In C98/19 Jane Benn refers to my contribution, ‘The Meaning of Life?’ C97/42, and implies that I have taken ‘life’ to mean human life. Not true. Graham Dare may have (C96/6) but I referred to life in a very general manner and nowhere did I regard human life as the ultimate or reject the possibility of extra-terrestrial life forms. Indeed, I deliberately left this open.
Our chances of becoming aware of other intelligent life in the universe is remote. Communication windows between us are bound to be relatively tiny. Our own ‘window’ has just barely opened. We could have missed evidence of other life by a second or by a million years.
But none of this makes much difference to ‘the meaning of life’. "What is the meaning of life? Is probably the wrong question. Perhaps we should ask, what is the meaning of the Universe?
Bob Cooper
Bob : I am even less hopeful that the question "what is the meaning of the Universe" is a sensible one to ask than I am of the "meaning of life" one. We supply meaning. Why should the Universe have one ?
I agree that communication with intelligent alien life is unlikely, and that dialogue with them is even more remote, given the time lapse between the sending & receipt of messages. However, it would be the receipt of the first undeniably genuine message that would be the revolutionary finding. I have a private theory that narrows any conversation window further - societies sufficiently technologically sophisticated to take part in this dialogue are unstable and would tend to destroy themselves before the dialogue could get far. It would be interesting to consider whether the competitive instincts inherited from our own evolutionary past would apply in alien societies. That is, would Darwinian evolution be the correct paradigm for any ecosystem anywhere ?
On another tack, did anyone read the recent Prospect article about the impact of gamma-ray bursts on life. The suggestion is that, if life is ubiquitous, then, on average, life in an entire galaxy is extinguished in some galaxy somewhere each day. A grim thought.
Theo