Collected Essays (45 page)

“From Puerto Rico, NASA scientists announce definite proof that aliens from outer space are blasting Earth-teens with subliminal messages to give up playing Nintendo and work on their Boy Scout merit badges. That story, and results of the Monopoly championship, at eleven.”

As with any massive effort, the NASA program’s size will ensure equally sizeable obstacles. Among its limitations, the Arecibo antenna will search a targeted band of stars near the celestial equator. Just as the drive to build enormous superconductors has robbed smaller and perhaps more important physics projects of money and human interest, so the increasingly huge bureaucratic ears of government SETI projects may end up causing smaller but equally valuable programs to wither in their shade. The fact is, even the scientists admit the value of amateur collaboration. With about $3,000 worth of equipment—including a TV dish satellite and personal computer—the enthusiastic amateur can engage in a SETI program of his own, to complement the larger endeavors, and fill in the gaps they’re unable to reach.

When it comes to SETI, the equipment may change according to the size of the pocket-book, but ultimately the challenge is the same for everyone. We don’t know exactly what we’re listening for, and whatever we hear, it’s going to be new to all of us. The riddle of actual contact is anyone’s game.

In communicating with other humans, we may puzzle endlessly over the meaning of the message and the intentions of its sender, but we never doubt for an instant that the sender is another human being like ourselves, and in some sense comprehensible despite differences in upbringing and motivation. The intelligence expert deciphering a cryptogram, the archaeologist working over cuneiforms, know that those seemingly unintelligible bursts of sound or weirdly chiseled characters represent meaningful human thoughts. The message might be an Edward Lear poem, in itself nonsensical, but this nonsense is defined in human terms. We understand that the song of the owl and the pussycat is not an actual description of an historic expedition, a cooperative endeavor between feline and avian species. But what would an alien race think of this message? Would they search the skies for beautiful pea-green spaceboats? How much more baffling to us would be the poems of an alien Lear; what sort of meanings would we read into them without even realizing? We are so literal-minded, so generally lacking in a sense of humor (especially when it comes to immense projects involving the investment of billions of dollars and years of effort) that the sublime messages of a truly advanced civilization might simply go right over our heads. This, as in any human endeavor, is where the little guy must step in.

When I was a boy I read a book called
The Flight of the Monarch
. It detailed the migration habits of the common Monarch butterfly, as the brittle little brown-and-orange creatures endured amazing hardship on their trek across the United States and Mexico, over sea and land. At the back of the book was an invitation for junior entomologists to take part in the ongoing efforts of scientists to label and track the hardy Monarch. I sent away for a jar of tiny gummed labels and proceeded to capture all the Monarchs I could in my back yard, holding them carefully as the book instructed, licking the little labels like postage stamps, and gluing them carefully to the fragile wings. Once released, I never saw any of them again, and I never captured a butterfly that had previously been tagged. Yet I had an amazing sense of fulfillment and participation; I was taking part in a scientific effort much vaster than myself and the few butterflies that strayed across my narrow Louisville horizon. Someone, somewhere, might have captured one of those tagged butterflies and sent the news to Monarch Central.

Likewise, the amateur listener can get involved in SETI, albeit with an investment somewhat larger than the postage stamps I spent to get my gummed labels. Free of the restrictions of a huge listening post, and unconcerned with quotas and paper-pushing that occupy so much of the time of workers in any large operation, and equally free of the dogma and assumptions that restrain the professional listener, the amateur can bend his ear to the night without preconception. The place of the amateur in astronomy has always been significant, and why should it be any different in SETI research? I believe a multitude of these little ears, operated by enthusiastic mavericks, can do as much as any enormous operation—not only in receiving signals, but in interpreting them. I only hope that the message that finally comes, whoever hears it first, will not be left entirely in the hands of “experts” for interpretation.

There will certainly be lots of room for interpretation. Even instructions for assembling a bicycle can be construed in a variety of ways, depending on the interpretive powers of the reader. An eight year old might discard the instructions altogether and soon have his bike assembled, while his father—laboring literally to connect part A to part B—is still laying out pieces on the floor of the garage. Of course, it helps that the eight year old has more recent practical knowledge of bikes and their working. He would be somewhat more puzzled by instructions on a tax return. What if, in comparison to the civilization that sends a message, we are like that eight year old? What if our first message from space is a cosmic past-due bill, for the cost of all the terraforming and life-seeding that was done to Terra eons ago?

Consider a few of the possible kinds of messages we might have to grapple with. First, as we sharpen our hearing, we might encounter unusual noises that are not messages at all, but merely the inadvertent byproducts of some advanced (or even primitive but huge) organism’s life cycle. What if an alien civilization, perhaps from a gas planet, constructed a highly selective listening technology that could only detect stomach rumblings, flatulence and other airy discharges? How would they interpret the random percolating of our intestines, when they couldn’t hear us complaining that our stomach hurts? How would a robot society interpret the slave-songs of heavy machinery? Would a vegetable race be more sensitive to the metallic screech of chainsaws, or to the subtler wail of a dying rainforest?

Presuming that the message we receive actually is a message, and not a cosmic fart, then we must interpret the meaning of “message” itself. Why assume that creatures with a technology similar to ours would share our preoccupations with scientific exchange? It only takes a slight tweaking of our own culture to imagine Hollywood in charge of a SETI program. A thousand light years away, this tweak might already have happened. We may receive messages that are in effect alien entertainments. In fact, we might not be able to receive these messages until we fork out a deposit for the galactic equivalent of cable installation. There may be some free concerts being broadcast by the Milky Way Public Broadcasting System, but with humankind’s luck we’d probably tune in during a pledge drive or auction….

Such “messages” might be the alien civilization’s equivalent of night music, a symphony. We could spend decades trying to unravel the complex symmetries of a “message” that is nothing more (not to deride its beauty) than a cosmic fugue, a sculpture made of signals, art for art’s sake. Or these messages might be a form more similar to prose than to music, with layer upon layer of meaning, from a superficial “plot” to an underlying philosophy, each level leading to the next, and open—like all great art—to infinite interpretation and resonance. How would a bureaucratic listening-post possibly deal with a message of infinite subtlety? Imagine the CIA poring over Finnegan’s Wake looking for clues to troop and ship movements. It would take a mind as agile as Joyce’s to perceive a fraction of the subtle meanings and alien puns in such a message.

It has been said that the occult writings of the Renaissance mathematician, philosopher and master cryptographer John Dee were actually coded messages to Queen Elizabeth, reporting on the activities of Spain. (In fact, one of his more cryptic communications helped the Queen’s agents apprehend Spanish saboteurs before they could set fire to England’s ship-building forests.) Others insist that these are spiritual writings with no political content. Over a distance of a few hundred years, no one can really be sure. What sort of interpretative uncertainties would creep in over distances of a million light years, and over the spans of time that pass before a message leaving a distant planet reaches the Earth? Signal degradation alone would be troublesome unless carefully corrected; how can we be sure the message we receive bears any resemblance to the one that was sent? What if some mischief-maker intervened to physically alter the message en route?

And speaking of occult messages, there is no real reason to believe that our distant correspondents would be quite as obsessed with the separation of science and sectarianism as we are. In fact their technology might be controlled by priests. Earth’s evangelists have been quick to harness terrestrial media to their own ends; it’s not too hard to imagine Jerry Falwell starting up his own version of SETI for the sake of broadcasting Moral Majority beliefs. Is it any harder to imagine that the first loud messages we receive from space might be evangelical in nature? If we are not careful, we might not recognize these messages as religious; in contravention of Clarke’s Dictum, they might seem to us like superscience. We could find ourselves pledging our planetary resources to an Andromedan 700 Light-Year Club in hopes of a Great Reward that doesn’t apply to Earthlings. And if we eventually get past the evangelists to meet the rest of the culture, those others might consider us hopeless boobs for taking the alien religious tracts as gospel. Even if we were quick to realize the nature of these messages, what then? Would we hide, or slam the door on the cosmic messengers, the way some people do when they see Jehovah’s Witnesses coming up the street?

All this speculation supposes an optimistically noisy universe, one in which we eventually find ourselves bombarded with signals—or at least one, which would be far noisier than the zero we now perceive. This brings up the problem of the “Great Silence.” Given a universe liberally scattered with stars and planets, and a high potential for intelligent life, why do we hear nothing? Can we really be so alone?

Have you ever walked out into the woods and stood perfectly still for ten minutes? At first everything sounds so peaceful and quiet…but after ten minutes, the woods become raucous with sounds of life. What made the place seem so quiet was you. Crickets chirp until someone approaches; as soon as the intruder passes away or quiets down, they start up again. Could the same thing be happening in our sector of space? Perhaps the signals we send out are inherently frightening to the gentler intelligences in the universe, and like those crickets they hold down their voices until they’re sure we’ve passed on. It might be instructive for us to attempt a period of “radio silence,” in which rather than send our cries into the night, we simply sit quietly and open our ears. Perhaps after awhile we’ll hear those crickets starting up again…though it might be a long while, probably far too long a while for impatient humans. Even more deceptive would be to fake our planet’s destruction, establish total silence, then hide out and see who comes to investigate and pick through the ruins. Advanced civilizations might erect “blinds” like those naturalists use to observe wildlife without interfering. Perhaps we are being observed even now. We could erect blinds of our own as we go out into the dark, so that we can creep up silently and let our first encounter come about only after we have had time to gather information and gauge our position.

These scenarios assume, in an unpleasant way, that we are somehow “different” from the rest of life in the universe, if there is any. In a way this is typical human neurosis. I prefer to think that the sound of our planet would be attractive, or at least interesting, rather than frightening to other civilizations. We arose from natural conditions, we are part of nature’s web; there really are no aliens in the universe. We all belong here. Like the crickets, it is natural for us to cry out the news and weather, with comments on life in our vicinity and life in general. But this optimism makes the concept of the Great Silence even more distressing. What could be more natural among intelligent living things than curiosity? Are we to imagine that the rest of the universe is populated, if at all, with species that are intelligent but just not interested? Can there be intelligence without curiosity? Human behavior suggests there can. Still, it seems inevitable that if there is intelligent life out there, and if it has the ability, it will be looking for other life, and as soon as it hears us it will either respond or else slyly investigate before responding.

Of course, it might all be a matter of timing. We might have attained our peak of intelligence and technology just at a moment when the great galactic civilizations have either lapsed, or have not quite yet arisen. The distances of space and time that surround us are immense. Any message we receive will necessarily endure some time-lag—and most likely will be more ancient than our oldest fragments of prehistoric human culture. In fact, first contact may not involve any interaction: we could receive a message for which there is no hope (and no point) of reply. Some might say that such a one-way contact would be unrewarding—yet this is precisely the nature of our contact with our own past. We investigate the lives of our forebears without ever communicating with them. Our listening activities seem like nothing so much as archaeology. In plumbing the depths of space we are in fact reaching into the past, sorting through ancient signals and survivals. We have yet to discover even fossil evidence of alien life preserved among the strata of emissions that we currently sift. Perhaps we need a net with a finer mesh and a broader sweep to catch such “fossils.” It is fortunate that unlike terrestrial archaeology, which requires disrupting the earth and perhaps destroying the evidence we seek, cosmic archaeology is a highly ecological and conservative activity. What could be more passive than listening?

Not so with sending. It is inconceivable that one of our outward-bound messages could be received without causing some disruption and upset elsewhere in the universe. Each of our messages leaves a wake, and we have no way of knowing what effects these ripples might have as they brush against a distant planetary shore. Receiving an intelligent extraterrestrial message would have unimaginable effects on Earthly minds—depending on the content of the message, and our interpretations of it. Would things be any different for an alien civilization receiving one of our messages? Suddenly their isolation would be shattered. As they attempted to grasp the news of our existence, their entire way of life might be overturned. Some might want to return the greeting, others could bid for silence (granted, these would be concerns of a civilization nearly like our own). By the time we actually made contact with another culture, the message we sent ahead of ourselves might have altered that culture irremediably. We would never see it in its original state.