The Humaniverse Guide to First Contact with ET

By Keith Seland

If extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) exists elsewhere in our universe, any meaningful and absolute confirmation would require either a transformative announcement, global broadcast, single fantastic irrefutable event experience, or acknowledgment of a large accumulation of increasing evidence which equates to that historical revelation.

The Humaniverse Guide to First Contact with ET embarks on an exploration of how ETI is viewed by theologians and their antagonists as well as by advocates and refuters alike. This work is a detailed investigation of how religious philosophy aligns with other worldviews and its potential reliability toward application and assistance in the development of a future relationship with ETI. The lens is focused on humankind’s evolution of cognition, conjecture, logic, and knowledge about ETI as transformative toward these end points. As we know, the only way these end points can be resolved are through the eyes, experiences, and activities as undertaken by the only intelligent life-form of which we are aware—namely ourselves.

Do you think your worldview about the meaning and purpose of life will be changed if and when ET comes calling?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781648012273

Book preview

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Introduction to ETI, EGA, and the Theology Hypothesis

In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.

—Carl Sagan

Keywords: law of three stages, enduring global acknowledgment (EGA), cosmic anthropy, cosmic anxiety, anthropocentrism, geocentrism, egocentrism, anthropic principle, cosmological, natural selection, fecund universes theory

As the founder of the field of sociology, philosopher August Comte (1798–1857) provided an epistemological—in other words, an investigation—of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion, foundation for the evolution of human societies. His most famous theory was the law of three stages which held that all human societies’ knowledge evolves through three distinct stages from primitive to advanced: the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive. The key variable in defining these stages was the way with which people came to understand their place in the world, both as individuals and as a collective society.

In the theological stage, humans explain causes in terms of the will of mythological and anthropocentric gods (the gods, as authoritarian, cause things to happen). In Neolithic and early human history, the practice of polytheism helps define this notion. The world’s mythologies and religions worshiped many gods specific to a particular situation in their lives. Each of the gods helped their understanding of a part of nature and, more generally, their existence. Each culture may have had a specific god for the weather, successful agriculture production, animal harvest, the underworld, etc. Society helped their understanding (religion and myth) by participating in ritual, and cult behaviors to cause the gods to administer to the wishes of the people. The gods are known as supernatural agents of causation. Therefore, society survived and progressed in this way.

In the metaphysical stage, humans explain causes in terms of abstract speculative ideas of the mind. Metaphysical inquiries are similar to inquiries in the theological stage, except that the mind is used to think through nature’s processes rather than relying on the agency of the gods for answers and end points. These are also not like empirical inquiries of science which help define the laws that govern the operation of nature; the how-tos. There is some discovery in the metaphysical stage toward an ought-to virtuosity, a morality and adding a why-perspective to their understanding of nature and their lives. Society then was able to form more complex infrastructures, economies, and sociopolitical platforms based on this abstract thinking.

Finally during the positive stage, humans explain causes in terms of positivist scientific observations and laws (i.e., positive knowledge based on propositions limited to what can be empirically observed). Comte believed this would be the final stage of human social evolution because positivist science could analytically determine how society should be organized. Science could reconcile the division between political factions of order and progress by eliminating the basis for moral and intellectual anarchy. The application of positive philosophy would lead to the unification of society and of the sciences (Comte, 1830–1975).

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The discussions that follow hope to motivate, engage, and develop an awareness and context of a worldview that embodies a holistic and a pluralistic potentiality that could include enduring global acknowledgment of extraterrestrial intelligence.

The Humaniverse Guide to First Contact with ET is not about discussing alleged descriptive contact experience events with an extraterrestrial species per se. Rather an exploration of references to and meaningful acknowledgment of the existence of what I call extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) is the theme under consideration. If intelligent life exists elsewhere in our universe, any meaningful and absolute confirmation of ETI would require either a transformative announcement, global broadcast, a single fantastic irrefutable event experience, or acknowledgment of a large accumulation of increasing evidence which equates to that historical revelation.

The Humaniverse Guide to First Contact with ET embarks on an exploration of how ETI is viewed by theists and nontheists as well as by advocates and refuters from all other professions. It is, in part, an investigation of how religious philosophy aligns with other worldviews and of its potential reliability toward broadcasting a future relationship with ETI. The lens is focused on humankind’s history of cognition, evolution, conjecture, logic, and knowledge about ETI. As you know, the only way this lens can be resolved is through the eyes, experiences, and activities as undertaken by the only intelligent life-form that we know of—namely us. I will work through an investigation of the thought processes, observations, experiences, potential proof, and disclosure parameters crosscutting the ETI/cosmic plurality controversy; more specifically, a philosophical belief in numerous worlds in addition to the planet earth.

For the purpose of this book, the historical revelation is viewed through a lens of an enduring global acknowledgment (known throughout this text as EGA). As the title of this text shows, it is recognized that EGA can also be equivalently interpreted to mean extraterrestrial global acknowledgment. The important thing to remember is that we will be discussing extraterrestrial intelligent life or ETI. This is the type of agreement that our human civilization will generally accept, from both acronyms, as factual, truthful, and, therefore, undeniable.

An acknowledgment to such EGA, which can be thought of in scientific terms as an independent variable, is the issue of disclosure of what knowledge humankind possesses as it relates to an EGA. Whatever irrefutable information or evidence our species retains is seen by students and curious individuals of this subject as held covertly by various special interest groups such as governmental, military forces, and religious.

Many possible scenarios can result with an announcement proclaiming contact with, or acknowledgment, of an intelligent life species outside of our planet. I will discuss these in later chapters.

It is frequently the government and military that are targeted as the pivot groups in any discussion of a disclosure sequence of events. This is because of their alleged cover-up of much information and evidence throughout the twentieth century and which continues today. The logical implication of this point is clear in that, if true, then we have already been contacted or at least visited.

For this topic, the focus of discussion is on a different aspect potential by analyzing the efficacy of another—the religious world. While government/military effort is concerned primarily with real estate, the governing and protection of its nation, the religious are not burdened with this factor as motivation to disengage from such a contact or announcement situation. Among the possibilities are to answer the question: is the religious world capable of and inclined to offer an announcement end-point of this nature?

This work will not explore the depths of what content is conjectured to exist in hidden archives. It will otherwise discuss potential for any such interest group to enable an EGA scenario as powerful confirmation of ETI. The lens of this investigation will focus acutely on the human religious community as a candidate to provide meaningful information and analysis in a contact and EGA discussion protocol.

Author Piers Bizony started his book The Search for Aliens: A Rough Guide to Life on Other Worlds by proclaiming, At first glance, our fascination with the possibility of life on other worlds seems like a contemporary strand of thought, bound up with the recent arrival of rockets and space technology. In fact there’s never been a time when humans were content just to settle for this one world (Bizony 2012).

As your investigation into The Humaniverse Guide to First Contact with ET is launched, you will develop an awareness of wisdom within this idea.

Many hundreds of great thinkers will be quoted throughout. Some of them lived even before the rise of many religious faiths, among them Thales of Miletus and his student Anaximander in 600 BCE, regarded as the founders of early Greek philosophy that is still influential today. You have no doubt heard of Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates. The contributors to the general categorization known as cosmic pluralism, the belief that numerous worlds, in addition to earth, exist which may harbor extraterrestrial life have spanned the millennia since their time. The plurality of worlds, specifically for our use—the plurality of inhabited worlds—aligns with this notion.

While many have weighed in with their views on the pluralism of intelligent life through the universe, only those who were able to document them via written language, our recorded history, are known. Many archaeological finds, such as petroglyphs and rock drawings, symbolize those natives’ experiences from the era before ancient Greece. Many more will be uncovered in the future.

The common thread weaved through this is that all natives of their time were aware of the stars at night above and that they had many experiences and observations leading them on a train of thought toward a cosmic anthropy. This is defined as a search for an awareness of the discovery, interpretation, analysis, belief, and practice of cultural traditions related to the evolution and design of the universe. According to the religious historian Mircea Elaide, Many of our religious rituals have their origin in the cycles of the season and in the symbolic patterns of the natural world (Elaide 1959).

The ancients of the pre-Neolithic period, well before the emergence of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, etc., had no other linguistic form of expression, except to glyph their experiences. It is affirmed in academic literature that the concept of communal living among humans on earth took root after the start of the Agricultural Revolution and attributed to the start of the Neolithic period around 7000 BCE. The move away from a nomadic existence to a sedentary life experience created the behavior of developing new forms of communication such as the spoken thought and, later, written language forms. This era also enabled the indigenous to attach new meaning and influence to such geophysical processes as climate, seasons, time, and the cosmos above.

Humankind’s fascination with the skies above emerged into a new platform. It took the intuitive and cognitive form of the pursuit of a behavioral intention to which was manifested a supreme cultural and existential importance. That platform was constructed of metamythological and religious ideology. Learning about the situational awareness of ancient cultures in these contexts, through archaeological artifacts, can offer insights into their cultural worldviews.

Archaeologist Peter Biehl suggests a novel explanation of theories applied to the archaeology of myth and religion, ritual, and cult in his article Meanings and Functions of Enclosed Places in the European Neolithic: A Contextual Approach to Cult, Ritual and Religion:

Ritual practices function both at a community and individual level, and as social and communicative acts. Ritual practice ought to be contextualized with the material culture and the place associated with it in order to better understand and theorize its complex meaning in prehistoric religious life. (Biehl 2012, 130)

Biehl continues with this definition:

Religion and myth provide prescribed ways of understanding, while cult and ritual offer prescribed ways of behaving… As archaeologists, we possess a realm of monuments, images, and material remains that exposes us to a wide range of paths that, if followed methodologically…can bring us closer to the understanding of the spiritual-religious sphere of preliterate peoples. (Biehl 2012, 131)

Whether the epistemology of mythology can pass an analysis offered to define common relationships with religion is subject to conjecture and debate. Both may be interpreted as investigating a how-to mechanism in human abstraction of life experience and man’s belief system. Later religious practice from around the world, however, was adapted to influence moralistic behavior among its congregations, an ought-to dogma.

Early religious practice was based more on reactions to events in the relationships among human life experience and belief. Deities were created and adorned as a safeguard or instrument of plea bargaining against harmful natural phenomena, wildlife attacks, or other existential circumstances. The ritual of praying or offering sacrifices in the name of the appropriate god is the practice behavior of this process.

According to University of Otago, New Zealand, psychology and science communications professor Jesse Bering, religion emerged circumstantially during that time (Neolithic Era). Religion is a communal concept that fits in with the introduction of village living back then. The natives were surviving, not by nomadic hunting anymore rather by pooling resources and efforts to produce enough food and shelter for the entire group. Security was another by-product of this manifestation (Bering 2011).

Another characteristic is that archaeologists and historians have noted an archival record that illustrates the evolving depiction of a hierarchal power between authoritarian figures and humans. This helps drive their analysis on the emergence of religious thought. To summarize their conclusions, astronomer, UFOlogist, and science writer Jacques Vallée suggests that religious practice emerged when cave paintings showing people of equal heights gradually changed to ones showing monstrous figures above imploring human beings (Vallée 1988, 9).

The construct of religion fits within the constraints of the natives’ frame of reference and situational awareness. When that reference included observations and experiences, the religious practice helped the village solve many problems. So religious thought could be construed as a biological and cultural construct which helped the village survive and prosper.

Sometimes those experiences, which were documented to include the glyphs and later writings of the native cultures, motivated their thinking in the direction of forming cognitive belief patterns in supreme beings. When, for example, the village’s crop yields were saved by the ending of a drought or animals of prey returned after an absence, either through coincidence or circumstance, observation, or whatever catalysts initiated their critical thinking, their cognitive religious science completed the analysis by concluding that such a supreme being(s) assisted them in solving their problems.

University of British Columbia professor of psychology Ara Norenzayan has studied the evolutionary origins of religious thought throughout his career. According to Norenzayan, Not only does a cognitive belief in a god solve their problems, but He can punish the village, too. This reward-punish mechanism motivated villages to harbor beliefs in larger and more powerful gods, and consequently allowed them to outcompete adversaries for resources (Norenzayan 2013). A belief in God in this way is recognized as a foundational characteristic of mythology as was practiced by the Indo-European, Egyptian, and Chinese cultures.

Science, on the other hand, is empirical as an application of what humans observe and feel in a literal sense. Intuition can help the scientist form opinions to later state a hypothesis. Using science is a hands-on activity of experimentation on and analysis of the natural world. Most often, it also means creating instruments with which to facilitate doing that science. One way to think of science is the engineering application of a hypothesis statement about the phenomenon being observed and studied.

Another way to distinguish between religion and science is to think of religion as a study which includes the supernatural. Alternatively science is a study of the natural world. Religion is more open-minded by allowing the supernatural to be addressed, for good or bad, according to the person offering the perspective. An end point for religion is belief. Science, alternatively, does not explain an existence of, for example, gods or angels. An end-point for science is theory. So while religion is both cognitive and intuitive, science is both cognitive and application-oriented. According to anthropologist Michael Ashkenazi, All human religions share two logical features. Their basic premises are unprovable (and thus not scientific inasmuch as they are impossible to refute) and religious action is a logical consequence of those irrefutable premises (Ashkenazi 1991).

In his 1988 article The Search for Knowledge: Science Versus Religion, Jacques Vallée defines the knowledge systems of religion and science as, a set of steps ordered so as to acquire a competence, starting from current synthesis and applications, progressing through critical analysis, reaching new synthesis and applications (Vallée 1988, 8). Religion is offered generally as a pursuit of identity, a moral compass alignment, and an existential meaning to an individual and his or her socioreligious group. All religions offer prescriptive holistic anthrocosmism for their followers, and most major religions pursue, at the very least, a modified epistemology toward global problems. Confucianism is a canonized ideology which embodies some of both attributes. Also flexibility toward freedom of thought is typically constrained in the world’s religions because their scriptures serve as bodies of absolute law from which their congregants can seek guidance.

Science, however, operates in a different direction. The laws that make up scientific discovery are the greatest accomplishments, not the prescription. Science defines a law only as a principle or concept that has been repeatedly not disproven over many experimental regimens by many research contributors to the subject. The progression of scientific thought moves thusly: observation, hypothesis, testing and more observation, analysis, and a decision whether or not to reject the hypothesis or to modify its definition. A theory is derived from many replicated results of the same hypothesis being tested. A law is only formulated when many more replicated results from both the same theory and formulated hypotheses, experimented upon and observed by many different research teams, can conclude the same inferences and deductions.

A synergy among science and religion is the mutual investigation of the finality of the human condition. Vallée calls this principle the cosmic anxiety (Vallée 1988, 15). Our reasons for existence and our place in the universe are common concerns of both. Because earth and our existence are not perfect, there is a continuous need to learn more about them. Both systems can study the human condition in the effort to seek out a more perfect existence. They just go about their studies differently.

As noted, our advanced intelligence, as a species, uniquely permits us to make adaptations to the physical environment in order to enhance our survival and the quality of that survival. Our awareness and that development of our cognition from early religious principle formation make us aware of being in a certain place—what we call earth. In an expanded view, earth was also known to humans then to be part of a much larger place known as the universe. The essence of being aware of these things is the basis of an anthropic perspective. The anthropic perspective defines that those indigenous people knew they were in the place called the universe. The ancients surmised that the practice of religiosity affected their immediate environment in some ways. Did that religiosity affect other places in the large universe? Could humans ever come to know if or how that is the case in other places? If so, is there anyone who is there in those other places with the ability to have those experiences? The ancients had the intellectual capability to think in those ways and to develop a belief system. But to get from religious intuition, belief, and cognition to scientific observation, physical experience, and analysis, the ancients first needed to create and develop a conduit of thought linking the two.

That conduit of thought was philosophy and metaphysics. The earliest philosophers developed a thought course of logical analysis with which to apply to those anthropic questions as well as to drive the road from intuitive cognition to a study of nature and how the universe works. This explains why the literature reveals a temporal progression from religiosity and mythology to the principles of philosophy, and then to development of metaphysics and ultimately the natural sciences, followed by the social sciences.

These early philosophers had to rely on more of a meta-analysis to speculate about the nature of our universe and its inhabitants. The early Greeks were the founders of the sciences we study today. Science, defined in this way, is capable of dealing with only phenomena which are observable either through physical senses or instrumentation specially designed for that purpose.

The early philosophers had only their ability to observe phenomena and to think critically and little or no instrumentation to guide their inquiry process. While the tool of observation is a first part of the methodology of scientific inquiry, the rest of the tools that define what we know as the complete scientific method did not evolve until much later. Another characteristic of the inquiry process is one that is universal among all humans. That is, decisions all people make are biased by their life experience and perspective. Specifically the knowledge and experience any individual can use to analyze a situation influences his ability to make these conjectures about the universe and its life-forms.

This is a main reason why, only with the inventions of the telescope and other contemporary devices far later in the Copernican age, did scientific thought and knowledge start to further shape the possibilities. In her treatise Science and Poetry, the ethical philosopher Mary Midgley stated:

The modern scientific vision of the vast universe does have enormous grandeur… The trouble about it is that, once we have this new vision, there are many different interpretations that we can put on it, many different dramas that arise, many directions in which it can lead us. It is quite hard to distinguish among those directions and to map them in a way that lets us navigate reasonably among them. (Midgley 2013, 36)

So only with the advancement of the instruments of science, and science itself, did a cosmology of the universe first take shape. This also allowed for the birth of a cosmic consciousness among humankind. As the dialogue among the cosmic plurality thinkers continued the debate, which up to the time of the Renaissance bounced between theological and philosophical arguments, a scientific body of thinking became influential among the later arguments. Humankind had achieved a cosmic consciousness of sorts.

This cosmic consciousness is an extension of the consciousness that our brains have allowed us to experience via the natural selection mechanism of our mind’s evolution. Because it is known that, on a debate of anything subjective in nature, our individual perspectives and life experiences define our arguments and viewpoints on that matter, you will interpret and interact with your environment based, in large part, on that nature. At ground level on earth, you can see, touch, smell, and/or feel that direct interaction with the environment. Cosmic consciousness alternatively must use inference derived from some type of logical sequence of thought in order to make more sense of that environment. Even at this time, in the twenty-first century, the environment of the cosmos is still untouchable for humankind; we must infer a lot about its nature and existence from abstract ideas and hypotheses.

In the course of cosmic consciousness and a dialogue on the plurality of worlds, a.k.a. cosmic plurality, it is asserted by many that a meaningful contact with another intelligence from the cosmos requires such a cosmic consciousness. In his paper Toward a New Cosmic Consciousness: Psychoeducational Aspects of Contact with extraterrestrial Civilizations, researcher Gabriel G. De la Torre claims:

A certain level of achievement of cosmic consciousness is need for successful contact (with an extraterrestrial intelligence). We do not understand cosmic consciousness as a special mystic-state achievement but as a conscious perception of reality beyond the major effect of the modular aspects (fear, religion, denial, etc.), which is related to attention-intention cognitive-behavioral patterns and mediated to some extent by learning and education. (2014)

De la Torre classifies space, time, and technology as physical modular aspects and religion, culture, education, fear, and denial as psychosocial and physiological modular aspects that affect this cosmic consciousness. Another perspective that aligns with this notion is taken from physicist Alan Lightman, as expressed in his 2014 book, Accidental Universe, wrote, Science has vastly expanded the scale of our cosmos, but our emotional reality is still limited by what we can touch with our bodies in the time span of our lives.

Later in this text, you will note that on the discourse in the times before the emergence of modern scientific thought, not much attempt was made by those thinkers to describe any physical characteristics of other intelligent life as just defined. Only when some factual basis was discovered about our own biology and that of other creatures of earth was that posit entered into on the debate. For example, after the Renaissance, we began to discover biochemistry and wondered later about how things and life operated and evolved. Thanks to much study done by such notables as Leonardo da Vinci and the like, we began to understand about the biological nature of the human and the animal kingdom as living species.

Although we had been aware of our own mental (cognitive) superiority to that of the other earth life-forms since prehistoric times, before the linguistic written word and before the agricultural revolution, the principle of anthropocentrism and the other centrisms, geocentrism and egocentrism, became permanently embedded in our consciousness as time went by. These will be defined next. Even though, thanks to Copernican thought and the pending technology inventions that nurtured cosmic consciousness then, while our planet was decentered away from being the core of the universe, our way of anthropocentric thinking had not. Humankind continued to think of itself at the top of the life hierarchy. We still had no other frame of reference with regard to trying to know of other extraterrestrial life-forms. Our cosmic conscience was really still infantile in this area/realm.

All these notions and principles are debate parameters in the pluralism of worlds controversy. The aspects of religiosity, philosophy, science, the centrisms of human thought and nature, and the accumulation of the discoveries of new knowledge up to now, and in the future, are also biased by the participants’ individual life experiences, knowledge, and perspectives. Remember, until we can actually physically touch an alien, and if we have not already done so as a species, a lot of the argument remains in the realm of subjectivity. According to the many definitions of science application and practice, if it is not attainable by our senses, science cannot act on it.

It is noted that the argument on the ETI debate, because of all the factors noted so far, cannot neatly fall into a simple competition between religion and science. It is not just a religion-vs.-science-or-philosophy argument nor is it a rigid duality defined as a plurality-vs.-monism of ETI.

Rather it is an open-ended controversy where many, though not all, of its advocates and detractors were/are personally affiliated with both religious and scientific beliefs that are reflected in their arguments. These unique belief sets shape their position on the ETI debate, i.e. many were/are both scientists who held religious beliefs and/or positions of employment in those professions. It could be held that one may have been both religious and a scientist; however, they could only be an advocate for pluralism or the uniqueness of man in the universe. Another fair conclusion you may formulate is that a contributor to the debate was secular and not a scientist or philosopher but could still align his perspective to either side of the pluralistic or monistic side of worlds. A religious scientist, philosopher, or other author by profession could do the same.

To further complicate the situation, there were many deists (those who believe in the existence of a supreme being, specifically of a creator who does not intervene in the universe and situated mostly in the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance eras) who were more moderate in their positions of either (or both) religion and science or philosophy. This affected their advocacy on pluralism or monism respectively.

A salient theme that crosscuts all analysis of the ETI/cosmic plurality debate is the principle of human thought cognition. Two parts of this theme are the anthropic principle and the various centrisms which effect the activity of human thought: anthropocentrism, geocentrism, and egocentrism as noted earlier. These attitudes and behaviors have been in existence for the recorded millennia of human history; the classification and study of them, less so. Unlike the others, the anthropic principle was only established in the 1970s.

Merriam Webster defines the anthropic principle in these two ways:

Either of two principles in cosmology:

conditions that are observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist—called also weak anthropic principle

the universe must have properties that make inevitable the existence of intelligent life—called also strong anthropic principle (Anthropic principle, n.d.).

Researchers from all the professions have extensively studied this principle of thought despite its recent conception. A general definition, such as this one, is a starting point for many avenues to this conversation. The avenue we wish to travel is the one that relates to extraterrestrial intelligence. Our lens of study can be focused on contexts of both the weak and strong anthropic principles. The creation of this principle was actually a mistake as subsequently lamented by its author, Brandon Carter. He coined the term in a 1974 paper, Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology (Carter 1974, 291–298).

Carter said, of the weak anthropic principle (WAP), We must be prepared to take into account the fact that our location in the universe is necessarily privileged to the extent of being compatible with our existence as observers. Later on in his presentation, he had this to summarize of the strong anthropic principle (SAP), The universe (and hence the fundamental parameters on which it depends) must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage. The APs are the latest attempt, of many throughout the millennia, toward an explanation of the universe, life, and their purposes.

If we accept the WAP, then we only presume the universe has the right cocktail of ingredients and circumstances for intelligent life to evolve. But the WAP offers no conclusion as to the possibilities of more than one intelligent life-form evolving. This doctrine determines nothing about an actual evolution event for that life to objectively exist. Nor does it determine that there may be more than one intelligent life-form existing to actually be observers. However, if you align more with the SAP, then the actual evolution constraint is removed. Indicating you presume that the universe must give existence to intelligent life. The SAP, in other words, excites us because we are allowed to exist to observe our universe but is silent about whether the universe allows others to observe the universe, and potentially us, or vice versa.

The AP has been conjectured as tautological by its refuters of which there are many. Because the study of the anthropic principle is very young and limited, there is ample time for this controversy to itself evolve. Part of the controversy is conjectured by the science communities who assert that because there can be no falsification analyses undertaken, the theory can never be proven scientifically. They deflect and shift any discussion of it away from them and into the realm of philosophy or some type of metaphilosophy or even myth and religion.

Among the appealing alternatives is one called cosmological natural selection. Its creator, physicist Lee Smolin, takes the principle of biological natural selection in the earth evolution theory and expands the thinking to encompass the entire cosmos and our universe. This theory holds more appeal among the scientific communities as Smolin’s principle, also called the fecund universes theory, allows for the prerequisite scientific method practices of experiment testing and falsification to be possible (Smolin 1999).

The reason Carter lamented on calling the theory the anthropic principle was that initial reactions attributed any example of analogy to only Homo sapiens. Because it was still popularly assumed that humankind is the only reference point of intelligent life-forms we have, this must logically follow that Carter meant only us. He later explained that he was referencing any intelligent life-form, not just us.

On the topic of intelligence species and a lack of reference points, perhaps some insight into this problematic area of anthropocentrism comes from astrophysicist and philosopher Carl Sagan, then of Stanford University. In his 1963 paper, Direct Contact Among Galactic Civilizations by Relativistic Interstellar Spaceflight, Sagan ponders the question of the evolution of intelligence:

The question of (evolution of intelligence) is a difficult one. This is not a field which lends itself to laboratory experimentation, and the number of intelligent species available for study on Earth is limited. Intelligent hominids have inhabited the Earth for 1/1000 of Earth history.

Sagan continues:

The evolution of intelligence and manipulative ability has resulted from the product of a large number of individually unlikely events. If the history of the Earth were started again, it is highly improbable that the same sequence of events would recur and that intelligence would evolve in the identical manner. On the other hand, the adaptive value of intelligence and manipulative ability is so great—at least until technical civilizations are developed—that, if it is generally feasible, natural selection is very likely to bring it forth. (Sagan, Carl 1963, 487–488)

Sagan was prolific in noting that it was hard to create and study scientific fact and analysis and that, even though the certainty of achieving an exact recreation of an intelligent life-form, itself exactly a duplicate of the original (cloning a human does not apply here) is empirically nonexistent, the processes of nature assert that creation of many intelligent life-forms is indeed probabilistic. Also when intelligence is introduced as an adaptive foundation for a continuing existential reality, the difficulty of logically including those premises onto an analysis of extraterrestrial intelligent life becomes apparent when there is only one reference point—namely humans.

This sequence offers an introduction into the realm of anthropocentrism. Homo sapiens’ thought process has evolved as the only intelligent life-form that is known. Maybe we were naturally selected, or maybe there was some intelligent design that allowed us to apply our intelligence early in our evolution in a strategy which allowed us to win a positional war of survival with the animal kingdom on earth. Once we became successful and comfortable with that as a species, our anthropocentrism thinking developed naturally.

Additionally once humankind’s basic survival needs had been achieved on a consistent