The Wary Keepers

We human beings love bragging about ourselves as a species, about how intelligent we are, and how quickly we went from horse-drawn carriages to gadding about on the Moon. We also love to quote one of our very own, old Bill Shakespeare, calling ourselves the ‘measure of all things’, and the ‘paragon of animals’.

However, there is a glaring flaw in the logic and the line of thinking, and it is this: Against what yardstick of measurement do we make these boastful claims? The fact that there are no other sentient or intelligent species among us (that we know of) makes most of these claims, at best, impossible to validate. (A driver cannot brag about having the ‘fastest car’ if she has never raced it against any other car, especially if the existence of that other car is not even known.)

The fact that we made it from horse-drawn carriages to the Moon in less than one hundred years (1900-1969, the life span of the typical ‘Moon shot’ era astronaut) sounds impressive, until one realizes that, again, there is simply no other meter against which to measure the time frame. Maybe we were slow getting into space, and should have made it from horses to lunar landers much more quickly, say, in twenty years? After all, it was the effort of only a tiny percentage of our population that actually got us to the Moon in the first place. As a species, we only use a tiny portion of our aggregate computing power. What if a greater portion of the populace had worked on the problem?

It would seem more logical to assume that the truer measure of human intelligence is an accounting of not just the accomplishments of the higher and more industrious few, but the aggregate intelligence of the entire species. As a matter of fact, aggregates are the only way to honestly gauge anything about a group, that is if an honest and frank accounting is to be made. Right now, the only characteristic that seems to honestly describe us as a whole is that we only seem capable of doing more harm (to ourselves, each other, the environment) than good - harm that cannot be easily redressed or repaired. If there were other intelligent species 'out there', surely they would know this of us.

As a matter of fact, there may well be Intelligences already among us so vast that we cannot even perceive them, much in the way that simpler life forms (like fruit flies and paramecia) may be only vaguely aware of us, if at all. If you squash a (theoretical!) spider and kill it instantly, is it able to contemplate your existence, motives, and actions before it dies, or does it just ‘die’? The humorous truth is some of us cannot even contemplate or understand the intelligence of others of our own species. (Many of Einstein’s theories are still beyond the understanding of most of the populace alive today. Does that fact make him a member of another species, hiding in plain sight?)

There have been many attempts to explain our seeming isolation in the apparent void of space, where no other intelligences dwell, or can be found, no matter how futilely we search: the Fermi Paradox, the Drake Equation, the Great Silence, and the Zoo Hypothesis. Moreover, as far as we know, we still have not found any ‘overt’ evidence of other intelligences either on the earth (well we sort of have, but I will not digress) or out in space.

But what if those other Intelligences don’t want to be found, at least, not by us? Any species wielding intelligence equal or greater than ours also knows that we are to be avoided. Human beings are fearful, dangerous, combative, close-minded, xenophobic, egotistical, and self-predatory. What if those are the very reasons we have not found any other intelligent species, because, we are, in effect, in a type of quarantine (or worse, an asylum), one where we may be observed from a safe distance, and only interacted with occasionally, like wild animals in a zoo, and their wary keepers?

Additional Article: "How Advanced Are We Earthlings? Here's a Cosmic Yardstick"