Category: Knowledge

135 W 50 St just sold for $8.5 million. That’s right – nine million dollars for a 23-story building in the heart of midtown Manhattan. That price dropped 98% since the last time it was sold!

This is actually a reasonably attractive building near the corner of 50th St and 6th Avenue. OK, it’s an office building, but knock out a few walls, and you have yourself a nice 23-story townhouse with a roomy million square feet of living space.

That’s right – a million.

That price is jaw-dropping. The bottom has fallen out of the commercial real estate market.

Contrast that to the residential market, where two million dollars buys you 1000 square feet.

(The story comes from the NY Times)

I see what they are driving at. The conditions necessary for the development of life do not automatically guarantee the evolution of technological life, whereas many have previously believed that life will inevitably evolve to intelligent life if given a nearly infinite amount of time. These scientists posit that plate tectonics are also important to facilitate the progress from life to technological life.

I suppose it is also possible that intelligent life may not evolve even when all conditions are perfect. Our planet has all the right conditions, but we have technological life only because of a freak accident. The dinosaurs made no meaningful progress toward technology in approximately two hundred million years. Based on current theory, it was only a random asteroid collision that destroyed the giant predators and allowed mammals to evolve on our own planet. If not for that, the giant Cretaceous beasts might still be in the upper Midwest instead of Bismarck.

Which might actually be an improvement.

But because of the sheer enormity of the universe, there is still an overwhelming likelihood of the existence of intelligent life elsewhere. Take all the worse-case scenarios. Let’s say that only one star in a billion has a planet that can sustain life. And let’s assume that in 99% of those planets, life never advances to a technological stage. Given those assumptions, there is only one chance in a hundred billion that a star is orbited by a planet harboring intelligent life, and it would therefore not be totally illogical to posit that we are alone in the galaxy, because that’s about how many stars are in the Milky Way. In support of that pessimistic hypothesis, we’ve been scanning the galaxy for signs of technology, and it does seem mighty quiet out there.

BUT …

Even with those pessimistic assumptions, there might be a trillion planets out there with intelligent life. That’s right, a fuckin’ trillion. That’s a realistic estimate of the number of galaxies in the universe. At that point, the math is simply overwhelming. We may be alone in the galaxy (or we may not, because those numbers I used are totally arbitrary) but we can’t be alone in the universe. There are just too many chances for intelligent life to exist.

Nonetheless …

It is probably rare for those technological civilizations to encounter one another. The only concept as overwhelming as the number of galaxies in the universe is the sheer distance between them. The nearest one to the Milky Way is more than two million light years away. We probably won’t be hearing from them. Even if we could travel at 25,000 times the speed of light, it would still take a human lifetime to reach the nearest galaxy outside our own. Even if we got there, we wouldn’t know where to look. And that’s our cosmic neighbor. The most distant galaxies are billions of light years away.

I read that the most distant galaxy that we have discovered is estimated to be 13.3 billion light years away. If we could travel there at the speed of light, the time it would take would be longer than the current age of the universe itself, which is estimated to be 13.7 billion years. (Why would it take us more than 13.7 billion years if it is only 13.3 billion light years away? Because it would do us no good to arrive where it is now. In 13.3 billion years it would have moved further away. Or I suppose it may even have ceased to exist. Indeed it may not even exist now, since we see it as it was 13.3 billion years ago.)

On the other hand:

(1) Once again taking into consideration how many stars there are, there are probably some circumstances in the universe where advanced civilizations have encountered one another, despite the vastness of the cosmos. It could have happened around our own sun with just a slight change in the development of our solar system. If things had taken just a slightly different turn on Mars, we would now be visiting or studying whatever form of life existed there. Or perhaps they might have gotten here first.

(2) It is possible that our conception of physics is too limited. The great unknown is whether it is possible to travel through the universe, or to another universe, in some way that we can’t yet conceive, thereby defying the presumed limitation of light speed. I have heard and read of theories suggesting this possibility, but the science is too complex for me to understand.

They would not eat the gall bladder.

Contrary to popular belief, it was not Joe Biden.