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CHAPTER TWO

Discovering Inhumanity

PROLOGUE: ONLY CONNECT

WHEN SHE accepted a postdoc position to be part of the team decoding the first message ever received from extraterrestrials, Camille never expected that the effort would occupy the better part of her career—would really be her career. That was actually the third surprise about the message. The first was that it came in on a tightly focused, extremely powerful beam of modulated UV light, when most of those engaged in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) still worked on radio telescopes detecting microwave radiation. At first, the speculation was that whoever was sending the message must be quite technologically advanced to have lasers on a scale that humans were just beginning to think about. But the intensive study of the alien sun that followed showed it to be far more active than Earth’s sun; the frequency and intensity of solar storms that Earth astronomers inferred from the data would have made radio communication on their planet so unreliable as to be nearly worthless. Unlike humans, they had probably started and stayed with light as they developed long-distance communication.

The second surprise was that the message was not very user-friendly. It was at least pretty clearly divided into “words,” and statistical analyses of their frequency looked a whole lot like what you got from similar analyses of human documents. But beyond that, it was not clear the aliens had considered the audience. Along with everybody else interested in SETI, Camille had given a good deal of thought to how she would design a message that started simple and moved on to more complex topics. At first, the assumption was that the easy stuff had been lost at the undetected beginning of the transmission. After nine months—a dauntingly long letter!—it was clear the message was repeating with no obvious primer at the start. That assumption had to be put aside.

Of course, at the beginning everybody was interested. The discovery galvanized and monopolized media attention at least as much as Sputnik and the moon landing. Like most others in her field, deep in her heart Camille had thought that “first contact” would be . . . well, like a revelation from on high. It would change everything. And the fuss at the beginning had done nothing to dissuade her. Interviews, op-eds, news analysis persisted for months. There were two “instant books” on the market within weeks; a couple of the senior people on Camille’s team were still living down some of the things they were quoted as saying in those early days. As transmitted, the signal was invisible to the human eye, but it was tuned down, analogized and transformed, mixed and remixed by countless artists in visual and audio forms, bits and pieces of it showing up in popular music and on t-shirts. Camille’s prior interest in SETI put her well ahead of the game; there was a huge “catchup” increase in interest in astronomy, optical engineering, linguistics, mathematics, and even astrobiology now that it was a real discipline. A predictable glut of Ph.D.’s in all these areas followed. Even the shifts in government funding for sciences couldn’t produce ways to employ them all, although that’s what funded Camille’s early years. The space program was reinvigorated, two sports teams abandoned Native American names in favor of “ALIENS.” Once the message was complete, three “unauthorized” translations were out within months. The only one that didn’t make it into print didn’t have to, as the author “proved” on his website that the message was none other than the King James Bible.

At the time, Camille had been too busy and too much on the inside to appreciate fully how the message was like a great rock dropped into a small pond. Ripples spread widely, reflected back on each other, interfered and formed a complex pattern. But as time went by and the message remained enigmatic, the disturbance in society at large faded; life returned pretty much to normal. A rump group of enthusiasts stayed focused on translating the message, and some people spent what seemed like all their time trying to show the whole thing was a hoax (“They say the message is transmitted on a light-beam, but YOU CAN’T SEE IT!”), but the vast majority of the world’s population went on exactly as before. That humans now knew there was intelligence “out there” became a historical fact among historical facts, part of the background against which the human drama continued to play pretty much as usual. Despite her own dedication to the project, Camille concluded that the discovery really was not, as some had claimed it would be, “the most significant event in the modern history of mankind”¹ or still less “likely . . . the most earthshaking event in human history”² or “perhaps the greatest discovery in scientific history.”³ It certainly didn’t “change everything,”⁴ or “cause the most dramatic shift in the status of our human species that has ever occurred in history,”⁵ which Camille came to count as her fourth surprise. It was not yet her last.

As the academic work of decoding went on and on and on, various schools of thought formed, competing journals were established on the basis of divergent assumptions, there were conferences you went to and those you didn’t. Camille did her best to be a uniter (consistent with keeping favor with her funders) and thank goodness the factions never lost contact with each other entirely, so when her final breakthrough came, nobody ended up a dissident prisoner of his own previous assumptions.

No, the last surprise was not that everybody essentially agreed about what the message said, it was rather the message itself. It proved to be a comprehensive history of the aliens’ world (the science parts proved key to the translation, of course). They wanted us to know where they had been, because they were concerned about where they were going. Their admitted flaws and imperfections were becoming increasingly dangerous, they thought, as their powers over their world (they didn’t seem to have a concept of “nature”) grew. Camille was the one who had first understood how the message began and ended, and it still chilled her when she looked back on it: “Can you help us?”⁶

WE SAW in the previous chapter how human re-engineering is related to ideas about space exploration—and has been at least since Winwood Reade’s popular 1872 book—and to speculation about alien life in space. The link continues to be significant today in the writings of prominent transhumanists, but with a new twist. Ray Kurzweil has concluded that “it is likely (although not certain)” that there are no alien civilizations.⁷ Nick Bostrom has written that “in the search for extraterrestrial life, no news is good news. It promises a potentially great future for humanity.”⁸

Why are transhumanists invested in the idea that we are alone in the universe? Kurzweil and Bostrom each draw their conclusions following out a similar logic. Stars and galaxies are, in comparison with the time it took for life and civilization to evolve on Earth, very old. There would have been plenty of time before we arrived on the scene for an alien civilization to have come into being. So such an alien civilization could be thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years “ahead” of us in terms of its science and technology. Even with the great distances involved, it has been estimated that an alien civilization—one more advanced than ours, but not unimaginably more advanced—could colonize our galaxy in perhaps 60 to 300 million years.⁹ From a cosmic perspective, that is a relatively short time. If an alien civilization were to evolve in the way some transhumanists believe we will evolve, achieving great powers to manipulate matter and travel great distances, then surely it would have left its mark on the cosmos.¹⁰ Yet we see no evidence for such a thing. So, as the great physicist Enrico Fermi is said to have asked, where are they?¹¹ Kurzweil and Bostrom plainly doubt the aliens are there to be found. To understand more fully transhumanist hopes and fears about alien civilizations, it is necessary to take a few steps back, and recall some of the earlier links between aliens and the eclipse of man.

As we saw in Chapter One, human space travel has been proposed as a way to solve the supposed Malthusian consequences of any Condorcet-like vision of material progress. If ever more people are going to be leading longer and wealthier lives, then they will require ever more of the finite resources upon which those lives depend. If we cannot do ever more with ever less, the argument goes, then either human civilization will come crashing down or the resource base will need to be expanded. Space travel, exploration, and settlement, however technically formidable, is conceptually a familiar solution—especially for a civilization, like ours, that was profoundly shaped by its own history of exploration, colonization, and expanding frontiers. So space exploration can seem like a way to protect and extend humanity. However, the genuinely “alien” conditions that prevail in space and on other worlds put a premium on imagining intelligent beings better suited to these environments. Having learned from Darwin that evolutionary diversity is a product of changing environmental circumstances over time, we can readily imagine how evolution might be deliberately helped along to our own advantage. Think of Haldane’s humans, bred to select for qualities conducive to survival on Venus, or Bernal’s attempt to imagine mechanical beings built for hostile extraterrestrial conditions.

So some human beings become aliens to explore and settle new worlds. Bernal acknowledges that this result may be problematic from the point of view of any who choose to remain merely human. Perhaps there is some further reflection of that problem in the complete equanimity with which Haldane’s Venusians report the end of humanity on Earth—the humanity that had created them and made Venus habitable for them.

But there is an additional problem. If we can expect to become alien and indifferent to ourselves, what if the universe is not waiting for us to enliven it? What if Flammarion is correct, and life establishes itself at the slightest opportunity? If there is alien life, then why should there not be alien intelligence? And if there is alien intelligence, why would it not eventually find itself facing the same limits and opportunities that, based on Malthusian assumptions, would drive us into space? If, as Haldane saw, we could become alien invaders faced with an imperative to destroy or be destroyed, why shouldn’t extraterrestrials behave in exactly the same way?

Of course, based on complete ignorance, we can say anything we wish about alien motives and abilities, a freedom much employed by those who write both fictional and speculative non-fiction works on this topic. So it is not hard to find grounds for happier outcomes, starting from skepticism about the Malthusian dilemma itself. But for our present purposes, the significant point is this: concerns about hostile aliens do not have to arise from commonly identified factors like primitive xenophobia or Cold War paranoia. They do not have to depend on any quirk of human history or psychology. As we have seen, when we imagine dangerous aliens we are imagining beings that are acting no better and no worse than we would act if we fulfill the hopes articulated by today’s transhumanists.¹²

Starting from this worldview, then, it is not immediately obvious that contact with aliens would be a good idea. Leave aside all prospects for tragic cultural misunderstandings; on the essential point we may understand each other only too well: they may not come in peace. Unless we are confident we would have the upper hand in the relationship, it might well be thought best to lay low, cosmically speaking.

MAKING FRIENDS WITH ALIENS

After World War II, advances in technology made it possible for the first time to think seriously about what it would mean to communicate across interstellar distances. Thanks to science fiction, the theme of hostile aliens was by then well established in the popular culture. So those who were advocating the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) had a problem: why would we want to have contact with unfriendly aliens? The first efforts at SETI, led by the American astronomer Frank Drake in 1960, were just a matter of listening with a radio telescope for what was hoped might be the background chatter of alien intelligence—the interstellar equivalent of tuning a radio to eavesdrop on conversations among truckers, or police, or ham-radio users. But those first efforts were rather quickly followed by deliberate attempts to send out contact signals of our own, over and above the radio and television broadcast signals that were already leaking into outer space.

Fortunately for the SETI pioneers, there was a readily available reason not to worry about giving ourselves away. By the 1960s, the prospects for other intelligent life in our own solar system were looking bleak, and the distance to the nearest stars provided a comforting buffer. Messages traveling at the speed of light would take more than four years to reach even just the star nearest to our sun. Any back-and-forth communication given this limit would be difficult enough—likely a project of generations, given that our part of the galaxy is not very densely populated by stars in comparison to some other parts. Visits in person, including marauding fleets of star cruisers, seemed, to say the least, highly implausible. So the scenario of aliens exploiting our world for resources to solve their Malthusian problems did not look plausible. We could reach out safely.

There was only one catch. Many of the supporters of SETI believed that any contact we would make would be with aliens more scientifically and technologically advanced than we. There is a simple logic to this familiar belief. Our ability to send and receive signals at interstellar distances is still new and remains quite limited. It would be impossible for us to detect signals from anybody much less advanced than we ourselves, since even to detect and distinguish the kinds of signals that we could send out would be difficult or impossible for us. Furthermore, the existence of human intelligence at all on Earth, let alone human intelligence with the technology to begin to contemplate interstellar communication is, cosmically speaking, a very, very recent event indeed. Since on the cosmic clock there has been ample time for life and intelligence to have developed elsewhere long before humanity even began to emerge on the scene, at whatever point we might stand on some general scale of abilities and intelligence, any beings we might contact are likely to be well above it.

But this argument, made by sober Ph.D.’s who did everything they could to distinguish themselves from those who believed in “flying saucers” and (later) alien abductions, in fact raises troubling questions. How confident ought we to be that our understanding of nature and the technologically possible is sufficiently definitive as to preclude practical interstellar travel? Couldn’t very advanced aliens know how to do things that would look impossible to us, just as some of the things we can do would seem impossible to primitive men? We are regularly told that the universe is a strange and surprising place—might it be even stranger and more surprising than we now suppose? Even if decades have gone by without aliens appearing on our doorstep, perhaps we should not be confident about what tomorrow holds.

So it proves necessary to attack the very premise of hostile aliens, to turn them from cosmic pirates to cosmic philanthropists. And that effort requires following up on a different aspect of the eclipse of man. For along with this positive view of aliens comes a very dark picture of human beings. As foreshadowed by nearly all of the post-Condorcet thinkers we discussed in Chapter One, the more that alien beings look like our saviors, the less we look worth saving.

HUMAN INSIGNIFICANCE