… can you determine if intex exist by sitting alone in your room contemplating the biography of the Earth?
Conundrum Two
There is a new generation of One World Doctrine advocates in the twenty-first century,[1] largely physical scientists, who believe that Earth is the only home to intelligence in the Milky Way. Their conviction is supported by a strong argument: namely, that the life story of planet Earth is characterized by the conjunction of a very long sequence of highly improbable events that in their cumulative far-fetchedness may be nigh impossible to repeat in the life of any other orb in our galaxy.
Put another way, the circumstances driving the emergence of sentience on Earth appear to resemble a luck-drunk gambler winning the Powerball jackpot over and over and over again. According to the new faction of one-worlders, intelligent life is more challenging to manufacture than the rosy-goggled world-mongers credit. Earth is one of the vanishingly few places in the universe—and likely the only world in our galaxy—where sentience managed to run the table, hitting inside straight after inside straight.
These exceptionally fortuitous intelligence-facilitating circumstances include[2]:
· Our sun is in the so-called “Goldilocks zone” of the Milky Way, the region of space around the outer edge of our galaxy with conditions that are “just right” for promoting the formation of life. The Goldilocks zone may comprise about 10% of the Milky Way[3].
· Earth is in our solar system’s Goldilocks zone, the region around a star with conditions hospitable to life. Only about 20% of stars possess a Goldilocks zone.
· Earth has a single, large phase-locked moon, which produces regular tides (which may be essential for the formation of advanced life) and stabilizes the rotation of the Earth (which otherwise would likely become too chaotic to support advanced life).
· The moon sponsored the evolution of intelligence in another way. During the Earth’s toddlerhood, the sun was far dimmer. If the sun had been anywhere near as hot five billion years ago as it is today, it would have vaporized all the water on Earth, so a “cold sun” was essential for oceans to form. At the same time, the chillier sun meant that conditions on Earth were likely too cold to enable the emergence of life. Fortunately, the moon was fifteen times closer to Earth than it is today and its stronger gravity would have provoked continuous geothermal activity on Earth, possibly heating our planet enough to allow life to form. Simply put, the moon saved us from existential frostbite.
· Earth rotates at a rate that permits the formation of intelligent life—if Earth rotated as slow as Venus (243 days) or as fast as Jupiter (10 hours) it might be considerably more difficult to evolve advanced minds.
· The tilt of the Earth’s axis, about 24 degrees, endows the mid-latitudes with four regular seasons and a constant, reliable climate cycle, facilitating the evolution of intelligent life.
· Earth possesses a rotating iron core the right size and rotation speed to generate a globe-enshrouding magnetic field, which protects Earth from solar winds that would otherwise burn off the atmosphere. (Mars doesn’t have a rotating iron core, so solar wind burned off most of the Martian atmosphere.)
· The chemical composition of Earth’s atmosphere allows water vapor to cool off and fall back to Earth before it is destroyed in the upper atmosphere by ultraviolet light, thereby preventing the loss of all atmospheric water (as happened on Mars).
· Earth is protected by our planetary guardian Jupiter, a gas giant located at the ideal distance from the sun to shield our planet from the large asteroids and comets circulating in our solar system that would otherwise regularly devastate the Earth. (Also, there are no gas giants located near our sun; if there was, their disruptive presence on Earth’s orbit and rotation would likely prevent the formation of intelligent life.)
· Earth has plate tectonics, which are believed to significantly contribute to the evolution of advanced species by allowing organisms to evolve in isolated geographical regions for very long periods of time, before bringing various isolated regions together again, triggering new epochs of evolutionary competition. (Venus, same size as Earth but lifeless, does not have plate tectonics.)
· Earth is blessed with abundant water, essential for life.
· Earth has abundant deep-sea vents, which may be essential for generating and supporting life in the oceans.
· Earth has a stable planetary carbon cycle, essential for securing a stable, hospitable climate that supports the evolution of advanced life.
· Mass extinctions have occurred on Earth at a regular though infrequent pace, serving to clear out the dominant species of one geological epoch and allowing new, hardier, smarter species to flourish, such as mammals arising to dominance after the dinosaurs died off.
· Sulfur-eating organisms who thrived in Earth’s early oxygenless environment were able to successfully evolve into oxygen-breathing organisms as the atmosphere filled up with oxygen excreted by the sulfurphilic organisms. There’s no a priori reason why it should have been possible for new life to evolve the ability to breathe the waste of old life, which would be like humans learning to breathe methane.
· Earth’s crust contains an abundance of heavy metals and ores that humans can readily extract and smelt, enabling civilizations to form.
· Early humans encountered widespread and diverse domesticable animals and plants, enabling civilization to form.
· Some scientists suggest that intelligent life is also unevenly rare in time—that we are living during a very limited temporal window in the history of the universe when life could form. In the past, there were too many galactic catastrophes, like gamma ray bursts, to permit sustainable life. In the future, galaxies will separate from one another, again dampening the prospects of life[4].
The contemporary One World Doctrine seems to provide a way to evade the Copernican Principle, the widespread consensus among scientists that we do not occupy any privileged position in the cosmos—that the laws, structure, and perspectives of the universe are the same everywhere and therefore there is nothing special about Earth’s location or its experience of the cosmos. The one-worlders contend that there is something quite special about Earth’s trajectory through reality: that we inhabit a vanishingly tiny shimmer of spacetime where life is possible at all and we have enjoyed a possibly unique timeline of events that in their aggregate implausibility have rendered Earth a Very Special and Privileged Place.
This echoes the attitude of many historical one-worlders, such as Thomas Baker, a Christian scholar who in his 1714 Reflections Upon Learning attacked the reasoning behind world-mongers’ faith in intex:
No doubt Telescopes are a noble Invention, and the Discoveries that have been made by them are very considerable; but as to the discovering thereby the Nature and Substance of Heavenly Bodies, I look upon it as utterly impossible. And yet, this is the modish way of framing new Worlds: We first observe Seas and Rivers in the Moon, and if such be there, there must be Plants that they water, and if Plants, there must likewise be Animals to feed upon them, and all these are design’d for the Service of Men... But this Chain of Reasoning is easily broken, by breaking its first Link: For if there be no Waters in the Moon, in consequence of that, neither are there any Plants or Animals, or Men; and if none of these be there, by Parity of Reason, neither are there any in the other Planets, and so the whole Chain falls to pieces.
I’ve always been fond of One World arguments derived from Earth’s luck-sopped biography, as I can happily apply the same reasoning to my own personal timeline. The “Rare Ogi Hypothesis”: I have experienced a deeply improbable sequence of circumstances that explains why I, and only I, have contacted intex. Everybody else is missing one or more of the links in my own fortuitous chain of happenings—their own life story lacked a moon, or plate tectonics, or an iron core. My personal trajectory leading to incessant contact with intelligent extraterrestrials is as Special and Privileged as that of Earth’s trajectory leading to intelligent life!
But I don’t believe this. I find it more credible that there are diverse cosmic pathways leading to the appearance of intex in our galaxy, and that there are many individual life paths—perhaps infinite—leading to intex contact. I believe my own timeline is not beset with anomaly, that minds with far different histories and qualities than mine can achieve intex contact just as (in)effectively as I do.
I also admit the possibility that the intex I’ve encountered may not be embodied within the Milky Way…
[1] Many advocates of the modern One World Doctrine refer to it as the “Rare Earth hypothesis.”
[2] The One World Doctrine can also be extended to encompass our entire universe, for there are many seemingly arbitrary qualities to our shared reality that enable intelligent life to form at all, such as the strange fact that solid ice floats on liquid water (otherwise, sea creatures would get crushed by descending ice, instead of living safe and secure beneath a protective icy sheath); the fact that steel and concrete have the same thermal expansion coefficient, allowing them to work together to build the architecture of modern civilization; the fact that compounds exist for anesthesia in humans, thereby permitting complex surgery.
[3] The exact size and location of habitable zones are highly disputed and may be unresolvable; nor is it clear which of the presumed Goldilocks factors actually contribute meaningfully to the emergence of life. It’s a bit like asking, “What geographic regions on Earth are in the Goldilocks Zone for the emergence of artificial intelligence?”
[4] Other scientists, however, suggest that the universe today is still too hot and that the reason we cannot detect advanced intelligent life is because they are sleeping, biding their time for a cooler universe where they can use resources more efficiently. Obviously, some intex are not sleeping—they are communicating with me.