Noam Chomsky: The Dice Are Stacked Against Humanity!

Noam Chomsky, whom I believe to be the "great white father" of a struggling humanity, relates a debate that took place some years ago between Carl Sagan, the well-known astrophysicist, and Ernst Mayr, "the grand old man" of American biology. Both men were debating the possibility of finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Sagan, speaking from his view as an astro- physicist, pointed out that there are innumerable planets just like ours. There is no reason they shouldn't have developed intelligent life. Mayr, from the point of view of a biologist, argued that it's very unlikely that we'll find any. His reason was, he said, that we have only one example: Earth. So let's take a look at earth: What he basically argued is that intelligence is a kind of "lethal mutation". Chomsky says he had a good argument, since he pointed out that if you take a look at biological success, which is measured by how many of us are there. The organisms that do quite well are those who mutate very quickly, such as bacteria, or those which are stuck in a fixed ecological niche, like beetles. These may survive the various environmental crises, but as you go up the scale of so-called "intelligence", they are less and less successful. By the time you get to mammals, there are very few of them, as compared to insects. The survivability of humans, whose origin may be 100,000 years ago, there is only a very small group: Though we presently see a lot of humans around us, these have developed in a span of a few thousand years. The average life span of a species, of the billions which have existed, is about 100,000 years. If nothing significant is done about it, and pretty quickly, human intelligence will survive, but it will be scattered, and we will take a lot of the rest of the living world with us!