The Esthetic Argument for ET

I woke up at 4:00 a.m. on the dot, so I put on my earphones and turned on my bedside radio. I waited for Coast to Coast to come on, and I discovered that Daniel Sheehan, of Christic Institute fame, was being interviewed. Sheehan was talking about extraterrestrials, and he seemed to be saying that Pope Francis believed in them. He seemed to quote Francis as saying that we should prepare for our encounter with civilizations far more advanced than ours. I turned the radio off and began to fume.

This is all the fault of the irrational cosmologists, who should know better. What deductions can be made from the existence of life on one planet? Try as we might, we haven't found any evidence of life anywhere else in the universe.

Then I thought of the Music of the Spheres, or something like it. The sensibilities of cosmologists must be offended by the gross asymmetry that would exist in a universe of stars and planets where life only existed on one unexceptional planet. The concept conflicted with mathematical esthetics. I concede that such a concept would not be consistent with my understanding of the logical structure of reality.

On the other hand, the asymmetry is only important because we think life is important. We are biased, of course. From the point of view of the universe and its structure, life is insignificant.