Jason T. Wright of Penn State, with colleagues S. Kanodia and E. Lubar, tells us why we seem to be alone in the universe: We just haven’t searched far and wide enough to find other life. SETI, according to Wright, et al., has looked at such a small segment of the universe that the group compares the search to looking at 7,700 liters of ocean water for evidence of fish. Yeah, not much if you consider Earth’s oceans’ 1.335 billion trillion liters of water.* Think, also, that unlike the oceans, the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, so their analogy fails.
I suppose we’ll keep on looking on the odd chance that we’ll stumble across E.T. It’s what we do as a curious bunch always looking for the exotic. But for now—and maybe forever—we are alone. And alone doesn’t mean there isn’t some microbial life on Mars. Alone means without finding another consciousness, another kind of thinker, another self-awareness.
Want that “E.T.” experience? Look no farther than the person next door. Maybe even than the person within your doors. What are you going to do with the consciousness from another world, anyway? What will you be able to understand, to see from the alien’s perspective? Aren’t you finding the perspectives of those on this world difficult enough to interpret? Do fish comprehend your consciousness? Does someone down the street understand you?
All of us are alone together. All of us have explored very little of the consciousness that surrounds us. All of us have only tiny fractions of understanding short of our stereotypical labeling. We see a little on our own world, and we take that as a whole. We extrapolate. We classify with bias and dismiss with impatience.
What are we going to do with the consciousness of an alien? We have a universe of consciousness to explore on our native world, but we prefer to generalize. You can see the generalizing at work around you in social and political contexts. You can see it in pop psych labels. You can see it in print or hear it in a bar.
If we are too impatient to study in depth the consciousness of others around us, aren’t we like those who would look for fish in a mere 7,700 liters of water in a container with over a billion trillion liters? Think of what our generalizing has done to us (probably always has done to humans). It makes us lazy and falsely secure in our knowledge. It makes us dismissive of nuances that pop up now and then in a neighbor’s consciousness.
Are we alone in the universe of Earth? Both not by choice and by choice.
*Grossman, Lisa. We may not have found aliens yet because we’ve barely begun looking. ScienceNews, September 30, 2018. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/only-small-fraction-space-searched-aliensWright, J. T., S. Kanodia, and E. Lubar. How much SETI has been done? Finding needles in the n-dimensional cosmic haystack. arXIv: 1809.07252v1. Posted 19, 2018.
I suppose we’ll keep on looking on the odd chance that we’ll stumble across E.T. It’s what we do as a curious bunch always looking for the exotic. But for now—and maybe forever—we are alone. And alone doesn’t mean there isn’t some microbial life on Mars. Alone means without finding another consciousness, another kind of thinker, another self-awareness.
Want that “E.T.” experience? Look no farther than the person next door. Maybe even than the person within your doors. What are you going to do with the consciousness from another world, anyway? What will you be able to understand, to see from the alien’s perspective? Aren’t you finding the perspectives of those on this world difficult enough to interpret? Do fish comprehend your consciousness? Does someone down the street understand you?
All of us are alone together. All of us have explored very little of the consciousness that surrounds us. All of us have only tiny fractions of understanding short of our stereotypical labeling. We see a little on our own world, and we take that as a whole. We extrapolate. We classify with bias and dismiss with impatience.
What are we going to do with the consciousness of an alien? We have a universe of consciousness to explore on our native world, but we prefer to generalize. You can see the generalizing at work around you in social and political contexts. You can see it in pop psych labels. You can see it in print or hear it in a bar.
If we are too impatient to study in depth the consciousness of others around us, aren’t we like those who would look for fish in a mere 7,700 liters of water in a container with over a billion trillion liters? Think of what our generalizing has done to us (probably always has done to humans). It makes us lazy and falsely secure in our knowledge. It makes us dismissive of nuances that pop up now and then in a neighbor’s consciousness.
Are we alone in the universe of Earth? Both not by choice and by choice.
*Grossman, Lisa. We may not have found aliens yet because we’ve barely begun looking. ScienceNews, September 30, 2018. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/only-small-fraction-space-searched-aliensWright, J. T., S. Kanodia, and E. Lubar. How much SETI has been done? Finding needles in the n-dimensional cosmic haystack. arXIv: 1809.07252v1. Posted 19, 2018.
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