An international team of astronomers recently grabbed headlines by announcing the discovery of a planet circling Earth’s nearest neighbor star in its “Goldilocks” zone, not too hot, not too cold. It is only 4.22 light years from Earth.

Stephen Hawking and other science and business leaders recently announced Breakthrough Starshot, a project designed to send tiny cameras to distant stars and planets. Unfortunately, the soonest people on Earth could receive Starshot’s pictures would be more than 20 years after the launch.

Life beyond Earth — but still within this solar system — might be found in just a few years if an appropriate probe finds a complex organic chemical, such as DNA, on another planet or on an asteroid. But that would not prove the existence of intelligent life, which is what most laymen are interested in.

Incontrovertible proof of intelligent life elsewhere would occur if beings from another star system visited us in a space ship. Those beings would have to be orders of magnitude more advanced than we are. Realistically, we don’t want to learn about other intelligent beings that way because they would dominate us totally (or eat us!).

TV and radio signals are the signs of life most easily detectable at a distance. Scientists are looking for signals from outer space right now. Two giant radio telescopes spend part of their time searching the heavens, and a new full-time life-hunting telescope is being built. But they have not found anything yet.

Some think that the effort to find electromagnetic evidence of life is extremely unlikely to succeed, for various reasons.

• There is much electromagnetic noise in the universe covering up any true “signal.”

• Not aiming the telescopes in the right direction at the right time.

• A civilization that can send a detectable signal will probably kill itself before it sends out many signals.

What is the reasoning behind the third point? Look at the human race.

We have not annihilated ourselves, yet, but we have come close. Our civilization probably first became detectable in deep space with Marconi’s 1901 transatlantic broadcast. Then, 44 years later we exploded the first atomic bomb, and 17 years after that we locked horns in an international crisis that threatened to exterminate mankind — the Cuban Missile Crisis. It took us only 61 years to go from deep-space-detectable to self-annihilating-capable.

Fortunately, we did not blow ourselves up or kill ourselves with radiation in 1962, but we are not out of the woods. Enough nuclear weapons still exist on Earth to destroy all but primitive life.

If an alien civilization began communicating across cosmic distances, wouldn’t it also probably figure out how to make atomic bombs? Would powerful individuals in that civilization resist using atomic weapons on each other? For how long?

Nuclear annihilation would mean a relatively quick and decisive end to our civilization. However, now there is a slower, more insidious threat to mankind — climate change. Slower on the human scale, but almost equally quick on the cosmic scale, it started with the Industrial Revolution and the mining and burning of hydrocarbon fuels, beginning about 200 years ago. Now, it is happening so decisively that the 15 hottest years on record have occurred in the past 16 years. It threatens to make our planet uninhabitable a few hundred years from now.

Within just 200 years, intelligent life on Earth has created two technologies capable of wiping itself out, leaving almost no time to “advertise” its existence. We have avoided nuclear annihilation for 70 years. We do not yet have the means or the will to deal with climate change. How ironic and sad.

I do not believe in a specific religious creed, but I do believe that mankind is special. Being at the top of the ladder of living things on the one planet in the solar system that can support life makes us exceptional.

If we are indeed the highest life form that ever existed in the entire universe, we are truly exceptional. For me the big question is not “Is there a God?” or “Is there other intelligent life in the universe?” The big question is “Are we, humankind, the apparent masters of intellect in the universe, intelligent enough to keep ourselves alive for more than a cosmic split second? Will we allow someone to press a button that starts a war that kills us all? Will we have the wherewithal to keep our planet from becoming a non-Goldilocks space rock?”

“God helps those who help themselves” is not actually a Biblical quote, but it does have support in many revered philosophical and religious works. If we do not make use of the incredible intellect that God has given us to understand and preserve this world, then we do not deserve the beautiful planet he has given us.

Ben Lounsbury is a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility and an avid reader of Scientific American. He lives in Auburn.

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