Are We Alone?

To tell you the truth I don’t know, and nor does anyone else. It is equally likely that there is no other sentient being/life form (comparable to ours) in the vast tracts of the universe as there is. We just don’t know. Anything else is speculation, or hope, or … but it isn’t science. The chances are as unlikely as some say they are likely. 

Watching documentaries about space asking/speculating whether there is life out there – somewhere – can be either informative or farcical, mostly the latter. Authoritative statements about extra-terrestrial life being almost certain are speculations, at best. We have no data to pronounce such misinformation. And if we ever pick up radio waves that suggest intelligence (our variety) they may well be ours looped back at us – who knows?

Some argue that the likelihood of life evolving elsewhere in the universe is close to a certainty have made the fatal error of bringing order and predictability to the (so-called) process of random evolution. The chances of evolution on this planet are infinitesimally small as it is, so predicting that a similar process has independently evolved in the vast reaches of the universe is that doubled or trebled. In other words, it is as likely to happen as chimps forming a choir and singing Handel’s Messiah, before Easter.

For evolution to have coughed up life elsewhere that approximates ours is a belief, not a fact. It militates against the very notion of random mutation, etc. Random is random, if you believe in random, and you do if you hold to mechanistic evolutionary processes. That the universe has spawned numerous or multitudinous evolutionary life forms that aren’t dissimilar to ours is an ask too far if we are to hold to the improbably and random nature of evolution, on this planet.

We have good reason to watch with a grain of salt the speculations of the scientific intelligentsia, so-called.

We could be alone and/or another mode of life may well have already spoken to us.