Exobiology: Extraterrestrial Technology

Exobiology was the original term given to the sciences central to the question of life-in-the-Universe. It’s now been largely replaced by Astrobiology, but I’ll stick with the original. To investigate whether technologically advanced intelligent life-in-the-Universe exists one not only needs to look at whether the trait of ‘intelligence’ is something that  biological evolutionary mechanisms will select for, but does technology itself have evolutionary  survival value? We’d say ‘yes’ because we’re a technologically advanced species and we exist. However, technology is a double-edged sword that may well prove our undoing. The number (N) of Extraterrestrial Intelligences (ETI) with advanced technology including an interstellar space faring capability will probably be very rare indeed. But N still equals more than just the one - us.

For SETI (the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) to succeed, for UFOs to be alien spaceships, one needs an intelligent species to develop technology, and here’s where I see a bottleneck. The evolution of technology isn’t inevitable and has a lot of just-so factors attached.

Firstly, your home planet has got to come equipped with the right sorts of materials like oxygen and metal ores and other objects than can be turned into useful tools, and of course a suitable supply of various energy sources. That’s not a given.

Water worlds are out of the running since it’s difficult to discover and utilise fire in that sort of environment.

If you have technology then it’s fairly obvious you have the ability to manipulate objects with some sort of appendage(s). The minimum required is one. Humans who have lost the use of a hand can still function and manipulate objects with the other. A tail might suffice. Then there are tentacles!  The number of limbs (tentacles are cool too) aren’t critical; what’s critical, if you’re to develop technology, is that you have to have appendages (even tentacles) that can manipulate the objects in your environment.

You can’t have all your required locomotive appendages in contact with the ground – some have to be free to manipulate objects in your environment. Birds have wings that are off the ground, but since wings aren’t good at making tools, that seems to rule out wings and birds of a feather pretty much as well

So, we’ve already ruled out dolphins and whales and the cephalopods being water based creatures, and the birds with their useless wings as far as building things is concerned, and all the four-footed walking mammals.

It might be conceivable that you can build up a technology using your mouth parts and/or using a tail to manipulate and build things, but we don’t have obvious terrestrial case studies, although you might argue that bees and wasps and termites and ants and birds can build elaborate structures using just their mouths.

It’s not all that obvious that technology actually adds all that much value towards ultimate long-term survival. Lots of technological advancements do, like controlling fire, developing agriculture, the rise of modern medicine and food technologies. But then lots of modern technological wonders, the automobile, CDs, sofas, microwave ovens, and thousands of other consumer products don’t really contribute to our overall survival – certainly cars don’t when considering the road toll! Then that brings up the fact that things technological can sometimes work in the opposite direction. Toxic this, pollutant that, nuclear the next thing; then throw in a bit of global warming; the rise of urban city living with overcrowding and in general overpopulation; chemical, biological and radiological warfare/terrorism; instruments of warfare in general, like guns; the overuse of antibiotics and the rise of antibiotic resistant germs; exposure to electromagnetic fields – well, the list of horrors or potential horrors goes on and on.

It makes for an interesting question: would mankind ultimately survive longer had technology never entered the equation, or not? It’s an unanswerable question in that 1) we can’t run the contrary as a controlled experiment, and 2) that the genie is well and truly out of the bottle and there’s probably no turning back now.