Ain't nobody here but us chickens

[andygates]

I'm not sure why, but lately I've become convinced that we are alone in the universe.  Just us, on our precious and singular little rock.  I don't think that it's the rock - my money is on the exoplanet guys finding a ton of Earthlikes soon - but I just have a gut feeling that they've all got bacterial mats, stromatolites, and that's the lot.



In the Drake equation, that's fi, the fraction of life-bearing planets which develop intelligent life.

It's a strange and profoundly melancholy feeling which makes even the most wretched human twaddle seen unbearably precious.

Comments

Re: Cheer up, Munky

[andygates.livejournal.com]

>But the only sentient life in the entire universe?

Nah, probably not. Even if you run Drake with teeny tiny numbers, the initial seed - star count - is so vast that it has to come up with something decent. But other galaxies are Elsewhere for anything that matters. My gut just says that we're functionally alone.

Heh. I could always take the quantum anthropic approach. The universe existed in a bajillion potential states until one of them developed the observer. Then all the possibilities collapsed, and we're left with some sabre-toothed tiger or early hominid looking at itself in a puddle and thinking, "I", and bam, it's all set.

But that is solipsistic wank. Glorious wank, mind you, a real four-hour session with special lube, but wank nevertheless. It's the kind of thing Raven would claim. "The universe? Just a mess of probability until the chance that *I* would be there came along. I created the universe, me." Ego as Creator. Chuckle.

>Even unbearably precious wretched human twaddle is wretched human twaddle.

On the one hand, all that mundane bullshit that people put out is a unique and beautiful snowflake. On the other hand, if my gut is to be believed, all of those quotidian goons could be out making music or painting the Sistine chapel or discovering new sexual positions, and instead they're doing the ironing and whining about the congestion charge. Because I'm not Rabbi Lionel Blue, and I can't find the beauty in that crap. And if we're all alone, that crap seems like so much more of a waste of time.

I hope it's just that the last SF I read was Against a Dark Background and I'm feeling blue.

It's not as if going with one's gut has the best precedent, after all. Eh, George?