Contact by Carl Sagan. It’s a novel (his only one?), now apparently out of print, about contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence. I’ve decided to start a process of discarding books I’m never going to read again, and I recall finding this one a bit disappointing the first time I read it, so it’s a candidate for the recycle bin. I’m only a couple of chapters in, and it starts off well enough, so maybe I’ll keep it.
This got me thinking about SETI in its various manifestations. It’s of interest as a distributed computing project, but I don’t know much about that side of things. More relevantly, I think the fact that nearly all the visible sky has been searched for radio signals, with no result, leads to some interesting and disturbing thoughts. A useful place to start is the (in)famous Drake Equation, which might be better referred to as the Drake Identity.
I won’t spell out the details, except to say that I think we can now assert, with high confidence that there are many planets (billions) and very few radio-using civilisations (probably none within thousands of light years of us[1]).
One implication that is fairly solid, I think, is that, either intelligent (radio-using) life arises extremely rarely (say once per galaxy) or interstellar travel is impossible. Otherwise some species would have colonised some planet in our neighbourhood. Either way, it seems certain that we will never have either physical contact or meaningful two-way communication with any other species.
The other implication is that radio-using civilisations either don’t arise often or don’t last long. I tend to favor the first implication. Even now, it would probably be possible for humans to set up a radio beacon in space that would last more or less indefinitely, and would serve as a permanent memorial if we managed to blow ourselves up (or back to the Stone Age). But even with civilisations lasting 100 000 years and arising on thousands of planets in our galaxy, the chances of actual contact (say, two civilisations existing simultaneously within 100 light years of other) would be minuscule.
fn1. In reference to planets a thousand light years away, it would be more precise to say that there were none a thousand years ago.
John Quiggin 
So as far as we know we are alone.
We humans have been suffering from an inferiority complex for the last hundred years or so: where we were once nobly created by God in His image and lived at the centre of the universe, we were found we had descended from apes by a staggeringly cruel process and were stuck on a smallish mudball on the periphery of a nondescript galaxy among 200 billion (or whatever it is) other galaxies.
But if we are REALLY alone – I do not see how we would ever be able to ascertain that – it means that we are the universe become conscious. Literally.
As carriers of the consciousness of the universe, we humans could regain our self-esteem.
I highly recommend the COSMOS series and/or book of the same name by Sagan. Therein he makes many profound statements, but the most, I think, being that Space is impossibly large, and our intelligence and technology is so very, very tiny by comparison. The Drake Equation can be read any number of ways depending on ones personal view and how one chooses to manipulate the variables. Simply because one chooses to take a dim view, or worse, a ‘creationist’ view, doesn’t mean for a second that that view is the only one.
There is, of course, the view that even Sagan toys with in many of his books. Perhaps we’re the first to reach this level of technology. Perhaps we’re the first at this point in time, to have reached this point in our evolution without destroying ourselves. It’s an endlessly fascinating question.
I second Niall with recommending Cosmos (as dated as it is). I remember reading it and at the end, when you realize how small and insignificant our planet is but how wonderful it is to be able to comprehend the universe (to a point) was a startling moment. And very much not nihilistic but inspiring and wonderful.
If we are alone then we are the universe manifest. Which is pretty cool in my book.
I’m not sure that the absence of detectable radio signals is an indication that advanced civilisations are not present. I would have though advanced civilisations would likely use highly directed electromagnetic waves to communicate and that might be hard for us to pick up at the distance we are.
The most interesting argument on ETI asks what an advanced civilisation would need to do in order to monitor every other system in the galaxy. And it turns out they don’t have to do much. They send a probe (probably powered by matter and antimatter) to a neighbouring system and then it replicates and sends 2 probles to neighbouring systems, and then those probles replicate and send on 2 probes. The power of compounding means that in much less than a million years one has a probe in every star system. If there is another advanced civilisation in this galaxy, then it is likely, given the age of the galaxy, that it is at least a million years older than us. Thus if there is one advanced civilisation elsewhere in the galazy it is highly likely it is up there watching us ( and at this stage it would not just be a probe. Signs of early life would have been detected by the probe and the home world notified and they would then likely have sent out a more significant presence). Ethics would quite likely forbid them interfering in our world, but one day it might be possible for them to make contact in a way that does not damage our society.
But then and again, we could be alone in the galaxy. We just don’t know.
John, I think you’re being overly pessimistic here. As Frank Drake has pointed out, as time goes on humanity’s use of radio transmission is becoming much more efficient, and indeed, in the not too distant future may be virtually undetectable from outside the solar system. So even if there was an alien civilization on a planet around Alpha Centauri, for instance, we wouldn’t necessarily be able to to detect it.
Drake suggests that instead of looking for accidental transmissions, it might be better to look for deliberately-aimed beacons, but that of course relies on the assumption that alien civilizations are actively trying to advertise their presence. Now, that’s a very big assumption – you’d want to be confident in your technological capabilities before you actively started advertising the presence of your civilization…
In any case, if it turns out that we truly are alone (or practically alone) in the universe, isn’t that awe-inspiring too?
Oh, and it’s highly unlikely that interstellar travel is impossible. If you’re prepared to use nuclear bombs as propulsion, and take the “interstellar ark” approach, we could probably do one in the pretty near future. Freeman Dyson and other physicists sketched out a plan for it nearly 50 years ago.
Sagan and others miss the point about alien civilisations. If we did encounter one, the experience wouldn’t be like they expect. First, there would be huge international conferences where the UN and nation states resolved the issue of who actually had the right to liaise with the alien representatives.
Second, there would be five years where the big law firms wrote complex new legislation addressing relevant changes to insurance, citizenship and 1000 other matters. I won’t put a figure on the cost of this.
Finally, ten years after first contact, a tentative communique would be sent to the waiting alien representatives, duly signed by representatives of every single nation. At that stage, we would discover the aliens had decided not to bother after all, and returned to Betelgeuse.
I think there is much to be said for David Bowie’s pithy observation:
There’s a Star Man waiting in the sky
He’d like to come and meet us
But he thinks he’ll blow our minds
Robert,
Suppose that the nearest habitable planet is 50 light years away. At 0.1 lightspeed, that’s 500 years travel time, plus probably 100 years for acceleration and deceleration. So we need to maintain a self-sustaining civilisation in the most distant reaches of space for 20 generations. To maintain the standard range of specialists, that would mean a population of at least 100 000 people.
We can currently maintain a handful of people in an earth-orbit space station for several months. In terms of sustainable person-years, our current capability falls short of requirements by a factor of at least 1 million.
And that’s without asking how anyone could be induced to participate in such a venture.
I forgot to mention the real estate agents who would drive the aliens mad trying to sell prime harbour front property and asking what the market’s like in Betelgeuse. Then there would the ad agencies trying to arrange product endorsements, the arms dealers offering equipment that works on earth and trying to buy the latest from the aliens. So, maybe the aliens have already had a good look at Earth, and set up a permanent isolation zone around us.
interstellar ‘ark’ type travel is interesting, but there will not be any meaningful colonisation of space by humans until there is is faster than light travel, which is not yet proven theoretically possible (wormholes are still conjecture despite being based in the very best of mathematical proofs) let alone forseeably practical.
simply put, we need to be able to travel to our colonies and back in the lifetime of a person. even the closest star (Alpha Centauri – probably uninhabitable by humans) has a round trip comms of 8 years.
if we send ark-style multi-lifetime voyagers out into space we have to do this knowing that no-on on earth will ever know their fate. we are not sending them to the colonies, we are sending them into exile.
this same problem exists for any other civilisation that exists which is colonising space. FTL travel is mandatory to create space empires. otherwise the colonies become detached from the centre very easily. of course you can still engage in that latter strategy for other reasons, say simple species survival from a dying solar system.
Another thing, even if we do ‘contact’ a civilisation how do we ensure it is benign, it has any shared values with us, that it won’t simply see us as food, or merely secondary lifeforms to be exploited, and so on. I don’t find the idea that ‘because they’re advanced, they must be enlightened’ to be in any way compelling or even philosophically sound reasoning. That’s just a sort of rationalist romanticism. I think it is just as (maybe more) likely to be ‘independence day’ as it is to be ‘e.t.’ or ‘contact’.
Last, but in no means least, human civilisation itself is based on a string of co-incidences of geography, climate, species evolution, and historical curiosities, that in many other circumstances would have produced vastly different outcomes in our rise from paleolithic caveman to neolithic villager, bronze age farmer, warrior and priest, to iron age city dweller, to industrial age planet-ruling masters of our destinies. And we still haven’t detected all the planet-killing, earth-crossing asteroids yet – let alone be able to do something about it.
Yep. If and when interstellar travel arrives, either by us or by someone else, I don’t think we will be interpreting it using current notions of physics, space dynamics or perhaps even biology. As JQ points out, the population dynamics are extraordinary, and some good sci-fi works have explored that theme.
I forget the author, but there was a good one where a catastrophe has caused the ship’s population to forget their goal, and even their origin on a planet. There was another moving one by Arthur Clark where a time arrives that humanity discovers its children have a higher destination and start collectively moving to that destination.
There’s a great Ballard (?) short story I think – might be Bradbury – where a group of people THINK they are on an intergenerational star voyage but actually, they are on a ship in a hangar on a base as part of an experiment.
While this is of course getting terribly sci-fi, it’s not beyond the realms of current physics and extrapolated technology to move objects of sufficient size across the galaxy. Galactic empires *are* certainly fantasy without the discovery of a way around Einstein, but the logistics of interstellar travel are not impossible in the longer term. For instance, who knows what the average human lifespan will be in the future…
As to the motivation, several possibilities spring to mind; the key factor running through a lot of them is the idea that the alternative is your civilization wiped out entirely…
Suppose that the nearest habitable planet is 50 light years away. At 0.1 lightspeed, that’s 500 years travel time, plus probably 100 years for acceleration and deceleration.
I understand that there are well-advanced plans to build a bypass that will take two hours off the travelling time.
I’ve had the book ‘contact’ on my shelf for a couple years now and never read it. I started reading it a few days ago. Spooky!
All the sci-fi technie stuff aside, I’m finding the book thought provoking in its comparison of religious and scientific explanations of life the universe and everything. Sagan (at least so far in the book) seems very frustrated with organised religion, but keen to extract some kind of spirituality out of the world around him at the same time. He isn’t completely dismissive of religion in the book.
Had a quick look on the web, and found this website with Carl Sagans name on it:
http://www.universist.org
“A universist is an individual who applies personal reason and experience to the fundamental questions of human existence, derives inspiration from the natural uncertainty of the human state, and denies the validity of revelation, faith and dogma.”
also from this site, a quote from Sagan:
“A religion that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by traditional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.”
Steve
The best reason to conclude that life is likely to have arisen on other planets, would be evidence that it has arisen more than once on our own planet, where conditions are favourable to life – at least as far as we understand what life is. The existence of millions of suitable planets boosts the probability that the right combination of circumstances will occurr, if that’s all that’s needed, but we have also have millions of suitable swamps right here on earth. And to the best of my knowledge, there’s no evidence for multiple origins. I think we’re alone, but it sure is a weird feeling.
I mean, it’s such a waste, isn’t it… all those galaxies out there, full of habitable planets, all empty. When they could be teeming with creatures hacking off each other’s limbs with their various versions of machetes, and dropping their various versions of cluster bombs on each other. The joys these bioastronomical absentees are missing out on!
A crucial question is whether an intelligent species can achieve sufficient equilibrium between their technological evolution and their socio-cultural development to avoid self-destruction as a result of having achieved the technical capacity for interstellar travel before they had reduced discontent, conflict, ambition, ill-will, ideological zealotry, etc., amongst their citizens to negligible proportions.
The question which follows from this one is whether a species which had achieved such a level of socio-cultural development would be subject to the kinds of expansionist internal dynamics which we are familiar with in terrestrial societies (both past and present) and which would seem to be essential for any serious attempt at star-faring on a large scale. A civilisation in a state of internal harmony amongst its members and with its biophysical environment will almost certainly not either desire expansion as an end in itself, or feel compelled by structural politico-economic or demographic demands to expand.
This leaves the question of intellectual curiosity. A highly technologically developed civilisation which had also resolved its internal disharmonies and achieved a perpetually sustainable level of material prosperity would be likely to redirect much of its energy into intellectual and artistic endeavour. But whether this would extend to the heroic efforts involved with mass inter-stellar travel is another matter. It’s quite likely that such a civilisation might be so engrossed with discovering the meaning of life that it might have little time to spare for finding out if there’s anyone else out there.
Also relevant is the key theme of Isaac Asimov’s The End Of Eternity. Basically, what happens in this story is that at some time in the next few hundred years, scientists acquire the capacity to step outside the normal passage of time and observe past and future history as another dimension, in the way in which we observe events and objects in space at the present time (see St Augustine, Spinoza, Olaf Stapledon, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 for a discussion of this issue). They are therefore able to travel up and down the length of future time, observe key causal events in history and their consequences, and eventually learn how to intervene at such moments to change the future for the better.
They are motivated by the utilitarian desire to maximise human well-being by minimising conflict, disasters and misfortune over the course of future history. However, the unforseen consequence of their benign interventions is that future humanity is denied the challenges which foster technological and social innovation. For reasons which I won’t disclose because I’ve gone close enough already to spoiling the book for potential readers, this leads to the stagnation and eventual extinction of the human species.
Insofar as I can detect an ideological influence, I think it is Asimov’s disdain, as a liberal emigre from Russia, for Bolshevik utopianism and utopianism in general.
“Either way, it seems certain that we will never have either physical contact or meaningful two-way communication with any other species.”
When I tell my dog to ‘sit’, he does so. When he needs to go outside he stands by the door and whines. Does this qualify?
As I see it, human desires that make us to live, eat, crap, talk, love, build, kill, explore, create and destroy empires, etc, arise from our underlying hormonal (aka emotional) structure. There’s a facade of rationality but the rationalty doesn’t provide the motivation for anything much, it just directs the motivation intelligently at times. Grand Masters are notable for brilliant ability in spatial logic, but are driven by a killer will to win.
Humans are now entering a period where the underlying biology is becoming redundant, replaced by technology. It’s choose your body, choose your mind, choose your impulses time over the next few hundred years.
It seems to me that this technology could easily result in any number of high-tech accidents or “shootout” scenarios that wipe out the species, way more effectively than the atom bomb. Give your average Iraqi a button that releases a lethal virus in Washington and see if he presses it.
But suppose it doesn’t happen like that or something survives, it’s not at all obvious to me that what comes out the other end will be imperial conquest outfits like we are now.
Our take on this issue is always based in our hormonal persective and that just won’t apply not very far down the track. To such beings, the conquest of space or communication with aliens might seem obviously crazy as, say, setting fire to your own hair does to us. We can only guess.
…I think we can now assert, with high confidence that there are many planets (billions) and very few radio-using civilisations (probably none within thousands of light years of us).
Very likely, especially if the quality of their FM breakfast radio is no better than ours.
Sagan and others miss the point about alien civilisations. If we did encounter one, the experience wouldn’t be like they expect. First, there would be huge international conferences where the UN and nation states resolved the issue of who actually had the right to liaise with the alien representatives.
Don’t think so. Long before the UN had a chance to act, the US would have pre-empted them and cluster-bombed the alien home world.
“Suppose that the nearest habitable planet is 50 light years away. At 0.1 lightspeed, that’s 500 years travel time…”
But that would be coasting. Suppose you had a constant acceleration of 1g, ie 10 m/sec. Velocity = acceleration * time. So after a year:
Velocity = 10 * 365*24*60*60 m/s = 365*24*6*6
= 315 360 km/s which is the speed of light.
That wouldn’t actually be so because relativity would step in but it should be possible to significantly reduce that 500 years.
For starters, assume that FTL travel will always be impossible. As Clarke put it, if it was possible, where are all the tourists? At the same time, we have to get off this rock at some point, as the sun won’t be around for ever. We have to at least assume the arrogance that there is something on this planet worth preserving
If you take Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series, he speculates that, alongside the main theme of colonising and terraforming Mars, the human lifespan could extend as long as 200-300 years (once we lick cancer and, more importantly, brain atrophy…), and thus building an ark out of an asteroid, banging a couple of fusion scram jet thingies on it that could manage .2-.3c, and sending a few hundred people to the nearest stars to see what’s there might almost be feasible. Not an uncommon theme, of course.
However, there would be no way to establish an “empire” as such – and in a way, that’s probably a good thing; a diasporic culture of exploring and settling would be possible, but the idea of interstellar warfare, or even mere trade between stars, would seem to be more trouble than its literal worth.
As for the more outlandish idea that’s involved with the so-called Singularity, of “uploading” one’s consciousness onto some kind of computer and sending that instead, I’m extremely sceptical about that, too, though I won’t say it’s impossible.
I sometimes wonder if other civilisations looked out into the relative void, and retreated inward, or transformed themselves into a form completely alien to us.
I strongly recommend Cosmos (the TV series, though the book is good too). Sagan’s widow Ann Druyan and their production company have put together an updated version with but there is remarkably little that needs revision. (The most dated thing about it is Carl’s brown skivvies. He;s still the only many who can wear one and still be sexy though … )
The mammals were nothing much until the death of the dinosaurs, if they hadn’t died out, intelligent life might not have evolved.FTL it would seem, would violate the 1St law of thermo-dynamics, unless the energy expended, would be equal to the energy to get you there by conventional methods, otherwise you could build a perpetual motion machine of the first kind. To propel an object to near light speed would require at least 1/2 MC2 of energy.
It is impossible to travel at the speed of light, and certainly not desirable, as one’s hat keeps blowing off.
(with apologies to Woody Allen)
Fools. The aliens are already here. The smarter ones are running America or preaching fundamentalisms of various shades. The rest of them are loitering with malintent over at spleenville.
So – humankind has already been defeated, but you’re right about one thing: there is no meaningful dialogue with these beings, whose motives are entirely inscrutable to our limited intellects.
‘s true.