The biochemist Leslie Orgel once remarked that “we have no way of knowing anything about the possibility of life in the Cosmos. It could be everywhere, or we could be alone.” But physicist Enrico Fermi put the question more colorfully. If aliens had visited the Earth, he asked, then “Where is everybody?”

In fact, however, American scientists via the government agency NASA spent decades and considerable funds creating spacecraft (probes) to seek out imagined distant civilizations. The project intended to reveal information about Earth and elicit reciprocity. These enthusiasts created the SETI project, abetted by science fiction and UFO interests. The famous Carl Sagan helped develop the now self-deprecating Pioneer plaque, wherein was revealed the DNA of Earthlings, their solar address, and an etching showing that Adam and Eve were astrophysicists. A few years later, on a Voyager probe, grainy and unimpressive (by modern standards) images of plants, animals, and earth objects were added, plus the famous Golden Record, a long play record complete with stylus and phonograph, containing representative Earth music: Beethoven, Mozart, Chuck Berry. In space, we are frozen in time, and any recipient extraterrestrial will wonder what, really, we were thinking as a civilization.

John Gribbin’s book Alone in the Universe is not about philosophy but astronomy, and the quotes of Orgel and Fermi (but not the details about Sagan’s NASA input) are his. The book neatly refutes the cherished late 20th-century myth about extraterrestrial intelligence and the ambitious projects it spawned. Converted to more powerful telescopes, a fraction of that money would have yielded information about gases, liquids, metals, temperatures — the real foundation of information about life. The 1970s-80s obsession with extraterritoriality was the zeitgeist of the Cold War.

Gribbin’s telling evidence starts with the Milky Way, where, in fact, only about 10% of the stars are in the Galactic Habitable Zone, that Goldilocks region of favorable safety (from shooting objects), metals, and evolutionary space and time. Everywhere else in the known universe are fainter stars, hence lower metalicities for sustaining life.

Then one moves to the Solar Habitable Zone, finding liquid water, essential to life as we know it. Here temperatures must be just right (zero to 50 Celsius) — Venus is too hot and Mars too cold. Next comes the Continuously Habitable Zone of Earth, where circular versus elliptical orbit turns out to be crucial. The Sun is 95% less massive and more bright (hence more stable) than 75% of the other stars we know of in the Milky Way, which are red dwarfs already dying, or unstable binaries.

The relationship between Earth and moon is critical because it further stabilizes orbit and gravity, while the Earth itself comprises a magnetosphere via plate tectonics, something absent from virtually all the potential planets of the galaxy. Earth has a strong metallic core, which is hot but both sustains the spectrum of temperatures on its surface and maintains the Earth’s favorable tilt. This balance of elements further includes a cycle of greenhouses gases that sustains the environment that evolved life and human beings on its surface.

Thus the Gaia theory of scientist James Lovelock posited that life on the planet sustains the ongoing cycle, and the ongoing cycle sustains life. Disruptions like the Cambrian Explosion, however, show that this precarious balance is easily disrupted even on Earth, a process which never even evolves (let alone gets disrupted) on other galactic bodies. Life itself is, as Grbbfin puts it, an “extraordinarily rare event.” We are the interplay of extinction and balance, having evolved as the result of a “string of coincidences.” We have been on the planet a short time under the most favorable conditions, conditions never likely to evolve again. Our own doing, as technological civilization threatens the precious balance.

“The biggest threat to technological civilization,” notes Gribbin, “seems to be technological civilization …” assuming that global war does not do us in first. The next biggest long-term threat is an impact from space (Gribbin discussed what past and possible impacts these are or may be). Volcanism is another threat. One may add that with Fukushima, one can see a convergence of such threats quite possible, if not probable. With global climate change, the threat now gives decades left to the fast-receding balance.

So the conclusion that the stars are silent and that we are alone in the universe is not a difficult one to make. This conclusion only makes the book’s subtitle (“Why Our Planet is Unique”) a more urgent notion to reflect upon, for the reasons we are here, says Gribbin, “form a chain so improbable” that the chance of another civilization anywhere in the Milky Way or beyond is “vanishingly small.”

In both Hinduism and Buddhism, a kalpa is an eon of time — 4 billion years or 16 billion years, depending on the tradition. We now know that that is long time, enjoying a better sense of time from modern physics and astronomy. But even the traditional calculation could not fathom the complexity of the universe except to say — as says the Dalai Lama among others — that to be born a human being is the rarest event in the universe. And so it is. Thus realization that we are “alone in the universe” becomes a mirror to our solitary lives in society, culture, and what was called “the world.” And so we are.

Among salient points in Susan Cain’s book Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking) are 1) personality type in US culture was changed from rural agrarian-based values to values championed by urbanization and technology; 2) that introversion is not a failed extroversion but a distinct psychological reactivity that can be studied and objectified; and 3) introverts need to find a zone that best safeguards creativity and imagination in a world where the Extrovert Ideal (the West) is dominant.

Cain pleads the case for tolerance of introversion in society, workplace, and schooling because introvert qualities can better foster important social functions of creative and critical thinking, detail orientation, thoughtfulness and reflective forethought.

But the book’s summary of how introversion was eclipsed in the US by extroversion, from a culture of values such as integrity and character to a culture valuing salesmanship and glibness, can be made more robust. The shift was essentially that of capital’s triumph and the personality type needed to enforce this victory, first domestically through advertizing and fostering of consumption, then globally over the markets of the East where introvert cultures had to be overthrown. The process of imperialism and globalization hollowed out the dominant classes in the East in order to replace them with Westernized functionaries. The East was taken out of the East and replaced with the West. What Europe, especially Britain — succeeded by the US — did to India, China, Japan, and to Central and West Asian lands in an effort to dominant and force them to consume Western values takes on a new cultural perspective when considered from the view of cultural personality. In the US, the process was more baldly domestic because it was not foreign but familiar.

In this light, what can be expected of the hope that the dominant cultural personality of extroversion will accommodate introvert values or personality types? If the whole consumerist modern culture is oblivious to the fouling and destruction of nature and resources for the sake of control, what will change? Cain herself notes that when extroverts engage in risky behavior and the result is clear failure or destruction, they not only do not back off but accelerate the destructiveness, being “geared to respond” rather than accustomed to forethought and conscience. And that is the quintessence of what is happening today, with modern advanced cultures (of the West, or simply Westernized) accelerating self-destructive behavior — in finance, environment, war.

These observations are clearly corroborated by psychologist Robert Hare, who has studied psychopathy for decades. By definition, psychopathy is ruthless and egoistic behavior that excludes empathy in the desire for control, what might be ultimately considered behavior “geared to respond” in the most subjective and destructive ways. Unlike stereotypical versions of psychopaths being serial killers, psychopaths are cool, social, functional, and successful. Psychopaths effectively present a set of behaviors that are recognizable as aggressive in breaking rules, codes, and ethical expectations, but not necessarily criminal or illegal in what they do. They are often the culture’s heroes.

In Hare’s pioneering 1993 book Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us presented the characteristics of psychopathy. The important conclusion Hare made is not only to narrowly refine the characteristics of psychopathy but to observe them on a larger social scale. Hare followed up this applied analysis in his 2006 book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work, the basis of the intriguing 2009 documentary film I Am Fishead, with the startling opening lines (spoken by Peter Coyote):

Imagine that the most handsome charismatic person stares you straight in the eye and says: “You’re special. You look good. And you’re good at what you do.” He seems to know just what you like. He reads your innermost thoughts, and you feel like you’ve discovered a soul mate, a deep intimacy. You’re experiencing one of those rare fleeting moments that makes life worth living. Ah! Before you know it you’re involved in a deep personal bond … with a psychopath.

The film examines corporate settings for psychopathic behavior, and finds it, easily. But despite apologists who might consider such behavior exceptional, the corporate sector is the engine of modern culture, and its values must thrive on a degree of psychopathy that is cultural, let alone those flagship leaders within who spawn crime, corruption, control, power, war, and psychopathy. Susan Cain discovered the heart of personality in briefly talking to students at Harvard Business School. When she explained to them the topic of her research, they told her: “There are no introverts here.”

So the expectation that culture and society will in any way accommodate the introvert is extremely unlikely. Better for introverts to follow the rest of popular advice and find a safe niche in which to be creative.

The content of psychopathy applied to a cultural setting is also confirmed by the historian Morris Berman, who popularizes the subject of US society and culture, his most recent book being Why America Failed. In some ways, Berman’s reliance on anecdotal cases of ignorance on the part of Americans has been well covered by critics and comedians. For example, the ignorance of American high school students who do not know the name of their first president or of what country the US revolted against is familiar. A medieval audience or a contemporary one in poverty might have been and is the same intellectually. The point must be that the powerful do not necessarily want an educated populace, a populace to question, reason, criticize and express moral indignation. Ignorance becomes a cultural introversion without any of the virtues. Such a structure is necessary for the execution of a psychopathic policy inimical to the needs of others. A seamless explanation emerges, an indictment as much of the lack of values as of the dangerous potentials of misunderstood or ignored personality types and their effects on humanity. The introvert and the solitary need not abide in waiting for society to change; the evidence is everywhere that it does not.