We May Find Alien Life Very Soon

But don't hold your breath for intelligent life.

That's the crux of a pair of articles that are on the front page of Space.com today. I thought it was kind of funny that they were sharing space with one being so optimistic and the other ... being decidedly less so.

Let's start with the positive, which comes from a discussion at the International Astronautical Congress. Basically, a lot of really smart people think we'll find life in our solar system very soon. As in, 10 or 15 years. It'll probably be on Mars, but who knows, maybe Enceladus or Europa would surprise. I thought it was funny that someone brought up Frank Drake, the man behind the infamous Drake equation, which seeks to put a number of possible technological civilizations based on the likelihood of a variety of factors, like the number of habitable planets, the number of planets that can sustain life, and the number of planets where life lasts long enough to reach intelligence.

And that brings us to the second article. It's nothing I haven't seen before, true technological intelligence is going to be incredibly rare because there are so many factors that have to go right, blah blah blah. I have two problems with this line of thinking. One: Anything that puts Earth on a pedestal is suspicious. We should always try to avoid thinking of ourselves as important, or at the center of the universe. Two: We have absolutely no idea how common the things that led to the rise of life on Earth actually are. We're only just now able to get some idea of the number of habitable worlds in the galaxy, and there are so many other steps involved. We have a sample size of one. We can't know how common intelligent life is because we have no idea how common life is. Concluding something when we're missing half a dozen variables is silly.

Anyway, that's my rant for the day.