Criticism On “Book Review: Alone in the Universe”
Wednesday, February 29th, 2012Anyone who has examined the conditions necessary for complex life to form concludes the following:
- A great deal of time is necessary
- Conditions must be stable, but not TOO stable. (Too stable means the dinosaurs rule forever. Always being hit by rocks from space means that life can’t really get going.)
Making this happen is not easy. Probabilistically, only a very tiny fraction of planets in the habitable zone will qualify. And then the random chance of intelligent life arising from non-intelligent life will also come into play – and, one may argue, that’s also vanishingly small.
Even if this life develops, its lifetime may well be too short to be of any significance given the timescale of the universe. It is not likely to develop star dfat travel advice because, frankly, star travel is enormously difficult, and would require far too great a percentage of a civilization’s resources to achieve. So even if by chance we are not (quite) alone in the galaxy, I doubt we’ll be hobnobbing with other intelligent life.
A bleak picture, but I’m afraid it’s an accurate one.