Collected Essays (44 page)

Flying Saucers : A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies
is a prolonged meditation on the psychic significance of people’s seeing UFOs. Jung speaks of these sightings as an instance of a “visionary rumor,” comparable to the collective vision of the Virgin Mary at Fatima, Portugal. In our fear and psychic need, we hope for help from superior beings, yet many of us have lost any faith in the traditional angels and Gods. As members of a technological civilization, it is natural for us to imagine help from above coming in the form of superior beings in wonderful machines.

But why must UFOs come from the sky? Jung makes this interesting point:

“Today, as never before, men pay an extraordinary amount of attention to the skies, for technological reasons. This is especially true of the airman, whose field of vision is occupied on the one hand by the complicated control apparatus before him, and on the other by the empty vastness of cosmic space. His consciousness is concentrated one-sidedly on details requiring the most careful observation, while at his back, so to speak, his unconscious strives to fill the illimitable emptiness of space. Such a situation provides the ideal conditions for spontaneous psychic phenomena…”

The ultimate experience with a Conscious Other is, of course, the religious experience. Yet many of us are so ill-prepared to deal with the religious concepts of unity and wholeness, that we interpret a desire for religion in terms of sex and power. It is no wonder that so many UFO encounters have a sexual component, or that UFOs are so often thought of as being invaders intent on conquest. In Jung’s opinion, UFOs are first and foremost projections of our desires for a healthy world and a union with God. But as “civilized” people under the thrall of factory technology, we imagine these UFO images to be machines filled with people interested in power and sex.

Jung ends his book by advocating the third of the possibilities mentioned above:

“It seems to me—speaking with all due reserve—that there is a third possibility: that UFOs are real material phenomena of an unknown nature, presumably coming from outer space, which perhaps have long been visible to mankind, but otherwise have no recognizable connection with earth or its inhabitants. In recent times, however, and just at the moment when the eyes of mankind are turned towards the heavens, partly on account of their fantasies about possible space-ships, and partly in a figurative sense because their earthly existence is threatened, unconscious contents have projected themselves on these inexplicable heavenly phenomena and given them a significance they in no way deserve. Since they seem to have appeared more frequently after the second World War than before, it may be that they are synchronistic phenomena or “meaningful coincidences.” The psychic situation of mankind and the UFO phenomenon as a physical reality bear no recognizable causal relationship to one another, but they seem to coincide in a meaningful manner. The meaningful connection is the product on the one hand of projection and on the other of round and cylindrical forms which embody the projected meaning and have always symbolized the union of opposites.”

In other words, there really may be things in the sky, but they are neither flying machines from other planets, nor giant apparitions of the Virgin Mary, nor winged horses bearing bearded gods. A belief in saucer aliens is qualitatively no different from belief in ghosts and goblins. Perhaps it does indeed make sense to suppose that such spirits crowd around us—and I’ll return to this question below—but we need to understand that scientifically plausible extra-terrestrial beings (ETs) have nothing to do with UFOs.

So what about ETs? When one looks at the size of the universe and the diversity of the life-forms here on Earth, it seems overwhelmingly likely that living creatures must exist elsewhere. Life is, after all, nothing more than a self-sustaining information process which feeds off the existence of an energy gradient. With stars scattered about space as they are, energy gradients are everywhere, as are the specks of matter which can carry and process information.

The world is a huge, chaotic computation, and what we call living beings are small vortex-like attractors in the great flow. The matter of my body changes constantly; all that persists is the pattern that is me. I am a chaotic attractor, drawing particles into the orbits which make up my body. The same is true of animals and plants, of course, and one might regard things like tornadoes, sunspots, or active computer programs as equally vivacious. A life is an individualized process which lasts for a while. Such a life is intelligent to the extent that it reacts to stimuli in repeatable (but perhaps not exactly repeatable) ways.

In such a broad and vague view of life, one can readily regard things like the sun or the galaxy as alive in their own right; and intelligent as well. But if the sun is intelligent, why doesn’t talk to us? Well, we’re intelligent, but we don’t talk to ants. The problem is that we, ants, and the sun have no common interests. We have nothing to talk about. Like you’re on a double date with an ant, the sun, and maybe a tree—what do you talk about? The ant waves its feelers, the tree opens blossoms, the sun sends out a solar prominence, and you…you say, “Where do you want to eat?”

Of course the extraterrestrials we really want to find are creatures something like ourselves. Lizards, sure, or squids, or bugs or rats, maybe—let’s not be simian chauvinists—but at least our sought-after ETs should be about our size and live about the same speed we do. Science fiction is filled with planets full of these guys, building their cities, fighting their wars, mating, eating, and so on. No one has written more entertainingly about these kinds of aliens than Robert Sheckley.

The kicker in Sheckley’s alien stories is always that the aliens are some kind of inversion or caricature of human beings—and this is true of all the other science-fiction aliens. Once this fact sinks in, we realize that most of our speculations about ETs are incredibly culture-bound. Radio-communication by modulated electromagnetic signals of a certain wavelength is something that we take as so natural that we assume that ETs would also use radio. Our best hope for detecting ETs is to scan the radio-crackle of the sky. But is this really so reasonable? Radio has been around for less than a century here, on a planet that is billions of years old. Why would ETs everywhere use radio forever? Why not gravity waves or quarkon flux?

People labor under the chronic illusion that the present moment is the apex and culmination of all past history. Every now and then the world changes, and we realize that nothing is eternal—not even the Berlin Wall. No matter how hard we push our fantasizing about ETs, we are doomed only to hold up funhouse mirrors of ourselves. The chances of ETs flying here in a metal rocketship are about as great as them arriving on a horse or on a wooden boat.

Why am I being such a wet blanket? I guess its because I think talk of UFOs and ETs distracts the mind from the true wonder of the actual world. I don’t want the gee-whiz, what-if world, I want the world that I see every morning. I want it to matter, and I want it to be interesting, just as it is, here and now. I don’t want to have to believe in a lot of fairy tales to see the wonder. If aliens are worth thinking about, I want to see them here and now.

Consider another computer analogy. With any given machine there’s a certain upper limit to how rapidly you can get it to create and display new graphic images. If I think of the world around me as a kind of computation, its also true that there’s a certain upper limit to how rapidly information can be fed to me—at least in a format which I can understand. My brain is, if you will, a certain kind of information display device, capable of so-and-so many colors and so-and-so many windows at such-and-such a bandwidth. Being in a pressure suit talking to green squid on a methane moon wouldn’t increase my upper bounds. The squids wouldn’t really be much stranger than the people in the parking lot at a Grateful Dead concert anyway. All the weirdness and alienness I’m capable of perceiving is already somewhere here on this planet.

My basic feeling about alien contact is that every minute of every day is a veritable fugue of alien contact. I think other people are aliens, I think animals are aliens, I think objects are aliens, I think the laws of nature are aliens, and I even think that thoughts are aliens. I’ve always been a very alienated guy. I had an unhappy childhood. I was having such a bad time growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, that my parents sent me off to a boarding school in Germany for a year. I didn’t know German. In the spring it rained a lot and all the puddles were full of yellow dust. I thought it was fallout, I thought there had been a nuclear war and nobody had told me. It wouldn’t have surprised me if a saucer had come to pick me up. Youthful dreams of glory.

Although science-fiction provokes wonder, it can also cancel wonder. If you spend all your time staring at the sky thinking, “If only, if only,” always waiting for the big ships to land, well if you do that then you don’t notice the field you’re standing in, the odd insects in the grass, the peculiar shapes of the grass seeds, the funny shape—if you ever stop to really look at it—the funny shape of your hand, and especially the funny shape of your foot, like if you straighten the foot out and look at the way the heel bulges out…odd, very odd.

I dig UFO novels more, actually, than space opera. Because space opera is really so quite essentially bogus because like maybe there really ISN’T any hyperdrive, and we really WILL always be pretty much confined to this planet and environs. Of course sooner or later we can send a generation starship, or send out our DNA in spores, but it may very well be really true that no individual human is ever going to be able to travel out to the stars and come back and tell about it.

I spent a lot of years thinking
if only
, and now I’m ready to forget that bogus trip. I’m ALREADY visiting a weird planet with colorful flora and fauna. My dog’s name is Arf. He’s so smart he can say his own name, and he’s so famous all the other dogs talk about him. Small chitinous parasitic animals live in the forests of his hair. He chews himself, producing scabs, and the fleas get under the edges of the scabs like our early simian ancestors got under ledges of rock. Simian males stick erectile tubes into self-lubricating little holes between the simian females’ legs whenever possible, depositing semi-autonomous creaturelets capable of merging with creaturelets of the females’ own growing, this merger producing a biochemical program for growing a new simian. No metal is involved, save for those few atoms that are used as chelation agents in the information structures. I mean, is this planet bizarre or what?

Sociobiologists have pointed out that a human can be thought of either as 1) a big meat machine for making copies of its DNA, or 2) a big computer for storing and replicating ideas. Gene carriers or meme carriers.

Memes? When I said earlier that ideas are aliens, I wasn’t really kidding. William Burroughs likes to say “the word is a virus,” and Laurie Anderson made a song out of it. Ideas make us do things. We teach our children how to read the old thoughts, we teach them the algorithms for how to do our algebra. It’s not a simple thing to program a raw computing system to do algebra. But we program ourselves to do it. Can you imagine trying to design a system for adding numbers inside the chaotic neural network of a wet human brain? God, Earth life is gnarly.

It’s always seemed odd to me how little information exchange we’ve achieved with elephants, dolphins and whales. They have bigger brains than we do, and they sing weird songs, so its safe to assume that their brains are storing and generating information structures at least as complex as the structures that we fiddling monkeys use. But nobody seems to be able to get much of a conversation going with elephants or dolphins or whales. John Lilly used to try to do it, but it seems like all that came of his attempts was that some of his female assistants gave the dolphins hand-jobs (alien contact!) and then Lilly got strung-out on ketamine and lost it.

Why would be be able to talk to mucus-oozing methane slugs when we can’t even talk to elephants? Do you see elephants coding up bitstrings of prime numbers and beaming them out to us as radio waves? So why would the squids in NGC 69 be doing it?

Ah, yes…but what if they ARE?

Marc’s Part

The term “SETI” sounds suspiciously like a Government acronym, something you’d find in a list with NASA, NORAD, OSHA or IRS. Most people, first encountering the term, probably wonder where it is. Is it a big grey building in Washington, D.C., or maybe a hundred miles of tunnels under Idaho, buzzing with civil servants and scientists in pale green overalls?

But SETI isn’t localized anywhere. SETI is a concept, an idea in the minds of scientists and layfolk alike…particularly a dream of “Searchers.” The letters stand for the “Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.” Which is not to say that SETI doesn’t exist outside the imaginations of all these starry-eyed (and radiowavy-eared) seekers.

In fact, the 1990s will inevitably be the decade in which SETI becomes a household word. In the 80’s we were glued periodically to our televisions, waiting for the latest images from Voyager—but now that wanderer is heading far into the dark, with all our hopes and fears rushing out ahead of it, restlessly anticipating what waits for us out there. And while Voyager glides into a realm where its eyes won’t be of much use, the rest of us will be waiting for sounds from space.

Currently, NASA is engaged in a project that will make the name SETI familiar to the millions of taxpayers who search for nothing more improbable than a good TV movie. Instead of the ten or twenty channels they’re used to searching, the public will soon be introduced to the concept of a search over 8 million channels. Talk about channel-hopping!

NASA’s pet SETI project, planned to be in full swing by the middle of the decade, will center around a three hundred meter antenna situated in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Coupled with the efforts of the Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena, and the observations of radio telescopes all over the world, NASA will be searching for extraterrestrial broadcasts in frequencies yet untapped, and with a thoroughness (8 million channels!) never before approached. You can be sure that at the first faint peep of anything suspiciously like an intelligent message, or even a good false alarm, your cozy viewing of Wheel of Fortune will be interrupted by a message like this one: