Here’s the link to the article, on line now for the Sunday Magazine. Let’s deconstruct the title, first by how it is perceived by the public, even by educated readers of this publication. The word “alien” has one meaning in the context of discussing life in the distant universe and say, people who come to this country without gaining permission from the immigration authorities. Since we know the second group exists, it must be and it is soon confirmed, Adam Frank Ph.D is referring to the former. So the headline is saying that a special kine of life exists in the vast universe.
Continuing on to the meaning to even the above average reader since this is a major article in an important newspaper, it must be aliens who are something like the Extra Terrestrials that have been portrayed in every medium for the last century or so. He confirms this with, “Among scientists, the probability of the existence of an alien society with which we might make contact is discussed in terms of something called the Drake equation. (You can read about that in the article- but the first finding is how humongous is the number of planets that are similar to us in size and proximity to their suns) So, he is talking not about sponges, mold or bacteria but life that thinks, communicates, and has enough in common with human beings to “make contact” This detail is important because his explanation, his logic is based on this premise.
Dr. Frank is among the many in his field who don’t choose to admit, “I don’t know, nor do I believe the tools are available to know that human like life exists now or ever has in the universe.” Instead he crafts formulas, complete with mathematical symbols that are designed to awe a reader into agreement. And then with the excitement generated by merging fantasy with pseudo science he can gain fame and gigs with Nova with sponsorship by federal dollars.
First of all, in order to grab his audience, he does not use a headline such as, “There is evidence that life of some sort has existed at some time in the Universe” O.K. that’s a good bet, but he makes a giant leap, a segue defensible by including that some biologist think the probability of extraterrestrial life approaches zero. If he explained why they believe this, he would then have enlightened his readers.
In doing my own research I found an essay, a transcript of a lecture that said what I believe by one with a somewhat more impressive intellectual reputation,
Steven Hawkings 1996, Life in the Universe: (penultimate paragraph)
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What is the explanation of why we have not been visited? One possibility is that the argument, about the appearance of life on Earth, is wrong. Maybe the probability of life spontaneously appearing is so low, that Earth is the only planet in the galaxy, or in the observable universe, in which it happened.
Another possibility is that there was a reasonable probability of forming self reproducing systems, like cells, but that most of these forms of life did not evolve intelligence.
This is my own belief, that we have no idea how many distinct life forms exist on earth even now . We can only guess how the precursors of humans happened to prevail eons ago, nor do we have any reason beyond the theological to believe that this was inevitable. While from the article we learn there are 1012 possible planets that could support life, we have no way of knowing the number of combinations of precursors’ combinations that had to prevail in the moment’s ecosystem in order to create a chain where human-like intelligence became dominant. If this number were one in 1016 , the chance of extraterrestrial advanced humanoid life would be one in a million. This is expressed by Hawking as follows:
We are used to thinking of intelligent life, as an inevitable consequence of evolution. But the Anthropic Principle should warn us to be wary of such arguments. It is more likely that evolution is a random process, with intelligence as only one of a large number of possible outcomes. It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value. Bacteria, and other single cell organisms, will live on, if all other life on Earth is wiped out by our actions.
There is support for the view that intelligence, was an unlikely development for life on Earth, from the chronology of evolution. It took a very long time, two and a half billion years, to go from single cells to multi-cell beings, which are a necessary precursor to intelligence. This is a good fraction of the total time available, before the Sun blows up. So it would be consistent with the hypothesis, that the probability for life to develop intelligence, is low. In this case, we might expect to find many other life forms in the galaxy, but we are unlikely to find intelligent life.
The New York Times is primarily a business in competition with media of all types that survive only by engaging readers. It is not an entity dedicated by sacred belief to dissemination of truth or advancing the skills that promote others to do so. So I contend this is a tabloid type article, in the same spirit of the National Enquirer, but without the photos of the little men with big heads.
This is junk science, and as such it degrades the efforts of others who are pursuing the real thing.