One of the best things ever posted on the Internet is this bit posted by one Nick Bostrom.  In it he posits that we may be alone in the whole universe based upon what he calls ‘The Great Filter’, which is basically a series of high hurdles that molecules on some rock in space most overcome in order to advance to the point of being able to launch a rocket into space:

You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful–which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable–that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. At least, none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.

In the book Sphere, Michael Crichton’s character Harry (played by Samuel L. Jackson in the dreadful movie adaptation) also voices extreme skepticism, pointing out that the Drake equation used by alien cheerleaders could be rendered moot if any of their assumptions weren’t greater than zero:

“What it means,” Harry Adams said, “is that the probability, p, that intelligent life will evolve in any star system is a function of the probability that the star will have planets, the number of habitable planets, the probability that simple life will evolve on a habitable planet, the probability that intelligent life will evolve from simple life, and the probability that intelligent life will attempt interstellar communication within five billion years. That’s all the equation says.”
…
“But the point is that we have no facts,” Harry said. “We must guess at every single one of these probabilities. And it’s quite easy to guess one way, as Ted does, and conclude there are probably thousands of intelligent civilizations. It’s equally easy to guess, as I do, that there is probably only one civilization. Ours.”

I bring this up as Glenn Reynolds has an affinity for posting alien invasion/contact stuff, the latest linking to an article by Gregg Easterbrook that argues that any aliens would probably tend to be aggressive just due to natural selection:

James Trefil, of George Mason University, has cautioned that if evolution functions approximately the same way on other worlds that it has functioned here — conferring survival upon the fittest — advanced extraterrestrials might still be aggressive, territorial, and quick to reach for the sword. In that case, counting on poor alien marksmanship might not be prudent.

This is cherry picking on his part though.  At first I had the article pegged as a rehash of the Nick Bostrom article that I cited earlier, but it turns out to be the other way around as the  Easterbrook piece was written 20 years (1988) before the Bostrom piece (2008), and only a year after Sphere wherein Crichton’s character derides the same Drake equation that is poked at in the Easterbrook article.  All come to the same conclusion: interstellar life is exceedingly rare, perhaps to the point that it only exists here.

Maybe it’s not that bad though.  What’s rarely brought up in these articles is the matter of life as it is on Earth.  For how long was the Earth ruled over by creatures that couldn’t even rub two sticks together?  It can also be argued that were it not for quirks of geography and culture (and race?) that formed Western European thought, that mankind would still be living under some sort of backwards Northeast Asian / Ottoman Empire style feudalism, possibly in perpetuity.  Tribes in places like Papau New Guinea, where people can practically sit under a tree and have it feed them, can scarcely be bothered to build a boat to go to a nearby island, let alone build a rocket the moon.

And those are the easy barriers to overcome.  Researchers have said that one reason that New World tribes were held back in being able to advance was their lack of a draft animal along the lines of an ox or horse.  What if a planet never had those?  Maybe didn’t have fossil fuels?  Or perhaps didn’t have any minerals of any worth close to the surface?  The more barriers thrown up, the more zeros that come after the decimal point for cheerleaders of advanced alien civilizations.

Life is indeed rare, but maybe not to the extent that skeptics would have.  But what of intelligent life?
That’s certainly nearly non-existent.

I truly am sad to see the space shuttle go. It started out with so much promise, watching those fancy shuttles launch in grade school! It turned into a bit of a travesty though with around 130 launches and two complete failures; it never went beyond an experimental space craft.

Going back to the Saturn rocket would be pretty cool. I’d heard a rumor though that Congress, in order to press upon the space agency to use the Shuttle exclusively, mandated that the tooling used to create the Saturn series of rockets be destroyed. The truth looks to be more boring since it looks like NASA didn’t readily need the tooling for anything, it misplaced, scrapped, or otherwise lost the capacity to build the giant rockets.

In anticipation of the demise of the shuttle though, smarter minds developed the Delta IV rocket. The Delta IV Heavy is a beast of a machine that (at least on Wikipedia paper) is more than a match for the orbiting capacity of the Shuttle. Although the Delta IV scales down nicely for more affordable launches, the ‘Heavy’ is the current limit and a poor match for the Saturn-like rockets and would be unable to get a man even half of the way to the moon.

So the next time someone needs a justification for their pie-in-the-sky idea and they say “if we can put a man on the moon”, politely point out that in fact, we cannot.

From The Register, quoting Neil Armstrong:

For The United States, the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature.

Unfortunately Mr. Armstrong, this will be just another of many such indignities I predict. This was preceded by the rot of our manufacturing ability and political system, and will probably be followed quickly by our health care and (what’s left of) our education systems, and ending with a post-Soviet style rapid decay of our military. Maybe not, but we are flat friggin’ broke and have been for years, and only a money printing binge by the Fed and a debt explosion at every level of government has papered it over.

It was like when Kid Sandmich asked me about how bad it was that Obama was getting rid of so many of our nukes, to which I said the number of nukes we’d like to have is more than what he would leave us with, but the number that we can actually afford is dramatically lower.