6. Is someone watching you?
‘No one would have believed in the last years of the 19th century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own.’ These opening lines of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds have a prophetic ring to them.

In recent years, a conviction that alien life is inevitable has bubbled into scientific consciousness. If the conviction is right then there is reason to believe that life might have evolved in one or more of the solar systems that are much older than our own. These biospheres could have had well over a one billion-year or even a two billion-year head start on our own.

Furthermore, if complexity and intelligence are the products of natural universal laws, then at least some of the beings on planets older than our own will have superseded our intelligence. If they have done that, then you’d have thought that they’d know about us. And if so, why can’t we find them? Why aren’t they here? This was the question posed by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950.

Professor Simon Conway Morris of Cambridge University has an unsettling take on the ‘Fermi Paradox’: ‘If we ever solve it, it will terrify us, because what will be out there will be so different, so strange, so weird, that I don’t think we’d possibly know how to deal with it. Though I find it a very interesting tension at the moment. Either we’re completely lonely, which is rather dispiriting, or we are surrounded by, for want of a better word, an over-mind, which I think is equally dispiriting.’

Which would you rather?

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