Are we alone? It depends on how we define alone. We are alone, inasmuch as any intelligence we may ultimately have contact with is probably eons ahead of us, and not truly interested in contact with primitive civilizations. I am sure Davies and others have turned this over in their minds a few dozen times. We are not alone in the human sense---we ARE alone in the non-human, super intelligence sense. I have read Davies and found him lucid. Enjoyable. To assume that we are the epitome of intelligence in the known universe is absurdly anthropocentric. But , hey, that is what we do, right?

I have written a short essay in which I considered this topic in greater detail. The central feature of the piece examines the long-debated question of whether there is, or ever has been life on Mars. The treatment is both serious and humorous and I raise the obvious (to me) questions regarding how life on Mars might look, considering the relatively cold climate it must have; the absence of an oxygen-rich atmosphere; and the likelihood that its water is bound up as ice, and not much of that. I even go so far as to speculate a different level of heat from the Sun, in some distant past, and whether a Martian civilization once arose, developed and prospered. My conclusions, in short, are not favorable towards Martian life, even if such once existed on the Red Planet. My short hypothesis: Maybe we ought not spend money, or, potentially, sacrifice lives, in pursuit of colonization. A famous line from one of the dinosaur movies (uttered, I believe, by Jeff Goldblum) was: life will find a way. Maybe so. Sure, heat tolerant tube worms and other aquatic life live and thrive near black smokers and undersea vents. We know this and it drives our imagination. Perhaps too much. Mars is not a Goldilocks planet. In only the most remote science fiction would it have ever been. We need to look elsewhere---seems to me...

My favorite fantasy in this regard is this. Billions of years ago, colonists from another star system arrived at ours. At the time (this is a known fact), Mars was actually more habitable than Earth, with a much thicker atmosphere than today's, surface water, temperate climate, etc., etc., and so they settled there instead of here. They even tried their equivalent of terraforming though ultimately it didn't work and, after thousands of years, they gave up and left for parts unknown. (If they were still around, we would know it!) But they might well have left behind artifacts which are still standing. No, not the famous "Face" (which likely is a natural formation) but things like an entire field of perfect tetrahedra. (This has actually been photographed from orbit and, of course, explained away as a "natural formation" by NASA, though how that could be is a mystery to me.) So anyway. Food for the time-travel novel I'll probably never write -- "The Martian Spring of Mrs. Stone".....

我们向太空投入了大量资金——试图获得问题的答案。外星生命——任何种类的生命，真的。我们可以在这里花更多的钱，可能会有更多的成果。但是。我们不是这样的。太多的人担心社会主义的侵蚀。当然，令人担忧的并不是真正的社会主义。没有人愿意说出‘C’这个词，即使它是引起担忧的原因。一个普通的美国人对政治科学知之甚少，而且愿意知道得更少。
但是,无论如何,. .我们可以更努力;好好想想，少废话。我们可以用我们所拥有的和我们所知道的做到最好。然而，这不是我们的方式……
IS political science. any sort of science at all? I think I know the answer. But, I won't say. Are we alone in the Universe? I do not think so. All else equal, it likely does not matter.

UFO的问题再次出现。似乎是周期性的,在某种程度上。鉴于我们继续在太空探索上投入大量资金，人们可能几乎会认为，周期性复苏是有意误导公众的眼睛，以便再浪费几十亿美元。或卢布。或者，选择你的货币。这不是什么阴谋论。更像是民族主义，失控了。我不在乎我们是孤独的还是宇宙中充满了智慧生命。如果现在它还不重要，那么明天，或者以后的一百万个明天，它似乎也不太可能重要。利用资源做一些有用的事情。 That is what pragmatists advocate: put your money where the problems are, not where it will make you look good on the world stage. That is only hubris. Seems...

This is in response to the page dealing with timeless philosophical questions, particularly that one that asks: what is the essential nature of the universe? It seems more a conundrum to me. Timeless?
If we choose to treat it as such; as contextual reality. Timeworn? Certainly that. We have effectively dismissed many chicken-and-egg questions, so, why not this one? The fact that something is old and unanswerable does not confer validity upon the question. Dogs chase their own tails, as play or out of boredom. Is this where we are? I do not think so. It is more out of respect for our 'giants'. How much of that do THEY need?