A serious consideration of extraterrestrial life by the scientific community has merged with the public’s perennial fascination with the subject. Scientists, despite often being brilliant in their fields, are saying some rather unintelligent things on the subject.
For example, on a two-part National Geographic documentary that imagines and fictionalizes first contact, Neil deGrasse Tyson offers some rather facile thoughts on extraterrestrial war.
“Perhaps the thought of war never entered their heads. Thinking they make war is assuming they have the same weaknesses we do. And I’m not prepared to drag ET down into that sewer.”
War is a defining feature of so-called human civilization, not just a “sewer” into which we regularly fall. The first cities, such as Jericho, emerged about 11,000 years ago. In just the last 6000 years, there have been at least 14,500 wars.
No wonder so many people take war as a given of human life. But without understanding and going beyond war, Homo sapiens cannnot call itself an intelligent species.
Even so, why is it so difficult to make a distinction between scientific and technological advancement, and intelligence in a species? Why are the two things almost invariably conflated?
In the view of the vast majority of people, scientific and technological advancement is equated with intelligence. That assumption has led to fetishizing science and technology on one hand, and its dismissal by the religious right and climate change deniers on the other.
If “the thought of war never entered the heads” of an alien species, would they be intelligent if they didn’t develop sophisticated science and complex technology? As juvenile as the Star Trek series was, it at least occasionally explored that question.
We assume a non-technological species would be living in Eden. However Eden — a place of perpetual abundance and a state of perfect harmony and happiness — never existed on Earth, and probably nowhere else in the universe. Knowledge was the apple, and division and conflict the worm that went with it.
Tyson’s philosophy is just the flipside of Ronald Reagan’s militarized and romanticized statement before the United Nations in 1987:
“Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”
Clever musings about extraterrestrial biodiversity (“life not based on DNA”) and conflict-free existence are just as implausible as Reagan’s puerile remarks.
Most scientists fail to grasp the basic nature of “higher thought,” which is probably the same throughout the universe. Which is that conscious symbolic thought is inherently separative.
It’s impossible to conceive of a creature developing the power to separate ‘things’ and manipulate its environment but not carry separation over into the psychological realm, thereby making the same mistakes as man — division, conflict and fragmentation.
The difference between Homo sapiens and genuinely intelligent species, and perhaps the reason there has been no direct contact, is that an intelligent species has an abiding insight into the nature of thought.
Probably all potentially intelligent life passes through the same stages, and makes the same basic, existential mistake humans are still making – – that is, assuming what we separate mentally is separate actually. Doing so ineluctably leads to war.
Christians used to speak of “original sin.” As inadequate as that notion was, there was at least some insight behind it. Unlike blurring the difference between the human adaptive pattern and the rest of nature, as science and philosophy have been doing the last 30 years.
Most people, in the West at least, have given up on humankind. Doing so, of course, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. (If you have, please don’t have any children.)
So does the evolution of life in the universe follow the same basic biological laws?
Astrobiologists are dabbling with the idea that completely different chemistries for life may be found. For example in our own solar system, in the methane lakes of super-cold Titan (the largest moon of Saturn), some scientists are seriously proposing that a totally different form of life could exist.
It probably won’t be long before they discover that life evolves along the same basic lines everywhere in the universe, involving liquid water, RNA/DNA, and the evolution from single-celled to multicellular organisms, with increasing neuronal complexity.
Therefore the idea that other planets and moons have different chemistries for life seems as silly as the notion that other stars and galaxies have different physics.
The question is, do principles of cosmic evolution apply to the evolution of consciousness and the emergence of potentially intelligent life—the stage at which Homo sapiens is currently stuck?
Of course, given the strangeness of past and present lifeforms on Earth, intelligent life may not look at all like us. But we would share the basics: sufficient neuronal complexity for higher thought, in conjunction with an equivalent to the human hand, enabling high science and complex technology to emerge.
So what makes a technological species intelligent? Simply put, a species-wide insight that ends the existential mistake of psychological division and fragmentation.
So does all potentially intelligent life pass through the same basic stages? I propose so, though some species undoubtedly transcend thought earlier, and some, like Homo sapiens at present, remain incorrigible until “the last trumpet.”
Does the transition from potentially intelligence species to an authentically intelligent species inevitably mean a painful stage of saturating darkness and spreading deadness, which humans are now planetarily experiencing, before an explosion of insight?
Perhaps, though some technological species make the transition earlier, some later, and some not at all. It’s not too late for Homo sapiens, but it appears to be getting close.
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