Extraterrestrial life

  I think a lot about time and eternity and recently got into conversation with a pupil at Giggleswick School provoked by thoughts I shared on Remembrance Sunday. I was asked what my thoughts were about the apparent absence of extraterrestrial intelligent and sophisticated life and where would I think the barriers preventing the emergence of a highly developed alien species would be located between the existence of dead matter and the rise of an interstellar civilisation? This got me thinking some more, hence this blog. Picture from Herstmonceux Observatory. Thinking about intelligent alien life, how probable do we suppose it is? Might we simply be incapable of detecting it or interpreting signs of it? Might extraterrestrials prefer to colonise dark matter or even exist in a physical dimension we can’t access? We know Einstein´s theory of general relativity implicates at least four dimensions and the string theory even suggests eleven dimensions so the barrier to accessing extrater...