Is there intelligent alien life in the universe?
We now estimate that there are billions of planets where complex life could have evolved just in our galaxy alone.
Life began on earth almost as soon as conditions settled down enough to permit it. Assuming it wasn't transplanted from elsewhere, it is likely then that life - given half a chance - can come to exist relatively easily - everywhere. It then took about another 4.5 billion years, or about 1/3 of the age of the universe, for intelligent life capable of technological advancement to evolve here on earth.
If this has occurred somewhere else in our galaxy just a few million years before us - they should by now be ubiquitous in our galaxy. One would think any technological intelligence would disturb its surroundings in ways we should be able to detect. And yet all we have experienced, in all our searching, is silence.
The silence is ominous, baffling, and quite dramatic. It does not make sense or as Enrico Fermi put it - where is everybody? We should be inundated with intelligent signal and have made first contact by now. Instead, silence.
Where is everybody? The question speaks to the nature of intelligent life, it's beginnings, its evolution, and to our possible future. Do all advanced civilizations destroy themselves? Is that our future?
I have noticed whenever scientists discuss this, that there is a tendency to linear thinking. We evolve, a few hundred thousands years later we invent rockets and then begin to explore space. We invent powerful electronic computers to help us along the way. These are things one could reasonably expect of any higher order intelligence.
But then the picture takes on a pretty unimaginative trajectory involving methodical linear advances in communication, rockets and space travel, even when allowing for the possibility of worm holes and interstellar travel. We envision a straight path of slow but steady progress - maybe hundreds of years, or even thousands of years from now when we will finally climb into space ships and begin to explore interstellar space as a species relatively unchanged. We project that sort of thinking onto alien lifeforms and their civilization's trajectory - and so cannot come up with reasons to explain the current day’s silence - all of this should have happened thousands of times already, just in our galaxy alone - millions of years ago - and aliens and their signals should be everywhere. So - where is everybody?
Technological growth is not linear. I suspect that in 100 years, or for the doubters, even a thousand years from now, we will have created an intelligence hundreds of thousands, if not millions of times, more intelligent than our current selves. From radio to super computer in less than 1,000 years - a blink of the eye. Along the way to getting there, in order to remain relevant and to simply keep up with the concomitant information explosion, we will alter ourselves to become that intelligence. In doing so it is highly likely we will no longer remain human and most likely not even biologic. Our current selves would likely not recognize our future selves ways of communicating, our even be able to experience them in ways that would have meaning.
This is likely the fate of all advance intelligences to include ourselves and our aliens.
There are fundamental truths as regards the nature of our universe yet to be discovered that when our future selves discover them could change everything, to include how we experience space-time itself. It is entirely possible that our future selves and our more advanced aliens, will reside in a different reality - one that we cannot experience.
Wild speculation? Well here's what I know. There are no theoretical bounds to the growth of intelligence - save perhaps heat dissipation. All intelligent life capable of building computers will eventually construct intelligences far beyond anything we can currently imagine. We then, are unlikely to know the answer to - Where Is Everybody? - until we do so as well.
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