There has been much speculation over the years about what the social/cultural effects would be if we found life on another planet. But let’s say we don’t find any. Specifically, let’s say that sometime in the next century humanity develops some form of faster-than-light space travel. We send hundreds of probes off to nearby solar systems, where we find…
…not much. Plenty of interesting planets, but no alien civilizations, no exotic lifeforms, not even bacteria.
What would be the social consequences of launching an extensive search for life, only to find that we really do seem to be alone?
If we have FTL space travel in the next century, I think we’re already looking for likely planets to colonize at that point, as we’ll have reduced our own to a sweltering septic tank.
If none of the planets we’re sizing up are currently inhabited, that will just make things easier, ethically and logistically.
It’ll probably look like a rhetorical win for religious types who believe God made our planet, and our species, as unique constructs.
The scientific types would point out that we hadn’t really searched a significant percentage of the galaxy, let alone the universe.
Uneducated masses would clamor for colonization of all of these new worlds without realizing what a total lack of life would mean to the habitability of said planets.
Conspiracy theorists would go insane (well, insaner) trying to figure out what The Man was trying to hide…
“Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” - Arthur C. Clarke
I can’t even imagine a Universe which isn’t teeming with life- after all, we’ve found it damn near everywhere here. I think that’d make the “simulated Universe” theory a lot more attractive, because it would explain why there’s nothing else out there.
You could argue that this is the case already. See the Drake equation and the Fermi paradox. Basically, the argument is: a) There are so many stars in the Milky Way that at least some, and probably a very large number, of them should have developed intelligent life. b) At least some of those should have developed interstellar travel. c) If any of them did, they should be able to colonize large portions of the galaxy in fairly short order. d) If so, we should have seen signs of it by now.
So, to slightly paraphrase Fermi: Where the hell is everybody?
You may question how valid those arguments are, and absence of evidence certainly isn’t evidence of absence. But I think it does answer the question of what we would do in the OP’s scenario: Pretty much exactly the same thing as we’re doing right now. We would get on with our lives, watch The Simpsons, eat, survive, have sex, make money and leave speculation about aliens to loonies, scientists and people on message boards.
I would hope that it would make us more mindful of the rare and unique diversity of non-intelligent life on earth…and maybe just a little more mindful of our own uniqueness.
If we’re all the life there is…then we really need to get over this “war” shit and start thinking about long-term sustainability.
(Of course, if we’re not all the life there is…we still need to get over war.)
Odds are pretty good, imho. I think it’s going to be the Foundation model. Humans are going to colonize the known universe, evolve, and become the aliens to other humans. But, if they colonize far enough, odds increase of them finding true alien life.
The problem is that the two possibilities don’t manifest the same way. If we do discover alien life, the discovery is a discrete event that happens at a particular moment in history. If we don’t, there’s no such transition point – it’s just more of the same, year after year, with the amount of time and attention paid to the possibility of discovering it in the future trailing off bit by bit. Identifying the cultural effects of the conventional wisdom changing from “there might be something out there” to “we’re probably alone after all” would be virtually impossible – it would have to be disentangled from everything else that happened over (at least) several decades.
“The Martians were there—in the canal—reflected in the water… The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water…”
Why is this even remotely likely? If the speed of light really is the universal speed limit (and really, it does seem to be) then none of the above is at all plausible.
I think the idea that we’d continue to search for life after not observing anything even remotely resembling life on the first predicted 25,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 earth like planets that we would bother to visit the remaining 25,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets is rather unlikely.
That seems like a pretty boring job that would lend it self to cheating “yep - no life there either”.
At what point does it turn from a mission of exploration to a mental illness similar to hoarding?
Agreed. I believe that there is lots of life, of all levels of complexity, throughout the universe. As someone said upthread, life will thrive wherever the conditions permit.
But I also believe that the distance between planets that sustain life is so great that it is functionally impossible for them to interact.
The lack of any evidence of alien life doesn’t disprove its existence.
Even chugging along at current human spacecraft speeds, a species could cross the galaxy in mere tens of millions of years, using unmanned probes or generation starships or whatever.
If one species is dumb enough to make self-replicating probes there could be a plague of them in our galaxy in the blink of an eye relative to the galaxy’s age.
So even with no possibility of FTL we can ask: If there’s other intelligent life in the universe, why no alien bric-a-brac in sight?
I don’t think there’d be a lot of social consequences. Humanity doesn’t really put a whole lot of thought into alien life anyway. We would have to revise downward the number of potentially life-bearing planets. We might conclude the Goldilocks principle is more significant than we thought. Life might be rarer than we thought (hoped) but it still doesn’t eliminate it as a possibility and there’s not enough reason to get religious and think we’re it in the whole universe.
If there isn’t life out there, nearby, I say we put it there. Why not, other than we’re condemning untold generations of life to an existence of constant struggle to survive and then die anyway.
Considering the size of the Universe, I can’t conceive of us being the only intelligent species. This unremarkable galaxy alone should be teeming with life. And I believe we will have FTL travel involving additional dimensions.
The point should be seriously considered: Abiogenesis is incredibly rare, after all—on the order of one event in 13 billion years—and we happen to be that one event. Someone’s gotta be first.
That said, I do believe there is intelligent life elsewhere in our universe, but far too disparate in form and distance from each other, making contact extremely improbable.
