The Black Campbell

The University of Cambridge has put out a report on the possibility of alien life that is fraught with anthropic assumptions and misanthropic bias.  Central to the report is the idea that evolution is predictable, and would lead to similar types of intelligence life as Mankind.  They would look like us (because it’s cheaper on the makeup budget) and would act like us — right down to a Hobbsian need to conquer, strip us for resources, enslave us (or steal our women for breeding, no doubt!)

This makes some seriously arrogant assumptions regarding the nature of life, the possibility of other chemical combinations that might produce life that is radically different from what we’ve experience, that different habitats might create sharply different physical structures and ways of perceiving the world around them.  If their environment that created them was different enough, you might have little way of understanding each others motivations — just think about the difference in perception, communication, and motivation between, say, a human and a cetacean.  We think we know what they might be thinking…but we’re not aquatic, we don’t communicate the way they do, and we have no clue how that molds their thinking (or if they’re truly intelligent!)

This “bad ET” prognosis is only useful, of course, if there is any other life out there…time to whip out the “Man is alone in the universe” hubris:  the aliens have had plenty of time to contact, so why haven’t they?  1)  Space is really bloody big.  It takes scads of time for a signal to get anywhere and unless it’s broadcasting at stellar levels of power, it’s going to get washed out int he background noise of the galaxy after a few light years.  aliens could simple be too far away to hear us.  2)  We might not be looking for the right kind of signal.  3)  Maybe we’re alone in the galaxy, but not the universe, in which case we’re unlikely to ever hear from anybody…which, I will allow, is tantamount to being alone.