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Humans are fascinated by the idea of finding intelligent life on other planets. Just look at the brouhaha that surrounded the Face on Mars, which turned out to be nothing but a jumble of rocks. SETI has been looking for neighbors for half a century and our radio signals have been reaching out for twice that long. So how come ET hasn't responded?
There can be little doubt they're out there. When you look at the number of galaxies, it becomes a matter of numbers. Almost anything is possible when you roll the dice a billion, billion times. Frank Drake figured on perhaps a bazillion yentas out there ready to kvetch. Then again, how many who figured out thermonuclear devices would still be around?
Life seems to have developed quickly enough on Earth. It could have happened here as a result of local chemicals hooking up with a little bit of water and lightening or maybe we were seeded by comets and asteroids coming in from outside. No matter.
The fact is...We're Here! But we haven't been here long. If you were to stretch your arms side to side and your left fingertips represented the earliest life on the plant (3.5 billion years ago) then the filings from your right fingertips would represent the totality of our recorded history. And when you look at something like the Roman Empire, around for centuries, not much happened. A citizen in 50 BC wouldn't have seen much scientific/technological progress if he were suddenly transported through time to 50 AD. And what happened from the Fall to the Renaissance? Nada. If anything, people took fewer baths. So you see where time doesn't make life forms better so much as it makes better life forms. That's why humans replaced monkeys; they had gone as far as they could go.
So here we are waiting for space aliens to call. You stand a better chance of hearing from Oprah. She's way ahead of you and they may be way ahead of us. No offense to Stephen Hawking, he's a very clever chap and all, but suggesting that aliens would be keen on building light speed vehicles to come here and steal our oil strikes me as just a little bit silly. As my friend Dr. Chris Ryan said, this is like Chimps in Africa worried that the grad students in Land Rovers were there to steal the termite mounds.
At the turn of the previous century, scholars believed mankind had already figured most things out. Nothing was left for physicists to do but arrange the tableware. Then along came Einstein and Planck. Talk about screwing up the status quo! The one brought us face-to-face with the very big while the other concentrated on the very small. And that's where we say: Bye-Bye. It's the end of the line for Homo.
I'm sorry to have to be the one to tell you this but you're finished. You can no more wrap your mind around ten dimensions than the cat can suss out a laptop. We just weren't built to go there. The next step in evolution is Artificial Intelligence. As Neanderthals passed the torch to us so shall we pass it to R2D2.
Or maybe not. Humans are remarkably resourceful and it may be that machines will soon sport body parts and vice versa. Some of this has already taken place and more is waiting to happen. In the future, it may be that half and half beings transcend our four dimensions and reach out to multiple universes.
For the moment then, I wouldn't worry much about who's going to win the next election. In fact, at this very moment, researchers in Geneva who are working with their particle accelerator could conceivably create a black hole. If that happens...well...if you're reading this...no problem.
