Extraterrestrial intelligence: what is our rating on the cosmic dating scene?

At the banquet of the first Galileo Project conference, Professor Ed Turner from Princeton University made the case that intelligent life may be extremely rare in our Universe. I was not surprised since I already knew intelligence to be rare on Earth, so extending this proposition to cosmic scales in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence seemed plausible. But as Ed concluded his arguments about how special we might be, I could not resist asking the question: “Do these arguments make you religious?”

There are two ways to interpret our existence as sentient beings. The materialistic view considers consciousness as an emergent phenomenon out of the initial soup of chemicals that pervaded early Earth. It took 4.5 billion years for natural selection to make Homo Sapiens a few million years ago, and within a billion years from now the Sun will boil off all liquid water on Earth.