National Science Foundation Proposal:
Where Is Everybody?
Inter-Species Communication and the Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence: An Anthropological Approach
(Including: Autopsy of a Proposal:
Peer Review, the Ethnographer’s Eye, and a Fundamental Problem)
By: Lee Drummond, Center for Peripheral Studies
www.peripheralstudies.org )
Submitted December 2001, rejected April 2002
The Stars Like Dust
Where is everybody? The theoretical physicist Enrico Fermi posed this question
over fifty years ago, at a time when the scientific community was still reeling from the
discoveries of Edwin Hubble and his two hundred-inch telescope. Through that
instrument it appeared that the Milky Way galaxy, home to our sun and its planets,
contained tens of billions, not tens of thousands, of stars like our sun. More daunting
still, many of the “gaseous nebulae” described by earlier astronomers as dense clouds of
interstellar gas and dust within the Milky Way revealed themselves through Hubble’s
telescope as separate galaxies, impossibly remote and each teeming with an uncountable
number of stars. Hence Fermi’s question: With all those stars and, presumably, planets
out there, why were the skies, and especially the airways, of Earth not filled with alien
craft and alien radio messages? Why, in the saucer frenzy of the immediate postwar
years, did the public have to clutch at straws — a smudged photograph here, a Roswell
New Mexico incident there — to bolster its new-found paranoia of the alien menace?
They should be everywhere. But they aren’t. So where is everybody?
Over the ensuing decades this mystery has only deepened, until it now presents
itself as an enigma for scientific and social thought as we enter the new millennium. Up
to now the possible existence of extraterrestrial intelligence(s) has been a matter of
professional concern only for a small group of physicists and cosmologists (excluding the
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legion of mostly non-professional saucer buffs). Except for episodic interest among a
few anthropologists (perhaps launched by the intriguing collection by Magoroh
Maruyama and Arthur Harkins eds., Cultures beyond the Earth, 1975), social thinkers
(when they were not consciously attempting science fiction) have mostly skirted the
issue. The result has been a peculiarly schizoid literature dominated by physical
scientists on one hand and novelists on the other, with the “true believers” making up a
third, raucous contingent.
In this research proposal I want to suggest that anthropology’s slighting the issue
has been a mistake, and that the time to address it systematically and in depth is now.
The questions raised in a thorough consideration of the possibility of extraterrestrial
intelligence are not merely an interesting adjunct to anthropology’s principal theoretical
concerns; they are at the heart of our discipline. As we proceed here, I hope to establish
that anthropologists do not have to wait on the sidelines for physical scientists to let us
know the outcome of the debate; it is rather we who offer an excellent hope of resolving
the enigma of extraterrestrial intelligence.
The Procreant Urge of the World
Until quite recently the existence of planets around our sun was thought to be a
rare occurrence, caused by an extraordinary event such as the sun’s near-collision with a
passing star. It now appears, however, that planets are routine products of stellar
evolution, coalescing along with the embryonic star from a collapsing accretion disk of
gas and debris. The billions of stars in our galaxy probably have billions of planets
circling them — a few of which have recently been identified by the telescope that bears
Hubble’s name.
On a considerable number of those billions of planets, conditions may be
favorable to the emergence of carbon-and-water based life forms. In the half-century
since Fermi posed his question, biologists and paleontologists have been as active as
cosmologists in populating the universe, and in the process demonstrating that the old
anti-Copernican, anti-Darwinian prejudices are untenable. If the cosmos teems with stars
and their planets, it also teems with the building blocks of life and, the conclusion seems
inescapable, with life itself. Complex organic molecules, including chlorophyll and even
amino acids, have been identified in interstellar gas clouds and in asteroids and planetary
debris that land on Earth as meteorites. Those meteorites may even be responsible for the
appearance of life on our planet some three-plus billion years ago, when Earth’s fiery
crust was just beginning to cool. Without some form of interstellar “seeding” process,
biologists seem at a loss to account for the fact that DNA-based organisms, with their
elaborate retinue of amino acids and proteins, were present at the earliest possible
moment: as soon as the planet began to be habitable, life immediately established itself.
We, or our earliest ancestors, may indeed be hitchhikers in the galaxy.
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Rather than a novelty, a unique product of divine creation, it now appears that life
may be commonplace in our galaxy, that it is irrepressible and inevitable wherever there
is the slightest chance for it to gain a foothold. And yet the heavens are silent. The skies
of Earth are not filled with saucers: the radio telescopes, despite thousands of hours of
observation, have not identified a clear interstellar message. So, “Where is everybody?”,
we must ask again, as what has come to be known as The Great Silence becomes
deafening. Their absence makes it all too easy to take the next treacherous step: the easy
refuge of our prideful human egos is to assert that there is something very special about
our species, something that accounts for the fact that, try as we might with our newfound
technology, we cannot detect a ghost of a clue of an extraterrestrial intelligence. Earth
may not be the center of the universe, nor the solitary cradle of life in a barren cosmos,
but, we like to tell ourselves, humanity does possess a unique quality that sets us apart
from other life forms. Call it consciousness, mind, spirit, or even soul — it is that spark
of self-awareness and self-determination that distinguishes us from all other animal
species on earth and, supposedly, throughout the galaxy.
How Things Stand Now, and Where Anthropology Enters the Picture
Faced with that silent sky and the ingrained xenophobia of the American public,
the few renegade astronomers and physicists (Carl Sagan, Frank Drake, Philip Morrison)
who inspired and organized SETI have made remarkable advances. From the first radio
telescope search for an extraterrestrial signal — Drake’s 1960 Project Ozma — until
today, researchers have begged, borrowed, and variously cobbled together enough
telescope time to carry out both full sky and individual star searches of significant
portions of the galaxy (a useful recent summary is found in Scientific American July
2000). While extremely modest in relation to what would be possible with substantial
regular funding, SETI research to date has progressed to the point that its lack of results
are worrisome even to scientists dedicated to the endeavor. One suspects Fermi’s
question has begun to haunt them.
Still, it is hard to argue with their rationale for continuing: Even though the
chances of detecting an alien signal seem to be diminishing, the importance of a single
authenticated result would be so enormous that the work must continue. If we stop
listening, we’ll never know. If we find something, humanity will be forever transformed.
True enough, but recent work in several fields adds to the mounting doubts.
Astronomers have now got passable data on enough extrasolar planets (about seventy to
date) to know that planetary systems come in an unexpected variety. Huge gas giants,
much larger than Jupiter, circle close in to their suns or, alternatively, describe highly
elliptical orbits. In other systems which include a companion star planets are regularly
fried and irradiated by one or other of the binary pair.
Another looming problem for the SETI camp is that the field of candidate stars
has been greatly reduced. Main sequence stars anywhere in the galaxy cannot be
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considered equally as potential life-sustaining planetary systems. Stars appreciably
nearer the galactic center than the solar system contain such a high proportion of heavy
elements (because they are older and made of more recycled stellar material) that
formation of Earth-like planets is improbable. Conversely, stars more distant from the
center contain too few heavy elements to permit any but gaseous planets to form. The
solar system happens to lie within quite a narrow “galactic habitable zone,” a torusshaped region roughly mid-way out from the center that includes only a fraction (about
twenty per cent) of the total population of stars (See G. Gonzalez et al, “Refuges for Life
in a Hostile Univese,” in Scientific American October 2001; and Virginia Trimble,
“Galactic Chemical Evolution: Implications for the Existence of Habitable Planets,” in
Extraterrestrials: Where Are They?, 1995). Within the solar system itself a comparable
“circumstellar habitable zone” (or “Goldilocks zone”) includes only Earth and Mars;
planets nearer or further away lack the bare essentials for organic molecules to produce
life. This restriction presumably applies to extrasolar planetary systems, further reducing
the odds for life-sustaining planets.
If recent work describes a less hospitable galaxy and solar system, it also
documents a less hospitable Earth. Paleontologists have now identified several extinction
events that have interrupted and threatened biological evolution. Multicellular life forms,
among them sapient species, have a limited time to evolve, develop civilizations, and
broadcast their existence to the heavens before the next cometary impact or tectonic shift
wipes them out. On Earth, even with some three-plus billion years of a sustained
biological presence, civilization arose only six or seven thousand years ago — and the
Sumerians’ clay tablets did not broadcast a strong signal to Tau Ceti and beyond. For
that, radio, television and radar were required — all developments of the past century
and less. A cometary impact at the end of the 19th century would have silenced Earth’s
radio space for another eon. Surely planets in extrasolar systems face these same odds,
and doubtlessly some or even most are not as fortunate as Earth in nourishing life through
the worst cataclysms. Only in the past couple of decades have we come to the sobering
realization that the heavens may bring an instant Armageddon as well as a welcoming
beacon from a galactic civilization. As we now find ourselves casting an anxious eye to
those heavens, their silence begins to seem less surprising, and more ominous.
Despite the generally negative cast of recent work, SETI advocates are by no
means ready to give up their search. Acknowledging that a significant portion of the sky
has been searched, with negative results, they counter that effective interstellar
communication requires tremendously high transmission power, huge receiving antennae,
and narrowly focused beams. Our planet is obviously not being blasted with such a
directional signal (if anybody is out there, they’re not much interested in talking to us),
and so our SETI search is necessarily a needle-in-a-haystack quest that has barely
scratched the surface. We have to keep trying until we stumble across one wayward
signal among perhaps hundreds of thousands of others that are directed elsewhere.
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The SETI research effort, in short, has become a stand-off in the physical sciences
community; advocates and critics could go on and on without much being accomplished
(short of that literal bolt from the blue in the form of an authenticated message). I
suggest this is an opportune time to introduce a fresh perspective to the debate, and from
an unexpected quarter: anthropology. With astronomers and physicists in profound
disagreement, it is crucial to re-examine the assumptions both sides bring to the SETI
debate. When we begin to do that, I believe it is immediately clear that both advocates
and skeptics of the program share a number of assumptions that prejudice their
discussions. An uncritical acceptance of those assumptions can derail the entire research
effort, and before a clear answer to Fermi’s question is obtained.
Anthropology’s potential contribution consists in recognizing from the outset that
the problem before us is not exclusively or even primarily one that physical scientists are
equipped to answer. In the search for a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence, we
have attached far too much importance to its “extraterrestrial” aspect while virtually
ignoring the complexities involved in an “intelligence” sending a “message.”
Astronomers and physicists are the people to ask about stellar evolution and intragalactic
radio transmission, but nothing in their training or job description prepares them to
address the problems raised in communicating with another sapient species — the
“intelligence” and “message” parts of the puzzle. That has much more to do with
anthropology, conceptual ethology, and linguistics; and yet no one to my knowledge has
previously suggested those fields be made a central part of the SETI project (rather than
the occasional window dressing or tokenism). The research proposed here is intended to
begin correcting our up-to-now lopsided approach to Fermi’s question, which, again, is of
fundamental importance to humanity.
To date the SETI project has addressed exclusively astronomical and
technological issues: How many stars in the galaxy might have planetary systems? How
many of those might contain earth-like planets? What sort of signal, in terms of its
strength, frequency, and directionality, might we listen for, or even send? While
necessary, all these issues side-step the critical problem: they deal with the means of
receiving and sending messages, and leave unexamined the nature of messages
themselves and of the sociocultural context for generating and interpreting messages.
The emphasis is on the how, rather than the what and why of communication. While the
how-emphasis is quite sufficient when it comes to, say, reading the spectral emission
bands of a star, it does not carry over into the what- and why-emphases necessarily at
work when one sapient species attempts to communicate with another. On that score
there is a pressing need for an anthropological and ethological orientation. That
orientation really should have preceded and guided the technological and astronomical
concerns. Now that SETI has reached an impasse, we need belatedly to turn to it, and
frame the search in terms of one overarching question: What does it take to communicate
with another species?
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Let me interject here that I quite probably would not be making this proposal had
I found some willingness among physical scientists involved in SETI to consider the
anthropological aspects of their search. As I delved into their literature, however, I was
struck by the narrow anthropocentrism these pioneers displayed regarding the very object
of their study. Without a deep-seated anthropological appreciation for the tremendous
cultural diversity of our own species, the founders of SETI blithely assume that there are
beings pretty much like us out there, with technological civilizations so similar to ours
that they, too, are utilizing a (radio telescope) technology we’ve had for less than fifty
years to broadcast messages that are much like our binary code or mathematical
formulae. My suggestion — call it an hypothesis if you like — is that the heavens’
silence owes more to the selective listening (or, frankly, deafness) of the SETI project
than it does to their inherent lifelessness.
Consider, for example, a remarkable comment made by Frank Drake during an
interview with David Swift, whose 1990 book, SETI Pioneers: Scientists Talk about
Their Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, chronicles the project’s beginnings. Swift
asks, “What might ETI [an extraterrestrial intelligence] be like?” And Drake responds,
“They won’t be too much different from us. What I usually say, when people ask me that
question, is that a large fraction will have such an anatomy that if you saw them from a
distance of a hundred yards in the twilight you might think they were human.” I was
struck dumb when I encountered this passage, revealing that the individual responsible
for launching SETI as a research enterprise fully expected to hear from beings who were
dead-ringers for the spacemen plastered over the covers of the National Enquirer. We
may not be alone in the universe, but, don’t worry, even way out there on Tau Ceti and
beyond they’re pretty much like folks.
Carl Sagan, more cerebral and more of a public figure than Drake, betrays much
the same anthropocentrism. The “calling card” assembled for Voyager — images of
humans, star maps, musical selections — would be unintelligible and simply inaccessible
(without precisely the right technology for decoding) had the space probe landed in an
African or Asian village, never mind journeying to the stars. And in Sagan’s visionary
work, Pale Blue Dot: The Human Future in Space, he envisions a distant future of
galactic exploration and settlement in which the actors remain “human” while
transforming (“terraforming”) extrasolar planets and whole star systems. He does not
stop to consider that “we” would continue to evolve at a pace at least matching the
relatively short time scale that has seen “us” develop from earlier hominid species. Forty
thousand years from now, in a star system far, far away, won’t our formerly human
descendants differ fundamentally from us? And won’t they possess a technology that
makes our hope of communicating with radio telescopes analogous to 19th century
proposals to send smoke signals to Martians who were out boating on their canals?
Given the serious defects in the principles (or assumptions) of the SETI project, it
is necessary to put the horse back before the cart. And then try to communicate with it!
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Our attempts to communicate with an extraterrestrial intelligence need to be framed
within the more general project of communicating with other terrestrial species endowed
with considerable intelligences themselves. There is such a diversity of communicative
facilities within even mammals and birds that producing reliable observations for those
cases should materially advance the vastly more general question of extraterrestrial
communicative systems.
Our problems to date have arisen at least in part because we have grandly assayed
the SETI project without stopping to ponder that our knowledge of other terrestrial
species’ communicative systems has been only recently and tentatively acquired. Our
track record of research there has not been one to encourage us to reach for the stars.
Take elephants, for example. Hard to miss, the subject of traveler’s fascinated study for
more than a century, the subject of professional zoological study for decades. Yet it is
only in the past fifteen years that elephants’ infrasonic signals have been detected and
analyzed by field ethologists — an entire communicative system functioning all around
previous trained researchers, without their recognizing it (See, for example, Cynthia
Moss’s Elephant Memories: 13 Years in the Life of an Elephant Family, 2000). Imagine
how much more difficult it would have been to identify elephants’ infrasonic
communication if researchers hadn’t been right there with them, and if those researchers
hadn’t resembled their long-lived, large-brained mammalian subjects. Suppose we
possessed radio technology but hadn’t yet explored the African continent. We might
have wanted to survey the continent for the presence of intelligent life, and employed our
technology to search for a signal. How would we have proceeded? Even assuming we
had extended our survey to sound waves, maybe with “microphone in the sky” survey
equipment, and thus succeeded in receiving elephant infrasonic transmissions, whatever
would we have made of those signals? Would we have identified them as “signals” at
all? As “intelligent”?
Outline of the Research Project
Goals. The proposed research is a comparative ethnographic study of diverse ongoing efforts to communicate with other, terrestrial species. The findings of that
ethnographic study will then feed into a cultural analysis of efforts to communicate with
extraterrestrial species, including the general background of images of the Alien in
American culture. This two-part endeavor brings what I believe to be the correct
perspective to discussions of inter-species communication, of which the SETI project is
part (although its practitioners do not acknowledge that fact). The question posed earlier
informs the entire research project, from ethnographic study to cultural analytic
theorizing: What does it take to communicate with another species? I claim that this
question is of supreme importance to the development of several branches of the
humanities and the sciences: anthropology and ethology, to be sure, but also linguistics,
philosophy, and those aspects of astronomy and physics concerned with SETI. My claim
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is based on a strong hunch, which the proposed research may or may not prove true, that
a searching inquiry into SETI and inter-species communication leads directly into
fundamental questions regarding the nature of communication itself.
The integrative phase of the project, in which the ethnographic studies will be
applied to a cultural analysis of images of aliens and alien civilization in American
society, should begin to answer those fundamental questions. The general argument here
is that “communication” and the composition and interpretation of a “signal” that
comprises communication are highly complex processes. Understanding those processes
involves a great deal more than keeping our eyes peeled to the printout of radio
telescopes; it requires delving into questions of identity: species, cultural, and even
ethnic. The Alien is a fixture of American/global culture that asserts itself far beyond the
tiny community of SETI and animal-language researchers; it is a springboard and index
into Americans’ deeply-held beliefs about themselves and their place in the world, about
how persons differ from culture to culture, about how humans differ from animals and
machines. Broadening the discussion in this integrative phase of the project will be both
theoretically necessary and socially productive: the oft-heard lament is that anthropology
does not contribute much to public intellectual forums; the results of the proposed project
should do just that.
Ethnographic Studies. It is important to note at the outset that the proposed
research lays absolutely no claim to contributing to ethological studies of animal
communication. Apart from quite extensive general reading, I have no professional
competence in ethology, and particularly in the field work regimen required by that
science. I will add nothing to our growing knowledge of how bats, elephants, dolphins,
whales, ravens, and chimpanzees communicate. What I propose to do is study the
studiers, that is, to conduct ethnographic interviews and observations with persons deeply
involved in animal communications studies. From those interviews and observations I
hope to develop a broad, fairly comprehensive account of how creative scientists and
others (1) identify the existence of communicative activity — signal transmission —
within an animal species; (2) reach some conclusions regarding the organization and level
of complexity of that communicative activity; (3) identify instances (if such exist) in
which signal transmission occurs across, rather than within, a species boundary
separating two animal species; (4) identify instances (if such exist) in which signal
transmission occurs between the researcher’s animal subjects and the researcher or other
humans; and (5) summarize their investigations in general terms that bear on the nature
and possibility of inter-species communication. I am particularly intrigued by the
prospect of exploring with ethnographic subjects their thoughts on SETI — in my view,
these are the people we should be hearing from at least as often as we hear from the
astronomers and physicists.
The general format for the ethnographic studies, therefore, is to develop an
account or narrative of particular individuals whose life’s work involves them in the
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phenomenon of animal communication. The species named above, from bat through
chimpanzee, are a sufficiently representative sample. Even more important, each of those
species has attracted a great deal of attention from several prominent researchers and
from lay students. While my interviews will focus mainly on professional researchers, I
do intend to explore inter-species relationships that lie well outside the discipline of
ethology.
Let me provide two examples here. For some time I have been fascinated by the
whale handlers or wranglers at San Diego’s Sea World, particularly by those daring souls
who hitch a ride on Shamu’s back, plummet with him to the bottom of his tank, then
erupt from the water twenty feet in the air, perched on the whale’s snout. That is some
feat, and while the surfer dudes who accomplish it don’t go on about sygtagmatic chains
in Orca infrasonic transmissions, they certainly know a thing or two about
communicating with those large, and truly dangerous beasts. Their stories need telling
and, more than that, interpreting in the context of a general discussion of inter-species
communication. A second example is that assortment of persons (far outnumbering
professional ethologists) who undertake interactions/communications with dolphins and
whales. I don’t intend to look closely at the cult-like aspects of this phenomenon (the
whale-huggers), only to concentrate on individuals (such as Jim Nollman, whose The
Charged Border is a highly intelligent account of non-traditional inter-species
communicative strategies) who meld ethology and artistic creativity in a novel fashion.
Individual ethnographic studies will each take four to eight weeks, generally with
a briefer follow-up visit during the final phase of the project. The research protocol will
be for me to attach myself to an on-going project on animal communication, to do indepth interviews with project staff, and to record my observations on the interactions
among staff and their animal subjects. The interviews will be structured around the fivepart series of questions identified above. Those inquiries will often assume a
chronological form: What were your earliest results that indicated the existence of a
communicative system for species X? How did you proceed to build early observations
into generalizable findings, to go from events to regularities or rules? Can you relate
experiences or anecdotes that demonstrate specific cases of inter-species communication?
What implications are you prepared to draw at this stage of your research for the general
study of animal communication systems? Finally, what are your thoughts about SETI,
having yourself been engaged in inter-species communication for much of your career?
Although candidates for the set of ethnographic studies may change with
circumstances, my initial aim is to contact the following persons/projects.
(1) Cynthia Moss, who has done pioneering and highly detailed work on both
elephant and bat communication (See, in addition to earlier citation, Moss and
Shettleworth, eds., Neuroethological Studies of Cognitive and Perceptual Processes,
1996). Having worked with such diverse species, I believe Moss should possess valuable
insights into the general topic of inter-species communication.
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(2) Bernd Heinrich, whose years of study on raven communication and
intelligence (see in particular Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with
Wolf-Birds, 1999) make him an ideal ethnographic source. His work should be
particularly appropriate, because it makes explicit points regarding a communicative
system between ravens and predators, including humans, and relates his findings to the
raven’s characterization in Amerindian myth and European folklore.
(3) Roger Fouts and the Washoe (or Washoe colony) project (see Next of Kin: My
Conversations with Chimpanzees, 1998). Of the several well-known studies of primate
communication, the Washoe project stands out as the longest sustained effort. Human
researchers and chimpanzee subjects have had decades to evolve inter-species
relationships, in the course of which a rich body of narrative-anecdotal material has been
generated that beckons the ethnographer.
(4) Jim Nollman and Paul Gilman and whale-dolphin communication. Nollman’s
work referenced above is well-known; he has combined a zoologist’s knowledge of
cetaceans with an unusual quest to communicate with them through music. The
composer Paul Gilman is newer to the field, but as an established professional musician
with much experience in cross-cultural musical genres, his recent work with cetaceans is
promising. Both Nollman and Gilman provide a useful balance to the more traditional
academic projects on animal communication, such as Moss’s.
(5) Whale wranglers at Sea World. Mentioned above, these individuals should
furnish a much-needed new perspective on inter-species communication, one based less
on formal signals at a distance and more on intimate contact and interaction.
(6) Vincent Janik, marine biologist whose dolphin communication research (see,
for example, “Whistle Matching in Wild Bottlenose Dolphins,” Science 289: 1355-1357)
argues for dolphin’s superior capacity for vocal learning over other species, including
primates. Janik’s rigorous approach to the subject will also provide a needed
counterweight to the whale wranglers and serenaders mentioned above.
(7) Shirley Strum, whose extensive field studies of baboons (see, for example,
Almost Human: A Journey into the World of Baboons) complements the captivity-based
Washoe project. Strum’s argument that the structure of baboon social life on the open
savanna allies them with early hominids despite their evolutionary distance is intriguing,
particularly because she supports that argument with accounts of pronounced
ambivalence in baboon sociality.
My aim is first to produce reasonably coherent individual accounts of these
several projects, accounts that pull together the ethnographic materials generated during
my research. I then hope to use the diverse perspectives on the subject in a general
survey of the nature and possibilities of inter-species communication. As part of that
general survey, I intend to situate SETI as an extreme instance of the other, accessible
projects.
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Cultural Analysis. My strong suit, such as it is, is the cultural analysis of diverse
cultural productions: myth, ritual, sporting events, movies, concepts of “family”,
“ethnicity,” and “race”, emblematic machines (cars, guns, spaceships). Throughout my
various works on these topics, I have sought to sketch an outline of a theory of culture, a
theory that situates a shifting and rather evanescent “humanity” within a semiotic space
or manifold. (See Chapter 3, “A Theory of Culture as Semiospace,” in American
Dreamtime, and the long theoretical essay, “Culture, Mind, and Physical Reality: An
Anthropological Essay). I visualize SETI and the encompassing topic of inter-species
communication as aspects of a cultural system in which people are forever defining and
redefining themselves in relation to what they are not: animals, machines, deities, and,
here, a little of all three: extraterrestrials. I believe the ethnographic studies and their
synopsis are interesting and worthwhile in themselves. Their true value, however, is their
potential to contribute to an anthropological theory of culture, to a science of humanity.
That is the final part of the project. I hope to bring the ethnographic studies to bear on
inquiries into explicitly fictional treatments of aliens, such as movies. We’re fascinated
by aliens, by the animate, intelligent not-us, whether those are found in movies, in all
those Discovery Channel wildlife documentaries, on in our daily doings with the animals
in our lives.
The ethnographic accounts and the cultural analysis are then meant to inform each
other: how we perceive and communicate with animals is intimately bound up with our
speculations about how we might communicate with extra-terrestrial species.
Interestingly, and perhaps as a vindication of the proposed research, that crossfertilization is much in evidence in American culture’s most important monument to
SETI: Steven Spielberg’s classic, E. T. That movie incorporated, often in highly
synthesized versions, the calls and cries of a number of animal species — it is something
of an acoustic bestiary. E. T.’s vibrant personality, which captured the imagination of the
nation, owes much to its voice, and that voice derives its cathectic power from its animal
sources. In emoting over E. T., we are returning to our primal concern with our relations
with animals.
Schedule of Research. The project is planned to extend over twenty-four
months. Individual ethnographic studies will be conducted during the first eighteen
months, including necessary follow-up studies. As outlined above, each ethnographic
study, consisting of sets of interviews and observations, will occupy four to eight weeks.
The final six months of the project will be occupied in pulling together the materials into
written conclusions. The four to eight week field studies will be interspersed with
comparable periods away from the field spent processing field notes, transcribing tapes,
and refining the research protocol.
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Principal Investigator’s Selected Publications
Culture, Mind, and Physical Reality: An Anthropological Essay.
Last Undiscovered Tribe Exposed. Anthropology News.
The Human Race. Anthropology News.
Where Is Everybody? Anthropology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Anthropology News.
American Dreamtime: A Cultural Analysis of Popular Movies, and Their Implications for
a Science of Humanity.
The Logic of Things That Just Happen. Anthropology News.
Are There Cultures to Communicate Across? An Appraisal of the “Culture”
Concept
from the Perspective of Anthropological Semiotics. In Georgetown University Round
Table on Languages and Linguistics 1986. Simon P. X. Battestini, ed. Pp. 214-225.
Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press.
Autopsy of a Proposal:
Peer Review, the Ethnographer’s Eye, and a Fundamental Problem
It has become fashionable, if not rather passé, for cultural anthropologists to
subject themselves and their discipline to a thorough critique of how they go about
cultural analysis, of the implicit assumptions they bring to a situation, of their analytical
procedure or methodology, and of theoretical bias that colors their conclusions. While
this sort of navel-gazing and self-abuse has become something of an obsession, it is
curious that, in my experience, much less attention is given to the actual practices by
which anthropological research and writing are evaluated within the discipline. Cultural
anthropologists are keen to tout the virtues of ethnography, but reluctant to place under
the ethnographic lens the concrete details of just how they go about sanctioning their
colleagues’ work, of how they go about constructing a little authoritative discourse of
their own. The practices of conducting research and publishing its results, as we all
know, are tethered to the sacrosanct institution of peer review: access to research funds
and to scholarly publications is controlled by a process in which established workers –
12
authorities – in one’s particular subfield or area of inquiry pass anonymous judgment on
their fellows’ (their “peers”) proposals and manuscripts.
We should look at the immediate intellectual history or context of this practice in
the United States. I would suggest that prior to World War II there existed a vibrant
tradition of social thought : figures such as Emerson, Thoreau and Veblen produced
masterful works on the nature of our society and culture, and did so without any
particular disciplinary or institutional affiliation. Following that golden era has come a
rather tarnished period in which a considerable number of individuals, few of whom
possessed anything like the acuity or lucidity of our classical thinkers, banded together to
stake out specific areas of research which they vaingloriously called the social sciences.
In appropriating the term “science,” of course, they hoped to secure something of the
legitimacy (and government funding!) enjoyed by the natural sciences (whose usefulness
to the powers-that-be had been amply demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki). And so
university departments in psychology, sociology, and anthropology were created. To
maintain this charade members of those newly minted groups of scholars sought to do
what actual living, breathing scientists do: to conduct research that has been sanctioned
by other members of the group and to publish their findings in official “refereed”
journals.
To some extent subfields of psychology and sociology with a strong quantitative
orientation have managed this imposture, although they remain open to the scathing
criticism Richard Feynman leveled at them long ago in calling their activities “cargo cult
science,” ( the “social scientists” wishing something would make it so). Cultural
anthropology, however, because it is inherently an analytical, qualitative practice, has
never got very far with a pretense to scientific rigor (although some cultural
anthropologists have tried, hoping, indeed, that their wishes — and introductory
textbooks — would make it so). This situation has set the stage for a most curious bit of
recent intellectual history. Although clearly unsuited for the regime of the physical and
so-called social sciences, cultural anthropologists have allowed themselves and their
subdiscipline to be subject to a pantomime of what actual scientists do: they acquiesce to
(or, all to often, embrace) the institution of peer review of research and publication. It is
both cowardly and stupid of them, for that institution presupposes that there exist clear
standards or yardsticks by which to evaluate the work of cultural anthropologists, to weed
out the bad and nourish the good. But what might those standards be? How might one
distinguish, as mathematicians and physicists are generally competent to do, worthwhile
from worthless problems and ideas? The pretense is insupportable because cultural
anthropology possesses no coherent body of theory and no established research procedure
(apart from vague exhortations to “do ethnography”). Even the concept of “culture”
itself, which should be the field’s organizing principle, is now held in deep suspicion by
many cultural anthropologists. It is high irony that the concept of culture has become an
embarrassment for cultural anthropologists. I have presented this argument in more
13
detail in my essay, “Culture, Mind, and Physical Reality: An Anthropological Essay,”
available at www.peripheralstudies.org , and in other work.
My own research proposal to the National Science Foundation provides a little
case study, an ethnographic vignette if you will, of the practice of peer review in cultural
anthropology. The proposal, unsurprisingly, was declined. It did not bristle with
“hypotheses,” and, the kiss of death, it proposed to tie more-or-less (okay, less)
traditional ethnographic research into a wider analytical program focusing on the cultural
identity of “Alien” in American society. Way too airy-fairy for the NSF, notwithstanding
the proposal’s other flaws. So, with the independent peer reviewers presented with an
obviously peripheral proposal from a decidedly peripheral guy, and with them following
the canons of an established, scientific discipline, one would expect them to return
uniformly unfavorable evaluations. Isn’t that the very spirit and purpose of peer review?
To assemble a council of elders who will insure that things proceed in an orderly and
constructive fashion? To continue to build, brick-by-brick, the solid edifice of the
discipline of, in this case, cultural anthropology? In my case and, I’m confident, in a
great many other cases the results were rather perplexing. When the four reviews
reached me via email I found – my ethnographer’s eye discerned – that they were all over
the board. Two reviewers, obviously appalled by my lack of scientific rigor, rated the
proposal “poor.” One reviewer, giving it the benefit of the doubt, rated it “fair.” But
then the fourth reviewer, obviously some old softie known as an easy grader, rated the
proposal “good.” To translate into terms I’m sure most of you will understand, it’s as
though a course assignment was submitted to four different instructors who returned
grades of two Ds, one C, and one B (maybe even, to indulge in a little self-flattery, a B+).
What does this little anecdote say to the cultural anthropologist engaged in turning
his ethnographer’s eye on his own field? I am afraid it demonstrates that the subfield is
altogether lacking in coherence or focus. The shabby pretense of peer review in the
absence of any real standards demonstrates, not the validity of particular “well-crafted”
research proposals and essays, but the invalidity of the subdiscipline of cultural
anthropology itself. Lacking standards and, far worse, genuine imagination and vision,
cultural anthropology may very well have drifted into an intellectual backwater while the
main current, the turbulent flow of important ideas and concepts, passes it by.
A Fundamental Problem. In my obviously biased view, cultural anthropology is
probably headed for the scrap heap of intellectual history. It may survive, and barely
survive, as something of an antiquarian curiosity, in much the way that the field of
philology, once the vanguard of social thought (when Burckhardt flourished and before
his University of Basel colleague, Nietzsche, abandoned the field as a lost cause),
withered on the vine. If so, we shouldn’t mourn its passing (though those with
professorships will doubtlessly find the process rather unsettling). Let it go gently into
that good night.
14
But whether cultural anthropology vanishes altogether (like alchemy) or lingers
on in a diminished capacity (like philology), cultural anthropologists will largely have
dealt themselves out of one of the most profound topics to engage 21st century thinkers.
That topic is the ongoing search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the subject of my
rejected NSF proposal. As I suggested in the body of the proposal, a penetrating analysis
of that topic involves far more than tweaking the dials on SETI instruments; it involves
an inquiry into the very nature of sapience and communication, and into humanity’s
present and possibly future place in a sapient universe.
I made the same suggestion some years prior to drafting my ill-fated proposal. In
late-1995 the American Anthropological Association’s publication, Anthropology News,
announced its 1996-1997 Annual Theme: “The Known, the Unknown, and the
Unknowable in Anthropology.” That call inspired me to draft a brief essay with the same
title given my NSF proposal: “Where Is Everybody? Anthropology and the Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence” (available at www.peripheralstudies.org ). That essay was
published (it didn’t have to survive a rigorous, months-long period of “peer review”), but
seemed to have no discernible impact in the subdiscipline of cultural anthropology
(though I did hear from a few self-styled and rather incoherent “futurists”). A few years
down the road and considerably longer in the tooth, I thought I’d give it another shot,
with the 2001 NSF proposal. We know what happened to that attempt. Now, in early
2011, some fifteen years after the appearance of my Anthropology News essay, cultural
anthropology’s involvement in the problem of extraterrestrial intelligence seems even
more peripheral than my own decidedly peripheral status in the field.
It is somewhat encouraging that a few anthropologists do find the problem
engaging. At the 2005 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association a
panel was convened on the topic of “The History of Anthropological Contributions to
SETI,” and in 2009 Anthropology News published another of its brief essays,
“Encountering the Future: Anthropology and Outer Space,” by D. Valentine, D.
Battaglia, and V. A. Olson. The same authors have collaborated with others in a
forthcoming journal publication with the intriguing title, “Extreme: Limits and Horizons
of the Once and Future Cosmos” (and the cosmos should be as exciting and dramatic as
T. H. White’s Camelot). There may well be other scattered efforts along these lines; I am
not much of a scholar and my “review of the literature” is never very thorough. But my
Internet searches haven’t turned up much (one prominent exception, by a nonanthropologist, is www.sentientdevelopments.com , which contains insightful pieces on
transhumanism and SETI). Still, cultural anthropologists have produced nothing
comparable in stature or distribution to the works of the late Carl Sagan, John Gribbin,
Michio Kaku, Arthur Clarke, and the rash of Discovery and Nature Channel pieces on
flying saucers and extraterrestrial intelligence.
The passage of time has only made the topic of extraterrestrial intelligence more
pressing, and more oppressive. Within just the past year the newly-launched Kepler
15
Space Telescope, having surveyed only a tiny region of the sky, has identified over 1,200
exoplanets (planets orbiting stars other than the sun). Of these over 250 are in the
habitable zone of their respective stars, in which liquid water on a planet’s surface would
be possible. A number of these exoplanets are Earth or Super-Earth size (up to twice the
diameter of Earth). When these preliminary and very partial findings are extrapolated to
the entire Milky Way Galaxy and beyond, the numbers are staggering.
Roughly one out of every 37 to one out of every 70 sunlike stars in the
sky might harbor an alien Earth, a new study reveals.
These findings hint that billions of Earthlike planets might exist in our
galaxy, researchers added.
These new calculations are based on data from the Kepler space
telescope, which in February [2011] wowed the globe by revealing more
than 1,200 possible alien worlds, including 68 potentially Earth-size
planets. The spacecraft does so by looking for the dimming that occurs
when a world transits or moves in front of a star.
Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.,
focused on roughly Earth-size planets within the habitable zones of their
stars — that is, orbits where liquid water can exist on the surfaces of those
worlds.
After the researchers analyzed the four months of data in this initial
batch of readings from Kepler, they determined that 1.4 percent to 2.7
percent of all sunlike stars are expected to have Earthlike planets — ones
that are between 0.8 and two times Earth's diameter and within the
habitable zones of their stars.
"This means there are a lot of Earth analogs out there — 2 billion in the
Milky Way galaxy," researcher Joseph Catanzarite, an astronomer at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Space.com. "With that large a
number, there's a good chance life and maybe even intelligent life might
exist on some of those planets. And that's just our galaxy alone — there
are 50 billion other galaxies." (www.msnbc.com /Space/ March 22, 2011)
One should consider Fermi’s famous question, “Where is everybody?” in light of these
research findings. Fermi posed his question nearly sixty years ago, when there was
absolutely no conclusive scientific evidence for the existence of planets beyond our solar
system. At the time the prevailing attitude even among astronomers was that the sun and
its planets were an unusual if not extraordinary phenomenon in the galaxy, the possible
result of a star passing close to the sun and tearing out solar material which could
collapse into planets. Even in modern science, Ptolomey’s ghost is hard to exorcise: We
are special, an incredible exception to physical processes which govern the rest of the
universe. Were Fermi to ask his question anew today, it would be deafening.
16
Deafening. And yet during that same period our searching out, our listening for
an extraterrestrial intelligence has advanced in pace with our increasing knowledge of the
physical universe. In addition to the thousands of hours of radio telescope time and
analysis logged by the SETI Institute and its supporters prior to 2007, in that year the
Institute was handed a godsend (well, not God exactly, but close enough: Paul Allan, one
of the founders of Microsoft). The new Allan Telescope Array, with its capacity to
search large swaths of the galaxy while simultaneously listening closely to the emissions
of selected stars, has expanded exponentially the earlier SETI searches. And the results
to date: nothing conclusive, or even strongly suggestive (otherwise we would hear the
finding trumpeted on all the cable news channels). The silence of space has been
deafening, oppressive, crushing. It is what has prompted George Dvorsky and other
critics of SETI to label The Great Silence.
In our search, our wonderment at what may be out there, we are faced with an
ever more critical impasse. While astronomers discover more and more Earth-like
planets in our galaxy, SETI researchers amass higher and higher mountains of radio
telescope data, to no avail. I suggest that this impasse represents a fundamental problem,
perhaps the fundamental problem for contemporary thinkers pursuing the age-old
question of “man’s place in the universe.” It is certainly a matter which cultural
anthropologists should have focused on long before now and made a central part of their
research programs, their (oh, to be sure) “refereed” publications and, perhaps most of all,
their departmental curricula (lets have hundreds of “Anthro and ET” courses at all levels
of instruction at our fine institutions of higher learning).
The source or inspiration behind my NSF proposal was the thought that we can
best approach the problem of extraterrestrial intelligence by investigating inter-species
communication on planet Earth. How can we possibly look for signals from other worlds
and hope to interpret them if we know very little of the nature or extent of inter-species
communication among creatures which share our DNA and our planetary environment?
In surveying the ethological literature it is clear that such communication is extremely
difficult both to identify and to facilitate. Right here on Earth, faced with fellow
mammals not so far removed from us on the evolutionary timescale, the infrasonic
signals of elephants and giraffes, the ultrasonic signals of bats, and the whistles, clicks,
squeaks, and burst-pulses of dolphins went on all around us for centuries before a few
brilliant ethologists identified them as elements of a communications system (or even
before the signals were known to exist). I noted that this track record does not inspire
confidence when we turn our eyes, and radio telescopes, to the skies in hopes of receiving
and deciphering an extraterrestrial message. I suggested that a constructive step to
ameliorate this unhappy situation would be to conduct a comparative ethnographic study
of the work of several prominent animal researchers, searching in their diverse research
programs and results for common threads that might lead to a deeper understanding of the
17
general phenomenon of inter-species communication. The NSF reviewers, my “peers,”
thought otherwise.
Although unable to do the actual field research, in the years following the
rejection of my 2001 proposal I have done quite a bit of reading and considerable
thinking about the issue. I must admit at this point that the ET question has become
something of an obsession with me. I cannot spend a day or restless night without at
some point turning the question over in my mind. And whenever I happen to glance up at
the stars twinkling in the clear night sky of my California desert home, the five Big
Questions almost always come at me unbidden: Who? What? Where? When? How? I
should also confess that the ET question has been with me for most of a lifetime, in more
or less acute form, from the tender age of six when my uncle, a science-fiction author,
took me to see the movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still (the original, not the special
effects remake).
With that background and continuing penchant to find ET (not unlike the scientist
character Keys in the movie ET) I would like to report here that my involvement with the
subject has led me to identify some encouraging possibilities for future contact.
Unhappily, that is not the case. I am afraid I have come to be one who finds The Great
Silence deafening, and not only deafening but, considering my deep interest in the
subject, rather agonizing. In this regard I have identified four problem areas or sources of
puzzlement, really bafflement. The four problems are highly diverse, originating from
very different lines of reasoning, and I will merely sketch these here. As I have come to
think of (or nickname) them, they are: (1) Wittgenstein’s lion; (2) the semiotic sinkhole;
(3) if they are out there the little green guys must be really, really green; or, where is
Asimov’s Galactic Foundation?; and (4) perhaps the most sobering of all: Nietzsche’s
abyss.
Wittgenstein’s Lion. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s bizarre and brilliant intellectual
odyssey took him from an “ideal language” concept of meaning rooted in the work of
Russell and Whitehead to a “meaning as use” concept in which utterances are devoid of
propositional form (the “atomic propositions” of Principia Mathematica) and derive their
“meaning,” such as it is, entirely from their continuously shifting context. To take or
gauge the meaning of an individual’s expression (whether linguistic or gestural) it would
be necessary to participate in the same context as that individual, to share a set of
common experiences and expectations, to be playing the same “language game.” If two
individuals lacked a common framework in which to communicate, Wittgenstein argued,
in a phrase now as famous as it is infamous, that they experienced different “forms of
life” between which any meaningful exchange was extremely limited or, more likely,
impossible. Toward the end of Philosophical Investigations he presented this idea in its
starkest form: “If a lion could speak, we wouldn’t understand him.” [The German, “Wenn
ein Löwe sprechen könnte, wir könnten ihn nicht verstehen.” is translated by Anscombe
18
as “couldn’t understand him,” which seems to ignore the future conditional aspect of the
expression requiring “wouldn’t”.]
While modern ethological studies may take some of the sting of finality from
Wittgenstein’s assertion, it is crucial to note that they manage to document instances of
animal communication, to understand something of what the lion (or dolphin or bonobo)
is saying only by meticulous, fine-grained analysis of animal utterances / gestures /
movements in specific, very well defined contexts. Popular productions which encourage
us to embrace the idea of animal language, such as “the song of the humpback whale”
and the host of Orca recordings, really tell us nothing about those species’ lives or
communication, for we hear them in the absence of any closely described behavioral
context. Dolphin ethologists such as Kathleen Dudzinski, Jim Nollman, and Karen Pryor
have managed to identify communication among their subjects only through sophisticated
observations below the surface in the immediate vicinity of interacting dolphins,
employing stereoscopic video cameras, hydrophones, and lots of computer analysis of
reams of data. Those studies are so far removed from the situation of the SETI
researcher, eyes glued to the oscilloscope screen or computer printout of signal blips, that
there is very little overlap between the two enterprises.
In addition to this considerable obstacle is the overarching problem that
contemporary ethologists are not primarily engaged in what would be an even more
daunting goal: to identify what, if anything, dolphins and bonobos are saying to us. It is
so daunting because it appears unlikely that wild populations of these species have taken
time to devise a means of inter-species communication with the pesky humans around
them. As a couple of the dolphin researchers phrase it, they are engaged in
“eavesdropping” on their subjects, of trying to find out what they are saying to one
another. When a dolphin stops what it is doing, turns toward the hovering scuba diver
and addresses her with an actual communicative signal besides a standard gesture of
(understandable) annoyance or curiosity, that will really get our attention. Only then
will we find ourselves in the position of beginning to understand Wittgenstein’s lion.
It is certainly true, however, that a great deal of highly publicized research has
been done on how individual animals may in fact communicate with individual
researchers in strictly controlled, artificial settings. This complex and controversial topic
should indeed be addressed in a systematic study of inter-species communication as that
might bear on the topic at hand, extraterrestrial intelligence. But I think it’s a reach. The
experimental subjects in animal-human communication studies are often raised and
conditioned from birth or infancy to interact with their human keepers through artificial
protocols of human design: sign language and computer-like keyboards being the most
common. Unless X-File scenarios have some basis in fact, and a deeply covert operation
in now underway in some underground laboratory at Area 51 in the Nevada desert, an
operation which involves strapping a few of our captive aliens to Hannibal Lecter-like
gurneys and attempting to teach them Earthling communication skills, we really should
19
not claim that the (contested) results of captive animal studies can be applied to the
search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Simply put, Washoe and Koko are not going to
get us very far in conversing with our little friend, E. T.
The Semiotic Sinkhole. In my 1996 Anthropology News essay, “Where Is
Everybody? . . .) I suggested that there are two diametrically opposed ways to view the
relationship between organisms’ complexity (in terms of neural organization) and their
sapient ability, particularly including their ability to comprehend what other organisms
are doing and to communicate with them. One way, the traditional and prevalent view, is
to see large-brained humans with their linguistic and cultural achievements as supremely
fitted to take in what other less well-endowed species are up to. As the most complex
organisms on Earth, humans stand at the pinnacle of a scale of relative complexity. I
termed this outlook the Ozymandias model of cerebral development and communicative
ability, after Shelley’s powerful poem. Standing on that pinnacle, we are masters of all
we survey. Contrasted to this view is that of the semiotic sinkhole. If we simply invert
the scale of relative complexity (see figure) we find that our big brain, our language, and
our cultural systems place us at the bottom of a steep declivity. In short, our remarkable
specialization makes us less able to communicate with other species, which rely on
relatively simple, and very different, signals involving gestures and rudimentary
vocalizations.
20
The crucial point here is that in a sapient universe, one in which other highly
evolved intelligences exist, they will be similarly specialized in their symbolic and
communicative abilities – quite likely to a far greater degree than ourselves. I proposed a
rather godawful term, semiospace, to describe the wide, possibly boundless, domain in
which our species and other sapient species function. And those species, rather than
being perched on pinnacles of complexity, are, like ourselves, resting at the bottoms of
their respective semiotic sinkholes. Faced with these hugely formidable obstacles, our
hope of establishing communication with them is nearly, well, hopeless. It is a curious
fact that a bacterium, with an elementary system of chemical signatures, can identify and
interact
with
other
species
of
bacteria
(see,
for
example,
http://www.jci.org/articles/view/20195 , whereas we will quite likely find the semiotic /
symbolic system of an extraterrestrial intelligence impossible to decipher. I also made
the rather blasphemous proposal that this universe of semiospace would be a good
candidate to replace our frayed and contested concept of “culture,” so that cultural
anthropologists might well take down their weather-beaten disciplinary shingle and
replace it with a new, shiny one: “anthropological semiotics.”
That proposal will
probably come to pass about the time we begin to have cozy chats with the Tau Setians.
At any rate, the argument is presented in detail in Chapter 3, “A Theory of Culture as
Semiospace” of American Dreamtime ( www.peripheralstudies.org ).
A problem closely tied to that of the semiotic sinkhole is that of scale, or degree
of relative complexity. Our sun is a fairly late bloomer in the galaxy; there are hundreds
of millions of main sequence stars billions of years older than the solar system. If some
form of sapient evolution (let’s not even call it biological) has been occurring on many
exoplanets circling those ancient stars, it boggles the mind to think what those beings
might be like. This problem is especially acute because it appears, at least from our
solitary example, that the pace of evolution increases dramatically with increases in the
complexity of the evolved product. Although living organisms appeared on Earth over
three billion years ago, anything resembling the human species was not present until
some three million years ago. Then, of course, things took off, first very slowly and then
faster and faster. True Homo sapiens sapiens, who possessed a fully functional language,
complex social organization, an elaborate toolkit, and cultural productions such as art,
dance, and, probably, music, have a history of no more than forty thousand years or so –
mere seconds, as is often pointed out, on the evolutionary time clock. Even those
developments seem agonizingly slow in comparison with what has come later. Human
civilization itself has a history of no more than ten thousand years, and as for societies
capable of producing spaceships and radio telescopes. . . Our legions of self-styled
“futurists” are now straining at their tethers (some rather short) to imagine what even the
next hundred years will bring. What should be clear, however, is that whatever the future
21
holds it will quite likely resemble our present far less than our lives resemble those of
Neolithic farmers ten thousand years ago.
If our future a century from now is mostly veiled in mystery, what might a sapient
life form millions of years older than humanity and with an utterly different evolutionary
past be like? Here the “visionaries” of the SETI Project have shown themselves to be
remarkably short-sighted. In the body of my rejected proposal I have quoted Frank
Drake, the originator of SETI, reflecting on the aliens who are the object of his
pioneering quest. It is worth doing so again:
They won’t be too much different from us. What I usually say, when
people ask me that question, is that a large fraction will have such an
anatomy that if you saw them from a distance of a hundred yards in the
twilight you might think they were human.”
Ridiculous. One could obtain the same answer from any dim-witted reader of the
National Enquirer. The anthropocentrism of Drake’s remark is staggering: In this vast
galaxy presumably teeming with intelligent life any beings possessing sapience “won’t be
too much different from us.” For how could they be, since we stand at the pinnacle of
creation, the masters of all we survey?
The implications of the problem of scale are daunting. If, and it is a very big “if,”
other sapient beings have undergone the sort of technological evolution the human
species has experienced, we are unlikely to be able to exchange messages with any of
them unless they occupy our own extremely narrow technological niche. Had an alien
civilization bombarded Earth with radio transmissions even 150 years ago they would
have gone unheard. And 150 years from now, who is to say that radio will hold much
interest for us, unless, that is, SETI grant meisters are still able to secure funding. It is an
impossibly tall order to expect that an exoplanet with Earth-like sapient life would
possess just the right technology to enable our communication with them. A sapient
species even modestly more advanced than us may well have forsaken radio in favor of
something like powerful laser transmissions aimed at specific locations, other exoplanets,
where life forms comparable to themselves exist. Such pin-point bursts of optical energy
could be going on all around us but would entirely bypass our primitive little planet. Not
being on the guest list, we wouldn’t be invited in on the conversation.
This picture of the extraterrestrial sapient landscape, however, is very likely far
too conservative. Rather than being separated by a few centuries in technological
complexity, it is far more probable that we stand in relation to another sapient life form
as, say, microbes or insects stand with respect to us. Even if those beings could adjust
their communicative facility to accommodate our hopelessly primitive devices of radio
telescopes and satellites, the looming question is, Why would they want to? Unless the
huge populations of bacteria in your lower intestine begin to act up, you don’t make
22
much of an effort to communicate with them. For the most part their existence, if
recognized at all, is completely inconsequential to you; your concerns are elsewhere and
you could care less about them. Why, then, should we expect that a sapient life form
millions of years more advanced than humans would be interested in communicating with
us? As the desert sands continue to drift in around the derelict monument to
Ozymandias, we must seriously question whether we are worth a call.
If They Are Out There, the Little Green Guys Must Be Really, Really Green.
If The Great Silence poses an increasingly difficult problem for SETI researchers and
others hoping to discover E. T., there is an even more formidable issue. It arises from the
big “if” question I noted above: Is it the case that sapient evolution elsewhere in the
galaxy has generally involved the sort of technological development we have come to
regard as the sine qua non of change? If the answer to this crucial question turns out to
be “yes,” then we may expect that highly evolved sapient life forms, which have been
around millions of years longer than ourselves, possess correspondingly evolved
technologies. That is certainly the assumption built into the famous Drake Equation,
which Frank Drake proposed to the very first conference of SETI thinkers in 1961:
N = R f p n e f l fi fc L
where fc represents the fraction of intelligent life-bearing planets whose inhabitants
have developed the ability to communicate beyond their own world. We won’t worry
that the Drake Equation is not an equation at all, but a mere list of factors several of
which are sheer speculation; there is no solution to an “equation” with so many
unknowns (and, possibly, unknowables).
Drake assumes, as apparently do all SETI researchers, that an ability for
interstellar communication goes hand-in-hand with a highly developed technology. Here
the problem of scale of relative complexity is again paramount. If we stand in relation to
other, ancient sapient life forms as bacteria or insects stand to us, what must their
technologies be like? We tend to take it as given that the more advanced the technology,
the greater the energy consumption of a civilization: all of evolution, biological and
sapient, seems to be about increasingly effective utilization of available energy. If we
have gone from the cooking fire to the fires of nuclear reactors in a quarter million years
or so, civilizations far more advanced than ours must have made even more dramatic
changes in their exploitation of their environments. They must, in actual fact, have
reached for the stars.
Three years after Drake put his equation on the chalkboard at the first SETI
conference, the Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev proposed what has become
known as the Kardashev Scale. Kardashev argued that technological civilizations
throughout the galaxy could be grouped into three categories based on their ability to
exploit, and thereby control, energy resources. He called these Type I, Type II, and Type
III civilizations. Type I civilizations could use the energy resources of an entire planet to
23
function, including controlling the environment. Type II civilizations would have
escaped the confines of their planet and proceeded to extract the energy they required
directly from their home star. They might employ a technology presciently described by
Freeman Dyson, often called the “Dyson sphere”: a vast number of stellar energycollecting satellites in close orbit around the home star. Type III civilizations would have
colonized significant tracts of the galaxy and would extract energy from many star
systems and, possibly, from the accretion discs of black holes. An advanced Type III
civilization might even tap into the ultimate energy source: the super-massive black hole
at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
And where on this scale does the human species reside? Nowhere, unless we
include a “Type 0” possibility. We haven’t made it to Type I yet, being unable to control
such forces of nature as wildfires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, and possibly even
earthquakes and tsunamis. Michio Kaku has a lively, entertaining, and terribly humbling
account of our place in the scheme of things :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA1_BsxOwzU
Recent calculations suggest that human civilization may now be at about 0.7 on the
modified Kardashev Scale, perhaps a century or two away from achieving control of our
planetary environment (but don’t hold your breath; you know what horrors may befall us
long before that happy day comes to pass).
But even though we may be the galactic equivalent of inconsequential bugs, there
is one all-important difference between us and the actual bugs we squash underfoot every
day. We happen to be bugs with large radio telescope arrays and powerful space-based
interferometers. The bacteria in our gut don’t have much of a sense of the organism they
inhabit, but with our observational capability, relatively primitive as it may be on a
galactic scale, we can identify planets hundreds of light years away and obtain precise
spectral emission patterns from stars over much of the galaxy. And there’s the problem.
Advanced civilizations may well not care to communicate with us, may employ
communications systems far beyond our ability to recognize, but their advanced
technologies should be impossible to keep secret. If we accept the premise that energy
demand and consumption increase in step with the evolution of civilizations, then we
must grant the general validity of Kardashev’s theory that a galaxy populated by diverse
sapient life forms would include some which consume energy on a colossal scale. Type
II civilizations, which significantly alter the energy emissions of their home stars, could
be readily identified by virtue of their unnatural spectral readings. And if our galaxy is
home to any Type III civilizations which have colonized major portions of the galaxy and
altered the emissions of a multitude of stars, these would stand out like blazing marquee
lights on a dark night. The heavens would sparkle with stellar beacons impossible for our
astronomers to miss. They would closely resemble a galaxy which I and millions of my
generation experienced vicariously through Isaac Asimov’s thrilling Foundation Trilogy.
24
Probably more than any other mid-century cultural production, Asimov’s novels
predisposed Americans to accept, and even yearn for, a galaxy teeming with sapient life.
The Foundation, however, has not turned up. Fermi’s famous question now
becomes, not only deafening, but blinding. Try as our astronomers might, including the
legion of SETI researchers poised to leap at the slightest flicker of a signal, they have
seen nothing. The heavens are not lit with any unnatural starlight. Where is everybody?
Given the problems outlined above, I think there are now only two possible
answers to Fermi’s question. The most simple, stark answer is that nobody is out there.
Some people, including myself, find that answer terribly depressing. Apart from the
overwhelming feeling of loneliness that comes with the acceptance of a cosmic isolation,
it seems such an incredible, improbable waste that billions and billions of planets are out
there, but not a single other sapient life form. Other people, of a fundamentalist turn of
mind or simply unjustifiably proud of our species’ miserable accomplishments, would
likely rejoice at confirming what they already believe: that the human species is superior
to whatever lesser life forms may be out there; we are The Chosen Ones. It is the
Ozymandias refrain, played in the key of species.
The other answer is perhaps even more disturbing than the first, given our deeply
rooted assumptions about the nature of biological and cultural evolution: Sapient species
millions of years older than us may not have experienced anything resembling our
technological history. Contrary to everything we have come to believe as a result of
several centuries of incredibly rapid technological development, highly advanced sapient
life forms may not (or no longer) feel the need to consume energy at an ever more
voracious rate. They may have devised patterns of existence – “societies” if you like –
which have minimally intrusive effects on their environments. The little green guys may
be really, really green.
Since we have no extrasolar data at our disposal in evaluating this possibility, we
are left, once again, to examine our own circumstances. When we do that, I think the
possibility of low-tech sapience “out there” begins to seem somewhat less improbable.
To begin, it is important to acknowledge that our search for “Other Earths” narrows the
range of possibilities by injecting yet another anthropocentric bias: They must be
something like Us (rather than just, well, Something). And so astronomers tune their
instruments to accomplish the extremely difficult task of identifying small, rocky planets
orbiting distant stars, planets that might support, in the classic phrase, “life as we know
it.” But there are other possibilities. Gas giant planets, such as Jupiter, seem a fixture of
the extrasolar world; some of these could host complex chemical processes based on
methane rather than carbon and water, processes that could be self-replicating, selfmodifying, and therefore “alive.” Another possibility, an intriguing and extreme
speculation put forward by the eminent astrophysicist Fred Hoyle (who first described the
nucleosynthesis process which makes stars shine) is that interstellar gaseous nebulae,
many of which contain complex organic molecules, have the capacity to evolve into
25
living beings. Hoyle wove this idea, which he called “panspermia,” into a gripping
science-fiction novel, The Black Cloud. Hoyle’s Cloud character, however, did engage in
activities which would tip off astronomers surveying the spectral emissions of stars: the
Cloud was headed for the solar system to devour the sun’s energy, an action which may
have proven an inconvenience to the creatures inhabiting the system’s third planet.
Methane or silicon-based life forms, sapient interstellar gas clouds – these are
indeed highly speculative, but perhaps not so extreme when viewed in the context of
biological evolution right here on Earth. Where and how did life originate on our planet,
at a time when global volcanism had barely subsided and the planet was clothed in toxic
gases? The best evidence is that it did not appear, as Charles Darwin proposed, in “some
warm little pond,” a pond much like Darwin, the country gentleman, might have
picnicked by with his brood on a balmy day in the English spring. No, life, in the form of
archaen organisms or extremophiles, probably first appeared in the deepest oceans,
clustered around hydrothermal vents belching hydrogen sulfide and boiling water. It has
only recently been determined that the Archaea form a new and separate Domain of life,
alongside Bacteria and Eukaryotes (the latter which includes all macrocellular organisms
such as plants and animals). Quite literally, life is borne of fire and brimstone. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaea . Limited as it is, our own biological history reveals
the great range of possibilities for the appearance and evolution of life. We should
therefore try to keep our preconceptions in check when we turn our eyes from our
birthplace, the deep-sea Hades of hydrothermal vents, to the stars.
One preconception we have not let go of in our search for extraterrestrial
intelligence is that most of our thinking strongly emphasizes the terrestrial aspect of that
topic. Our telescopes and interferometers are busily searching out “Earth-like” planets
within a star’s “habitable zone,” that is, small, rocky planets which can support liquid
water on their surface. Water, rather than methane or molecules in interstellar gas clouds,
is essential for the evolution of carbon-based organisms such as ourselves. Yet waterbased life itself is pretty much left out of the research protocols of SETI researchers, and
quite understandably. It is conceivable that highly evolved, sapient species exist in the
aquatic environments of Earth-like exoplanets, but they haven’t quite got around to
constructing radio transmitters and radio telescopes. I believe this possibility represents a
severe, possibly crippling limitation to the SETI Project. A defining characteristic of
humanity is what I have called an artifactual intelligence (see, again, Chapter 3 of
American Dreamtime). We are what we are only because, long, long before Homo
sapiens sapiens appeared on the scene, our hominid ancestors were fashioning finelyworked stone tools and using fire. Our innermost nature, our identity as a sapient species,
is bound up with our artifactual facility; tools are not an external accessory but basic
components of our neural and cerebral functions.
Inhabiting land rather than water would seem to be a requirement for developing
anything remotely resembling our own technology. No matter how smart you (or they)
26
are, it’s pretty hard to get a cooking fire going at fifty fathoms, and forget about smelting
metal for implements (f’gitaboutit as our old friends the Sopranos would say). And yet
we tend to ignore just how transitory and precarious a land-based existence is. Again, we
have only our own situation to examine, but it is a telling one. We know that life
originated in the oceans, which now cover about three-quarters of the earth’s surface,
over three billion years ago. A great deal of evolution went on there before, around 550
million years ago, the first small, worm-like organisms began to burrow in the muddy
shorelines of a land mass utterly devoid of life. The history of life on land is but a small
fraction of that of life in the water. And halfway through its history, the End-Permian
mass extinction, more widely known as The Great Dying, obliterated some seventy per
cent of all terrestrial vertebrate species. An aquatic environment is a far more stable
setting for long-term biological evolution than a terrestrial habitat, but, as is obvious, that
imposes severe limitations on the course such evolution can take. Employing that gold
standard of (pop) science, the “law of averages,” we would reasonably expect that sapient
life forms are much more likely to evolve and survive in a watery world, cut off from the
inquiries of terrestrial aliens such as ourselves.
Even among land-based species here on Earth, it is sobering to reflect on how
very few possess what I have called an artifactual intelligence. And those few,
intriguingly, are spread haphazardly among the Animalian kingdom – it is simply not the
case that the ability to construct implements and environments is an attribute of what we
like to think of as the most highly evolved, i.e., human-like, species. Apart from
ourselves and, of all things, the beaver, mammalian artifactuality (forgive the pedantic
coinage) is extremely limited. A number of species dig burrows, elephants use their
trunks to manipulate various objects (including the bones of elephant skeletons), a few
chimpanzee groups use stones to crack open palm nuts, otters employ the same means to
open shells, and that’s about it. Birds, those descendants of dinosaurs, are much more
adept than mammals, for almost all construct some form of nest. In a few species, such
as orioles, weaver birds, and, most impressively, bower birds, these constructions are
very elaborate and well beyond the ability of any mammal to reproduce. But the true
architects of the non-human world are not the usual suspects introduced in any discussion
of animal intelligence; they are the numerous species of spiders, ants, termites, and bees,
which construct elaborate edifices for themselves that, in proportion to body size, dwarf
almost anything humans have put together. If on Earth so few species have the ability to
construct their environment, and those species comprise such a haphazard assortment, it
would seem unreasonable to expect that extraterrestrials would exhibit a different pattern
of accomplishment.
Among aquatic species, as noted above, artifactual production is even more
limited. Some species, such as the octopus, fashion burrows, and the octopus is
additionally endowed and capable since it has tentacles with which to manipulate objects.
Curiously, though, the most strikingly intelligent sea creatures, cetaceans, produce
27
nothing. Lacking grasping limbs and living in the open ocean, they provide the sharpest
contrast to humans in terms of what one might call the radiation of sapience. Dolphin
ethologists, such as Karen Pryor and Kenneth Norris, speak with scientific authority (they
are not the general run of whale huggers) of dolphin societies and dolphin language, but
how very different these intelligent beings are from us. Even if we don’t endorse John
Lilly’s proposal to create a Cetacean seat (tank?) at the United Nations or a Cabinet-level
position, alongside the State Department, for a Department of Cetacean Affairs, we must
acknowledge that the more we learn of dolphins the greater is our appreciation for the
staggering diversity of sapient beings. And if this is the situation right here on planet
Earth, how does one begin to sketch the range of possibilities for exoplanets?
There is yet another potential obstacle standing in the way of SETI researchers as
well as that of astronomers surveying the stellar emissions of distant stars. Even were we
to grant the common argument that advanced sapient beings would possess advanced
technologies, we really have no grounds for believing that those technologies would feed
on enormous amounts of energy and would therefore light up the skies. Again, take our
own technological civilization as a starting place and sounding board. Within just a few
decades the fields of electronics, computer science, and biotechnology have fashioned a
world that would be incomprehensible even to my grandparents’ generation. And as an
individual of a certain age, I (and millions like me) find things pretty incomprehensible
already. A broad-brush characterization of those decades might be that humans
increasingly have moved from a technology based on making things to one which
concentrates on having experiences. In the United States, I would wager than anyone
over the age of twelve (a conservative guesstimate, it’s probably more like six or seven!)
spends far more time staring into and manipulating a television, cellular phone, or
computer monitor (the difference among these is evaporating) than gazing into another
human face. The individual no longer operates a machine; he communicates with it, and
it with him. The dark satanic mills of our industrial world still churn out untold millions
of tons of traditional consumer goods, but those now compete with, and are often eclipsed
by, small, personal devices with which one may interact,. The adjective, “interactive,”
has already become the dominant concept of a post-tech world; our ardent desire is to
communicate, relate to, do things with the little gizmo in our pocket or tucked under our
arm. We don’t just want to own a thing; we want to have experiences with it.
Note that this process, already well underway, involves a not-so-subtle blurring of
the classical opposition, man vs. machine (a struggle, as discussed in American
Dreamtime, enshrined in the story/myth of John Henry, that steel-drivin’ man who died
with a hammer in his hand battling the Company’s machine). The few decades I
mentioned above have taken us from the crudest form of video games, such as Pong and
Pac-Man, through games with increasingly sophisticated and realistic graphics, and now
on to devices such as X-Box 360, WII, and Kinect, in which the individual player is
replicated within the device. The individual quite literally is translated or transformed
28
into a dynamic, responding video image which inhabits and experiences only the
electronic domain generated by the mega-Gigahertz processor at the core of the device.
It is not unfounded speculation to suggest that this trend toward an increasing
synthesis or symbiosis of human biology and machine electronics will continue, and
probably at a faster and faster rate. If more and more of human experience can be
replicated through biotechnological devices, at some point (which we may have reached
already) the desire and, later, actuality will be to cast aside the frail, mortal shell of the
body and enter the immortal realm of circuitry. Heaven on a chip. Science fiction has
provided the most gripping imagery of such a world. In the first of the endless Star Trek
movies, Arthur Clarke describes an immense interstellar being, not unlike Hoyle’s Black
Cloud, which approaches Earth with apparent malevolent intent. Captain Kirk and the
weaponry aboard the Enterprise are powerless against the Object until Spock and a
couple of bright young scientists in the crew hit on a strategy: they make it possible for
the Object to replicate, in exact holographic form, the two young scientists, who then
proceed to act as liaisons between the electronics-based Object and the human “carbon
units” which the Object believes have infested the starship. It regards the human crew as
a parasitic infestation of a being something like itself, the Enterprise, and proposes to do
its new friend (romantic? machine sex, anyone?) a favor by ridding it of that plague.
Even closer to the subject at hand is a sci-fi movie not quite in the league of Arthur
Clarke and Steven Spielberg productions: the 1952 oldie-but-goodie classic, Forbidden
Planet. If one ignores the inane script and characters, the provocative theme of the movie
is that a vanished civilization has abandoned biological existence in favor of assimilation
/ synthesis with immense underground computers which possess enormous energy to
simulate or re-create all of physical experience.
Machines with the power to produce simulations or re-creations of human
experience are really no longer what we conventionally call “machines” (nor are they
what we conventionally call “human”). I would describe them using a term I find
evocative: they are Something Else, some form of alien sapience either yet to come or
already “out there.” The question then becomes, would beings inhabiting such immortal
virtual worlds have the need, desire, or even ability to communicate with other entities
(organic like ourselves or biotechnological like themselves) scattered around the galaxy?
There may be a communications window which imposes rather severe restrictions on
sapient beings, which acts to create what, again following Wittgenstein, we might call
“forms of life.”
In concluding this section, consider a little thought experiment:
………………………………….
In the not-too-distant future the SETI Project secures truly windfall funding.
Imitating the object of their attentions, Project administrators decide that they should
construct a starship for themselves. They produce one capable of indefinitely sustaining
crew members through cryogenic suspension, just as in Signourney Weaver’s Aliens
29
movies, and launch the starship in the direction of the nearest Earth-like planet. Now,
with no Star Trek-like warp drive and with interstellar distances being what they are, it
takes a long, long time for the starship to arrive at its destination, let’s say around 10,000
years. Those ages pass, the crew is awakened by the ship’s computer and, after limbering
up, set about their task to survey the planets of the new star system. But first they need to
check in with their SETI Project leaders back on Earth. And fortunately, although their
starship does not have warp drive, humans have mastered greater-than-light speed radio
transmission. They send off their report and wait the half-hour required to receive an
answer. For a time, silence; nothing but the interstellar hiss of hydrogen atoms. Then an
image appears on the ship’s communications monitor: a woman dressed in a peculiar
tunic/uniform. She proceeds to address them:
“The SETI telescope array has received your transmission. We
congratulate you on the completion of your long voyage, and hope that
you are well. I come to you by means of a message-disc recorded some
4,000 years after your ship’s departure. The SETI monitoring system has
been deactivated since that time, except that it has been programmed to
receive and respond to any transmission received on your ship’s
frequency. The news I bring you is of great importance and, I am sure,
will come as a severe shock to you. Some 4,000 years after you left Earth,
remarkable advances in computer science and biotechnology presented us
with a momentous opportunity: the human population of the planet could
be wholly assimilated by the global network of supercomputers,
synthesized as virtual beings capable of an indefinitely long existence and
of all conceivable experiences. Since the social and environmental
problems you had known became immeasurably worse in the centuries
following your departure, all the world’s people elected to become part of
this new electro-organic Community. Upon entering that Community, we
arranged for our physical beings to be . . . extinguished. Since the
supercomputers that serve as our host are located deep underground and
are impervious to natural disasters, our only concern is that a space-going
sapient life form might reach Earth and interfere with the biotechnological
system which sustains us. Therefore, we have created automated devices,
in the form of extremely powerful laser transmitters, to identify and
destroy any such invasive forms. The one exception we have made to this
policy is that, in the event you re-program your ship to return to Earth, you
would be allowed to land at a designated Synthesis Station and be
transformed into full members of our Community. Otherwise, regrettably,
you must be destroyed to avoid any possible disruption to our system.
Alternatively, should your exploratory voyage discover another habitable
planet, you might wish to colonize it. I’m sure you will understand our
30
reasoning on this matter, difficult as that may be for you. And please
know that the seeming harshness of our policy is not intended to detract
from your magnificent accomplishment. Unless you do return to Earth
and enter Earth orbit, your ship will receive no further transmission from
us. We wish you well.”
The ship’s crew, consisting of three men and three women, turn away from the
communications monitor with mixed expressions of alarm and despair. As they reflect
on the sobering news, they happen to glance at the display bank of the planetary survey
they had initiated before receiving the broadcast. One monitor shows a small planet, blue
tinged with swatches of brown and green. The spectroscopic data array for the planet
indicates a breathable concentration of oxygen and nitrogen. The crew members gaze
deeply into each others’ eyes . . .
………………………………….
Nietzsche’s Abyss.
And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Of all the eminently quotable passages from Nietzsche’s remarkable oeuvre, his
haunting admonition about the abyss is perhaps cited only a bit less frequently than his
notorious “God is dead.” remark. But while his anti-Christian position is clearly laid out
in most of his writings and provides a context for his “God” remark, there is not a
comparable background within which to situate his provocative warning about the abyss.
Apart from sending a cerebral chill through the perceptive reader, what exactly did
Nietzsche intend by his statement?
The quotation invites a variety of interpretations, but here I would like to
emphasize its relevance for our inquiry into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In
pursuing this line of thought, I do not claim to identify the meaning of the remark, if any
such definitive meaning exists.
For our purposes here, I believe the remark illuminates, in the most glaring light,
Nietzsche’s paramount vision of humanity as inherently inadequate, as a miserable
failure, as a mere transitory phenomenon in a transforming world which might eventually
usher in the only truly moral being, the übermensch. To my knowledge, Nietzsche was
the first philosopher to ground his thinking in a concept of humanity as an evolving entity
with only a limited lifespan. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra he summed up this idea in a
phrase as chilling as his remark about the abyss: “Man is a thing that will pass.” And in
Human, All too Human he proceeded to situate that concept within a philosophical
tradition which lacked it:
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Family failing of philosophers – All philosophers have the common failing
of starting out from man as he is now and thinking they can reach their
goal through an analysis of him. They involuntarily think of ‘man’ as an
aeterna veritas, as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux,
as a sure measure of things. Everything the philosopher has declared about
man is, however, at bottom no more than a testimony as to the man of a
very limited period of time. Lack of historical sense is the family failing of
all philosophers.
From what has gone before, it is clear that this belief in the constancy of humanity
is not only a family failing of philosophers, but of SETI researchers as a group. From
Frank Drake through Carl Sagan and on to the present generation, these scientists, with
their gaze fixed on the heavens, have not subjected their own species and other intelligent
animal species to close inspection. Had they done so, they would have identified
problems of the sort I have discussed in this essay, problems that may have given them
pause, perhaps even shaken their rather doctrinaire resolve.
It may be that the gravest problem of all is the one alluded to in our little thought
experiment. It is the problem of the relation between language and artifact or, phrased
differently, between a linguistic facility and an artifactual intelligence. We should not be
too hard on the SETI researchers here, for they have merely inherited another “family
failing” of Western thinkers, one intimately tied to that Nietzsche criticized. That is the
failing to place language and artifact production on at least an equal footing, if not to
assign primary importance to the latter. I have critiqued this failing in previous works,
and will merely summarize it here. For quite a number of years now it has struck me as
highly ironic, and deeply regrettable, that we typically emphasize the importance of
language and language acquisition in shaping the human mind, in making humanity what
it is today, while skirting the role that two and a half million years of artifact production
played in that process.
I believe the reason for this damaging oversight is rather obvious, and acutely
shameful: it is because those individuals who publicly ponder the nature of the human
mind and human culture are almost without exception “word people.” They are linguists,
philosophers, cultural anthropologists, English professors, professors of comparative
literature – in short, an academic community fiercely self-selected (tenure, anyone?) for
people good with words. They took third and fourth-year literature classes in high school
rather than shop, auto mechanics, and mechanical drawing. Nor did they play much
varsity ball or get on the varsity cheerleader squad. And in college, of course, these nerds
never looked back, never considered that the low-brow kids down in the basement shop
class or out on the football field might be onto something, might be instantiations,
however off-putting their personal appearance and behavior, of something fundamentally
32
human, perhaps more fundamentally human than the language our budding young
scholars esteemed so highly.
We inhabit, as Ernest Gellner intimated in the title of the first of his brilliant
books, a world composed of words and things. That world in turn has shaped us, has
made us a bizarre, composite creature born from biology but not of biology. Our
bilateral (cognatic) inheritance, however, has been obscured by several centuries of
Western-style “learning” – the monkish, insular fussing with words to the exclusion of a
vast surrounding world of human action and experience.
There is nothing wrong in itself with the scholarly pursuit of a topic, but it is
utterly wrong to project the nature of one’s calling onto the subject at hand, particularly
when that subject happens to be the fundamental nature of the human species. Thus we
have Philip Lieberman, an eminent professor of linguistics, publishing a book entitled
Uniquely Human, whose astonishing conclusion is that it is language which makes us
“uniquely human.” Lieberman does not devote a page to the tremendous range of
facilities, of distinct intelligences, our species uniquely possesses. He does not discuss,
and certainly does not engage in any sort of basic ethnography of, such individuals as
auto mechanics, test pilots, major league baseball sluggers and pitchers, concert pianists,
race car drivers, artists, chess prodigies, or even mathematicians. He does not consult
them at all, and those individuals, being who they are, have not dedicated themselves to
writing books about the uniquely human abilities they possess. We do not learn that Ted
Williams, of a long-ago Boston Red Sox team, rose to preeminence in his sport because
he combined superb muscular strength and coordination with a remarkable visual acuity
which enabled him to see the stitches on a fastball hurdling at him. We do not hear about
Chuck Yeager, test pilot and hero of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, who broke the sound
barrier in the X-1 when everyone said it was an impossibility. When he wasn’t piloting
experimental aircraft, Yeager displayed an incidental trait which set him apart, his
“signature,” “written” in the “language” of raw nerve and mechanical aptitude.
Approaching the landing field, he liked to do a fly-by of the control tower, an action
strictly against regulations. Yeager would bring his jet in at over two hundred miles an
hour, some fifty feet above the runway, rattling the windows of the tower and the nerves
of its occupants with the hellish roar of his engines, and, passing the tower, would give it
a wave. If there were any question about the identity of the infractious pilot, that was
dispelled because, you see, Yeager’s plane was flying upside-down. In exploring the
boundaries of the “uniquely human,” it would be interesting, as Yeager’s plane began its
shrieking dive toward the airfield a thousand feet below, somehow to replace the daring
pilot with the good Professor Lieberman. Failing that little experiment, ask a duck-billed
platypus to draw the tree of evolution.
Comparable examples could be added indefinitely. Consider Joe Montana, future
Super Bowl-winning quarterback for the San Francisco Forty-Niners, as a high school
student. He and his father would take a football and go out in a field by their home,
33
where his father would hold up a wire coat hanger, stretched to form a crude rectangle.
From thirty yards away, Joe would put the football through the hanger. Or consider
Bobby Fischer at thirteen, playing a game that has become known in the chess literature
as “the game of the century.” While it is Fischer’s dazzling Queen sacrifice that is
usually mentioned in discussions of the game, a grandmaster commentator has suggested
that a rather puzzling, apparently unassuming Knight move preceding the Queen sacrifice
may have been “the most brilliant move ever played on a chessboard.” Thirteen years
old, and Bobby much too young and too poor a student to asses the profundities found in
Uniquely Human. In a somewhat more orthodox intellectual vein, one might try, in vain,
to relate Lieberman’s theory to the phenomenon of Srinivasa Ramanujan, a mathematical
prodigy so brilliant that historians of mathematics place him in the select company of
Leonhard Euler and Carl Friedrich Gauss. Ramanujan’s story is all the more remarkable
because he was born to a poor family in south India at the turn of the century and lacked
both teachers and mathematical textbooks during early childhood. Upon being exposed
to formal mathematics at the age of ten, he began to produce original theorems in
trigonometry. Over his tragically short lifetime, he proceeded to fill up his famous
Notebooks with equations and theorems which contemporary mathematicians still mine
for insights. Desperately poor, he was awarded a scholarship to a post-secondary school,
which he lost after his first year because he was unable to do the work in his other, liberal
arts classes. Evidently Ramanujan didn’t possess that uniquely human intelligence
esteemed by his teachers in British India.
Of these and many other extraordinary individuals, perhaps the one that contrasts
most starkly with Lieberman’s view is the card-playing sensation, Stuey Ungar. Born
and reared on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Ungar’s father was a loan shark who
operated a bar at which illegal gambling was routine. Stuey thus grew up among
gamblers and hoods, one of whom befriended and became a sort of mentor to him. By
his early teens, having dropped out of school, Ungar was a master of gin rummy and a
fixture of the New York gambling scene. Barely literate, speaking mostly in uniquely
human curses and obscenities, eating his meals, as acquaintances said, “like an animal,”
mortally addicted to cocaine, mocking and taunting his victims, Ungar experienced a
meteoric rise to the summits of the gambling world. In his brief lifetime he won the
World Series of Poker three times, an unmatched record, defeating in heads-up battles
legendary figures of the poker world like Doyle Brunson. A master of blackjack as well,
a casino owner once bet Stuey $100,000 that he could not identify the last card in a sixdeck blackjack shoe, that is, the 312th card to be dealt. As Stuey watched, the dealer
whipped out and flashed the cards in rapid-fire sequence, letting them scatter face-down
on the blackjack table. At the final card the dealer stopped and Stuey called out the three
of spades. The dealer turned over the card. It was the three of spades.
In my view the only way to begin to make sense of this astounding diversity in
human aptitude is to abandon a monolithic theory of intelligence in favor of one that
34
gives due credit to that diversity. The scholarly oxen, as Nietzsche called his former
academic colleagues, in psychology departments who design IQ tests and conduct
experiments designed to yield results already foreseen would do well to broaden their
horizons. As would cultural anthropologists, whose stock in trade, the diversity of
cultures, of multiple systems of meaning, should sensitize them to the enormous range of
human thought and action. In Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences and
subsequent works the psychologist Howard Gardner eloquently makes this proposal.
Language ability, as determined by sitting down at a desk, reading and answering
questions, represents only a fraction of a human cognitive repertoire that includes kinetic,
musical, mathematical, interpersonal, and other distinct orders or faculties of intelligence.
It is an indication of our shortsightedness, rather than our analytical acuity, that we persist
in stacking the deck, to return to Ungar’s world, in favor of individuals who are able to
perform as we would like them to, as good little students, seated at their desks arranged in
tidy rows, parsing sentences and quoting acceptable authors. It is perhaps understandable
though regrettable that psychologists, linguists, and, of course, English professors, should
adopt this outlook, but it is a major intellectual scandal that cultural anthropologists have
acquiesced in it as well. While, mercifully, I am not a diligent scholar, I have searched
the anthropological literature for any significant use of Gardner’s theory, to no avail.
Crunch Time (X 2). This essay has left things in a state of ruin; hopefully even
that result will prove edifying. More edifying, I would argue, than the deeply flawed
SETI Project or the nattering squabble the once-promising field of cultural anthropology
has become. It is a bitterly ironic pill to swallow that both these areas of inquiry, the one
focusing on the vast panorama of the stars and the other on the broad sweep of all the
world’s cultures, should reveal themselves to be essentially myopic, narrow-minded,
provincial, in a word, inadequate to the tasks they set themselves. They founder on two
major issues: the relationship between language and sapience; and the integrality and
persistence of the human species. SETI researchers sift through mountains of data
searching for a message, while cultural anthropologists collect myths and record
conversations searching for the meaning, the interconnectedness, in the words of their
ethnographic subjects. Therein lies the problem. Here is the first zinger, the first crunch:
Suppose that language, far from being the definitive trait, not only of humanity, but of
sapience generally, is just a kind of hiccup, a speed bump, in the continuing (d)evolution
of a particular sapient species (ourselves) and, just perhaps, of a limited number of other
sapient species scattered around the galaxy? We have seen that our intellectual myopia,
really, our bigotry, has led us to ignore both the brief involvement our species has had
with a fully-developed language (fifty thousand or so years out of some three million
years of hominid evolution) and the tremendous range of contemporary human
performance which is quite independent of language use. And there is every indication
that language, in any presently recognizable form, is on its way out. We’ve experienced
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the Lost Generation, the Me Generation, the X-Generation, and are now well into the egeneration. Language is “uniquely human”? Say goodnight, Phil!
Here is the second zinger, the second crunch (danke to Fritz): Humanity itself,
considered as a coherent entity, has already disappeared. The “human species” is a
fiction. In fact, as Nietzsche remarked long ago, there has never been a being you could
point to and call “Man.” Humanity is and has always been a transitory phenomenon, a
couple of seconds in the life of the galaxy, an entity that came from Something Else and is
now barreling headlong into an utterly unknown and probably unknowable Something
Else. “We” are already so diverse, so discrepant in our sapient abilities that it is a
meaningless exercise to attempt to draw a neat line separating the human from the nonhuman. “We” are simply too fragmented, too smeared (as quantum physicists say) across
the vast manifold of sentience for that to be possible. All the king’s horses and all the
king’s men . . . The earnest folks at SETI need only to wait around a couple of thousand
years (if that), pretty much the turnaround time for a signal beamed to and from a distant
extrasolar system, and they will discover their aliens. Those beings, or that entity, will be
wholly alien, wholly unrecognizable, and may well not “communicate” in anything
resembling “messages.” But they will be there, nonetheless. For “they” will be what has
become of the human species. E. T. won’t have to phone home; he’ll already be home.
Only “he” will probably lack bilateral symmetry and perhaps even the DNA discovered
in Spielberg’s movie version. E. T. will most likely be an “it,” a Something Else.
In conclusion, this is the perspective I would bring to the interpretation of
Nietzsche’s abyss. Before I began to think long and hard about the question of
extraterrestrial intelligence, I took Nietzsche to mean that a penetrating examination of
the essential ugliness of humanity – its meanness, its hypocrisy, its claustrophobic
smallness – inevitably rebounded to oneself. As a perceptive, deeply thoughtful being,
Nietzsche, and those few independent thinkers somewhat like him, could not but sense
the vestigial taint, the stench, of those human-all-too-human qualities within themselves.
I continue to think this is a valid interpretation, perhaps even what Nietzsche actually
intended. But there is something more. There is Something Else. If language itself is to
be rejected as an instrument or standard for understanding, and if one, like Nietzsche,
relies on his mastery of language to formulate his thoughts, what then is the status, the
worth, the possible validity of those thoughts? Don’t they have to be discarded, thrown
under the wheels of an essentially non-linguistic cosmos barreling along helter-skelter?
There are passages in Zarathustra, which I have cited elsewhere, that indicate Nietzsche
himself came to this conclusion. Finally, a discredited language is left to deal with an
impossibly variegated subject: a writhing, amoeba-like humanity which lacks any
coherence or permanence. In reflecting on this, the deeply thoughtful individual cannot
help but realize that the incredible diversity of his species is contained, imprisoned,
struggling for release, within himself. The individual’s “identity,” his “personality,” is a
turbulent mix of utterly incompatible experiences: child, adolescent, student, teacher,
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lover, spouse, parent, businessman, soldier, religious believer or, just possibly, doubter.
All these and other discrepant identities are not mere “social roles” as preached by a
pathetically inadequate American sociology; they are incompatible, deeply confused, and
often warring beings locked inside a crammed darkness (as Merleau-Ponty described the
human body). Or, as Walt Whitman wrote in a loftier turn of mind in Leaves of Grass,
“each of us contains multitudes.” In subjecting the transient jumble of humanity to a
penetrating analysis, the undeniable truth looms up that just such a transient jumble is
contained within oneself, is what passes for one’s self. And when you gaze long into an
abyss . . .
But it was fun while it lasted. We really got blasted!
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