Jesteśmy społecznością, która kocha książki

For example, you’ll often hear astrobiologists claim that once life gets going it’s extreme resilient—and they support their claim by enumerating the many and varied shocks that the universe has thrown life’s way, from asteroid impact to catastrophic climate change. Life on Earth has survived all those shocks, so it certainly seems to be robust. But how could we possibly observe it to be otherwise? Any intelligent observer has to look back on its evolutionary history and see events that failed to wipe out life; if life had been wiped out there’d be no intelligent observers to look back and bemoan the fact.

It hardly seems worth mentioning that, depending upon the severity of a nuclear war, the extinction of an intelligent species might follow. (One hesitates to use the word “intelligent” in this context, but the meaning is clear.).

What perhaps could resolve the paradox is if ETCs either won’t or can’t make self-replicating probes. In that case, might they send out life streams anyway, like dandelion “clocks” in the wind, hoping that occasionally someone somewhere will catch one and reconstitute the life they contain?

Ludwig Wittgenstein once famously remarked that “if a lion could talk, we would not understand him”. It’s easy to see the philosopher’s reasoning: lions must perceive the world in ways quite alien to us. They possess drives and senses and abilities that we don’t share. On the other hand, the statement is all wrong. If a lion spoke English then presumably English speakers could understand it—but the mind of that lion would no longer be a lion’s mind. The lion would no longer be a lion.

So, like the drunk who looks for his lost keys at night under a lamppost, not because that’s where he lost them but because that’s where he can see, we might be condemned to search for electromagnetic broadcasts because we can.

Every species has abilities, forged by evolution, which enable them to scrape a living in a world that cares not whether they survive.

Whatever information the Voynich Manuscript contains, we know it was written by a human being in the not too distant past. So the author had the same sensory inputs as the rest of us; a cultural background that is recognizable, if not identical to our own; human emotions that drove him (or her) in exactly the same way they drive us. And yet he (or she) wrote a book we can’t decipher. If such a situation can occur with a member of our own species, what chance do we have of understanding a message from an ETC?

The probes reproduce as if they were living beings, rather than replicate as if they were crystals, so inevitably there’ll be reproductive errors. There’ll be mutations. Probes would evolve, just as biological creatures evolve. The Galaxy could soon be home to different probe “species”, each with its own interpretation of its goals. There’d be a risk, for example, of a probe returning to the home system and failing to recognize it—not good news for the ETC if the probe’s orders are to dismantle planets and use the material to construct something else.

One final thought. Mathematics, at its heart, is all about patterns. Even if mathematics itself is universal, perhaps different intelligences appreciate and investigate different types of pattern. There could be nothing more interesting for mathematicians than to learn about different mathematical systems. To me, this provides yet one more reason why intelligent beings would choose to try and communicate.