cosmic clock there has been ample time for life and intelligence to have developed elsewhere long before humanity even began to emerge on the scene, at whatever point we might stand on some general scale of abilities and intelligence, any beings we might contact are likely to be well above it.
But this argument, made by sober Ph.D.’s who did everything they could to distinguish themselves from those who believed in “flying saucers” and (later) alien abductions, in fact raises troubling questions. How confident ought we to be that our understanding of nature and the technologically possible is sufficiently definitive as to preclude practical interstellar travel? Couldn’t very advanced aliens know how to do things that would look impossible to us, just as some of the things we can do would seem impossible to primitive men? We are regularly told that the universe is a strange and surprising place—might it be even stranger and more surprising than we now suppose? Even if decades have gone by without aliens appearing on our doorstep, perhaps we should not be confident about what tomorrow holds.
So it proves necessary to attack the very premise of hostile aliens, to turn them from cosmic pirates to cosmic philanthropists. And that effort requires following up on a different aspect of the eclipse of man. For along with this positive view of aliens comes a very dark picture of human beings. As foreshadowed by nearly all of the post-Condorcet thinkers we discussed in Chapter One, the more that alien beings look like our saviors, the less we look worth saving.
HUMAN INSIGNIFICANCE
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