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Like many of you, I grew up in the early years of the space race. I remember as a boy sometimes standing in my backyard at night looking up with a flashlight, flicking it on and off, sending my own secret code out into the faraway stars. I was sure that somewhere up there some intelligent being would notice my little flashlight beam and recognize it as a friendly greeting from planet earth.
I assumed there must be millions of inhabited earthlike planets scattered through the heavens. After all, the movies and TV programs of the time routinely showed beings from outer space visiting our planet or our spacemen meeting other life-forms as they explored the galaxy.
For decades now, most scientists have assumed that uncountable planets inhabited by uncountable life-forms are scattered across the universe, just waiting for us to make contact with them or vice versa. Yet after we've spent years of effort and billions of dollars on projects like the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) listening for signals indicating intelligent life, all we have detected is—nothing. Not a single sound anywhere indicating intelligent life out there. Nothing.
Could we really be all alone in the universe? In recent years several intriguing and important books have asked that question, among them such works as The Creator and the Cosmos, Rare Earth, Nature's Destiny and The Privileged Planet. They're fascinating reading. Written by authors from across the ideological spectrum, they essentially reach the same startling conclusion: We shouldn't be here.
Mathematically, it's simply impossible. When we consider the hundreds of factors required to produce life or a planet capable of sustaining life as we know it—factors as diverse as the decay rates of elements and the distance of a planet's orbit to its sun—and multiply them by the scientific and mathematical odds of those factors being right, it just doesn't work. We shouldn't be here.
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