The Gold of the Gods (15 page)
The inevitable development of such series of experiments is to couple a solo brain to a computer. Thus the Californian brain specialist Dr. Lawrence Pinneo replaced a small part of a monkey’s brain with a computer. It was then possible to control the animal’s arm movements through the intermediary of the computer.
Professor José Delgado of Yale University went a stage further. He sank several probes into the aggression center of the brain of Paddy, a female monkey, and in addition put a tiny radio transmitter under the skin of her head. If Paddy got furious, Delgado pressed some buttons on the control set and the lady monkey (who incidentally suffered no pain throughout the whole process) at once became as quiet as a lamb.
The London brain surgeon Professor Giles Brindley is already working on human brains. Brindley implanted eighty tiny electrodes in the soft brain matter of a blind old lady and she can already recognize geometrical figures again. At the University Clinic in New Orleans, three men had electrodes implanted in their sexual center. Using a control set which they could carry in their trousers pockets or hide under their pillows, they could be in fighting form for the sexual act in a flash. These technical aphrodisiacs may have a tremendous future in our stress-troubled male world.
Bio-engineering is still a very young offshoot of the established sciences, but it is coming on rapidly under the pressure of necessity. The development of bio-engineering is still in its infancy. Will it succeed in building a Cyborg, a combination of solo brain and computer? Undoubtedly it will. Dr. R. M. Page, Director of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, has seriously discussed the project of feeding a computer with ideas, plans and commands via a solo brain—free of all influences. When is this project to become reality? Professor Robert L. Sinsheimer, California Institution of Technology, Pasadena, USA, has this general observation to make:
“The history of the natural sciences and technology has shown, especially in this century, that scientists, particularly the conservative ones, have nearly always erred when they tried to predict the rate at which the new theoretical findings of scientific research are put into practice.”
The Cyborg will inevitably have to come, because the dozen billion nerve cells, multiplied by the hundred billion cells in the supporting web of the nervous system, are the only ones in a position to store and make use of the knowledge of the present for the future. What the 45 1/2 to 64 ounces of our brain mass really contains will not be known until there has been much more work in this broad new field of research. It will take a Cyborg to show that until now only a small fraction of the tremendous storage capacity of our gray cells has been used.
It should need no commentary to make clear how important brain research and brain surgery are for the well-being of mankind. But it is also obvious how important these results of medical research are for future space travel. There are two possibilities for the technical reach for the stars. If we do not succeed during the next decades in building propulsion units which can take spaceships close to the speed of light (186,283 miles per second), then a journey by human astronauts even to the nearest fixed star, Proxima Centauri, is impossible. It is 4.3 light years away from us and 3,000 terrestrial years of cosmic flight are an absurd conception. However, time as the giant hurdle in the way of successful cosmic flight
can
be overcome by the Cyborg. The solo brain, linked to a computer and given a constant supply of blood, will be the control center of a spaceship. In the view of Roger A. McGowan, a practical scientist, the Cyborg will be developed into an electronic being whose functions are programmed in a solo brain and transformed into orders by the brain. The Cyborg does not change, does not fall ill, does not catch cold, has no lapses of memory. It would be the ideal commanding officer of a spaceship. And the unbridgeable gap between us and the stars out of a sea of time would be spanned.
Up to that date, the year that opened up the heavens, the following were the successfully launched
unmanned
space flights.
| | USA | USSR |
| In orbit round the earth | 529 | 272 |
| Moon hits | 12 | 6 |
| Moon orbits | 6 | 5 |
| Venus hits | — | 2 |
| Sun orbits | 11 | 8 |
manned
spaceflights.
| Flights | 15 | 9 |
| Times round earth | 840 | 310 |
| Flying hours in space | 2773 | 533 |
In the spring of 1973 Skylab, the first world space station and Wernher von Braun’s “favorite child,” will leave Houston.
Whereas on all the previous Apollo flights every pound of weight was grudged—each pound of payload needed 2,360 pounds of fuel—Skylab will offer a degree of comfort on its four-week journey through space that might have been invented by science-fiction authors. It will be 45 feet long and 19 1/2 feet wide, and the astronauts will have a workroom and a sleeping cabin at their disposal, not to mention a bathroom supplied from a tank containing 600 gallons of water. The refrigerators hold a ton of selected foodstuffs. The astronauts will not only be in permanent contact with Houston by radio and television as before, they will also be able to type the results of their scientific missions on 160 rolls of telex paper and telex them to earth. And so that the astronauts do not have to wear the same clothes all the time, Skylab will have an extensive wardrobe with 60 items of clothing.
What an outcry I should have heard if I had foretold Skylab for 1973 in
Chariots of the Gods?
in 1968!
Then Pioneer F will leave our solar system.
The launching of the ship alone with a weight of nearly 600 pounds caused a sensation in the technology of space travel. With a three-stage Atlas Centaur rocket it had to be accelerated to 32,500 miles per hour so that the right ballistic curve—passing Jupiter with extreme accuracy—could be reached. This feat has broken all speed records. Pioneer F has an especially significant technical novelty on board. As sunlight in the vicinity of Jupiter has only l/27th of the force it has on earth, it has not been possible to build solar batteries for storing the sun’s energy. For the first time a tiny atomic power-station will be constructed for Pioneer F. The reactors will be driven by plutonium 238 dioxide and the energy produced will suffice with its wattage to send radio signals to earth on the 28 quadrillion (=1015) kilometer-long space flight.
The data that Pioneer F will supply, however important they may be at the beginning of the age of inquiry and research into the outer planets, do not interest me as much as the aluminum and gold plaquette that Pioneer F has on board. The American astrophysicist and exobiologist Carl Sagan of Cornell University and Frank Drake of the United States Astronomical Research Center persuaded NASA that a gold-covered aluminum plaque measuring 6 inches by 12 inches by 1/2 inch should be placed in the ship so that extra-terrestrial intelligences that might encounter Pioneer F could extract information from it.
The text of the message could not be written in any of the languages known to us, because it is 100 per cent certain that it would not be understood. So Sagan and Drake developed a sign language which in their view ought to be intelligible to all thinking beings.
What should the plaque’s message be? It should say where Pioneer F came from; who sent Pioneer F out into space; when it was launched and what its home planet was, among other things.
At the foot of the plaque there is a picture of the sun and its nine planets, an “image” that does not have to be deciphered, as every intelligence knows them. The distances of the planets from the sun are given in binary numbers. For example, if Mercury has a distance from the sun of ten binary units (expressed by 10 10), the earth is 26 units, or 11 0 10, distant from the sun. As the binary system of counting is the “language” of all logically constructed computers, Sagan and Drake say that it is the one that could be most readily understood by alien intelligences. On the right of the plaque the outline of Pioneer F on its flight path from earth to Jupiter is schematically engraved. Above it are a man and a woman in a standing position. The man raises his right hand in the peace sign. The left half shows the position of the sun with 14 lines, cosmic sources of energy, which are supposed to explain by the sun’s position both the launching date and the home of the ship using binary notations. An atom of hydrogen, which has been proved to have an identical structure in all worlds is drawn in the upper left-hand corner as the “key” to deciphering all the information. An alien intelligence (provided it thought in a technical way) could even work out the size of the woman’s body from it! The wavelength of the hydrogen atom in spectrum analysis (which radiates symbolically from the sun on the plaque with a line 20.3 centimeters long) is multiplied by the binary figure 10 00, which is marked next to the lady and corresponds to an “8.” This gives 8 x 20.3 = 162.4, and that is the height of the Eve on the plaque: 162.4 centimeters!
I met Dr. Frank Drake in New York and asked him why the aluminum plaque had been covered with a layer of gold.
“In theory the ship can cover 28 quadrillion kilometers. It may be 3,000 light years en route (a light year is the distance covered by light in a year and light travels at 186,000 miles a second). If we want to ensure that our plaque can still be deciphered by someone after its long journey, we have to protect it from corrosion with a precious metal. Aluminum covered with gold was the cheapest.”
“For whom is the information on the plaque intended?”
“For any intelligence who happens to locate the ship and then undertakes to examine and interpret it. Sagan and I consider the very fact that we could equip Pioneer F with a cosmic message is a hopeful sign that our civilization is interested enough in the future to actually send out information and not merely await a sign from the universe.”
I think that Sagan and Drake’s enterprise provides a chance of passing information to intelligent scientists on distant planets.
But what happens if this Pioneer plaque lands in a civilization that understands nothing of binary arithmetic and computer technology? Will our unknown brothers in space look on the gold and aluminum plaque as an extraordinary present from the gods up in heaven? Will our alien brothers teach their children to make similar “images”? Will they themselves make imitations and set them up in their temples? Will archaeologists claim, even out there in space, that the copies are ritual objects? Who knows what other interpretations might be given to the Cape Kennedy plaque?
If scientists in the year 1972 send two naked members of our species, plus suns, lines and circles, into the universe on a shining plaque, why should not extraterrestrial beings 3,000 light years away have brought
us
similar messages or variations of them on a similar journey? If I put the Pioneer F’s plaque next to the Inca gold plaque and compare the signs under a magnifying glass, I ask myself why someone does not begin to examine and check all these circles, lines, zigzags, squares and dotted lines with the eyes of space-age men. Perhaps they could even be deciphered.
Surely the chances of success would make it worth the effort?
Chariots of the Gods?
I briefly mentioned the possibility that the speed of light might not necessarily be the upper limit of all velocity. This frivolous suggestion was met with icy silence, because everyone knew that Einstein had proved that there was nothing faster than light. Einstein has shown that light is a universal constant. Nevertheless, he takes the factor
t = time
into account in his formula. For example, the time in a rocket passes more quickly or slowly depending on the condition of motion, distances alter and the upper limit of the speed of light shifts. This says
nothing
counter to the theory of relativity, which proves conclusively and for all time that a body which moves below the speed of light can
never
exceed the speed of light with an expenditure of finite energy. But what happens with the expenditure of infinite energy?
Today physicists and astronomers actually confirm that the speed of light is
not
the upper limit of all motion. Professor Y. A. Wheeler of Princeton University, USA, who is an expert on the relativity theory and was a codiscoverer of the hydrogen bomb, and therefore is no visionary, invented a model of a “super-space” in which time and the speed of light lose their values. However contradictory it may seem, spaceships in the super-space could be in any desired place without time passing.
Does that mean theoretically all the possibilities for interstellar space flight exist? Perhaps. At some time in the future. With the discovery of the subatomic particles called tachyons, luxons and tardyons, a new subatomic world swam into the physicists’ ken. All these particles move faster than light within their inertial system (this means a system in which there are no forces to overcome inertia, but in which a body remains in a state of rest or in uniform motion). Tachyons, luxons and tardyons always move faster than light. Consequently existing calculations of energy no longer apply to these particles because they are faster than light “by nature.” Our world, in which the speed of light is the upper limit of velocity, is
one
inertial system, but the world of tachyons, luxons and tardyons with a velocity faster than light is
another
inertial system.
