Readers may recall the 25-year wager neuroscientist Christof Koch made with philosopher of mind David Chalmers in 1998 — a case of fine wine said that by 2023, the signature of consciousness would be found in the brain. That wager attracted a fair bit of attention when settled last year.

Now, it appears, another wager is on the horizon. This time it’s about extraterrestrial life.

Astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch, who leads the Astrobiology Research Group at the Technical University of Berlin, has bet University of London planetary scientist Ian Crawford a bottle of whisky that within 15 years, “convincing evidence for technological life elsewhere in the Universe will be found.”

The wager originated in a paper Crawford published in Nature Astronomy last October on possible solutions to the “Great Silence,” that is, the Fermi Paradox. If there are many intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations out there, as many astrobiologists believe, why don’t we see any evidence of them?

The two most plausible hypotheses face off against each other

Many explanations have been proposed. Schulze-Makuch and Crawford decided to trim them down into the two most plausible:

Our conclusion is that advanced extraterrestrial intelligent life (ETI) is either (1) extremely rare or non-existent in our galaxy or (2) these civilizations are deliberately hiding from us. No other possibility seems very likely. While Ian tends to favor the first explanation, I lean toward the second one.

Dirk Schulze-Makuch, “Life in the Universe: It’s either everywhere or nowhere,” Big Think, January 18

So, either they’re out there and hiding (Schulze-Makuch) or they’re just not out there (Crawford).

Schulze-Makuch’s view is called the Zoo Hypothesis. As he explains,

Following up on a 1973 proposal by John Ball, this “zoo hypothesis” holds that Earth is effectively a fenced-off game preserve, with extraterrestrial visitors not allowed to interfere. The idea was anticipated in Olaf Stapledon´s 1937 science-fiction epic Star Maker and was implicit in Star Trek’s “Prime Directive” in the 1960s.

Schulze-Makuch, “Either everywhere or nowhere

Why does he expect something to happen in the next fifteen years? In his view, “the good news is that, given our current rate of technological progress, it will be increasingly hard for the aliens to hide from us. We’re now discovering their planets at a rapid clip, and soon we may be able to detect their technosignatures remotely.”

To those who see the wager as a bit of a walk on the wild side, he offers a challenge:

To those who consider all of this idle speculation, here’s a challenge: How would you reconcile the Copernican principle — that humans don´t occupy a privileged position in the cosmos — with the idea that we really are the only advanced civilization in the Universe (in which case, consider the enormous responsibility weighing on our species!).

Schulze-Makuch, “Either everywhere or nowhere”

On the other hand, if they’re not out there, then they just are not and we mut make what we can of the fact. Maybe we do occupy a privileged position after all…

We can be fairly sure that if 15 years elapse and Ian Crawford is a bottle of whiskey to the good, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) will not stop looking for the technosignatures of ET. So many people today need intelligent extraterrestrials to make sense of their world. Meanwhile, as the bet develops, it should be fun.

About that neuroscience bet…

By the way, philosopher David Chalmers won the neuroscience bet and collected the case of fine wine from Christof Koch. No signature of consciousness had been found in the human brain by 2023. As Nature wrote it up: “Decades-long bet on consciousness ends — and it’s philosopher 1, neuroscientist 0”.

Sadly, however, shortly afterward, Koch was denounced in a letter signed by over 100 fellow neuroscientists and philosophers of mind because his Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness, taken seriously, might lead to the conclusion that unborn children are conscious. The conflict is still simmering and is considered by many to have harmed the discipline.

We trust nothing like that will happen to Dirk Schulze-Makuch or astrobiology. This is too much fun to spoil.

You may also wish to read: The Aurora Hypothesis: ET could risk only rare contact with us. Given the difficulties and risks of space travel, extraterrestrials with advanced technology may have visited Earth only one in a million years, researchers say.