Extraterrestrial Civilizations - Isaac Asimov [95]
As a matter of fact, if you leave human beings to one side, other intelligent species are even less successful. Neither the gorilla nor the chimpanzee is a very successful species. Certainly neither can match the rat when it comes to making its way through a hostile world. Nor is the elephant as successful, to all appearances, as the rabbit; nor the whale as the herring.
Might we argue, then, that intelligence is essentially an evolutionary blind alley? Might we argue that, on the whole, the disadvantages outweigh the advantages until some critical level is reached and passed that will allow the intelligent species to assert at least some spectacular forms of domination over the world?
Perhaps that critical level is so difficult to reach, through and over the disadvantages of intelligence generally, that it was obtained by the hominids on Earth only through an extraordinary fluke which is duplicated nowhere else.
All this, however, does not carry conviction.
As we survey evolution on Earth, there does seem a trend in the direction of increasing size and complexity (occasionally overdone, to be sure, to the point of diminishing returns). What’s more, increasing complexity seems almost always to involve increasing intelligence in widespread groups of living things.
Even among the insects, at least three groups—ants, bees, and termites—are social insects. Instead of growing into large and complex individuals, they remain small, but form large and complex societies; and the societies seem considerably more intelligent as a whole than are the small individual organisms that make it up.
If intelligence increases in the development of many different groups of species, and even does so in two widely different ways—the elaboration of the individual and the elaboration of the society—then we have to assume that sooner or later some developing intelligence will pass the critical level.
The weight of evidence, as presently known, therefore forces us to consider that intelligence, and sufficient intelligence to produce a civilization, is more or less an inevitable development on a habitable planet, given sufficient time.
EXTINCTION
And still we’re thrown back to that same question. If we can’t find any reason to deny the development of hundreds of millions of civilizations in our Galaxy, why is everything so quiet? Why has not one of them made itself known to us?
The answer may lie in the fact that so far we have only specified that so many civilizations have come into being. We have not yet asked the question as to how long a civilization may endure once it has come into being.
This is an important point. Suppose that each civilization that comes into being endures only a comparatively short time and then comes to an end. That would mean that if we could examine all the habitable planets in the Universe, we might find that on a large number of them civilization has not yet arisen, and that on an even larger number civilization has arisen, but has already become extinct. Only on a very few planets would we find a civilization that has arisen so recently that it has not yet had time to become extinct.
The briefer the duration of civilizations, on the average, the less likely we are to encounter a world on which the civilization has come and not yet gone, and the fewer civilizations in being there will be now—or at any given moment in the history of the Universe.
Might it be, then, that civilizations are self-limiting, and that the reason civilizations elsewhere have not made themselves known to us is that they don’t endure long enough to be heard from?
Is there reason to suppose that civilizations might be short lived? Unfortunately, judging from the one civilization we know—our own—the task of finding reason is all too easy.
Our own civilization has a dubious future,