Passage Based Questions: English - 10 | Passage Based Questions for CLAT Preparation PDF Download

Directions: Kindly read the passage carefully and answer the questions given beside.
Many scientists were convinced that there must be a plethora of intelligent civilizations sprinkled across the galaxy. The story goes that in 1950 Enrico Fermi and his colleagues were discussing the existence of alien life over lunch. The question that Fermi asked at the table became infamous in its simplicity: “Where is everybody?” The room fell silent because, well, nobody had an answer. Originally, the question was meant to attack the idea of interstellar travel, the possibility of which Fermi wasn’t confident in. But the question remains: if there were civilizations scattered across the stars by the billions, why haven’t we heard from them? The Milky Way is about 10 billion years old and 100,000 light-years across. If aliens had spaceships that could travel at 1 percent of the speed of light, the galaxy could have already been colonized 1,000 times. Why haven’t we heard from any other life?
That very question is the Fermi paradox. It has sparked numerous explanations for the silence we’ve been experiencing. Some scientists think that the silence is the product of something they’ve coined the Great Filter theory, an evolutionary wall impermeable to most life. For these scientists, there are two basic possibilities regarding the Great Filter: it’s either behind us or in front of us. If it’s behind us, scientists have speculated that it may have occurred at the creation of life itself or at the jump from single-cell prokaryotes to multicell eukaryotes. Either way, it implies that we are a rare case and that communication isn’t happening because we’re one of very few, if any, survivors. If the Great Filter is ahead of us, on the other hand, then we’re not receiving communication because advanced civilizations have hit the wall and ceased to exist—implying that we too will hit that wall eventually. Other scientists have come up with other explanations for this literal radio silence. Perhaps most of the universe is colonized and communicating, but we’re stuck in a desolate area far from the action. Or maybe Type III civilizations simply don’t care about communicating with inferior life like us. If they have all the power of an entire galaxy, maybe they can’t be bothered by us and our handheld cell phones. Some scientists even think that the lack of communication might be due to the existence of a predator species of which intelligent civilizations are afraid, and thus they refrain from transmitting so as not to reveal their location. The general consensus, however, is that if there are others out there transmitting signals, we’re probably just listening wrong: we don’t have the appropriate technology or understanding of the universe to receive or decode any messages just yet.
However, there’s still a chance it’s just us. If a civilization could live at least a century after developing transmission technology, there could be 10 civilizations in our galaxy alone. But what if they couldn’t live for 100 years after developing this technology? As we begin to develop our own transmission technology, we also develop nuclear power, advance the warming of the climate, and exhaust our food sources with overpopulation. Is it such a stretch to say that perhaps an intelligent civilization cannot live for 100 years after developing space-penetrating transmission technology? If civilizations can typically survive for only 10 years after developing this technology, meaning that we may be the only intelligent life in our galaxy—or even the entire universe.