Krauthammer: Politics and ultimate survival
This artistic rendering from the National Science Foundation shows a new planet, right. Astronomers have found a planet that is in the Goldilocks zone -- just right for life. Not too hot, not too cold. Not too far from its sun, not too close. And it is near Earth -- relatively speaking, at 120 trillion miles. It also makes scientists think that these examples of habitable planets are far more common than they thought. Credit: AP/National Science Foundation
Huge excitement. Two Earth-size planets found orbiting a sun-like star less than a thousand light-years away. This comes two weeks after the announcement of another planet orbiting another star at precisely the right distance -- within the so-called "habitable zone" that is not too hot and not too cold -- to allow for liquid water and therefore possible life.
Unfortunately, the planets of the right size are too close to their sun, and thus too scorching hot, to permit Earthlike life. And the Goldilocks planet in the habitable zone is likely gaseous, like Jupiter. No earthlings there. But it's only a matter of time before we find the right one of the right size in the right place.
And at just the right time. As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy -- a lonely species anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.
That silence is maddening. Not just because it compounds our feeling of cosmic isolation. But because it makes no sense. As we find more and more planets where intelligent life can exist, why have we found no evidence -- no signals, no radio waves -- that intelligent life does exist?
It's called the Fermi Paradox, after the physicist who asked, "Where is everybody?" Or as another scholar put it, "All our logic, all our anti-isocentrism, assures us that we are not unique -- that they must be there. And yet we do not see them."
How many of them should there be? Modern satellite data suggest the number should be high. So why the silence? Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the answer is to be found, tragically, in the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.
This silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness, but a tragic story about our destiny. It is telling us that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the universe.
This is not mere theory. Look around. On the very same day that astronomers rejoiced at the discovery of the two Earth-size planets, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity urged two leading scientific journals not to publish details of lab experiments that just created a lethal and highly transmittable form of bird flu virus, lest that fateful knowledge fall into the wrong hands.
Wrong hands, human hands. This is not just the age of holy terror, but also the threshold of an age of hyper-proliferation. Nuclear weapons in the hands of half-mad tyrants (North Korea) and radical apocalypticists (Iran) are just the beginning. Lethal biologic agents may find their way into the hands of those for whom genocidal pandemics loosed upon infidels are the royal road to redemption.
And forget the psychopaths: Why, just 17 years after Homo sapiens discovered atomic power, those most stable and sober states, the United States and the Soviet Union, came within inches of mutual annihilation.
Rather than despair, however, let's put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence: Intelligence is a capacity so godlike, so protean that it must be contained and disciplined. This is the work of politics -- the ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing while restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts.
There could be no greater irony: For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics and other human genius, everything depends on the frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics. Because if we don't get politics right, everything else risks extinction.
We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember: Politics -- in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations -- is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it. Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history. It will determine whether we will live long enough to be heard one day. Out there. By them, the few -- the only -- who got it right.
Charles Krauthammer is a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post. His email address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com
