As I’ve said before, intelligent design can take or leave extraterrestrial life. It doesn’t affect the cogency of ID arguments one way or the other. Materialism, on the other hand, must have ETs and the more intelligent and advanced, the better. After all, human life can’t be special, therefore something like us must be replicated across the cosmos.

The problem is that the universe offers no hint of objective evidence for ETs. So the race is on to find plausible rationales for why the heck not. Enter Columbia University astrophysicist Caleb Scharf with a novel idea: We can’t see advanced otherworldly life because it’s so advanced it has encoded itself in the structure of the universe itself (“Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence?“).

Actually it’s literally a novel idea since, as he points out at the end of an article for Nautilus, Carl Sagan came up with it in his science fiction classic Contact back in 1985.

[I]f the cosmos holds other life, and if some of that life has evolved beyond our own waypoints of complexity and technology, we should be considering some very extreme possibilities. Today’s futurists and believers in a machine “singularity” predict that life and its technological baggage might end up so beyond our ken that we wouldn’t even realize we were staring at it. That’s quite a claim, yet it would neatly explain why we have yet to see advanced intelligence in the cosmos around us, despite the sheer number of planets it could have arisen on — the so-called Fermi Paradox.

For example, if machines continue to grow exponentially in speed and sophistication, they will one day be able to decode the staggering complexity of the living world, from its atoms and molecules all the way up to entire planetary biomes. Presumably life doesn’t have to be made of atoms and molecules, but could be assembled from any set of building blocks with the requisite complexity. If so, a civilization could then transcribe itself and its entire physical realm into new forms. Indeed, perhaps our universe is one of the new forms into which some other civilization transcribed its world.

These possibilities might seem wholly untestable, because part of the conceit is that sufficiently advanced life will not just be unrecognizable as such, but will blend completely into the fabric of what we’ve thought of as nature. But viewed through the warped bottom of a beer glass, we can pick out a few cosmic phenomena that — at crazy as it sounds — might fit the requirements.

What’s that about a beer glass?

Actually, this is clever as a thought experiment. As an illustration of how his alien physics idea might be true, he suggests that mysterious dark matter, thought to constitute 27 percent of the mass and energy of the universe we see, might not be the formless, structure-less stuff we imagine. Perhaps it’s more like cloud storage for alien civilizations that have uploaded themselves.

Coming on top of biologist Andy Gardner’s proof against ID that I mentioned this morning — from the fact that gazelles don’t leap into the mouths of waiting cheetahs, as a perhaps “slightly facetious” Dr. Gardner would design things if he were in charge — this is a good day for some rather underwhelming attempts to escape from scientific indications of ID.

So Scharf’s escape hatch is to posit alien design in the cosmos in the form of physics and its laws. At first glance this doesn’t sound radically at variance with Discovery Institute biologist Michael Denton’s argument (see the Privileged Species website) that chemistry and physics, with their extraordinarily detailed fitness for life, give evidence of design.

One difference is that a suggestion like Scharf’s is intended, perhaps not consciously, to evade the possibility that a designer is outside nature, something that the game of science as currently played arbitrarily excludes. Denton more reasonably leaves the question open. The other difference is that Denton’s evidence is massive, while Scharf’s is hard to distinguish from sci-fi.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, M.J. Jee and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

I’m on Twitter. Follow me @d_klinghoffer.