Sapient Window

I have previously coined the term "sapient window" when discussing the possibility of communicating with life elsewhere in our universe ... see: Cosmic Silence. This term is meant to define the period when life on a planet has progressed far enough scientifically to understand its uniqueness in the continuum of space and time. In other words, without superstition, being able to define enough of the essential realities of the universe to fathom that there is other life elsewhere out there ... is the essence of a sapient window.

It is difficult to say when the sapient window opened here on Earth, but a good guess would be with the publication of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity in 1916. Thus our sapient window seems at most to be about 100 years old. This is a vanishing small percentage of our Earth's 1.3 billion years of age which is about 10% of the age of our universe. The more difficult task is estimating how long our sapient window will remain open ... may I be optimistic and propose another 10,000 years? (I think Charles Krauthammer is more pessimistic in the article above-referenced.) What will cause this window to close is anyone's guess ... a pandemic, a natural disaster, another Dark Age, self-annulation, etc.

Even with this, the Earth's sapient window would still be but a snap of the fingers compared to the age of our planet ... and just a blink of the eye relative to the age of the universe ... as, I assume, it would be for other exo-planets.Therefore, assuming a meaningful concurrence of the sapient windows between any of the billions of possible life-supporting exo-planets is a bit of a stretch ... even ignoring the unfathomable distances involved.