The search for extraterrestrial intelligence as practiced by scientists has been a huge failure. Among its attempts were these:
The SERENDIP I project, which from 1979 to 1982 surveyed a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 4 of the paper here, a project which a Sky and Telescope article tells us surveyed "many billions of Milky Way stars."
The Southern SERENDIP project lasting 1998 and 2005, which surveyed for some 60,000 hours a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here.
The SETI project surveying a significant portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here.
The all-sky SETI survey discussed here, which operated continuously for more than four years.
The two-year southern sky SETI search discussed here, which observed for 9000 hours and "covered the sky almost two times."
The five-year META SETI project discussed here, which between 1988 and 1993 spent about 80,000 hours of telescope time searching for extraterrestrials.
A failed search of 10 million stars using what in 2009 was the latest and greatest technology.
The Breakthrough Listen project described here, which began in 2015, and has run for 10 years with 100 million dollars in funding.
A failed search of 1300 galaxies, reported in 2024, using low frequencies and the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA).
What do you do if you are an empty-handed astrobiologist with nothing to show for all the efforts looking for extraterrestrial intelligence? Maybe you try changing the depiction of what your search was all about. That is what astrobiologist Michael L. Wong tries doing, in an article entitled "What Searching For Aliens Reveals About Ourselves." So we get something that sounds rather like "it wasn't really about searching for extraterrestrials, it was more about discovering something about ourselves." It's rather like what we might get from a college student who dropped out of college in his third year, after his parents had spent $60,000 funding his studies. Such a student might say, "It wasn't really about getting a college degree, it was more a journey of self-discovery."
Rather laughably, Wong says that when people complain that he and and his colleagues have not found life in space, he replies by saying "you are life in space" and "we are all life in space." That sounds rather like someone complaining to a dropout that the dropout failed to get a degree, and the dropout responding, "But I have a degree -- 98 of them," referring to his body temperature.
Wong conveniently fails to mention 65 years of failed searches for extraterrestrial civilizations, searches that used radio telescopes to search for radio messages from such civilizations. He states, "There is likely to be one pileup of civilizations that don’t last very long — those that were 'too dumb' — and a second pileup of civilizations that somehow figured it out, so to speak." But why would someone conclude that such a "pileup" of successful extraterrestrial civilizations has occurred, given that all searches for such civilizations have failed?
We have some "science teaches" misuse of language in which groundless dogmas are passed off as something science teaches. Wong states, "Science teaches us that evolutionary history is rife with major transitions to brand-new states of being: eukaryogenesis, multicellularity, sociality." No, science with a capital S does not teach us that, and such things are not explicable by any theory of natural evolution. Evolutionary theory is Darwin's theory that things happen only from gradual transitions, from an accumulation of accidental variations. Such a theory has no explanation for any of the three things Wong mentioned. "Nature makes no leaps" was Darwin's mantra, and his theory cannot explain "major transitions to brand-new states of being."
Eukaryogenesis is an imagined transition from very organized cells (prokaryotes) to gigantically organized cells (eukaryotes) a thousand times more organized. Darwinism does nothing to explain such a transition, and the people who speculate about such a transition make appeals to non-Darwinian and non-evolutionary combination accidents that would have been sudden miracles of luck if they had occurred. Multicellularity (a transition from one-celled organisms to visible organisms with organ systems and limbs) is beyond any Darwinian explanation, and cannot be explained by any process of gradual transition. The reference to sociality is a reference to the ability to communicate by language, an aspect of the human mind. The co-founder of the theory of natural selection (Alfred Russel Wallace) wrote a very clear essay (which you can read here) arguing that natural selection was incapable of explaining the human mind. Nothing in evolutionary theory explains the origin of language, which is a gigantic unsolved problem.
Wong claims that astrobiology (the search for extraterrestrials) has taught us these things:
"Astrobiology teaches us about our strengths, which derive from relationships that are both obvious and subtle. It teaches us about our fragility — just around 62 miles of air separates us from the blackness of space. From it, we learn more about where we came from — our humble beginnings as single-celled organisms swimming in Earth’s early oceans — and who we are, whether incessant explorers, persistent dreamers or inevitable storytellers. Astrobiology teaches us about our planetary belonging — Earth is our home, a pale blue dot that serves as our perch for peering into the cosmos."
None of these things are taught us by astrobiology, the search for life in space. As for the phrase "our humble beginnings as single-celled organisms swimming in Earth's early oceans," we do not know that humans are descended from single-celled organisms that swam in the ocean, and such organisms were in no sense us. Astrobiology does nothing to establish the dogma of common descent that Wong refers to here. We certainly did not learn from astrobiology that Earth is our home. Humans knew that fact before anyone tried to search for life in space. Astrobiology did not teach us that there is a mere 62 miles of atmosphere between the surface and outer space, something that was learned before astrobiology started.
There is a very strong argument to be made that astrobiology has taught us something important about ourselves: that we are a very, very special type of creature. Very expensive multiyear searches for intelligent life in space (conducted over 65 years) never succeeded. Scientists have not found intelligent life in space, and they have also failed to find any sign of life in space. A reasonable inference from such search failures is the inference that the human species is even more special and more of a miracle than anyone dreamed before astrobiology got started. Another reasonable inference or suspicion from such search failures is the inference that the accounts of scientists such as Wong about how we got humans and earthly life are not correct, and that both the arising of life on a planet and the arising of mobile intelligent life on a planet require miracles of biological organization or wonders of mind origination beyond the reach of chance processes. But astrobiologists such as Wong have failed to learn the lesson of the search failures of astrobiologists.
In this sense they are similar to two other types of scientists: neuroscientists and geneticists. Neuroscientists around 1950 were confident that one day we would be able to read memories from brains. Geneticists around 1950 were confident that a study of DNA and its genes would discover some blueprint or program or recipe for building a human body. But neither of these things was found. Brain tissue from very many thousands of humans has been scanned with the most powerful microscopes, and no one ever discovered any trace of learned human knowledge in such brain tissue, not even the number 6 or the word "cat" or the word "America." The most exhaustive analysis of human DNA has occurred, in huge billion-dollar projects such as the Human Genome Project. No one ever found any blueprint or recipe or program for making a human body or any of its organs or any of its cells, contrary to many misleading claims made on this topic.
Neuroscientists and geneticists totally failed to learn from their search failures. One reason is that the search failures suggested ideas that such people did not want to believe in. The failure to find any trace of learned knowledge in brain tissue suggested that brains do not store memories, contrary to the dogmas of neuroscientists. The failure to find in DNA or its genes any specification for making a human body or any human organ or any human cells suggested that the physical origin of every adult human is a miracle of organization beyond the understanding of mechanistic science. Because scientists did not want to believe in the lessons taught by these search failures, scientists failed to learn from these search failures.
And so it is for the astrobiologists, who fail to learn anything from 65 years of astrobiology search failures.
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