Why haven’t they called us?
Jim Al-Khalili (Wondering why ET hasn’t rung yet? 6 July) offers two hypotheses as to why we have not heard from extraterrestrial civilisations. One is that there are just none out there. The second is that once any civilisation gets the technology to make itself heard throughout the universe, it ends up using this knowledge to destroy itself.
A third, even darker, hypothesis was set out by the science fiction author Cixin Liu in his trilogy starting with The Three-Body Problem. Civilisations do not announce their presence because of the axioms of cosmic sociology: “First: survival is the primary need of civilisation. Second: civilisation continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant”. So any civilisation that announces its presence will be annihilated by existing advanced ones, which have kept themselves cloaked for their own protection. In the second novel of his trilogy, Liu likens this to a dark forest where any light that shines is a signal of its existence, bringing destruction on itself by advanced, but hidden, civilisations.
Robert Kinzie
Honolulu, Hawaii, US
• Enrico Fermi’s question on other life in the universe (referred to in Jim Al-Khalili’s piece) can have many answers, such as the one put forward in a paper published by the Future of Humanity Institute in 2017 on the aestivation hypothesis: that there may be intelligent aliens but because they are waiting for the right conditions, they are not interacting in any obvious manner.
We must not, in this debate, mistake technological capability with intelligence. It has been said, no doubt tongue in cheek, that we are yet to discover intelligence in the universe, including on planet Earth. If there are technologically capable aliens out there that are also intelligent, and the maths make this a reasonable probability, the question that Fermi missed is this: why would they want to communicate with us?
Maybe Douglas Adams had it right all along: the only intelligent species are the dolphins, and they are getting ready to leave, after thanking us for all the fish!
Trevor Rodwell
Bridgewater, South Australia
French vegans misconstrued
The article Let them eat steak, butchers tell French vegans (6 July) highlights how butchers are overreacting to the actions of vegans who want people to understand that eating animals and their products is unsustainable. We don’t have a Planet B to utilise to feed the burgeoning human population. Crops could be fed to people directly, rather than via farmed animals.
If the French population would take the time to educate themselves, they would know we are a growing group of people who want a better future for the younger generation who will inherit the mess we are making of our planet. Diversification into more sustainable food enterprises is desperately required.
Diane Cornelius
Adelaide, South Australia
Loss of forest is disturbing
The loss of an Italy-sized portion of the world’s remaining forests in just 2017 is trauma in itself, even before imagining the life and beauty lost with it (6 July). Likewise painful was the suggestion that forestry rapacity is a minor problem in the developed countries at higher latitudes.
Logging here in the state of Tasmania may seem more discreet than in Colombia, but largely because it has been legalised and heavily subsidised by state governments who see the state’s public forests as an essential component of their pork barrels.
Tasmanian officials have long classified the pesticide-sprayed seedlings that replaced clear-felled native forests as “forests”, and the CO2 that they sequester as the environmental equivalent of that lost in the felling of old-growth. With the stakes now of a life-and-death gravity, it’s time for the industry’s game to be called.
John Hayward
Weegena, Tasmania, Australia
Sustainability and equity
Steven Poole in his book review of The Inner Level (6 July) may be justified in damning Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s outline of a “sustainable” society (Poole’s quotes) as a “bit woolly” but his closing rejoinder – that advances in renewable technology will nevertheless continue be made by capitalists – misses the point. Wilkinson and Pickett argue that inequality is wrong and damaging to the psycho-social fabric. In a world of diminishing resources, the notion that a few should continue to secure privileged access to them is doubly unconscionable.
That is precisely why equity is the heart of sustainability. One reason why sustainability as a political doctrine has failed to gain traction is the scepticism of intellectuals and many on the so-called left. This disturbing myopia displays a profound misunderstanding of the implications of the ecological crisis that we face.
Neil Blackshaw
Barbizon, France
Briefly
• Moya Sarner’s article on back pain (22 June) omitted one possible solution requiring neither drugs nor surgery. When I complained to my doctor of lower back pain, he asked how long I had owned my mattress and prescribed a new one. Problem solved overnight.
Joan Dawson
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
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