What Do You Say to a Naked Alien?
The spaceship comes down in your backyard, crushing
a bed of petunias, and out steps the alien. This is always an awkward social
moment. What, exactly, do you say to someone who may hold the secrets to the
universe? After, that is, you finish quivering and quaking and wondering if he
(she? it?) is going to suck you down like a raw oyster?
Obviously you would want
to get some information out of the alien--no easy trick, to judge from most
alien-encounter narratives. The aliens who show up in the middle of the night
and abduct people are notoriously stingy with information. They never solve any
mathematical equations. They don't offer up the long-sought simple and
"elegant" proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. They don't tell us where Jimmy Hoffa
is buried.
When aliens do communicate with humans, they're always a
bit like the Michael Rennie alien in the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood
Still : They tell us to behave. They say we need to get our act together.
They're self-help gurus. A fellow named Darryl Anka channeled an alien named
Bashar for many years, and Bashar, though wise, didn't really have much data to
offer, just advice on how to live a better life. (Anka, when I last spoke to
him, said he'd given up channeling Bashar and was working on designing a UFO
theme park.)
There's a scene in Carl
Sagan's excellent novel Contact when Ellie Arroway, his protagonist,
whooshes down some kind of intragalactic "wormhole" and winds up on a sunny
beach, face to face with an alien. The alien, annoyingly, doesn't seem to know
who built that wormhole subway system. Eventually Arroway gets around to asking
what is no doubt her most urgent question: "I want to know what you think of
us, what you really think."
Wow. That's really the wrong question there. That's blowing
it big time. This gal crosses half the galaxy and is tossed and rattled
around to within an inch of her life, and when it's over she starts fishing for
a compliment!
No, a better question to an alien would be: What
are you made of? Are you based on carbon and liquid water? Do you have
DNA as your information-bearing molecule or something like it?
Stephen Jay Gould put it this way, on Timothy
Ferris' recent PBS program Life Beyond Earth : "What's your
biochemistry?"
Some people may argue that other questions should
precede the biological ones. They might, for example, choose a political
question, asking who, exactly, is in charge of this universe. Or they may skew
theological, and ask if there's a God and what exactly he's got on his
mind.
A good argument could be
made that a physicist should pose the first batch of questions to an alien,
asking whether it's possible to go faster than the speed of light and whether
there are other universes outside our own. The physicist and the alien would no
doubt get embroiled in a discussion of string theory, and soon they'd be
jotting down incomprehensible equations about 10-dimensional vibrating loops.
Maybe at the end of the encounter we'd figure out how to yank free energy out
of the quantum vacuum. We'd have a new trick for cooking a hot dog.
My feeling is that the biology questions trump everything
else. We know essentially nothing about life beyond Earth. Because we are
ignorant of other biological systems, we have no context for understanding
Earth life, for knowing to what extent the life we see around us is, on the
cosmic scale, relatively ordinary or totally freakish.
We don't know, for
example, if Earthlike planets are common. We look around our own solar system,
and what appears to be common are planets that have no life whatsoever. We also
see signs that Venus and Mars were once more hospitable to life and over many
hundreds of millions of years became inhospitable. Bad stuff happens to good
planets. It'd be nice to know more about that trend.
We also don't know how life originates and to what extent
it evolves in an orderly pattern. The debate in Kansas over the teaching of
evolution misses the real debates within the field. There are those who argue
passionately that life originated with a single replicated molecule. Another
camp favors the notion that it began with a kind of garbage bag of molecules
that more or less eased its way from nonlife to life. And the biggest question
may be to what extent evolution is divergent or convergent. Divergence gives us
a bewildering variety of life; convergence gives rise, repeatedly, to certain
anatomical features, like wings and eyeballs. You can make an argument that
intelligence is an extremely unlikely, random, quirky event in terrestrial
biology, or you can make the counter-argument that you can see intelligence
coming down the pike from many millions of years in advance. On that issue
hinges the abundance of intelligent life in the universe.
How likely is it that life elsewhere will go
through the same evolutionary leaps as life on Earth? To take one obscure but
critical example: Life on Earth remained entirely one-celled for 3 billion
years. For at least half of that time, those cells didn't have a nucleus. They
couldn't use oxygen in their metabolism. They were pitiful even by microbial
standards. So, how lucky was the evolutionary leap from prokaryotes
(non-nucleated microbes) to eukaryotes (nucleated, and using oxygen)? It
happened here about 2.1 billion years ago. Was that our lucky break? Or does
life, in general, figure out the trick of using oxygen and growing big and
brawny?
And, of course, we don't
really know what we're talking about when we talk about "intelligence." We tend
to think of creatures that use technology and language. But that could be
shortsighted. Maybe most intelligent creatures are dolphinoids, blissfully
swimming in an alien ocean with little interest in building spaceships.
Imagine for a moment that we could see the universe through
the eyes of an alien creature. Would the universe look more or less the same?
Or would we be confused, dazzled, and feel as though we were hallucinating?
Are the aliens interested in the same things that
interest us? Could we carry on a meaningful conversation?
We should prepare
ourselves for finding something out there that's totally unexpected. And we
have to prepare for bad news, or at least bad news in the context of our
Star Trek fantasy. We may have wildly overestimated the abundance of
extraterrestrial civilizations. Carl Sagan thought there were millions such
civilizations in existence right now in our own galaxy. The actual number may
be a handful. Or we could be, as Sagan's old collaborator I.S. Shklovskii
argued, "functionally alone." Not literally alone, just so isolated that
there's no practical way to make contact of any kind with another intelligent
species.
Whatever we do, we shouldn't take ourselves for granted.
There may be something extremely rare and wonderful about a world in which
water splashes on the surface, and where life survives for nearly 4 billion
years, where it has the leisure to evolve and, through natural selection,
explore the possibilities of complexity.
The search for life beyond Earth always doubles
back to our own existence. Why are we this way? How did we come about? How
special is it to be a thinking organism? This is the kind of stuff you'd want
to discuss with the aliens. And remember, they like it when you compliment them
on the really cool spaceship.
