Or are there inevitable limits to growth of complex decision-making structures, including and beyond biological ones?
Stephen Arthur has written a very interesting article, “How I Know There Are No Aliens” (https://medium.com/@sxarthur_80712/how-i-know-there-are-no-aliens-d85e826c41f1), in which he begins
“The Great Silence contradicts what should be. Intelligent alien species should be millions or billions of years more advanced than us because most star systems are several billion years older than ours. It should only take a million years for one of these aliens or their machine descendants to colonize the galaxy, whether directly or through self-replicating robotic probes. So techno-signatures from their god-like astro-engineering should be abundant.”
and concludes after much plausible argument,
“Despite a seemingly atavistic, anti-Copernican view, I think we must accept that we are alone.”
He may be right. Nevertheless, I find it implausible that among the likely trillions of habitable planets in the billions of galaxies in the known universe, none has evolved forms of life with brains, sensory organs, and action capabilities functionally similar to ours. So the fact that we have, so far, not detected signs of advanced intelligent beings may be due to inevitable…
