Posted by:
esias
(
)
Date: June 25, 2020 02:13PM
Where is Everybody?
'Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s revolving, and revolving at nine hundred miles an hour. It’s orbiting at ninety miles a second, so it’s reckoned, the sun that is the source of all our power. The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see are moving at a million miles a day. In an outer spiral arm at forty thousand miles an hour in a galaxy we call the Milky Way.
'Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars. It’s a hundred thousand light-years side to side. It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick. And out by us it’s just three thousand light-years wide. We’re thirty thousand light-years from galactic central point. We get round every two hundred million years. And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions in this amazing and expanding universe.
'The universe itself keeps expanding and expanding in all the directions it can whiz. As fast as it can go the speed of light you know twelve million miles a minute and that’s the fastest speed there is. So remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure how amazing and unlikely is your birth. And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space. ’Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth. (Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life 1983)
The space-headed prophets of the Old Testament might have preached the parable that no matter how high the religious addiction to the deluded, both feet on terra-firma must be firmly rooted in evidence. The parable of evidence applies equally to the highest math-wizards, waving their wands of chalk and smothering magic boards with the scrambled custard of calculations — the Scientist — not the Prophet — gave us E=MC², took us to the Moon, and the scientists — not the prophets — are sending us high-definition colour pictures of Mars.
The Mormon Church has made an astonishing contribution to astrophysics and human progress. The big-bearded Brigham Young — the second murderous polygamous prophet following the gunning down of the gold-digging magic-stone-peeping gangsta Joseph Smith — blazed a trail to the salt flats of Utah with the sacrificial fodder of pioneers, and a spiritual trail to the stars with the superficial space-dust of revelation:
'We are called ignorant; so we are: but what of it? Are not all ignorant? I rather think so. Who can tell us of the inhabitants of this little planet that shines of an evening, called the moon? When we view its face we may see what is termed ‘the man in the moon’ ... So it is with regard to the inhabitants of the sun. Do you think it is inhabited? I rather think it is. Do you think there is any life there? No question of it; it was not made in vain. It was made to give light to those who dwell upon it, and to other planets; and so will this earth when it is celestialized. Every planet in its first rude, organic state receives not the glory of God upon it, but is opaque; but when celestialized, every planet that God brings into existence is a body of light, but not till then. Christ is the light of this planet. ' (Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 13:271)
The rocket-fuel of prophecy throbbing their temples and spirit-burning their bosoms, star-struck Mormon cosmologists raced to their telescopes to ratify the prophet’s tall-hatted findings:
'The inhabitants of the moon are more of a uniform size than the inhabitants of the earth, being six feet in height. They dress very much like the Quaker style and are quite general in style or fashion of dress. They live to be very old; coming generally near a thousand years. This is the description of them as given by Joseph the Seer.' (Oliver B Huntington journal vol 2 p166)
God was on a rock-’n’-roll rush to reveal the highest magic-laughing-gas secrets of the universe. Mormon prophets were leading lights with their out-of-this-world ability to Babel in tongues. The steady, stay at home stick-mud prophets of the satellite sixties inspired their sheeple with supernova predictions:
'We will never get a man into space. This earth is man’s sphere and it was never intended that he should get away from it. The moon is a superior planet to the earth and it was never intended that man should go there. You can write it down in your books that this will never happen.' (Joseph Fielding Smith, stake conference Honolulu 14th May 1961)
The Incredibly Shrinking Con Cult Corporation of Creepy Crinkly Men is a collection of likely looking clones — twelve apostles, two counsellors and a prophet propped, prodded and paraded in public twice a year at the appalling parody of General Conference under the panoply of a panoramic Salt Lake conference centre like puppets — rows of Russian-doll apparatchiks whiffing strongly of formaldehyde, waving white handkerchiefs and hawking clichés. We are the Morg. Resistance is futile.
In 2002 the BBC’s John Sweeney, who had twice crossed e-meters with the Scientologists for Panorama, penetrated the hive and infiltrated the brain of the Morg Apostle Elder Holland for This World: The Mormon Candidate
'We’re not a cult. I’m not an idiot, you know. I’ve read a couple of books and I’ve been to a pretty good school, and I have chosen to be in this church because of the faith that I feel and the inspiration that comes. I’ve met people, and if people want to call us a cult, they can call us a cult and you can call us a cult, but we are fourteen million and growing, and I’d like to think that your respect for me would be enough to know that this man doesn’t seem like a dodo.' (Elder Holland, BBC Television)
Why the vicious unprovoked attack on the dodo? Was the Morg conspiring a daring papal Proclamation to deny the existence of the dodo? Dodo Holland’s naked admission during the BBC probing that he had ‘read a couple of books’ renders this leading naturist a giant of Morg Intelligentsia.
At the bizarre bi-annual Morg conference of April 2012 Elder Russell M Nelson, a fiery Virgo with his moon in Uranus, and hopeless addict of the Analogy, came out of the cosmic closet to let fart a celestial clanger:
'Yet some people erroneously think that these marvellous physical attributes happened by chance or resulted from a Big Bang somewhere. Ask yourself: Could an explosion in a printing shop produce a dictionary? The likelihood is most remote. But if so, it could never heal its own torn pages or reproduce its own newer editions.' (Elder Russell M Nelson, Thanks Be to God)
We have crossed the Van Allen Belt of sanity from the stubbornly stone-hearted to the barking, howling lunar-brained delirium of a Munchkin who will say anything to keep his $80,000 a month allowance.
Or perhaps we should thank the likes of Russell M Nelson for shovelling us so much manure to feed the running horses of ripping the piss out of the Analogy. May the force be with you, Russell M Nelson.
The inkily suspicious story of a print shop and dictionary — stretched to include ‘torn pages’ and ‘newer editions’ — is a corruption of an analogy attributed to Fred Hoyle, former astronomer and mathematician at the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy, and fireside familiar radio voice of the BBC:
'The chance that higher life-forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.' (Fred Hoyle, Hoyle on Evolution, Nature 294: 5837 p105 12th November 1981)
Our parable of the importance of evidence stars the enfant terrible of dissenting scientists Fred Hoyle — an honour sure to compensate the late space-head for the lack of a Nobel Prize for his part in the development of the concept of stella-nucleosynthesis. Our faithful Sun fuses hydrogen atoms into helium atoms, and Hoyle and others realised that to consummate the alchemy of the heavier elements we need a bang from a bigger sun — much bigger — a super-sun or supernova, and when that goes off all Hell lets loose, with the biggest mother-farting bang outside of George W Bush’s underpants.
We swing back to the sixties and discover the author a stripling astrophysicist with a wee plastic telescope and espying the celestial movements of the blonde next door. Two rival theories lock horns for the origin of the universe: the gang of Steady Staters led by Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold, Fred Hoyle et al maintain a stable universe the same yesterday, today and for ever in a ‘steady state’. The gritty west-Yorkshire way-out-there-on-the-moors avuncular voice of Fred Hoyle gushed from the radiogram a sixties’ gospel of the Steady State. The rival, gestate theory of an expanding universe was christened the Big Bang by Hoyle not particularly as a spiteful term of derision but simply to explain the difference between the two competing theories:
'Perhaps like me you grew up with the notion that the whole of the matter in the universe was created in one Big Bang at a particular time in the remote past. What I’m now going to tell you is that this is wrong.' (Professor Fred Hoyle, radio broadcast)
Abandoned alone in a big unfriendly universe built on probabilities we find a brazen, brave scientist burning her or his breaches and willing to declare that so-and-so is definitely right or wrong. And so bold a prediction must be backed by a bucketload of evidence.
'This Big Bang assumption is much the less palatable of the two. For it’s an irrational process that can’t be described in scientific terms. On philosophical grounds too I can’t see any good reason for preferring the Big Bang idea ... It can never be challenged by a direct appeal to observation.' (Professor Fred Hoyle, radio broadcast 1950 The Nature of the Universe)
Every Jill and Jack of us is vulnerable to magical thinking and the temptation of magical language (the universe isn’t ‘built’ on probability). The spell-bound religious victim longs to believe a logical God has built a logical universe. But to prophesy that a scientific theory can ‘never be challenged by a direct appeal to observation’ is boldly to burn one’s pocket-marbles where no blow-torch has burnt before. Fred Hoyle believed that the conception of a universe having a beginning was voodoo science and smacking of a Creator.
Belgium priest and professor of physics Georges Lamaitre proposed in 1927 the prospect of an expanding universe, although at first the paper had little impact.
The scrambled-custard calculations of Albert Einstein were leading the foremost star-stirrer to the disturbing conclusion of an expanding universe. Einstein’s cosmological constant was later to haunt him as a quasar mistake, but the volte-face to recognise the custard on the wall was a relative triumph for human reason and science.
Twinkling high atop our heaven-tree of scientific stars hangs the blue-suited pipe-smoking Edwin Hubble. Hubble beadily eye-spied through the Mount Wilson Observatory California telescope in the red spectrum of light a rebellion of galaxies rip-roaring away from the Milky Way at a rude rate of knots. A fleet of physicists led by George Gamow grappled with the Gordian knot of expanding space between the galaxies to contend that the space between the galaxies must have been smaller in the past. The universe — ‘the king of infinite space’ — shrunken to a conclusion will have been ‘bounded in a nut-shell’, confined in an incredibly compact hot-spot, and when that kick-blasts ker-bang, it crackerjacks the biggest bad-boy Kilimanjaro of a johnny-come-lately universe.
'This is the Holy Grail of Physics. We want to know why it banged; we want to know what banged; we want to know what was there before the bang.' (Professor Michio Kaku, author Physics of the Impossible, interview How the Universe Works)
From 1946 Robert Dicke et al were predicting that along with the matter condensed into galaxies, the Big Bang must have scattered a tremendous amount of background radiation.
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were two affable scientists working at Bell Labs, New Jersey 1964 on a modest twenty-foot horn antennae built to detect radio waves bouncing off satellites. Their first task was to eliminate all Earth-bound interference but they found wherever they pointed the antenna a strange, steady confounding hum more than a hundred times stronger than the signal they expected.
On checking their equipment Penzias and Wilson found a family of pigeons nesting inside the antenna — intent less on the science but more on coating the insides with a thick layer of dickie doo-doos. Now, any documentary covering the Big Bang will fill you with a nice, warm story that the horn-loving pigeons were posted to a new home nearby.
The ploppies had dropped and I had fallen on a blue-ribbon plan for a high-flying doctorate: if I could track down the descendants of the pigeon family, maybe interview them, I would have sufficient filling for a doctorate of tremendous value to science. But as my research delved deeper and darker and down into a devil’s den of dastardly scientific secrets I discovered that these highrollers of science had lied to us. The pigeons were shot. There lies the truth of the matter. The reader knows from Chapter One the softness of the author’s brain-matter. I can’t tell you the sleepless nights I’ve cried. Not so much over the shot pigeons as over the loss of my doctorate — one small step for man — and the loss of knowledge — one giant leap for pigeonkind.
Professor Robert H Dicke rushed to Bell Labs to confirm Penzias’ and Wilson’s evidence of background cosmic radiation — ubiquitous and detectable proof of the Big Bang.
'The universe was an expanding structure — galaxies flying away from each other, flying away from each other ever more rapidly the further away they were. The implication of course of all this if you simply send Time backwards — everything is closer together in the past. So there’s the idea of something blowing up or flying apart.' (Professor Bob Dicke, interview BBC)
Where were you, and do you remember the first time your virgin eyes beheld Hubble Telescope’s star-spangled pictures of baby galaxies and towering gaseous nurseries? The less romantic, lesser remembered 1990s COBE satellite and Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe of 2001 detected unevenness in the microwave background of the early universe:
'The cosmic microwave background is the echo of creation itself. It’s the embers, the afterglow of the original shock-wave that created the universe. If we had microwave eyes, eyes that could see microwave radiation, then every night we would see the Big Bang coming out. Looking at the heavens, we would actually see an explosion ... The discovery of the microwave background radiation ranks as one of the greatest discoveries in all of science.' (Professor Michio Kaku)
But the Steady Staters, underscored by the cosmic trail of evidence, stood firm and refused to accept the match result. Behold in bold array the brass-necked brave-new-world refuseniks of cosmic science!
'In the beginning I thought this was pretty bad for the theory ... It’s a completely open question today I believe as to whether this background really comes from the general universe or whether it comes from sources in the general manner of radio-astronomy.' (Professor Fred Hoyle, The Violent Universe, BBC 1969)
Would the Steady Staters have listened to you and me and our parable of the importance of evidence? No they would not.
'What this journey really boils down to is trust in evidence. Because no matter how strange the conclusions may seem, it is only be accepting evidence that we have come to understand not just the universe but also our place in it.' (Michael Mosley, The Story of Science, BBC)
Will our warnings stop scatter-gun scientists peppering their books and documentaries with a Valentine’s-Day massacre of runaway analogies? Not till the last speakeasy in Hell freezes over. Will Bob Dicke and Fred Hoyle agree to resolve their differences in the virtual debating chamber of Celebrity Death Match? Science has no higher mission.
'The primordial atom burst. Sending out its radiation. Setting everything in motion. One particle collides with another. Gasses expand. Planets contract. And before you know it we’ve got starships and holodecks and chicken soup. In fact you can’t help but have starships and holodecks and chicken soup because it was all determined twenty billion years ago.' (Star Trek: Voyager: Latent Image s5e11, Doctor to Janeway)
Bob Dicke et al back in the star-struck sixties were preaching a lesson from the pulpit of science that if the cosmological constants were slightly different, life could not exist in the universe. From such black and white beginnings, without planning, was born the baby-booming Anthropic Principle — the universe seems to have been fine-tuned for our benefit. Fred Hoyle hung until the eighties to wham us with another of his withering analogies comparing: ‘The chance of obtaining even a single functioning protein by chance combination of amino acids to a star system full of blind men solving Rubik's Cube simultaneously.’ (Fred Hoyle, Intelligent Universe)
Fred Hoyle wasn’t yet converting to the Christianity of a white-bearded God sitting by a tomb-sized radiogram and fiddling an array of knobs to resurrect life from a cosmic sea of interference.
What ho! What is this? Do we detect with the defined value of certain cosmological constants the final proof of a fiddling God? The hearts of theists everywhere skip a beat and burst into a chorus of Onward Christian Soldiers:
'The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron ... The values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.' (Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time)
Are these fine-tuned parameters — Martin Rees envisions six — as fine-tuned as we suppose? Do the cosmological constants have free agency of value? If not, why those particular values and not others? Do the constants in combination conspire other values that give rise to the conditions ripe for life? Does String Theory tie the values of the constants? Would a Theory of Everything explain the values?
'I am really not impressed with the amount of fine tuning there is, with the exception of this one — dark energy.' (Professor Steven Weinberg, interview Professor Richard Dawkins)
Varying versions of the Anthropic Principle have evolved. So has criticism of the cosmological constants as logical truisms rather than observable reality e.g. D = number of spatial dimensions. The teleologic Anthropic Principle is a straw man. A tautology. An all-encompassing idiom adopted as a lazy surrogate for a proper body of further observation and research.
'It tends to be invoked by theorists whenever they do not have a good enough theory to explain the observed facts.' (Professor Roger Penrose)
The universe is not friendly to carbon-based life-forms apart from a few freak flat spots. The universe is not built for our benefit. The Earth is not built like a Raisa-style pleasure planet. But you can bet your bottom dollar the loose-moralled Analogy is right up our alley and riding to the rescue to sucker the susceptible with another highly suspicious death-defying cosmic comparison: Stephen J Gould suggests a sausage made long and narrow to fit the modern hot-dog bun. Ships are made to shelter barnacles. John Leslie puts a man before a firing squad and all ten men miss the target leaving the lucky man to muse that, ‘obviously they all missed, or I wouldn’t be here thinking about it.’ Richard Dawkins, offering for his friend a eulogy, described the domesticated example from that bête noir of the cosmic analogy, the late author Douglas Adams:
'Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact, it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the Sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be all right, because this World was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.'
In a Mormon universe Psi is the number of wives sealed to Joseph Smith; Delta the number of sections in the Book of Mormon as a ratio of the time it takes to stare at a peep-stone in a hat; Eta is the strong binding nuclear force of the penishood; and Kappa is the distance to Kolob as a ratio of the IQ of the person yearning to get there.
Paul Davies in The Goldilocks Enigma (2007) prefers the lumpy porridge of the Three Bears to explain our upstart place at the universe table:
1) The Absurd Universe: Our universe just happens to be this way.
2) The Unique Universe: The Theory of Everything governs the values of the universe.
3) The Multiverse: Multiple universes with all possible combinations of constants, and we have hit the cosmic jackpot.
4) Intelligent Design: A crazy creator designed the universe to support intelligent life.
5) The Life Principle: Some underlying principle obliges the universe to evolve intelligent life.
6) The Self-Explaining Universe: Only universes with a capacity for consciousness can exist.
7) The Fake Universe: We are part of a virtual reality simulation.
The final option — Simulated Reality — is a pot-load of fun, popular with philosophers and writers of science fiction — Imagine there’s no heaven. Imagine a civilisation civilised enough not to top itself in a puff of nuclear wind. Imagine a civilisation whose computing capacity doubles every eighteen months or so as prophesied by Moore’s Law. Imagine the day in the dawn of infinity when that civilisation’s super-duper computer has evolved the power to duplicate an exact copy of planet Earth replete with holes in socks that need mending and hair that needs cutting. And if this super-duper computer can compute one copy of planet Earth, it can compute a multiverse of copies. The people of planet Earth will not know they are part of a duplicated simulated reality. The chances weigh heavily we inhabit a copy of planet Earth and not the pristine original. The pixels of this computer program are the iddy-piddy quarks and protons we hold in smashing esteem at the Cern particle accelerator.
'You cannot have complexity to build a computer, to build a second-life software to run us, unless the creatures that built that computer evolved ... Sooner or later regresses of that kind have to be terminated. You cannot suddenly invent complexity and intelligence. The only way to do it is to start from primeval simplify and work up gradually.' (Professor Richard Dawkins, American Atheist Conference 2009)
Too far-out and trippy for you? This advanced civilisation has evidently discovered a way to overcome an unnamed law that dictates your computer will crash at the climax of your video game, document or program. The philosopher Nick Bostrum proposes a window pop-up with the message ‘You are living in a simulation; Click here for more information’. Should you come across this marvel of super-computing, assume you’re either confronting a giant computer bug, you’re the picked-out favourite of the programmer — God — or in accordance with a universal Sod’s Law you’re about to crash into oblivion.
This universe would have to be one sick fucked-up computer program. How else do you account for the Eurovision Song Contest, the Spice Girls or Arsenal regularly beating Spurs at home?
'This universe we live in: scientists have discovered some remarkably strange things about it. So strange they are having to use the most disturbing principles to describe what’s going on.' (BBC Horizon: The Anthropic Principle 1987)
Scientists point with prurient probing to the peculiarly incestuous relationship between the universe and mathematics. High-church big-up respect to Galileo who realised that the universe obeys mathematical laws — so is mathematics merely a language that sets to paper the music of the universe, or is there a more fundamental key?
'If Max [Tegmark] is right, Maths isn’t a language we’ve invented, but a deep structure we are gradually uncovering like archaeologists. An abstract unchanging entity that has no beginning and no end. As we peel back the layers we are discovering the code. Strange as it seems it’s a comforting theory because if the reality is a mathematical object, understanding it might be within our reach.' (Horizon: What is Reality? 2011)
Imagine a trip like Alice down a black hole, up through a white rabbit hole, over the rim of an event-horizon and into a universe thirteen and a half billion years old and floating on a vibrating membrane of ten dimensions of Space and one of Time, where every particle vibrates like String — now that really would be mad.
But Lenny [Susskind] didn’t stop there. He and other physicists made a truly shocking leap of the imagination: they asked what if the whole of reality is a hologram, projected from our own event- horizon, the far edges of the universe. Horizon: What is Reality? 2011
‘What a piece of work is man!’ enthused Hamlet in one of his upbeat moments. ‘How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty!’ This backward, red-necked day-dreaming species of human — half a chromosome away from a chimpanzee the late Christopher Hitchens called us — like Herculean giants crawl from the gutter to look up at the stars and with the mighty power of reason seize black holes by the throat, swim down wormholes, smash atoms like a quantum game of billiards, suck from the bellies of comets, and toast the delights of a champagne supernova star-bursting universe.
'We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.' (Professor Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean, 1979)
‘But yet I could accuse me of such things, that it were better my mother had not borne me,’ sorrowed Hamlet in one of his downbeat moments. ‘I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in’. This backward, bigoted, bloody-minded species of humans — barely down from the trees — abandoned its moon landings to spend hundreds of billions on nuclear weapons, abandoned its brothers and sisters by the millions to die of starvation, and abandoned the benevolence of a good nature to burn with greed for the Yankee dollar.
'The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of Tragedy.' (Professor Steven Weinberg)
The freedom of a consciousness-raising trip to the stars outshines the synthetic rush of endorphins from the strictures and confines of false religious dogma. Unchain the mind and release a roaming spirit to explore a superstar universe where wonders are weirder than we can suppose.
'Look up at the stars. Not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see. And wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.' (Stephen Hawking, 2012 Paralympics opening ceremony)
The reader will have noticed that alien life is highly popular these days. The modern cosmologist is not so reluctant to regurgitate a strong fancy for extra-terrestrial life as say Carl Sagan who saw little benefit in belching the reaction of his gut.
Ah! Alien life was so much simpler then. Were Martians green? I can’t remember. Memory gone to pot. Triffids were popular. So was Captain Scarlett. The prize for the coolest alien is credited to the film It Came From Outer Space, featuring aliens with the foresight to be shot in 3-D.
Nowadays planet Earth is crammed with crash-heavy sky-roaming aliens raining on our parade. Big greys. Little greys. Ferocious fang-faced blood-sucking chupacabras who prefer to suck on Puerto Rican goats rather than the superior though tougher-skinned noble English goat.
The pain-in-the-neck neighbours to avoid are probably the Borg from Star Trek, whose cuboid tastes in architecture will bring down the tone of your neighbourhood, and who are giving honest gangstas a bad name.
The discovery of prime real-estate planets replete with their own pristine suns, the age of the universe, and the ease with which the virus of life spreads from desert to ice-cap suggest the universe should be chok-full with tech-savvy aliens wanting to sell us afterlife insurance.
The universe is a pretty big space. It’s bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So, if it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space, right? Professor Carl Sagan
The Milky Way is studded with two to four hundred billion suns, each dripping their own dream team of darling planets, and the universe is studded with a harem of two to four hundred billion galaxies. Estimates vary (seventy billion to a trillion) but all agree the universe is bigger than Disneyland. And far more fun.
The nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi over an informal lunch confounded friends with the indigestible entree, ‘Where Is Everybody?’ (or ‘Where Are They?’), and by the desert course was conceived the Fermi Paradox — the contradiction between the high probabilities of extra-terrestrial life cf. the reluctance of extra-terrestrials to make contact with cardigan-wearing, be-spectacled, shaggy-bearded scientists.
And it came to pass on planet Earth that from those primeval black and white days when creatures other than politicians crawled from black lagoons a group of scientists at SETI — the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence — have been zapping the skies with radio telescopes in the hope of swapping phone numbers with back-packing outward-bound aliens.
Back in the short-trousered black and white day, the small club of Big scientific Knobs who, tuning in and dropping out, founded SETI included the astrophysicists Carl Sagan and Frank Drake. When scrambling a scratch agenda for the founding meeting of SETI scientists, Frank Drake scribbled an equation to estimate the number of detectable extra-terrestrial hang-outs in the bars and pool-rooms of the Milky Way. Feel free to add your own constraints to the seven big sisters of Drake’s famous equation: average annual rate of star formations (about seven), the fraction of stars with planets, fraction of planets that can support life, fraction of planets to evolve life, fraction of planets evolving intelligent life, fraction of intelligent civilisations that evolve technology, the time taken by intelligent civilisations to release detectable radio signals into space.
'Occasionally, I get a letter from someone who is in ‘contact’ with extra-terrestrials. I am invited to ‘ask them anything’. And so over the years I’ve prepared a little list of questions. The extra-terrestrials are very advanced, remember. So I ask things like, ‘Please provide a short proof of Fermat’s Last Theorum’. Or the Goldbach Conjecture ... I never get an answer. On the other hand, if I ask something like ‘Should we be good?’ I almost always get an answer.' (Carl Sagan)
The nearest detectable intelligent civilisations should by now be receiving our ever-rippling television signals of I Love Lucy, which might explain their reluctance to visit planet Earth for lunch. Intelligent life may find great difficulty in arising from the slime, and if you’ve stood on the terraces of Arsenal’s North Bank, you’ll understand why. Or intelligent life has a propensity to self-destruct — which includes the stupidity of spending precious resources on nuclear weapons.
'The planet will be here for a long long long time after we’re gone. And it will heal itself; it will cleanse itself ’cause that’s what it does — it’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover. The Earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm — the Earth plus Plastic. The Earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the Earth; the Earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the Earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place — it wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it — needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old philosophical question — Why are we here? Plastic, assholes! (George Carlin)
So here we stand you and I — fragile freaks stranded on the shore of an unfriendly universe, surrounded by a sea of indifferent silence.
'So what are we? A statistical accident. Where are we? Nowhere special. Where are we going? Into oblivion. A meaningless hiccup in the blank procession of matter through time. It’s a tatty destiny.' (BBC Horizon: The Anthropic Principle 1987)
The profound loneliness of the lowly human condition inspires the most dulcet dreamscaped drama, literature, art and music. So whether the brain’s defence to evolve a day-dreaming of God, the fancying of faeries, the gazing on ghosts and the supposing of purpose where no purpose supports the evidence, does us a disservice the reader must decide.
The expanding universe enables the detective to place time restraints on a logical God claiming ownership of the universe thirteen and half billion years old. We face not the inevitable return of a living God but the inevitable invasion of an asteroid or comet to read us our rights. The lucky stragglers can await the collision of the Andromeda Galaxy with our own and a cosmic son et lumiere fireworks display. And if that doesn’t give us a headache we simply wait for the Sun to run out of gas. Game of patience, anyone?
'An expanding universe does not preclude a creator but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job.' (Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time series, 1991)
What are the chances that after such a long absence from the scheme of things God decides a couple of thousand years ago to intervene with a sordid session of eldest son sacrifice? God is twitching to intervene with a message but can’t be arsed to let us have that message from scratch, or deliver the message godo-a-mano.
The universe doesn’t give a cat’s furball for a fascist gangsta God muscling in on the action of a backward bunch of hairless apes and our brief moment in the Sun.
'Meanwhile, the sun is getting ready to explode and devour its dependent plants like some jealous chief or tribal deity. Some design!' (Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great p80)
The universe won’t miss us when we’re gone and won’t thank us for the ever-rippling television signals of I Love Lucy, our final legacy to a friendless, faceless but fantastically fire-balled universe fleeing into the setting Sun.
'We will disappear into the blackness of the space from which we came. Destroyed as we began in a burst of gas and fire. The heavens are still and cold once more. In all the immensity of our universe and the galaxies beyond, the Earth will not be missed. In the infinite reaches of space the problems of man seem trivial indeed. And man existing alone seems himself an episode of little consequence. That’s all.' (Rebel Without a Cause 1955, man in planetarium)
***