Just briefly, let’s be unafraid to question cosmology’s most basic assumptions.
Let’s start with the Drake equation, which estimates the number of communicating alien intelligences in the galaxy. Its fame has grown, since its 1961 creation, to virtually rival Einstein’s E=mc2. Frank Drake’s brainchild became one of the key tenets of astrobiology and still shapes efforts to search for alien life, including the James Webb Space Telescope’s plan to characterize habitable exoplanets. Recently, physicists at Britain’s University of Nottingham published a new analysis of this formula, concluding there are likely 36 alien civilizations in the Milky Way currently emitting signals we might be able to detect.
It all jibes with the standard cosmological model, which depicts the universe as a matter-and-energy-based entity that accomplishes cool things through random activity. Ever since its sudden appearance as a hyperdense marble-sized ball that bewilderingly popped out of nothingness, the cosmos, employing nature’s four forces, has created conscious life on at least one world. Astronomers’ biggest current quest is to locate other such worlds where this happened.
I may be the only one who hates all this. Starting with the Drake thing: That equation certainly tidied up the messy alien puzzle by clothing it in a respectable formula. But if you dislike hypotheticals, you may be wary of Drake’s thinly veiled guesses. For example, many intelligent life-forms, such as orangutans and dolphins, show little interest in actively contacting other species. So, how many alien intelligences would actually build transmitters and broadcast radio signals in an effort to communicate? Drake guessed it was one out of every 100.
There’s nothing wrong with guesswork. So there’s also no harm if we suggest a very different model for alien life in the universe, closer to the beliefs of Werner Heisenberg and his genius colleagues who developed quantum mechanics a century ago. With undisguised amazement, they found that human consciousness altered the results of their experiments. Consider the double slit, which shows that the forms taken by fundamental particles — meaning whether electrons, photons, and the like act as waves or discrete particles, and even how and when they appear — depends on knowledge in the human mind rather than the arrangement of the apparatus.
Erwin Schrödinger believed that consciousness is fundamental to the universe. He said in a 1931 interview, “Although I think that life may be the result of an accident, I do not think that of consciousness. Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.”
With those ideas in mind, this year, medical doctor Robert Lanza, theoretical physicist Matej Pavšič, and I published The Grand Biocentric Design (BenBella Books, 2021), which builds upon the work of those quantum originators. The resulting science, also published in May in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, supports a very different universe than the one Drake’s equation describes. If true, the current quest for alien life may need a bit of expanding.
How? Let’s assume those quantum originators were right and consciousness is indeed fundamental, meaning it doesn’t come and go. In that case, the cosmos might be defined not as an insentient matter/energy object but as an eternal self-awareness. And this can actually be mathematically demonstrated through experiments such as that double slit, in which the instantaneous metamorphoses of objects (electrons) have no other explanation except a correlation between human awareness and the physical world.
What if, here on Earth and perhaps elsewhere, brains arise with an architecture that nature specifically designed to capture, filter, and cognize consciousness? This suggests that while the brain perceives consciousness, it’s not its originator. Indeed, no one’s ever explained how awareness can arise from matter, including brain tissue.
This is what suggests there may be a key aspect we’re overlooking in the search for alien life. We currently picture planets as blank slates, devoid of life and consciousness. We act as if the burden is on astrobiologists to show how life can arise from these primordial soup bowls. But to those who see the cosmos as fundamentally consciousness-based, those quests are pointless. They’re asking the wrong questions. Instead, by assuming consciousness will be encountered in many places, we can begin exploring several steps ahead in the game.
