The Future of the Mind (48 page)

In 2011, Stephen Hawking raised another question. The noted cosmologist made headlines when he said that we must be prepared for a possible alien attack. He said that if we ever encounter an alien civilization, it will be more advanced than ours and hence will pose a mortal threat to our very existence.

We have only to see what happened to the Aztecs when they encountered the bloodthirsty Hernán Cortés and his conquistadors to imagine what might happen with such a fateful encounter. Armed with technology that the Bronze Age Aztecs had never seen before, such as iron swords, gunpowder, and the horse, this small band of cutthroats was able to crush the ancient Aztec civilization in a matter of months in 1521.

All this raises these questions: What will alien consciousness be like? How will their thinking process and goals differ from ours? What do they want?

FIRST CONTACT IN THIS CENTURY

This is not an academic question. Given the remarkable advances in astrophysics, we may actually make contact with an alien intelligence in the coming decades. How we respond to them could determine one of the most pivotal events in human history.

Several advances are making this day possible.

First, in 2011 the Kepler satellite, for the first time in history, gave scientists a “census” of the Milky Way galaxy. After analyzing light from thousands
of stars, the Kepler satellite found that one in two hundred might harbor an earthlike planet in the habitable zone. For the first time, we can therefore calculate how many stars within the Milky Way galaxy might be earthlike: about a billion. As we look at the distant stars, we have genuine reason to wonder if anyone is looking back at us.

So far, more than one thousand exoplanets have been analyzed in detail by earthbound telescopes. (Astronomers find them at the rate of about two exoplanets per week.) Unfortunately, nearly all of them are Jupiter-size planets, probably devoid of any earthlike creatures, but there are a handful of “super earths,” rocky planets that are a few times larger than Earth. Already, the Kepler satellite has identified about 2,500 candidate exoplanets in space, a handful of which look very much like Earth. These planets are at just the right distance from their mother stars so that liquid oceans can exist. And liquid water is the “universal solvent” that dissolves most organic chemicals like DNA and proteins.

In 2013, NASA scientists announced their most spectacular discovery using the Kepler satellite: two exoplanets that are near twins of Earth. They are located 1,200 light-years away in the constellation Lyra. They are only 60 percent and 40 percent larger than Earth. More important, both lie within the habitable zone of their mother star, so there is a possibility that they have liquid oceans. Of all the planets analyzed so far, they are the closest to being mirror images of Earth.

Furthermore, the Hubble Space Telescope has given us an estimate of the total number of galaxies in the visible universe: one hundred billion. Therefore, we can calculate the number of earthlike planets in the visible universe: one billion times one hundred billion, or one hundred quintillion earthlike planets.

This is a truly astronomical number, so the odds of life existing in the universe are astronomically large, especially when you consider that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and there has been plenty of time for intelligent empires to rise—and perhaps fall. In fact, it would be more miraculous if another advanced civilization did
not
exist.

SETI AND ALIEN CIVILIZATIONS

Second, radio telescope technology is becoming more sophisticated. So far, only about one thousand stars have been closely analyzed for signs of intelligent
life, but in the coming decade this number could rise by a factor of one million.

Using radio telescopes to hunt for alien civilizations dates back to 1960, when astronomer Frank Drake initiated Project Ozma (after the Queen of Oz), using the twenty-five-meter radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia. This marked the birth of the SETI project (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Unfortunately, no signals from aliens were picked up, but in 1971 NASA proposed Project Cyclops, which was supposed to have 1,500 radio telescopes at a cost of $10 billion.

Not surprisingly, it never went anywhere. Congress was not amused.

Funding did become available for a much more modest proposal: to send a carefully coded message in 1971 to aliens in outer space. A coded message containing 1,679 bits of information was transmitted via the giant Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico toward the Globular Cluster M13, about 25,100 light-years away. It was the world’s first cosmic greeting card, containing relevant information about the human race. But no reply message was received. Perhaps the aliens were not impressed with us, or possibly the speed of light got in the way. Given the large distances involved, the earliest date for a reply message would be 52,174 years from now.

Since then, some scientists have expressed misgivings about advertising our existence to aliens in space, at least until we know their intentions toward us. They disagree with the proponents of the METI Project (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) who actively promote sending signals to alien civilizations in space. The reasoning behind the METI Project is that Earth already sends vast amounts of radio and TV signals into outer space, so a few more messages from the METI Project will not make much difference. But the critics of METI believe that we should not needlessly increase our chances of being discovered by potentially hostile aliens.

In 1995, astronomers turned to private sources to start the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, to centralize research and initiate Project Phoenix, which is trying to study one thousand nearby sunlike stars in the 1,200-to-3,000-megahertz radio range. The equipment is so sensitive that it can pick up the emissions from an airport radar system two hundred light-years away. Since its founding, the SETI Institute has scanned more than one thousand stars at a cost of $5 million per year, but still no luck.

A more novel approach is the SETI@home project, initiated by astronomers
at the University of California at Berkeley in 1999, which uses an informal army of millions of amateur PC owners. Anyone can join in this historic hunt. While you are sleeping at night, your screen saver crunches some of the data pouring in from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. So far, it has signed up 5.2 million users in 234 countries; perhaps these amateurs dream that they will be the first in human history to make contact with alien life. Like Columbus’s, their names may go down in history. The SETI @home project has grown so rapidly that it is, in fact, the largest computer project of this type ever undertaken.

When I interviewed Dr. Dan Wertheimer, director of SETI@home, I asked him
how they can distinguish false messages from real ones. He said something that surprised me. He told me that they sometimes deliberately “seed” the data from radio telescopes with fake signals from an imaginary intelligent civilization. If no one picks up these fake messages, then they know that there is something wrong with their software. The lesson here is that if your PC screen saver announces that it has deciphered a message from an alien civilization, please do not immediately call the police or the president of the United States. It might be a fake message.

ALIEN HUNTERS

One colleague of mine who has dedicated his life to finding intelligent life in outer space is Dr. Seth Shostak, director of the SETI Institute. With his Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology, I might have expected him to become a distinguished physics professor lecturing to eager Ph.D. students, but instead he spends his time in an entirely different fashion: asking for donations to the SETI Institute from wealthy individuals, poring over possible signals from outer space, and doing a radio show.
I once asked him about the “giggle factor”—do fellow scientists giggle when he tells them that he listens to aliens from outer space? Not anymore, he claims. With all the new discoveries in astronomy, the tide has turned.

In fact, he even sticks his neck out and says flatly that we will make contact with an alien civilization in the very near future.
He has gone on record as proclaiming that the 350-antenna Allen Telescope Array now being built “will trip across a signal by the year 2025.”

Isn’t that a bit risky, I asked him? What makes him so sure? One factor
working in his favor has been the explosion in the number of radio telescopes in the last few years. Although the U.S. government does not fund his project, the SETI Institute recently hit pay dirt when it convinced Paul Allen (the Microsoft billionaire) to donate over $30 million in funds to start the Allen Telescope Array at Hat Creek, California, 290 miles north of San Francisco. It currently scans the heavens with 42 radio telescopes, and eventually will reach up to 350. (One problem, however, is the chronic lack of funding for these scientific experiments. To make up for budget cuts, the Hat Creek facility is kept alive through partial funding from the military.)

One thing, he confessed to me, makes him squirm a bit, and that is when people confuse the SETI Project with UFO hunters. The former, he claims, is based on solid physics and astronomy, using the latest in technology. The latter, however, base their theories on anecdotal hearsay evidence that may or may not be based on truth. The problem is that the mass of UFO sightings he gets in the mail are not reproducible or testable. He urges anyone who claims to have been abducted by aliens in a flying saucer to steal something—an alien pen or paperweight, for example—to prove your case. Never leave a UFO empty-handed, he told me.

He also concludes that there is no firm evidence that aliens have visited our planet. I then asked him whether he thought the U.S. government was deliberately covering up evidence of an alien encounter, as many conspiracy theorists believe. He replied, “Would they really be so efficient at covering up a big thing like this?
Remember, this is the same government that runs the post office.”

DRAKE’S EQUATION

When I asked Dr. Wertheimer why he is so sure that there is alien life in outer space, he replied that the numbers are in his favor. Back in 1961, astronomer Frank Drake tried to estimate the number of such intelligent civilizations by making plausible assumptions. If we start with the number one hundred billion, the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, then we can estimate the fraction of them that are similar to our sun. We can reduce that number further by estimating the fraction of them that have planets, the fraction of them that have earthlike planets, etc. After making a number of reasonable assumptions, we come up with an estimate of ten thousand advanced civilizations
in our own Milky Way galaxy. (Carl Sagan, with a different set of estimates, came up with the number one million.)

Since then, scientists have been able to make much better estimates of the number of advanced civilizations in our galaxy. For example, we know there are more planets orbiting stars than Drake originally expected, and more earthlike planets as well. But we still face a problem. Even if we know how many earthlike twins there are in space, we still don’t know how many of them support intelligent life. Even on Earth, it took 4.5 billion years before intelligent beings (us) finally arose from the swamp. For about 3.5 billion years, life-forms have existed on Earth, but only in the last one hundred thousand years or so have intelligent beings like us emerged. So even on an earthlike planet like Earth itself, the rise of truly intelligent life has been very difficult.

WHY DON’T THEY VISIT US?

But then I asked Dr. Seth Shostak of SETI this killer question: If there are so many stars in the galaxy, and so many alien civilizations, then why don’t they visit us? This is the Fermi paradox, named for Enrico Fermi, the Nobel laureate who helped build the atomic bomb and unlocked the secrets of the nucleus of the atom.

Many theories have been proposed. For one, the distance between stars might be too great. It would take about seventy thousand years for our most powerful chemical rockets to reach the stars nearest to Earth. Perhaps a civilization thousands to millions of years more advanced than ours may solve this problem, but there’s another possibility. Maybe they annihilated themselves in a nuclear war. As John F. Kennedy once said, “I am sorry to say there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.”

But perhaps the most logical reason is this: Imagine walking down a country road and encountering an ant hill. Do we go down to the ants and say, “I bring you trinkets. I bring you beads. I give you nuclear energy. I will create an ant paradise for you. Take me to your leader”?

Probably not.

Now imagine that workers are building an eight-lane superhighway next to the anthill. Would the ants know what frequency the workers are talking
on? Would they even know what an eight-lane superhighway was? In the same fashion, any intelligent civilization that can reach Earth from the stars would be thousands of years to millions of years ahead of us, and we may have nothing to offer them. In other words, we are arrogant to believe that aliens will travel trillions upon trillions of miles just to see us.

More than likely, we are not on their radar screen. Ironically, the galaxy could be teaming with intelligent life-forms and we are so primitive that we are oblivious of them.

FIRST CONTACT

But assume for the moment that the time will come, perhaps sooner rather than later, when we make contact with an alien civilization. This moment could be a turning point in the history of humanity. So the next questions are: What do they want, and what will their consciousness be like?

In the movies and in science-fiction novels, the aliens often want to eat us, conquer us, mate with us, enslave us, or strip our planet of valuable resources. But all this is highly improbable.