Dr. Michio Kaku is a funny SF storries teller. In a recent interview for Valutainment, Dr. Kaku details his “Squirrel Theory” related to life in the Universe. Shortly put, we are to ETs like squirrels are to us: small and insignificant. ETs do not care about us just as we do not care about squirrels. Pretty smart, huh?
The first error in the Squirrel Theory is even to claim that aliens can exists. I mean, you can claim anything, the problem is that you do not have any proof, not so ever. For a long time we were told that if we can find a planet with water in the goldilocks zone, than life should be there, since in the non-goldilock zones, conditions are not met. That was before exo-planets!
Now, we have exoplanets, we have extended conditions for goldilock zones and we even found a planet in our Solar System that is goldilock and it had water – Mars. But there are no signs of life on Mars! So, the goldilock theory has one more negative tests and only one positive – the Earth.
But going back to Kaku’s Squirrel Theory I’d ask Dr. Kaku how could humans be able to hide from squirrels? I agree, pretty much no squirrel can claim human abduction (with probably insignificant small cases compared to the overall population) but if you are a smart squirrel you have to be pretty stupid not to see the signs of human civilization.
No matter how insignificant we are, from the billions of stars we have seen, the fact that no single interesting spectrum was found and also no radio signal was detected it pretty much shows we are alone in the universe.
There are two main narratives that ET proponents still maintain after all the observations we have till today: 1) life is very rare so we did not find it so far because it is out of our perception 2) life is not rare, but somehow ET is keeping us in a very wild zoo in which we can not see the bars of the cage we’re in. Both are stupid: we’ve seen enough to conclude there is no life. The light spectrum is a nice tool we have used to see what other planets have in their atmosphere and we have found nothing interesting. I am not sure about the range of this detection, but since we can see an exoplanet I think we can see spectrum of their light, so we probably have thousands of spectrums analysed so far and no sign of anything. The radio waves are also a method with very high reach around us and we could have detected any ET radio or TV until now.
Of course, there are many layers of discussion but none is based. Let’s say for example that life exists, but only intelligent life is rare. So rare, that we are the only planet in our visible bubble. But if life can exists, since evolution is considered true by some, how come life does not evolve on these planets if it evolved on our planet?
In the interview I mentioned, Dr. Kaku expands his Squirrel Theory with a nice perspective: ET does not care about a squirrel maybe because other animals are interesting in the forest. But wait! If we are squirrels, how come we do not see the other animals, if ET is so much not carring about us because we are so un-evolved? This forest is a pretty weird one if squirrels are wandering what is going on and are questioning if there any other animals, be it ants or lions!
In conclusion, people invent stupid fairy tales to run away from the single theory that exists and explains our Universe: the God theory.