{"id":97585,"date":"2019-10-18T12:22:35","date_gmt":"2019-10-18T19:22:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/evolution-tells-us-we-might-be-the-only-intelligent-life-in-the-universe"},"modified":"2019-10-18T12:22:35","modified_gmt":"2019-10-18T19:22:35","slug":"evolution-tells-us-we-might-be-the-only-intelligent-life-in-the-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/evolution-tells-us-we-might-be-the-only-intelligent-life-in-the-universe","title":{"rendered":"Evolution tells us we might be the only intelligent life in the universe"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/evolution-tells-us-we-might-be-the-only-intelligent-life-in-the-universe2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Are we alone in the universe? It comes down to whether intelligence is a probable outcome of natural selection, or an improbable fluke. By definition, probable events occur frequently, improbable events occur rarely\u2014or once. Our evolutionary history shows that many key adaptations\u2014not just intelligence, but complex animals, complex cells, photosynthesis, and life itself\u2014were unique, one-off events, and therefore highly improbable. Our evolution may have been like winning the lottery \u2026 only far less likely.<\/p>\n<p>The universe is astonishingly vast. The Milky Way has <a href=\"https:\/\/asd.gsfc.nasa.gov\/blueshift\/index.php\/2015\/07\/22\/how-many-stars-in-the-milky-way\/\">more than 100 billion<\/a> stars, and there are <a href=\"https:\/\/iopscience.iop.org\/article\/10.3847\/0004-637X\/830\/2\/83\">over a trillion galaxies<\/a> in the visible universe, the tiny fraction of the universe we can see. Even if habitable worlds are rare, their sheer number\u2014there are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/nature10684\">as many planets as stars<\/a>, maybe more\u2014suggests lots of life is out there. So where is everyone? This is the Fermi paradox. The universe is large, and old, with time and room for intelligence to evolve, but there\u2019s no evidence of it.<\/p>\n<p>Could intelligence simply be unlikely to evolve? Unfortunately, we can\u2019t study extraterrestrial life to answer this question. But we can study some 4.5 billion years of Earth\u2019s history, looking at where evolution repeats itself, or doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Are we alone in the universe? It comes down to whether intelligence is a probable outcome of natural selection, or an improbable fluke. By definition, probable events occur frequently, improbable events occur rarely\u2014or once. Our evolutionary history shows that many key adaptations\u2014not just intelligence, but complex animals, complex cells, photosynthesis, and life itself\u2014were unique, one-off [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":511,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,385,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-evolution","category-existential-risks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/511"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}