The next time you look up at your night sky and its thousands of stars, realize there are alien intelligences somewhere out there in all that immensity, perhaps looking back at you.
Life began here on Earth almost as soon as it was possible once things settled down from its fiery beginnings. It seems then that given half a chance life can begin anywhere. The laws of physics that directed our solar system's formation and life's beginnings here on earth are ubiquitous throughout our universe. It seems more than reasonable to assume life can, and has, come into existence where-ever conditions are right once stars and their planets have formed, to include intelligent life.
Something akin to this was first postulated by the Greek philosopher Epicurus in 50 BCE and described by his disciple Lucretius in his poem
“On the Nature of Things”
If store of seeds there is
So great that not whole life-times of the living
Can count the tale …
And if their force and nature abide the same,
Able to throw the seeds of things together
Into their places, even as here are thrown
The seeds together in this world of ours,
’Tmust be confessed in other realms there are
Still other worlds, still other breeds of men
As far as we know this was the first speculation as to the existence of alien intelligence in all of history.
Given that physical laws are the same everywhere in a universe 93 billion light years across, and given it's age - 13.8 billion years - and the sheer number of stars with planets that could foster intelligent life - trillions - there really is little doubt that intelligent life has had the means, the time, and the conditions, to come into existence elsewhere.
People have speculated for millennia as to the nature of extraterrestrial intelligence. Most of that speculation, as most of all speculation prior to the development of the scientific method, has been fantastical, and for the most part, utter nonsense. Gods and spirits, angels and demons, shadowy giants possessing unimaginable power, were really our first extraterrestrials.
But even after the development of the scientific method, emotion has crept into this discussion well into into the 20th century. Despite large written volumes containing speculation as to the nature and location of extraterrestrials by some of our greatest early scientists - Edmond Halley, Gottfried Leibniz, Alexander Pope, Immanuel Kant, William Herschel, Pierre Laplace, Thomas Paine, and many more throughout the ages, it wasn't until the 19th century when Percival Lowell tried, for the first time, to use empirical evidence to prove the existence of alien intelligence. But alas even Lowell allowed fantastical nonsense and his own emotions to cloud his findings. Following the teachings of Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli who had published “La vita sul pianeta Marte” (“Life on Mars”), where he described “seas,” “continents,” and waterways on Mars, Lowell attempted to use astronomical evidence to prove the existence of alien intelligence on Mars. As the story goes Schiaparelli had described the lines he had seen on the surface of Mars during astronomical observations, using the word canali, “channels.” English translators, however, rendered it as “canals.” And so Lowell, having misunderstood, set out to prove the lines seen through telescopes were canals built by a vast, technologically advanced civilization on Mars. He built an entire astronomical observatory in 1894 in order to do so. No bias here, oh no. As you can imagine Lowell saw what he wanted to see and none of it was real.
At about the same time H.G.Wells wrote a book titled "The War of the World's" inspired by speculation that there was alien intelligence on Mars. In the book Martians invaded and violently attempted to take over Earth. The book was made into a movie and then subsequently dramatized in a 1938 radio show directed by Orson Welles that was so well done it caused panic among some listeners who thought the events in the show, real. That was followed with the UFO craze in the 1950's and 1960's and then the successes of baseless cartoons such as the Star War Series, Star Trek, The Alien Series, etc, and it's a wonder we can take speculation about alien intelligence seriously at all.
And truth be told - we did not take it seriously for most of the 20th century.
The thing is - it exists. Statistically speaking it has to exist. And that fact helped scientists finally over come their reluctance to even look for it after our embarrassing beginnings, when in 1984 the SETI Institute - the search for extraterrestrial intelligence - started a systematic search for intelligent alien signal from space. It was headed by an astronomer from Cornell, Jill Tarter. The project grew into the NASA SETI Program (later renamed the NASA Microwave Observing Project) with a $10 million annual budget from NASA.
More recently countries around the globe have invested significant amounts of money and energy in serious scientific endeavor to find alien intelligence and alien life, looking for it in telescopic observations around exoplanets - planets outside our solar system - within purposefully modulated electromagnetic radiation - light, radio, etc, and in earnest on Mars - but it has yet to be found.
In order to aid our search for it scientists have tried to classify alien civilization by their energy use, and have tried to estimate the number of civilizations that might possess technology such as radio or laser that we could detect within our galaxy. The Kardashev scale tries to determine ways of detecting alien intelligence's level of technological advancement, based on the amount of energy its civilizations consume. The Drake equation tries to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy based on assumptions that in great part reflect our own technological projections. Both are deeply flawed and both repeat a mistake I have seen time and time again - the projection of modern day human into the future relatively intact - just with cooler gadgets and more knowledge - and the application of that model to alien intelligence and their advancements.
Both ignore the expansion of intelligence that must occur as part of the technological growth of any species capable of advanced technology.
The Kardashev scale does not take into account the true nature of the growth of intelligence and technology and thus the speed and proportion of increased efficiency of energy extraction and use.
Any intelligence as it evolves will experience an information explosion as it develops its technology and enhances its computers. On earth our information explosion has already descended on us. Doubling the knowledge base of all humanity took 150 years between 1750 and 1900. It took 50 years between 1900 and 1950. 10 years to double from 1950-1960. By mid 2023 our knowledge base will double every 54 days - with no end to this exponential growth in sight. How are we to ever keep up? The simple fact is we won't, unless we alter our brains. The information 'explosion' will far outpace growth in our population and in our ability to use it cohesively as a species. Even if individuals specialize to the point of absurdity - competition, and limits of cooperation and bandwidth, will demand brain enhancement. The alterations and enhancements will continue at ever greater speed with an ever increasing deluge of information until finally we will become unrecognizable to our modern day selves - until we are in fact, no longer human.
We will in fairly short order have to enhance our intelligence just to be able to keep up with information and artificial intelligence or we will become obsolete. And this will be true of any technologically advanced alien intelligence. They will undergo their information explosions and will be forced to alter themselves to become a thousand, a million, a billion times smarter than their predecessors.
Im sorry Dyson but I just cant see intelligence that powerful building megastructures around stars to harvest energy. It would have no need. (Dyson proposed building megastructures around suns in order to capture all of their energy for use by advanced civilizations. A sphere with a radius of say 150 million miles - the distance from the sun to Mars would have a surface area of 283,000,000,000,000,000 miles squared = big, bulky, and unnecessary when we learn to convert mass to energy with say 90% efficiency. More on that to follow...)
And here lies the fundamental flaw in much of the scientific speculation as to the nature of alien intelligence. We assume things will progress as they always have - even when accounting for rapidly progressing technology and knowledge - but intelligence will remain relatively fixed. We will remain pretty much as we are, alien intelligences will remain pretty much as they are, regarding intelligence - the only thing that will progress is accumulated knowledge and technological advancement at a rate we would expect given fixed intelligence levels.
And so we search for extraterrestrial signal within the sorts of ways we communicate today. We search for signs of intelligent life on exoplanets looking for traces of a complex society that probably bears no relationship to our reality given their massive expansion of intellectual capability.
Few scientists consider the growth of intelligence fundamental to any technologically advanced civilization in their speculations as to the nature of alien intelligence. We are talking about going from radio, to electronic computers, to super intelligence in 100-200 years here on Earth. A blink of the eye. The same will occur elsewhere.
Drake talks about communicating civilizations lasting maybe 10,000 years, assuming they remain on their home planets, do not expand their intelligence, or establish non-planetary worlds. ( In his defense Drake had not seen Star Wars - and the Death Star when he invented his famous equation). Kardashev did not imagine an intelligence 1 million times our own that would be capable of increasing the efficiency of energy utilization and extraction in ways we cannot imagine. Detecting energy use by any civilization relies heavily on detecting the waste and inefficiency of the processes employed to extract and use it. We are not going to understand what an intelligence a million fold ours is capable of doing in this regard, and so the scale becomes limited in helping us to find and categorize alien intelligence.
For fun lets imagine that this super-intelligence has discovered a way to convert almost any mass into energy with 90% efficiency.
E = mc2
This now famous equation of Einstein’s reveals that mass and energy are interchangeable - different forms of the same thing - a little like water and ice. C is a constant and so E ∝ m. There is nothing inherent in the physical laws of this universe that prevents intelligence from discovering a way to safely convert mass to energy with high efficiency. If we can convert 210 grams of mass (about 6.5 ounces) to energy with only 90% efficiency we can extract enough energy to completely power the entire US for an hour. Providing all the earth’s energy needs for an entire year would require only 7100 Kg of matter. A little over 7.8 tons of material.
E = m x (300,000)2
1 gm of matter = 81 terajules at a 90% conversion
The world presently consumes about 580 million terajoules/year or 7100 Kg of matter
Even if we increase our energy consumption 1 million fold going into the future Mt Everest would provide all the energy the entire world would need for 114,000 years or we could just mine asteroids.
As you can see we won't need no stinking Dyson spheres going into the future. So if by chance you've been looking for a Dyson sphere, stop.
I doubt you'd need an intellect a million times ours to do this. So imagine what is possible.
Until we factor in the growth of intelligence that must occur with the growth of information and technology in any technologically advanced civilization I think we are very unlikely to find any trace of them. For an intelligence a million times our own would be indistinguishable from a God and Gods would most likely have no interest in revealing themselves, especially to the likes of us.
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