Drake showed Cox an orchid that flowers for only two days a year. Anyone who observed that orchid on any of the wrong 363 days would miss the flowers. Communicating civilizations might be rarer than those flowers so we have to keep looking.
Cox explained that complex, multi-cellular organisms are composed of complex cells. It is thought that two simple cells fused to form the first complex cell which then reproduced as complex. However, such fusion would usually result in one cell eating the other or both dying. Fusion to complexity must be rare and is believed to have happened only once on Earth. How often elsewhere? Cox guesstimated one civilization per galaxy which would make us effectively alone and also very valuable.
This is not Poul Anderson's Technic History where sapient species are as common as snowflakes but the universe of his later future histories. Next we will recapitulate what Anderson wrote about hyperspace in Is There Life On Other Worlds?
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Emotionally speaking, I don't like that idea, that there might be only one intelligent species per galaxy.* I far prefer either the many sapient species seen in the Technic stories or Anderson's suggestion in IS THERE LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS? that mankind might be one of the earlier intelligent races in the Milky Way galaxy to achieve a high tech civilization.
And I certainly agree with Drake and Cox that we have to keep trying, keep searching, not only for colonizable, terrestroid planets, but also for intelligent life elsewhere! And I hope we find out more about either possibility from use of the James Webb Telescope.
Ad astra! Sean
*Or satellite galaxies, if we include the Magellanic Clouds.
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