If you ask modern people about the place of mankind about the Universe, they will most likely support the opinion of Carl Sagan, who said: "We live on an insignificant speck of dust orbiting an ordinary star in the far corner of an obscure galaxy." That is, on a cosmic scale, humanity is not something unusual, it is just one of the countless examples of the extraterrestrial propagation of intelligence in the Universe. This view reflects an understanding of important advances in science, which show that the Universe is huge and is about the same everywhere. But there was a time when astronomers considered the Earth to be the center of the Universe, and mankind was considered as something extremely important from a cosmic point of view. When Copernicus refuted this claim, we became nothing more than ordinary. Today, the idea of ordinary humanity is sometimes referred to as an indicator of the ordinary of Copernicus himself.
As an astrophysical researcher, I can say without exaggeration that not a day goes by without being amazed at the incredible explanatory power of modern science. But I also learned to be open to the world as it presents itself, and not as I would like to see it. Therefore, it is worth paying attention to two recent discoveries, due to which our place in the Universe now needs to be revised. Perhaps we are not really that ordinary.
Intelligent life can be the result of an astronomically unlikely sequence of events.
The idea that intelligent life could be common in the universe has ancient roots. Renaissance theologian and naturalist Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake, in part, for this claim. One hundred and eighty-one years ago, The New York Sun even published images of the Moon dwellers having fun. In 1908, Percival Lowell, famous for his studies of the Martian channels, wrote: “From everything we have learned about the structure of life on the one hand and its distribution on the other, it can be said that it is as inevitable stage of planetary evolution as quartz, feldspar or nitrogenous soils. Each and all of them are just manifestations of chemical affinity. Today, of course, we know that there are no channels or aliens on Mars. From a purely scientific point of view, recent books and scientific publications have shownthat only for the emergence of life on the planet there should be more than favorable conditions, and even more so for its evolution and survival in order to develop intelligence. In relatively stable conditions, this will take at least billions of years. Any hypothetically habitable planet should at least be in a stable orbital system around the star, which will not die in the near future and is not a source of harmful X-rays. Numerous evolutionary biologists writing about the surprisingly conditional nature of human evolution have added a biological caveat to this: even on Earth, with a possible repetition of the process of evolution, intelligent beings would hardly appear again. Thus, although the processes occurring in the Universe are more or less similar to each other,some events are less likely to occur than others. Until we know more, it must be admitted that the evolution of intelligent life could have been the result of an astronomically unlikely sequence of events.
ask modern people about the place of mankind about the universe, they are likely to support the opinion of Carl Sagan, who said: "We live on an insignificant speck of dust orbiting an ordinary star in the far corner of an obscure galaxy." That is, on a cosmic scale, humanity is not something unusual, it is just one of the countless examples of the extraterrestrial propagation of intelligence in the Universe. This view reflects an understanding of important advances in science, which show that the Universe is huge and is about the same everywhere. But there was a time when astronomers considered the Earth as the center of the Universe, and humanity was considered as something extremely important from a cosmic point of view. When Copernicus refuted this claim, we became nothing more than mediocre. Today, the idea of ordinary humanity is sometimes referred to as an indicator of the ordinary of Copernicus himself.
As an astrophysical researcher, I can say without exaggeration that not a day goes by without being amazed at the incredible explanatory power of modern science. But I also learned to be open to the world as it presents itself, and not as I would like to see it. Therefore, it is worth paying attention to two recent discoveries, due to which our place in the Universe now needs to be revised. Perhaps we are not really that ordinary.
Intelligent life can be the result of an astronomically unlikely sequence of events.
The idea that intelligent life could be common in the universe has ancient roots. Renaissance theologian and naturalist Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake, in part, for this claim. One hundred and eighty-one years ago, The New York Sun even published images of the Moon dwellers having fun. In 1908, Percival Lowell, famous for his studies of the Martian channels, wrote: “From everything we have learned about the structure of life on the one hand and its distribution on the other, it can be said that it is as inevitable stage of planetary evolution as quartz, feldspar or nitrogenous soils. Each and all of them are just manifestations of chemical affinity. Today, of course, we know that there are no channels or aliens on Mars. From a purely scientific point of view, recent books and scientific publications have shownthat only for the emergence of life on the planet there should be more than favorable conditions, and even more so for its evolution and survival in order to develop intelligence. In relatively stable conditions, this will take at least billions of years. Any hypothetically habitable planet should at least be in a stable orbital system around the star, which will not die in the near future and is not a source of harmful X-rays. Numerous evolutionary biologists writing about the surprisingly conditional nature of human evolution have added a biological caveat to this: even on Earth, with a possible repetition of the process of evolution, intelligent beings would hardly appear again. Thus, although the processes occurring in the Universe are more or less similar to each other,some events are less likely to occur than others. Until we know more, it must be admitted that the evolution of intelligent life could have been the result of an astronomically unlikely sequence of events.
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