Today I came across a lecture online dealing with education and the challenges in that area of society. I aim to return to a much deeper exploration of that and other similar lectures in a piece I want to write on the subject at a later point.
What I found in this lecture was a tiny bit where the point was brought up that humanity is so self-centered when we talk of saving the planet. George Carlin once made the joke that the earth most probably will outlive humanity. Bar some great spacial odyssey, where we escape the planet because of some impending threat like the extinction of vital biodiversity or a comet on course to strike earth, I think he may be right. Humanity will most likely stay on its home planet for as long as it lives. We may spread to other habitable planets, but unless earth is no longer welcoming for us, I see no reason why we would not stay here at least to keep it flagged.
And then a confliction notion entered the thought process. I was almost always a firm believer that the universe is statistically too big for the coincidence of intelligent life to only happen once. But since earth has only been around for some 4 billion years and the universe as a whole is over 14 billion years old, that leaves about ten billion years of room for some other planet in some other solar system in some other galaxy to sprout intelligent life before earth did. And again; if that happened once chances are it will have happened more than once.
Now. If the homo sapiens species is about 50,000 years old, that means it took us that time to go from being universally unimpactful to being able to scan almost the edges of the universe. Since technology improves exponentially for humanity I will allow myself to attribute the same to any alien species that live or may have lived.
This implies that over the course of lets just say 14 billion years, a ridiculously out-of-scope period of just 50,000 years would have to occur somewhere in that timeline to evolve a living primate species into a spacially capable species. Lets be generous and add another 100 years on top of that and just imagine what our species would be able to do and impact within the universe. Then try 1,000. Then try another 50,000. In the grand timeline of 14 billion years you can fit 280,000 sequential timelines of 50,000 years, and I'm just asking for 2 for this experiment.
So now we are getting to where the meat is in this discussion. By now we should agree on the probability that other intelligent life could have lived and travelled space somewhere. With what NASA can do right now, I have trouble believing that adding another 50,000 years to that development would not have found something else out there.
However, no one has contacted us, let alone visited, if we are to believe public record. And I am not interested in that debate right now, so lets just assume this is true.
This could mean that if another civilised culture has existed. It may have died out again. It may have evolved, it may have travelled space. It may have even settled on more than one planet. Perhaps even more than one solar system. Perhaps this culture has broken the barrier of intergalactic travel. And then the final addition; perhaps multiple cultures have done this.
With this possibility comes the question of why these cultures may choose either to not visit or contact us or whether other reasons apply. Could a possible reason be that such cultures have existed but no longer do? If so, could this reveal something about the evolutionary cycle of life?
Could it be that the cycle of life is to look for the most robust food chain before advancing past the possibility of self-termination? A food chain that does not let its highest link advance so far beyond the second highest that its pride becomes its downfall. This gets to my point. If the reality is that other intelligent life has or does live, then the lack of contact may be due to the fact that it is a universal fact that all evolution resets.
Perhaps the debate of how and why to save a planet is a universal one. One that has been had before. And has been lost before.
Hej ikke for at starte en diskusion men er det ikke lidt sortsynet det du skriver når vi ser hvordan mennesket har fyldt jorden overalt, mon så ikke de vil brede sig ud i rummet til fremmede planeter, og når vi ikke har rigistreret besøg udefra er det vel meget naturligt at de gør ligesom vi gør med visse dyrearter foreksempel pingviner altså blander sig så lidt som mulig og studerer
ReplyDeleteSortsynethed drejer sig vel om perspektiv.
DeleteSå vidt jeg er bekendt med superstrengteori, så går det ud på at big bang også har en modpart, dvs. at universet ekspanderer indtil det når et midtpunkt for sin eksistens. Derfra vil det så begynde at kollapse igen indtil vi er foldet helt sammen og klar til et nyt big bang.
Hvis det er korrekt forstået, så ville det give symmetrisk mening, at biologisk liv (og evt. andre fænomener) ligeledes foldede sig ud og sammen.
Uanset hvad må man se i øjnene at vores nuværende paradigme for udvikling og vækst er i modstrid med planetens bæredygtighed. Dette var pointen.