Where Are the Aliens? New Study Suggests They're Stuck Like Us
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
It goes like this: we assume we're typical life, and we're getting bored of searching, therefore other typical life must also get bored.
It's a challenge to make you think about the point in which such comparisons (life outside must be similar to life here) are true or relevant. It's almost a joke (in the good sense).
This challenge can be expressed by taking the principle that we're not special to the max: if we take it to extend to all aspects of Earth's life, then when we find aliens, they'll be identical to us living in a planet identical to us, which sounds unreasonable.
Therefore, the thing to discuss here is: how special we are and in which ways? How much can we infer about the universe from our current vantage point?
Evolution is entirely random, and you really just need one mutant to survive and propagate enough to create a line from its original mutation. If that mutation, or collection of such effects, results in greater than human intelligence at any point in time, then there’s no reason to assume that other intelligent life is similar to us, and as such “stuck” right now.
If there is intelligent life that developed enough to hack resource-efficient interstellar travel which doesn’t kill them and has found Earth and exists in the same universal time span as us, then it’s likely they’re either studying us (via infiltration), or avoiding this planet altogether.
Evolution is not entirely random. A lot of things go into it, some of which are random mutations, and some of which are not. But even if every change was a random mutation, natural selection is still in play and forms a non-random forcing function.
Is it more likely for some processes to be favored? Maybe, depends on the set of genes and environmental conditions, but there are always epigenetic factors which will introduce differences, which makes evolutionary development more a random process than a stochastic one.