Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

SkyTonight.com blogger Robert Naeye wrote an interesting article explaining his hypothesis that intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy are few and far between. I’m not sure I agree with that, so I wrote a comment to his post which was subsequently featured on the article page with Bob’s reply. Since my reply may not be featured as part of the article in the future, I want to reproduce my comment and his reply here.

The example I always like to fall back on is ants. Humans are obviously aware of ants, and we see ants in a bunch of places. We observe them and their way of doing things and try to understand their ant world, but in the end, what is it we have to say to them? What conversation is it possible to have with ants? What can humans and ants do collaboratively? They’re obviously not stupid, but they’re not on the same intelligence level as we are, and it’s extremely unlikely they’ll catch up any time soon, so we don’t make the attempt. They go about their ant lives and we go about ours. We don’t even know that the ants are aware of who or what we are when we put our faces right next to them.

Perhaps the human-alien relationship is similar. Regardless of any reasonable value for L, a few centuries or millennia difference in development between technological civilizations would likely make them unrecognizable to each other unless the more advanced cares to reach out. As the article stated, think how far we’ve come in 100 years. Now imagine 10,000 years (small, in astronomical terms) difference between two civilizations at a similar development acceleration curve.
Aaron Adams

Bob’s reply:

Aaron’s comments are very interesting and insightful. What I’m about to write could be totally wrong. But my gut feeling is that humanity has passed some kind of threshold that would make us interesting to at least some aliens (those with an interest in science and technology). No matter how advanced they are, we have developed mathematics, science, and technology to a level where they probably could talk to us at our level, in a way we can’t talk to ants. ‘We share something in common with aliens — the language of mathematics — and our ability to generate electromagnetic (EM) waves and use them to send information across interstellar distances probably gives us a framework for exchanging information. After all, we and they would see stars and other objects that emit EM waves, so we would both be familiar with the EM spectrum, and would be able to distinguish artificial EM signals from natural EM signals.

As a blogger myself, I’m smart enough to know that at SkyTonight, Bob gets the last word. But here, I get the last word.

It’s true enough that we certainly have the foundations necessary to communicate at least rudimentarily with another technologically-oriented civilization. I won’t argue that because I know it to be true. But I don’t think Bob has addressed the thrust of my point which is, what would we talk about? Do we have anything to say or do that a more advanced (even slightly so) civilization would find of any interest? Could it be that more advanced civilizations are so busy doing their own thing they don’t have time or motivation to deal with us right now? Perhaps there is some kind of upper limit as to how advanced a civilization can be, and they’re busy talking to their equally advanced buddies while they’re waiting for us to catch up. Maybe the 10,000 years or so that modern man has existed on Earth hasn’t been long enough for them to notice us.

If we take a step back, we have to question how many civilizations that are intelligent take the path of science and technology. Perhaps creatures in other parts of the galaxy are indeed intelligent, but they’re preoccupied with religion, music, literature, weather forecasting, avoiding predators, curing disease, or whatever self-involved issues they consider most important. Maybe they don’t care about other beings, or maybe the thought that we’re out here hasn’t crossed their mind. None of these situations makes aliens any less intelligent, it just means they have different priorities than we do. Maybe only one civilization in 50 takes the science and technology route. And maybe there’s something inherently self-limiting about that course of action. Or maybe space really is so vast and interstellar travel really is so hard that technological races rarely or never meet.

Obviously, we just don’t know. Absence of evidence of alien races is not evidence of their absence. We simply don’t have enough data to even know what questions to ask. The best we can do is listen intently and hope someone else, purposely or accidentally, gives us a clue. Until then, it’s all guesswork. I’m not ready to dismiss the possibility of a densely populated universe until more data is available.