This is a statement that's hard for any Trekkie to swallow. Indeed, it's even discomforting for anyone who's ever glanced into the night sky and wistfully dreamed of what's up there, of new worlds and extraterrestrial life.
The man who penned the above statement, John Gribbin - a prolific author and noted astrophysicist - makes a variety of very compelling arguments to back it up. In his book, Alone in the Universe, Gribbin admits that there are other planets in habitable zones and that these planets could indeed support life. But, as far as intelligent life is concerned, we are alone in the Milky Way. The coincidences that led to our creation, he says, could not have happened anywhere else in the galaxy. From the book's inside flap:
A novel feature of Gribbin's argument is the suggestion that another catastrophic event occurred in our solar system six hundred million years ago. An enormous super-comet collided with Venus, scattering ice balls and dust grains across the inner solar system. A side effect of this activity triggered a freezing of Earth into a "snowball" state.
The most profound transformation then occurred among the microscopic, single-celled organisms that had populated Earth virtually unchanged for three billion years. Suddenly, as Earth thawed, complex multi-celled organisms appeared, including the first complex sea animals, and life began moving onto land.
This sudden profusion of life, known as the Cambrian Explosion, marked the effective beginning of rapid evolution on Earth--but it took a disaster of cosmic proportions to set it off. Had it not happened, Gribbin argues, there would be no intelligent life here. What are the chances that such an improbable chain of events could occur twice in the same galaxy? Zero, says Gribbin.
Gribbin is not the only one to poo-poo the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence. In 2008, Professor Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia developed a mathematical model that calculated the chances of emergent intelligent life at less than 0.01% over four billion years.
Sorry, Alf. We'll probably never meet.
Now, despite these cogent arguments, there is no reason to ditch your belief in intelligent cosmic life just yet. The universe is so unbelievably big that there is certainly room for many series of incredible life-spawning coincidences to occur. Amongst the literally countless solar systems, intelligent life has surely found a way.
NASA's recent discoveries of several Earth-like planets (Kepler-22b, Kepler-20e, and Kepler 20f) has spurred a lot of excitement. While none of these planets are thought to be able to support life, it feels like the Kepler mission is edging closer and closer to locating a suitable planet where life - maybe even intelligent life - could flourish.
However, we probably won't ever meet E.T., at least in person. Remember that the Kepler solar systems are hundreds of light years away, which means that even if we had the technology to travel at the speed of light, it would still take generations to get there!
Even if John Gribbin and Andrew Watson are wrong, and we are not alone in the universe, the cosmic speed limit and the distance between solar systems render us effectively alone. But hey, being alone has its merits!
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