Discussing the Voyager spacecraft today, and all the ways that Carl Sagan and company were able to represent that humans have intelligent (more or less) understanding of the universe, I started to wonder.

What are the chances that Voyager will end up on another M-Class Planet (ST:TNG) that can support humanoid life? And what are the chances that sentient life is evolving on these planets that has the same pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the universe that we do? Dolphins and gorillas are plenty smart, but probably wouldn’t know that perfect triangles don’t occur in nature. Or maybe they do know that, and I’m an anthropocentric ass.

But you know what I mean – we think that our sense of the universe and the meaning of knowledge is in some way the ‘true’ truth, but who’s to say what all the different options are for perceiving reality? All human knowledge stems from our sensory abilities and the spectrum we’re working within. What if other planets see in a different part of the light spectrum, or hear with their feet, or something totally unimaginable? 

Then I started thinking about time and evolution. Humans would only have been able to understand the value of the knowledge on Voyager for a few thousand years at most, and then only a small segment of the population. What are the chances that another planet has sentient life existing at the moment Voyager arrives? If something has managed to develop complex cognitive abilities, I assume it will have managed to outcompete natural predators to the point of absolute world domination. And then what stops these hypothetical beings from making the same mistake humans are currently mired in – eating themselves out of house and home, overpopulating their planet and eventually falling like Rome, Easter Island, or America (post-dated comment: to be read after 2100 at latest)?

The same competitive advantages that helped humans become the apex predator on Earth are killing us. We’re choking on our own rampant avarice, but how could we be expected to act any differently? It’s our evolutionary nature to eat fat and sugar – now with cheap calories and processed industrial food we can eat as much of these preferred tastes as we want – whether it’s good for us or not. Fossil fuels allow us to destroy ever larger ecosystems, subverting nature and extracting natural resources at a rate that could not be accomplished without these ‘energy slaves.’

So would evolution play out differently with these mystery aliens? Or would the same competencies that allowed them to develop culture, knowledge, high mathematics, eventually be their undoing? There’s a theory that people have evolved ever more murderous and psychopathic habits over history, with the considerate and altruistic repeatedly trampled by the uncaring, conscious-less bloodsuckers. Could evolutionary principles work differently in another place? Where people see in a different part of the visible light spectrum, and somehow evolved compassion and community instead of capitalism and destruction?

Maybe one day we’ll find out… if we’re still around when they come looking for us. Or maybe voyager will be all that remains of this brief blip self-named homo sapien sapien on planet earth in the Milky Way Galaxy.