London Letter: Man’s stupidity keeps The Great Filter at bay

The importance of many events is often only known way after they have happened.

One is just how widespread the consequential fallout of hateful men armed with submachine guns killing other men armed with pencils in Paris earlier this month will be.

Another is a bit more mystical: scientists discovered more than 800 exoplanets orbiting in space last year.

How are the two related?

I’ll get to that, but a few weeks ago I didn’t even know what an exoplanet was, and suspect you may not have either.

It’s basically a planet that revolves around a star and is possibly able to support life. In other words, an exoplanet is like Earth.

On our planet, life took about five billion years to form, and scientists have worked out that some of the known exoplanets have also existed long enough for life to evolve.

In fact, three weeks ago, as terrorists were shooting elderly satirists, scientists announced the discovery of Kepler-186f, a planet 492 light years away in the Cygnus constellation. Kepler-186f is of massive interest because it is the first planet almost exactly the same size as Earth orbiting in a habitable zone around a sun. So the law of averages states that there should be life out there.

Yet there isn’t. Or if there is, there is no sign of it in the eerie galactic stillness.

So we are back to the perennial question: Is there anyone out there?

Scientists call this the Fermi Paradox: the puzzling contradiction between the extreme likelihood of extraterrestrial civilization and the absolute lack of evidence of it.

The sheer number of exoplanets is now actually deepening rather than shedding light on our understanding the Fermi Paradox. We must be missing something massive because everything points to life in abundance and yet we can’t find a single instance of it.

So some scientists are now exploring another argument – we are looking at planets where life is actually extinct instead of evolving. That is why we have we not found aliens, despite the existence of hundreds of billions of solar systems in our galactic neighbourhood.

The Great Filter

This theory, which is gaining momentum, is called The Great Filter.

All this is way above my intellectual pay grade, but a prominent astrobiologist Andrew Snyder gives the layman’s explanation that The Great Filter speculates there is a built-in limit to the evolution of intelligent life, which otherwise would filter throughout the universe.

The sheer complexity of advanced intelligence that goes beyond nuclear fission or high-tech computers has its own embedded self-destruct button that leads to a catastrophe from which nothing has so far escaped. Burgeoning knowledge eventually becomes an information cancer; it destroys itself.

To put it more simply, super-intelligence is ultimately self-destructive. If you are able to make a Utopia of the world you live in, it will eventually implode.

In other words, if you straighten all rivers, control all weather, have perfect cloned people … and more importantly, if you have the technology to do that as some hyper-civilisation, you will go up in smoke. The trajectory is unsustainable.

Christianity has preached a variation of this for some time. St. Augustine’s commentary on the Sermon on the Mount said that a certain childishness was necessary to inherit the earth; because in some weird way the most dangerous voodoo of all was “the knowledge that puffeth up”.

To me this is all fascinating, but still verging on sci-fi-babble.

Which takes me back to the terrorist killings in Paris. When you live on a planet where vile gunmen massacre people for drawing cartoons, you are reverting to a barbarism so regressive it is Neanderthal. The irony that the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket murders in the French capital happened as scientists were discovering the new world of Kepler-186f is stark.

So rest assured: The Great Filter theory will not apply to us. We are nowhere near perfection on our planet. Our stupidity is still paramount.

As the song goes: ‘Hello darkness my old friend/I’ve come to talk to you again.’