Once upon a time, people believed that there were Martians wanting to contact us. The NYTimes article today about 1924 fervor about that is darling, yet implicitly dramatizes how fast our technological resourcefulness is evolving, given what scientists are doing now.
Below is a comment I posted today at the article.
Around the time of the Opposition fervor, Edwin Hubble opened a “Copernican” revolution by discovering that all the stars we had seen were merely part of one galaxy—or that most of those “stars” were other galaxies.By the way, though I posted that comment soon after the article appeared, it didn’t appear at the Times “Comments” feature for that article until the comments closed. It appeared as the last comment, which readers see at the top of “All” comments as the first one. I thank the Times for that very deliberate featuring.
So, all of that was a background to what became of philosophy in the 20th century—especially "the question of being" (Heidegger, _Being and Time_, 1927)
We are so early in our evolution of intelligent apprehension.
The most credible answer to Fermi’s Paradox is suggested by our own behavior: The brightest of us seek to leave lower forms of life to their own designs (e.g., valuing wildlife conservation), though we have immense knowledge of them.
Also, the brightest of us tend to want as much privacy as possible, i.e., they don’t wish to be known.
We are “alone” in Our evolving, because only we can ensure a sustainable Earth.
We are already able to detect bio-signatures on other planets. We can’t imagine what we’ll be able to do in a hundred years. We can’t conceive what intelligent life a million years beyond us can do, nor how long they’ve known about us—and known that we children must learn our own way.
We’re not yet evolved enough to make sense of what the Absolute Others have to share. The answer to Fermi’s Paradox is that “We’ll let you know when time has earned Contact competence.”
[As I’ve done at this blog earlier,] I recommend reading The Great Silence: Science and Philosophy of Fermi's Paradox, 2018 by Milan M. Ćirković, especially its last chapter.
