Preparing for the Miraculous

2012 and 1956: Doomsday? 109Paleoanthropology has not yet been able to pinpoint theorigin of the real Homo species (see e.g. Pascal Picq: Les originesde l’homme, and Friedemann Schrenk: Die Frühzeit desMenschen, both recent publications). Humanity appeared inAfrica? The age of fossils of Homo sapiens found in Europeand China increases year by year and puts the “out of Africa”theory in serious doubt. And so on.Another item on this list is the status of planet Earthand of life on it. Life has not yet been found anywhere excepton the Earth, although the countless articles about thepossibility of life existing on other planets at times turns thepossibility into an apparent certainty. “A new age of planetaryexploration and exobiology dawned in the seventhdecade of the twentieth century,” wrote the late Carl Sagan,who built a glamorous career on his much-professed enthusiasmfor the subject. “We live in a time of adventureand high intellectual excitement, but also in the midst ofan endeavour which promises great practical benefits.” Heestimated in 1974 that a million civilizations may exist inour Milky Way alone. Given that our galaxy is but one ofhundreds of billions of galaxies in the Universe, the numberof intelligent alien species would be enormous. “The studyof a single instance of extraterrestrial life will deprovincializebiology,” wrote Sagan in his best-selling Cosmos. “Forthe first time, the biologists will know what other kinds oflife are possible. ... Every star may be a sun to someone.Within a galaxy there are stars and worlds and, it may be,a proliferation of living things and intelligent beings andspacefaring civilizations.”Everyone does not share this enthusiasm. “Thosesearching for extraterrestrial intelligence have publishedcopiously, in almost total absence of data and in completeabsence of any direct data,” notes Henry Bauer dryly. But,as mentioned before, the search for exoplanets is on and