Desperately seeking aliens

Abstract

Belief that intelligent life is commonplace in the Universe was taken for granted by scholars and scientists until well into the nineteenth century. Space travel since the late 1950s reignited the debate, which even now attracts discussion by serious, professional scientists. And although statisticians might lobby that life must surely exist somewhere in the Universe, the evolution of what we perceive as 'intelligent life' seems utterly improbable--elsewhere as well as on Earth. Can we free ourselves of our animist fantasies and accept that all alien forms of intelligent life are, and always have been, imaginary?

Adaptation and Evolution in a Gravitational Environment — A Theoretical Framework for the Limited Re-Generative Post- Natal Time Window of the Heart in Higher Vertebrates

“…We know that many attempts to search for other forms of life in the universe have been made since the Sixties but, to date, without significant results (Wilson, 2001). Thus we cannot exclude that life on earth is, in fact, the only result of a larger experiment that we might call life in the universe (Aldiss, 2001).…”