The short answer is “yes”, but we also should ponder what is meant by “advanced”. Oftentimes, when people say an extraterrestrial life form may be more advanced, they mean simply that aliens might have cooler gadgets. However, we need to consider the possibility that the reason we haven’t come across extraterrestrial life is that it is more advanced than us on a far more fundamental level.
Consider the amoeba.
It is a simple unicellular organism that can divide, absorb nutrients, regulate its internal chemistry and die. However, it has no nervous system, no vision and only a limited range of functions for interacting with its environment.
Now consider the grasshopper.
A grasshopper is almost unimaginably advanced compared to the amoeba. It has specialized organs. It has a nervous system. With a brain even! It has eyes; it can see. It can mate with other members of the same species. A grasshopper can experience and interact with its environment in a way that would be completely unimaginable for an amoeba.
Now consider the human.
We are tremendously more advanced than grasshoppers. Our brains are infinitely more complex. Grasshoppers have no neural capacity to do what humans can do, which is to engage in abstract thought, enjoy art and music, make memories, solve multi-step problems, radically transform our environment, or create and use complex tools. It’s possible, even likely, that grasshoppers are on some level aware of humans — but there is no way for a grasshopper to comprehend what humans really are, much less to interact with us on our level.
Is there another level though? Is it possible there is another organism, another entity, which is as advanced over us as we’re advanced over grasshoppers? We think of ourselves as an intelligent species and the pinnacle of how complex a life form can get. But if we were wrong about this … how could we even know?
There is a 1998 animated comedy Antz, which illustrates this point nicely. (Yeah, did you know Woody Allen voiced a character in an animated film? Stallone is in it, too.)
The movie is, not surprisingly, about a colony of ants. These ants have real civilization with a complex, well-organized society. They work, they rest, they fight for power and control. They are an intelligent species who believe themselves, as one character puts it, “the lords of the Earth”. They have capacity for abstract thought, and a tendency to ponder existential matters. But: despite the fact that these ants constantly bump into humans and man-made things, they simply lack the ability to understand what it is they encounter. At the end of the movie, it is revealed that the ant colony exists beneath an overfilled garbage can in the middle of Central Park — one of the most densely populated urban environments on the planet. And yet, the ants are completely unaware of us, our society and our civilization, except for the dimmest observations (food wrap is “some kind of force field”; light concentrated through a magnifying glass is “this is so beautiful”; pretty much everything else is “what the hell is this”).
This is the scary “point” of the movie: the ants are us. It is quite possible we too are sitting in the middle of someone’s garbage heap, unable to comprehend an advanced civilization and an infinitely complex society all around us, our brain power only sufficient to come up with terms like “dark energy” and “dark matter” for things that, for a more advanced organism, are perhaps obvious and mundane; “lords of the Earth” lacking the neural capacity to comprehend that society’s thoughts and culture, or indeed to even take notice of it.
We think of ourselves as not only an intelligent species but the intelligent species. Plenty of scientists believe we are alone in the universe, simply because no one has dropped in for a chat. But the scary possibility is that perhaps there’s chatter all around us; we just can’t understand the signals.
Kate Stoneman
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