Astronomers often talk about trying to make contact with "higher intelligence", but are puzzled and frustrated why no planet-wide "contact" (a la Karl Sagan) has been made with us to date.
Note that "higher intelligence" here means basically being in the same ball park with humans. But, what if higher intelligence means being a hundred or a thousand times MORE intelligent than our species? If so, why would they WANT to make contact with a species that is rapidly (almost "instantaneously" on a cosmic time scale) self destructing and dragging countless planetary ecosystems with it?
Roughly 65 million years ago the consensus scientific view is that the Earth had one of its several catastrophes, i.e., it was struck by an asteroid that "killed the dinosaurs" (and much more). In point of fact, this was an infinite stroke of luck for animals, since for roughly 150 million years dino's ruled our swamp-like planet and once the dust had settled (literally) they crawled out of their holes and had a safe environment in which to flourish and evolve.
Many people in science are now speculating that humans are the most recent catastrophe (out of, say, 5 or 6 known ones) because they are (like the asteroid) decimating countless ecosystems of the Earth.
And this means TRULY higher intelligence life forms would want to make contact with us . . . precisely why?
This is just an intro to the thesis that stupid life forms have stupid "societies". It's also the thesis that humans try to find social/political solutions to social/political problems since we are too "intellectually challenged" to realize this is like putting band aids on degenerative diseases.
Treating symptoms instead of causes is virtually the definition of a human being.
And the causes are what? Well, basically having a spider web contact with reality.
Consider institutionalized religion (if you have as strong stomach). How seriously can you take a like form that has INSTITUTIONALIZED "intermediaries" between each of us and truth/reality (or your biggie concept of choice)? Here's a better way to say this. If you want to know who/what you are, you ask a religious professional (e.g., rabbi, priest, minister, guru, etc.). How painful it is to acknowledge that most of the human race is so insecure and stupid they actually ask SOMEONE ELSE who they are! And such intelligence wimps are really going to construct a creative, healthy, and compassionate society? In your dreams. What they are going to construct is exactly the social/political toilet we wake up to every morning (or something gaggingly equivalent).
Even science is tarred by this brush. Not all scientists buy into this, but most of them assume science is our best shot at "objective truth" (this, of course, can be said in a variety of ways). So what's wrong with this? Almost too many things to talk about.
The MAIN problem with "religicized" science is that it's a game only Homo sapiens play. This certainly doesn't totally discredit it. Indeed, the scientific method holds the scientist's feet to the fire pretty well, but there are several Achilles' heels in those feet.
Consider Einstein's work and the "laws of physics". To cut to the chase, Einstein's Theory of General Relativity is often described as proving that the laws are physics are the same for any observer in any state of motion anyplace in the universe (Special relativity limited them to inertial systems). Wow! What an achievement.
And it WAS an achievement. Einstein magnificently jumped out of the common sense box of 19th Century physical contradictions.
So what's the problem? It's so obvious that only a Duh species would miss it. The problem is that the world of physics is species specific. "Our" physics (good bad or otherwise) is only OUR physics and the world it deals with is only OUR world.
The point is that all life forms (including probably trillions of extraterrestrials) "evoke" their own reality/universes so if they do something like "science", that science will be 100% a function of each life form. So, even though we like to think human science is "objective", it's only objective FOR US. Bacteria, whales, bats, salamanders, and extraterrestrials have their OWN reality/universes, fully as objective for them as ours is for us. And if they do something resembling what we think of science (which is a stretch) it would be a very different science in a very different reality. And to think that out of these billions and billions of worlds, some of which with science-like structures, ONLY OURS is the "real" one, the "objective" one, is simply a proof of how stupid we are.
We could go on and on, but let's stop with these two cases (there's lots more).
The moral is that a species utterly dominated with (a.) institutional religion and (b.) religicized science is a criminally stupid species, and from such a species can only come stupid manifestations -- specifically our insane asylum social/political world.
Naturally, the beat will go on with this species stupidity and we'll keep running around, bumping into each other and bumping into to walls in nearly totally dark rooms thinking: "Hey, we're doing something socially & politically significant". Duh . . . no, DOUBLE Duh.
However, the fact that these things are self-evident may be ray of hope. Indeed, our primary problem now is that we may have already passed the survival point of no return since we're accelerating our way to the evolutionary waterfall of human extinction. Put poetically, from probably the beginning of the Have and Have Not horror (the birth of the Beast!), we are less sliding into a “black hole” than WE ARE the black hole into which constellations of ecosystems and life forms keep vanishing.
So, will the human race snap out of its planet-wide mind set of suicidal stupidity in time to "get real"? An exquisite irony is that typically the things in life that are the most ultimately true are also the things that are the most ultimately obvious (the raw meat of species-transcending intelligence), but is the human race willing and/or able to “stand up” in this hurricane of obviousness in time avoid the abyss?
This is not just an important question. It is the only question,
