(with apologies to Carl Sagan)

The question of the relative abundance of intelligent life is one of great interest because of what it can teach humanity about itself. It can teach man if he is rare or common and thus how effective he is at the game of survival. It can teach him about the absolute value of intelligence since survival over time is a direct measure of that quality.

As can readily be observed, all life forms are preoccupied with survival. This is also true of man, though he approaches the question in many diverse ways, some of which do not have an obvious connection to survival. Take art for example. It isn't obvious how art contributes to survival. However, if one looks at the definition of art and widens it to cover the spectrum of human creativity, the connection becomes clearer.

The first question leading to a theoretical conclusion on this issue is definition. Precisely what is meant by the term intelligent life? The rough answer is life like man, sharing in his uniqueness. Humans are uniquely creative so that will be the quality to be carefully inspected.

Before this unique quality can be isolated, which apparently arises from awareness, which is obviously not unique to humanity, an analysis of awareness will have to occur. Whence comes awareness? What is awareness? How widespread is awareness? What are the attributes of awareness? How does awareness differ from consciousness?

Once clarity arrives on these questions, one needs to look carefully at the structure of the universe to determine how frequently similar conditions to those on earth arise elsewhere. Then there is the question of the duration of intelligent life. How long would it be expected to last before dying out? Would it endure as long as the alligator or would a much shorter period of time be expected. Would its likely end be death or would metamorphosis be more likely?

Therefore, the questions are:

How frequently in a galaxy like ours do the environmental conditions necessary to life arise? In order to answer the question it will be assumed that the solar system is the definition of what is required to support life. It will be further assumed that life on earth is typical and that life depends on the circumstances that prevail on this planet.

How likely is life to arise when the environmental conditions are right? The assumption here will be that life refers to awareness. That awareness distinguishes the living from the non-living and further that awareness is an attribute of a complex carbon molecule. From these assumptions one must conclude that life will always arise when environmental conditions are suitable, since liquid water and a carbon rich environment are all that is necessary.

How likely is consciousness to arise from awareness? It will be assumed that consciousness is equivalent to objective awareness, which arises from sufficiently intense concentration. Concentration is understood similarly to its use in other applications such as in the case of water. Thus, mental energy is concentrated into a stream by the brain and trained on the issue of interest producing a separation between it and the observer, which is called objectivity. It would appear to be a product of the ratio between brain size and body size so there is no physical barrier to its arrival. The question about consciousness then reduces to whether or not it is useful in the struggle for survival.

How long is consciousness likely to endure? This question amounts to one of survivability. What qualities produce long term survival? Are the acts of consciousness consistent with those qualities?

These questions can only be answered theoretically, but knowing the theoretical answer can provide the basis for experiential verification as time goes by.

The environmental conditions necessary to the arrival of life, assuming those prevailing here are typical, will be a single average star being orbited by several planets, the inner ones being rocky while the outer ones are mainly gaseous. The rocky inner planets must have a large quantity of water and therefor must be sufficiently large to retain it but not so large as to produce an excessive gravitational field. The rocky planets must be sufficiently far from the star to allow for temperatures allowing water to exist in its liquid state. The life zone would appear to be very narrow, but since the star will gradually cool, all planets fitting the above description would be expected to achieve the necessary conditions at some time in the life cycle of the star.

Are average stars likely to have orbiting planets? Since the majority of stars are of the binary variety, that is two stars orbiting each other and since, were Jupiter several times larger this system would also be a binary system, one is drawn to the conclusion that orbiting bodies around any sufficiently large object is to be expected. This expectation would seem to be confirmed by the fact that most objects of sufficient size in our system have satellites with the larger bodies having the most.

This analysis leads to the conclusion that life could have first appeared on Mars in our system and subsequently to the Earth experience can be expected to appear on Venus.

The expectation must therefore be that life is abundant in the galaxy. If that analysis is correct one must look to the question of intelligence. Does life typically produce progressively more complex organisms, eventually arriving at intelligence or more accurately, objective life? That has been the general assumption since Darwin developed evolutionary theory. The conclusion to be presented here is that this assumption is invalid; that, while life must be expected to be very common, objective life must be expected to be rare.

This conclusion is based on analysis regarding the expected duration of humanity on the Earth. The general assumption that technological civilization will continue indefinitely is unlikely to be correct. All living things have a task to perform and capabilities commensurate with that task to allow them to function in the desired way. The goal of all of these living entities taken together is to assure the continuance of life itself on the planet. Most living things represent a food supply to other living things. Many are garbage collectors. All are transformers of one sort or another, ingesting some sort of matter and producing some other sort useful to the project.

Living things that become negative forces in this project must transform into something more useful or die out. This will turn out to be the reason for the demise of the dinosaur and many other species over the life of the life project on this planet.

This is the appropriate basis on which to analyze the likely duration of Homo Sapiens. In order to accomplish the analysis one must identify man's primary mission and also his negatives regarding the impact his existence has on the viability of living things on the planet. One of the main tasks of living things is to maintain the atmospheric composition, the amounts of the various gases, and also the temperature on the planet in a state most favorable to the continuance of life. This task lies mainly in the province of microscopic creatures like plankton, but man is a large creature that is having an inordinately large impact on this process by burning oil. There is a continuous need to manage the atmosphere due to large-scale natural events like volcanic eruptions or forest fires. Many trace gases have to be managed in order to provide necessary molecules to be ingested by living creatures but the main work is to manage carbon dioxide in order to control temperature. The more carbon dioxide there is, the higher the temperature will be. There is some ideal temperature range for living things, though that range might have to be adjusted upwards or downwards from time to time to encourage a continuing balance among creatures and the various elements and chemical compounds on which they are dependent.

Assuming the natural atmosphere on the planet in the absence of life would be expected to be roughly the same as Mars and Venus, that would call for a carbon dioxide rich atmosphere with little oxygen, nitrogen and other trace gases. In fact, carbon dioxide on Venus and Mars and pre living Earth is thought to be above 90%. Currently the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is about 0.03%. The reason for this is that living things have industriously removed the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and replaced it with oxygen and nitrogen in order to encourage life by providing an ideal environment.

Now, man comes along and reverses this process by burning oil, which has the effect of replacing lost carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In no way can man be expected to return the atmosphere to its original composition, but he can alter that composition significantly, even as some scientists worry, to the point of producing the green house effect. This likely will produce an elevated temperature it is thought, possibly melting the ice caps.

The judgement associated with this action is negative as well it might be, but that conclusion can only arise if man considers that his actions are the product of his own self generated desires. It is possible that life on the planet has contrived to assign man the task of recycling carbon dioxide because of a general recognition that removal of it from the atmosphere cannot go on forever, that some significant percentage is necessary to life. In fact, it is well known that all vegetative life is completely dependent on some small percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As it is said, vegetation breathes in carbon dioxide and expels oxygen while animal life does the opposite.

Since animals are utterly dependent on vegetative life, some minimal level of carbon dioxide is essential to their continued existence. This minimal level could be experimentally determined relatively easily by the simple expedient of setting up an isolated environment in which the levels of the various gases could be controlled. The expectation would be that a further loss of perhaps one half the remainder could be devastating. Since carbon dioxide has already been brought from a dominant position to its currently relatively insignificant quantities, it isn't difficult to believe that removing two hundredths of one percent of the atmosphere wouldn't be unexpected were some counter force not employed.

Since man is an effective counter force to that trend, one concludes that, that is his mission. With that in mind, what would man's duration be expected to be? Not long, since he is recharging the atmosphere at a dizzying rate and too much carbon dioxide is just as deadly as too little, otherwise it wouldn't have been removed in the first place. An unfortunate requirement of man's mission has been that man must be creative in order to devise a method of recycling since success rests on finding an economic basis for oil converters. As we observe man in comparison with his co inhabitants of this planet it is inescapable that he is both highly creative and the most destructive force alive.

Since that is the case, one must conclude that creation and destruction are closely related. One might reasonably conclude that destruction is a necessary prerequisite for creation.

All of these ideas reinforce the general conclusion that objective creatures are too destructive to have around much of the time. That they might reasonably be brought into existence only in order to solve problems specifically suited to their special capabilities and that the life project would be better served were they not present at other times. This, one concludes is undoubtedly the reason for the blazing speed with which oil has been burned once the technology to do so was devised. Once this project nears completion, one must expect that man will find a way to exit the scene.

These considerations lead to the conclusion that, while life is undoubtedly common in the universe, intelligent or objective life is exceedingly rare. If one takes objective life to be equivalent to civilization and that its duration is likely to be about 10,000 years because that has been the duration up until now of this phenomenon on this planet, then even in so large an entity as the galaxy it would be an exceedingly rare occurrence and utterly unlikely to occur simultaneously in multiple places.

To perform this calculation, take the number of stars in the galaxy, divide by two to eliminate binaries as unlikely candidates for life, reduce that number by the number of red giants and white dwarves, so that only stars in the main sequence are candidates and assume that only for about half of that time are they suitable so that possibly ten percent of the stars are candidates. Then compare the duration of civilization, assumed to be about 10,000 years to the life of the planets, perhaps eight billion years if our planet is taken to be at the mid point of its life and the unlikelihood of coincident civilizations becomes apparent.

Even this small likelihood is further reduced by the recognition that technological civilization is a very small percentage of the duration of a civilization, in our case 200 years out of 10,000. Additionally, if there were one other in our galaxy, randomly placed, it would be so far away as to reduce the likelihood of contact to none. All of these conclusions are based on the assumption that our mission is to alter the atmosphere and that it is nearly complete and that when it is complete, the need for technological civilization being eliminated, it will rapidly disappear.

It may be that there is some intrinsic benefit to life in having intelligent observers and, to limit the destructive potential that they represent, that they should not be manipulative. The whale family, since they possess large brains and no manipulative appendages might be assumed to fulfill this need if it exists.

If it is reasonable to assume that life exploits the complexity spectrum as one of its strategies for survival as it seems to do, then it is also reasonable to conclude that whales inhabit a position of greater complexity than does man. They have already completed the land dwelling phase of their existence.

If it is also reasonable to assume that living things that outlive their usefulness typically metamorphosize into some more adapted creature, as did the dinosaurs, in order to avoid losing the genetic record of their existence, then it might also be reasonable to assume that man's destiny is to adopt a form similar to that of whales.

Finally, a question arises regarding one's feelings about this conclusion. It is perfectly reasonable for man to be initially put off by the anticipation of the demise of his species. It is consistent with the will to survive included within the makeup of all living things. None the less, objectively viewed, one can achieve equanimity of feeling, at least in the abstract. Comparing the experience of life that man has had with what seems to be that of whales, it doesn't seem so bad. It might be characterized as trading creativity for sanguinity.