"No wonder that search had never found spoor of other thinking races. Life was a rarity. Sentience must be infrequent to almost the vanishing point. Maybe, in the whole of the universe, it had evolved on Earth alone." (p. 413)
"...a universe that produces sophonts as casually as it produces snowflakes."
-Poul Anderson, "Outpost of Empire" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-72 AT p. 7.
I think that "sentience" should mean animal consciousness and that "sapience" should mean rational consciousness but apparently "sentience" is used to mean reason. In any case, so far, the universe that we inhabit seems to be intermediate between the "life is rare" universe of the Harvest Of Stars Tetralogy and the "sophonts like snowflakes" universe of the Technic History.
There are many extra-solar planets the right distance from their primaries to have life but there is as yet no confirmation of intelligence.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
As of now, I too lean to the intermediate position between those two extremes: intelligent life is vanishingly rare in the HARVEST books; moderately infrequent but not vanishingly so, as we see in STARFARERS; or extremely common, as in the Technic stories. I would prefer the last option, but would settle for the second!
The sooner we find out how rare or not intelligent life is the better!
Ad astra! Sean
Right now, we just don't know. But we should have some new information in the lifetimes of those posting here.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Amen! I hope the three or four most frequent combox commentators, including you, lives long enough to know more. And readers too, of course.
And I hope so much Elon Musk founds his Mars colony. That too would help to jump start efforts to FIND out!
Ad astra! Sean
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