SETI Reset—Part 2

In the last post I began to describe a few possible reasons why our Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has as yet not found any signals arriving from outer space. Here are a few more suggestions I offer.

(2) Other alien civilizations may not have chosen to pursue a similar technological path as we have. Our technology too often has led to weapons that harm living beings. I can conceive of a civilization deciding to have taken a more sensible and peaceful approach and thus avoided technology’s harmful side effects, by avoiding much of our problematic technical inventions, such as the many types of weapons we’ve created. Would it not have been possible for Earth’s humans to have decided to put its energies into a spiritual society, rather than a high-tech and dangerous existence?

(3) Life may indeed be common out there, but the chances of it progressing beyond a single-celled state to a multi-cellular, more complex phase, may be quite low. Life on this planet stayed at a microbial state for about three billion years, before favorable conditions evolved to allow it to grow large enough to build things like cars and computers. Those propitious conditions were not inevitable. Life on Earth could still today easily be simple, single-celled critters, waiting patiently to grow more complex. 

(4) It took 4.5 billion years for “intelligent” life to evolve on Earth, so there's a low probability that life elsewhere (at the present) is at a similar stage of technological development to us. They may not reach that stage for a few billion years yet, or have long ago passed through it. I say “pass through it,” because an argument can be made that if life is to survive in the long term, it may have to get past dabbling with hazardous technological toys.

And finally, (5) Life anywhere in the universe may be doomed to evolve into a technological stage, after which it inevitably extinguishes itself. We on Earth seem to be headed towards what is often called an “omega point”—a time where we dramatically transform from civilization’s chaotic and exponential path, towards a sustainable way. It may be that that omega point could be the arrival of a completely different kind of intelligent life on Earth… if we survive to that time.

So the search for SETI will go on. We are curious creatures, and we want to know if there are others like us out there. It appears increasingly likely that extraterrestrial life might well exist, given our recent discoveries of extrasolar planets and Earth-bound extremophile-kinds of life. If the discovery of life in the vastness of the universe comes about, it would be an incredible discovery.

We cannot yet travel to the many distant worlds and directly observe life there... and maybe we never will—given the immense distances. So we continue look out there, building receivers to apprehend any EM signals flying through our region of space; which could prove that we are not alone. But is the presence of an “intelligent” species out there really going to be detected only by our reception of a technological signal they emit? Could there be other kinds of contact that we’ve not yet imagined? We'd best keep our minds open.

Next time I will describe yet another, rather weird possibility, for reconsidering the SETI issue… that we may already have been contacted and absorbed into a super intelligent civilization’s domain.