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Where Are The Little Green Aliens?
Why technologically sophisticated species will be vanishingly rare
Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, education systems were forced to adapt in order to meet the growing need for intellectually skilled workers. Over time, and largely by accident, this led to an increasing number of people acquiring the capacity for reasoning from facts. As a consequence, superstition/religiosity diminished among educated people and a more coherent worldview began to take shape.
Today, most Europeans understand that we live in an expanding universe and that all life is shaped by the inexorable forces of evolution. Teleological explanations are therefore ruled out as a means of explaining such large-scale phenomenon.
Unfortunately, we’re still in the very early stages of learning to reason and consequently we still make very basic intellectual mistakes. One such highly revealing mistake is our obsession with the idea that there “must be” many other technological civilizations “out there” for us to encounter at some point when our own technologies permit us to do so.
In fact, this notion is merely a substitute, dressed in Star Trek clothing, for our former belief in angels. Rather than indulging in wish-fulfillment fantasies, it’s more interesting to explore the reasons why technologically sophisticated intelligent life is…
