RSS Feed
December 3rd, 2020 
Awake Goy The search for intelligent life may be over! A team of Oxford University researchers claims life on earth is probably a unique universal phenomena, and that it´s “extremely unlikely” that any other intelligent life exists anywhere else in the universe.
In 1959, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi posed the Fermi paradox as a way of questioning whether human beings were the only intelligent life in the universe. But today, according to a recent IPSOS poll, “Just under half of Americans believe UFOs exist and have visited the Earth,” and the idea that we are the only intelligent species in the universe is utterly outrageous to at least these 150 million people.
Throwing a cat among the pigeons, a team of researchers from Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute have published a new paperthat all but says the words “we are all alone.” The chief argument is that took approximately 4.5 billion years for a series of complex evolutionary transitions to spark what would become intelligent life on earth. This, coupled with the widely spaced timing of key evolutionary transitions on earth, led the scientists to conclude that the expected transition times likely “exceed the lifetime of Earth,” suggesting the evolution of intelligent life is “exceptionally rare.”
Evolution: from single cells to intelligent life, and then human evolution. An unlikely, essentially rare chain of events and likely not statistically possibly beyond planet earth. ( elyomys / Adobe Stock)
The Chance Of Anything Coming From Mars Is A Million To One!
The new research leans on the Fermi paradox and the primary claim in this new statistical study is that the chances of intelligent life existing anywhere but earth is “exceptionally rare.” They also concluded that human-like civilizations are extremely unlikely to exist on other planets. The Oxford researchers make this assertion on an observation that’s really hard to argue. Namely, that it took about 4.5 billion years for a series of evolutionary transitions to produce intelligent life on earth. Therefore, for life to have evolved elsewhere in the universe “it would take longer than the whole of Earth’s projected lifespan.”
The question on the lips of diehard alien believers will be “so what type of science suggests we are all alone,” because in the polarized world we live in “my science is often better than your science.” Yes, that´s actually a thing these days.
Dr Anders Sandberg, lead author of the new paper, told the Daily Mail that the principal statistical application they used was a kind of “Bayesian analysis” that determined the probability of the same transitionary events that occurred on earth occurring elsewhere.
Intelligent Life Is Unlikely And Science Proves It
If these scientists were a bunch of sloppy-Joe skeptics maybe they should launch torpedoes at their underlying “assumptions.” For example, if they set out to prove life doesn’t exist perhaps their whole experiment leaned towards this expectation, skewing the results. However, according to Dr Sandberg his team made the primary assumption that what happened on earth “is typical for what happens on other planets.” The scientists highlight how low the probability actually is.
Multicellular life evolved on earth, according to the paper, and “originated independently over 40 times in nature.” The new statistical approach allowed the researchers to estimate how unlikely all the steps leading to life on earth actually were, Dr Sandberg told the Daily Mail . And knowing these levels of difficulty, it turns out earth is a very “unlikely planet,” and that the chances of us, being, well, us, is even infinitesimally smaller.
With enormous technological listening posts like these, we have been trying to find signals from other forms of intelligent life for a long time. But maybe there isn’t anybody else out there! ( ILYA GENKIN / Adobe Stock)
Alien Intelligent Life, For Now, Is A Dead Idea
While this whole idea that we are all alone in the universe might be new to you, the scientific world has been buzzing about this outcome for at least a decade. In 2014 celebrity British professor Brian Cox debunked all ideas about intergalactic alien life in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald , when he stated that he believed “humans were the only form of civilization in our galaxy.”
While skeptics sharpen their pencils to attack this new paper, they must keep in mind the challenging words of Dr Sandberg. He states that for anyone to prove life is indeed out there, evidence of “much earlier transitions than the ones that occurred on Earth, or multiple instances of transitions” must be presented. And there is no sign of that coming soon from anywhere!
You can read the full paper, ‘The Timing of Evolutionary Transitions Suggests Intelligent Life Is Rare’ published Online:19 Nov 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1089/ast.2019.2149
Top image: The search for intelligent life on other planets may have reached its end. Statistically it’s just not possible: we are alone! Source: vchalup / Adobe Stock
By Ashley Cowie
Posted in 
Tags: 
