Is there hope for the human race?
I really don't know, but I hope so.
It's hard to believe that, in the total vastness of the universe, there isn't another lifeform just as intelligent and advanced as we are. But, there may not be. We could be the only hope for the universe to be aware of itself.
I'm sure the universe is filled with life, and life entails intelligence of some sort, but an octopus or elephant, though very intelligent in their own right, could never develop a technological civilization. Our cousins, the chimps, even though they develop and use simple tools, are incapable of anything close to our achievements. So, there could be billions of planets throughout the cosmos filled with life that never progressed to even a stone age.
I'm sure the universe is filled with life, and life entails intelligence of some sort, but an octopus or elephant, though very intelligent in their own right, could never develop a technological civilization. Our cousins, the chimps, even though they develop and use simple tools, are incapable of anything close to our achievements. So, there could be billions of planets throughout the cosmos filled with life that never progressed to even a stone age.
I'm not holding my breath over the possibility of rounding a corner and bumping into an ET. It's theoretically possible. Just not likely, all the UFO propaganda and theorizing notwithstanding.
We may be all there is in this league. Don't know about you, but I feel a certain level of responibility due to that fact. We'd better not mess up, but our history doesn't bode well for our future.
Every great civilization of the past has inevitably perished and if we don't salvage and preserve the present one, some tremendous natural disaster akin to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs could turn us into equally infrequent fossils with no comparably intelligent and gifted species to wonder at in the future.
So many things had to happen at just the right time and in just the right way for us to exist at all that the possibility of duplication somewhere else goes way, way down on the probability scale. Imperfect as we are as a species, a lot may depend on whether or not we get smart enough to survive.
We may be all there is in this league. Don't know about you, but I feel a certain level of responibility due to that fact. We'd better not mess up, but our history doesn't bode well for our future.
Every great civilization of the past has inevitably perished and if we don't salvage and preserve the present one, some tremendous natural disaster akin to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs could turn us into equally infrequent fossils with no comparably intelligent and gifted species to wonder at in the future.
So many things had to happen at just the right time and in just the right way for us to exist at all that the possibility of duplication somewhere else goes way, way down on the probability scale. Imperfect as we are as a species, a lot may depend on whether or not we get smart enough to survive.
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