Motive for Scientific Research

Motive for Scientific Research

We’ve only achieved the capacity for radio astronomy in the last few decades, in a Galaxy where the average star is billions of years old. The chance of receiving a signal from a civilisation exactly as advanced as we are should be minuscule. If they were even a little behind us, they would lack the technological capability to communicate with us at all. So the most likely signal would come from a civilization much more advanced. May be they would be able to write full and melodic backwards. In fact, it is a tiny extrapolation from what human beings could do. Bach and Mozart had made at least respectable stabs at it.

We can’t get into the others’ minds; we can’t imagine what thinking would be like if you were much more capable than an average human being. It is like trying to visualize a new primary color or a world in which you could recognize several hundred acquaintances individually only by their smells.

By definition, it has to be mighty hard to understand the behaviour of a being much smarter than you are. Image © by Megan Jorgensen

What else could they tell? From the blueness of the sky, they could make a rough estimate of Loschmidt’s Number, how many molecules there were in a cubic centimetre at see level. About three times ten to the nineteenth. They could easily tell the altitudes of the clouds from the length of their shadows on the ground.

If they knew that the clouds were condensed water, they could roughly calculate the temperature lapse rate of the atmosphere, because the temperature had to fall to about minus forty degrees Centigrade at the altitude of the highest clouds.

Albert Einstein said once (in his Ideas and Opinions, published in 1954): I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.