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Extraterrestrial Civilizations

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Extraterrestrial Civilizations

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Highlights & Notes

Free will is inevitably associated with intelligence. To do something willful, after all, you have to understand the existence of alternatives and choose among them, and these are attributes of intelligence. It seemed to make sense, therefore, to consider intelligence a universal aspect of nature.

To many Americans, however, a drought, for instance, is the will of God, and they flock to the churches to pray for rain under the impression that the plans God has made are so trivial and unimportant that He will change them if asked to do so.

When we lead from ignorance, we can come to no conclusions. When we say, “Anything can happen, and anything can be, because we know so little that we have no right to say ‘This is’ or ‘This isn’t,’ ” then all reasoning comes to a halt right there. We can eliminate nothing; we can assert nothing. All we can do is put words and thoughts together on the basis of intuition or faith or revelation and, unfortunately, no two people seem to share the same intuition or faith or revelation.

What we must do is set rules and place limits, however arbitrary these may seem to be. We then discover what we can say within these rules and limits.

The scientific view of the Universe is such as to admit only those phenomena that can, in one way or another, be observed in a fashion accessible to all, and to admit those generalizations (which we call laws of nature) that can be induced from those observations.

Thus, there are exactly four force fields that control all the interactions of subatomic particles and therefore, in the long run, all phenomena. These are, in order of discovery, the gravitational, the electromagnetic, the strong nuclear, and the weak nuclear interactions.

That may conceivably be so, but it doesn’t fall within the purview of science since under those conditions, anything can be said. I can say that the Rocky Mountains are made out of emeralds that have the property of looking like ordinary rock to everyone else but me. You can’t disprove that statement but of what value is it? (Far from being of value, such statements are so annoying to people generally that anyone who insists on making them is liable to be treated as insane.)

Science deals only with phenomena that can be reproduced; observations that, under certain fixed conditions, can be made by anybody of normal intelligence; observations upon which reasonable men† can agree.

Acceptance will come in the end, though, for scientific thought is self-correcting as long as there is reasonable freedom of research and publication. (Without infinite money and infinite space, it is hard to be sure of absolute freedom, of course.)

In the discussion of nonhuman intelligence that will occupy us in this book, we will consider neither angels nor demons, neither God nor Devil, nor anything that is not accessible to observation and experiment and reason.

Suppose we define “human intelligence” as: A level of intelligence high enough to allow the development of methods for igniting and using fire.

We are looking for extraterrestrial civilization that disposes of enough energy of a sufficiently sophisticated kind to be detectable over interstellar distances.

If, however, Earth’s average temperature were to be substantially increased, the average speed of the molecules in its atmosphere would also be increased and so would the fraction of those molecules traveling at more than escape velocity. The atmosphere would leak away more rapidly. If the temperature were high enough, the Earth would lose its atmosphere rather quickly and become an airless globe.

The Moon, therefore, must be without water as well as without air. What’s more, any airless world would be a lifeless world—not because air is necessarily essential to life, but because an airless world is a waterless world, and water is essential.

Therefore, until evidence to the contrary is forthcoming, we can only assume that if organic compounds are not present, life is not present.

To suppose that everything in the sky was there only because it affected human beings (the basis of astrological beliefs) seemed to argue against invisible bodies.

That would mean that in the observable universe, there are as many as 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (a billion trillion) stars.

Our own civilization has a dubious future, and if we can express the reason in brief it is that we find it difficult (perhaps impossible) to cooperate in solving our problems. We are too contentious a species and apparently find our local quarrels to be more important than our overall survival.

Humanity may fail. The forces of violence may overcome those of cooperation; or else we have waited too long and even though we attempt cooperation with all our heart, we can no longer prevent civilization from collapsing under the gathering pressures. However, even if we lose out, it will not be an inevitable or unopposed loss; we will put up a fight.

Surely by that point in history, it will be understood that it is the nature of the mind that makes individuals kin, and that the differences in shape, form, and manner are altogether trivial.

And whereas the money spent on armaments only stimulates hatred and fear and increases steadily the chance that the nations of the Earth will wipe out each other and, perhaps, all humanity, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is something that would surely have a uniting effect on us all. The mere thought of other civilizations advanced beyond our own, of a Galaxy full of such civilizations, can’t help but emphasize the pettiness of our own quarrels and shame us into more serious attempts at cooperation. And if the failure of the search should cause us to suspect that we are, after all, the only civilization in the Galaxy, might that not increase the sense of the preciousness of our world and ourselves and make us more reluctant to risk it all in childish quarrels?

Knowledge, wisely used, has always been helpful to humanity in the past; and there is every hope it will continue to be helpful in the future.

Therefore, for the sake of all of us, let’s abandon our useless, endless, suicidal bickering and unite behind the real task that awaits us—to survive—to learn—to expand—to enter into a new level of knowledge. Let us strive to inherit the Universe that is waiting for us; doing so alone, if we must, or in company with others—if they are there.

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