Why Humanity Will Never Encounter Intelligent Alien Life

Nor will we find gods, goblins, angels, fairies or ghouls lurking at the bottom of the garden

Image credit: NASA

We humans have a hardwired set of neural patterns that, without us realizing it, influence the way we perceive the world and the fantasies we conjure up. That’s why all religious mythologies are fundamentally the same: mummy or daddy god creates the world, shoves animals etc. into it, there’s a clash between positive and negative, and there are some crude tenets for how to live the “good” life. Polytheistic myths are usually more psychologically adequate than monotheistic myths, and thus less harmful, but all are essentially trite and tedious because of their intellectual vacuity.

Another hardwired pattern is our frame of reference: the group. Throughout our evolutionary history, small groups of humans would encounter other groups of humans, very often to fight over precious resources; less often to engage in mutually beneficial trade. We naturally think of our group as our reference-point and other groups as “strangers.”

As the baroque superstructure of religious mythologies grew after the development of agriculture and the consequent emergence of large-scale human populations anchored to a single location, the “stranger” was often symbolized within the context of prevailing mythology. Those following…