We Live In A Cold, Dead Universe, Virtually Devoid Of Life. This Is The Most Optimistic Scenario Available

Scientists and science-fiction writers alike have attempted to furnish us with answers to this question, which is a difficult task given the lack of solid clues to go off. We only know about the kind of life that exists here on our planet, after all, and so we have to extrapolate from that. Imagine finding a packet of salt and vinegar crisps and from that inferring the existence of Danny DeVito, that's the ballpark of how difficult the problem is.

As such, there are a number of quite human takes on the situation. For example, perhaps these advanced alien civilizations are like us, and they are refusing to make contact in the same way we try not to meddle with uncontacted tribes. Except, of course, that there are plenty who do attempt to make contact with uncontacted tribes, sometimes offering them cans of Coca Cola.

Maybe the idea could work, but you'd have to rule out the existence of alien social media influencers, or extraterrestrial dickheads in general. Surely as the technology to contact other star systems becomes easier, someone (probably Zurg, who I'm certain is an arsehole) would attempt to establish contact for a laugh, or perhaps to push their own favorite brand of fizzy soft drink.

Then there is the Dark Forest hypothesis. Though not a scientific hypothesis so much as the basis of a truly fantastic trilogy of sci-fi novels, the idea is that the universe may be filled with life, but it remains quiet for fear of being destroyed by others. According to this idea, you can never really know the intention of anyone you meet out in space – so, with no way to know if they pose a threat, it becomes rational to destroy any signs of life you encounter before they cause you any trouble. 

If they turn out not to have been a threat after all, that doesn't matter, as with time they could easily have become one. Indeed, they still might, but it'll be much more difficult for them once you've destroyed their star and/or planet with a big space cannon.

As fun as this is as a concept, I don't really buy that one either. For one thing, it isn't necessarily rational for everyone to want to become Space Hitler. Plus, just as I am unwilling to rule out alien social media influencers, I am reluctant to rule out the existence of space hippies. 

Throughout human history we have, to some extent, attempted to live alongside other civilizations as we have encountered them. Surely the same could happen in the universe, and particularly if we imagine an alien civilization that has become totally self-sustaining, without a need to expand further into the cosmos. 

One would hope, and expect, that such a species will have stemmed any desire to kill people willy-nilly, particularly as conflicts start to involve more and more advanced weaponry, and so bring with them more and more existential risk. It's certainly a nicer view of the cosmos than the Dark Forest, and I don't think it's necessarily less "rational" to think that at least some alien civilizations would prefer tree-hugging to just blasting everything in sight.

The great cosmic filter

Before I argue for a cold, dead universe where life rarely shows up at all, there is one more idea: that civilizations simply go extinct long before they are capable of communicating with other star systems. 

I could buy this one too. With nuclear weapons, for example, we are more than capable of wiping ourselves out, assuming an asteroid or some other natural disaster doesn't do it first. Perhaps there is an even easier way to destroy ourselves, as yet undiscovered by physicists, which makes long-term survival basically impossible. Say constructing a devastating weapon becomes as easy as crochet, how would a civilization hope to survive long-term, when all it takes is a few mad individuals to ruin things for everybody?

I think it would be fairly stupid to argue that we are the only intelligent civilization in existence, particularly given [gestures at the general lack of intelligence going around at the moment]. The universe is simply too big, surely out there the conditions must arise for life on other worlds, even if it is not common. But it's not altogether mad to suggest that life may be incredibly rare, and the universe not ideally suited to it. We may be simply separated from other, rare, lifeforms by the vast gulf in time and space.

The argument that really got me came from physicist Edwin Jaynes in 1968, and updated by astronomer David Kipping, host of the popular Cool Worlds YouTube channel in 2024. 

Imagine that you have been given an unknown substance, and are placed in a lab filled with hundreds of beakers of water. You simply have to place substance X in the beakers and see if it dissolves.

In this scenario, you would expect the substance to dissolve either nearly 100 percent of the time, or nearly 0 percent of the time. If it dissolved around half the time, that would imply that tiny differences in pressure and temperature in the lab were enough to affect the outcome, and that the conditions in the lab had been "finely tuned" for the substance to dissolve. 

An all-or-nothing perspective

"Consider an ensemble of Earth-like planets across the cosmos - worlds with similar gravity, composition, chemical inventories and climatic conditions," Kipping and his colleague Geraint Lewis wrote in their paper. 

"Although small differences will surely exist across space (like the beakers across the laboratory), one should reasonably expect that life either emerges nearly all of the time in such conditions, or hardly ever. As before, it would seem contrived for life to emerge in approximately half of the cases - again motivated from the fine-tuning perspective."

At the moment, though there are certain oddities that need investigating, we largely assume the laws of physics to be the same throughout the universe, and we see no signs of life in the cosmos. Perhaps we already have the answer; life, or intelligent life, may be astonishingly rare, and we may, for all practical purposes, be entirely on our own.

On the one hand, this may seem like a pretty bleak scenario for a species that so often envisions meeting aliens and/or making whoopie with them (looking at you, Captain Kirk). But on the other hand it is freeing. It would mean that we aren't waiting for the big inevitable demise that all civilizations go through, AKA the Great Filter, and our future is really in our own hands. 

On the third (alien) hand, surely any species that found themselves alone would do everything they could to seed life elsewhere in the cosmos, and make their own future friends/frenemies/intergalactic fuck buddies, making it weird that life isn't absolutely everywhere again. Let's try not to wipe each other out before we have an answer, eh? Those three-breasted/double-penised aliens won't bang themselves, after all.

IFLScience Hot Takes is a semi-satirical Opinion column where we take a silly or outrageous idea and argue for it as if it's our earnestly held belief… as long as we can find good scientific reasons to back it up.

Do you agree with James? Are we doomed to forever be alone, and is that a good thing? Let us know!