human existence must be unexceptional, not only on the planet but in the cosmos. If ETs already died out, that’s fine too.

Photo credit: NASA/ESA, via NASA.

David Klinghoffer

Senior Fellow and Editor, Evolution News
David Klinghoffer is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute and the editor of Evolution News & Science Today, the daily voice of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, reporting on intelligent design, evolution, and the intersection of science and culture. Klinghoffer is also the author of six books, a former senior editor and literary editor at National Review magazine, and has written for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Seattle Times, Commentary, and other publications. Born in Santa Monica, California, he graduated from Brown University in 1987 with an A.B. magna cum laude in comparative literature and religious studies. David lives near Seattle, Washington, with his wife and children.

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