The Aliens Are Coming! by Ben Miller

Author:Ben Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Experiment
Published: 2016-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

HUMANS

In which the author stakes his footling reputation on one particular hypothesis of how life got its start, and forces himself through the evolutionary bottlenecks that impede the flow from microorganism to Microsoft.

The booking hall at central London’s Euston Station will never be the same again. I am crossing it now, as I hurry to catch my train, my head buzzing with ideas. Not my ideas, I hasten to add. They are the ideas of Nick Lane, the Provost’s Venture Research Fellow at University College London. Though if you ask Lane—and I just have—he will say some are the ideas of one Mike Russell, now of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, who first proposed them some twenty years ago.

I came to see Lane because I am on a quest. To try and figure out how likely intelligent aliens are, I need to know how likely I am. We’ve seen that, from its very beginning, the universe was “trying for a baby,” in that nature is fine-tuned to produce atoms. But it’s one thing to try and another to conceive. How likely was it that a small, wet, rocky planet orbiting a humdrum star in a spiral galaxy would be the birthplace of single-celled life? And how and why did that single-celled life evolve into a technologically advanced civilization of intelligent apes?

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.