CAPITOL IDEAS: The Anxious Search: Are We Alone?
Bethell, Tom
ECOND STORY BOOKS IN BETHESDA has a good selection of out-of-print science books and I drop by from time to time. I was surprised to find recently that they had a whole shelf of books about the...
...called our possible solitudea"chilling"prospect.Anotherextraterrestrial seeker said that finding life out there would deal another blow to our "psyche"--a blow that he seemed to think was much needed...
...Yet if we are alone in the Cosmos--well, you can't get more exceptional than that...
...Billions and billions...
...nothing out of the ordinary about them...
...Sometimes I wonder if SETI isn't the respectable versionofthesearchforunidentifiedflyingobjects.The late Carl Sagan, the most widely publicized SETI-promoter of recent times, was absorbed by flying-saucer reports in his teenage years...
...So far both varieties of intelligence have provedtobeelusive--muchhardertolocatebyradio or re-create in computers than anyone imagined...
...IN1950,ATLOSALAMOS,thenuclearphysicistsEnrico Fermi, Edward Teller, and others were discussing the latest ideas about the universe--much larger and older than earlier thought...
...Here are just some of the titles, all published in the 1990s: We Are Not Alone (1993), Are We Alone...
...Before you knew it, the probability of life evolving was said to be: If the conditions are suitable, evolution will happen, given enough time...
...Then he moved smoothly into the SETI field, joining the astronomy department atCornell.Hechairedrespectableconferences,appearedontheJohnnyCarsonshow40times,andaccording to his biographer Keay Davidson "believed in superior beings in space, creatures so intelligent, so powerful as toresemblegods...
...Actually, the Copernican system wasn't jolting atall.Thatisamoderninvention,promotedbypeople like Gould and Krauss...
...Frank Drake and colleagues have been listening in for almost 50 years now but they haven't heard anything much beyond backgroundhiss.Arecentbook,RareEarth,concludesthat conditionshereareindeed"extraordinarilyrare...
...The longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer--he worked on the San Francisco docks for 25 years-C A P I T O LI D E A S 4 4 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R A P R I L 2 0 0 7 Sby Tom BethellTheAnxiousSearch: AreWeAlone...
...That misanthropic essayist Stephen Jay Gould derided our "need to see ourselves as separate and superior" and drew endless comfort from our downgraded status...
...Davidson said of Sagan that "he believed in superior civilizations because he believed in Progress...
...Perhaps that's why the author of Where Is Everybody...
...And if that is so, we should expect to find such life all over the Galaxy...
...Then he gave us a brief tour of nuclear winter, second-hand smoke, and finally global warming, wherein science always defers to politics...
...He contrasted Pascal's comment that "the firmament, the stars, the earth are not equal in value to the lowest human being," with that of "the humanitarian" Bertrand Russell: "The sea, the stars, the wind in waste places, mean more to me than even the human beings I love best...
...But Crichton skirted what for me is the most interesting question: Why have we invested so much hope in SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence...
...Thou art dust...
...Some of us still vainly place ourselves at the center of the universe without realizing that Science dethroned us long ago...
...He was whistling in the dark...
...So what's this all about...
...Somehow,wetakethatasasignofourmaturity...
...Maybeittakesadesigner?OrshouldIsayDesigner...
...If the origin of life is easy, why can't we make it happen here, in our laboratories, by deliberate and ceaseless effort...
...to demonstrate that we are "not essentially distinct from other forms of life...
...1995), Are We Alone in the Cosmos...
...At the first international SETI conference, held in 1971, Sagan declared that a new civilization is formed in the Milky Way galaxy every ten years, and affirmed: "There are a million technical civilizations in the Galaxy...
...billions of stars evolving over billions of years, probably accompanied by more planets than stars...
...But there is something else...
...There is "not asingleshredofevidenceforanyotherlifeformsand in 40 years none has been discovered...
...That's how Sagan came up with one million civilizations...
...Enter Frank Drake, a Cornell astronomer who setupProjectOzmain1959.Usingradiotelescopes,scientistscouldlistenforsignalsfromaliens.Alisteningpost was set up at the National Radio Astronomy ObservatoryinWestVirginia.Drakealsocobbledtogetherthe Drake Equation, which estimates the probability that, outtheresomewhere,thereexistintelligentbeingsthat cancommunicate...
...Some of us want to believe in extraterrestrials because an article of our secular faith holds that there is nothing exceptional abouthumanlife.Thisisdogma,lackinganyjustification,butithasalreadybeencodifiedastheMediocrity Principle...
...The center of the Cosmos was considered an insalubrious place, the point to which impure matter fell...
...Lawrence Krauss wrote that the discovery of extraterrestrial life "would be far more jolting--and not just to orthodox Christians--than was the revelation that the Earth is not the center of the solar system...
...1992), Extraterrestrials: Where Are They...
...He gloried in mankind's supposed demotion...
...You take the number of stars and multiply by the fraction that have planets, times the number of planetsperstar,timesthefractionwithinahabitablezone, times the likelihood of life evolving, times the probability of it reaching a level where critters can build radiotransmitters--andsoon.Butthereisnorealdata to work with, so enthusiasts can go ahead and plug in theirownnumbers...
...So,"whereiseverybody...
...We are seeing a "loosening of the definition of what constitutes legitimate scientific procedure," he concluded...
...Tom Bethellisasenioreditorof TheAmericanSpectator and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science (Regnery Publishing).T O MB E T H E L L A P R I L 2 0 0 7 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R 4 5 Wehavespentsomuchtimeputting mankindinitsplace--inthebasement-thatitgoesagainstthegraintothink thatwemightactuallybeexceptional...
...Somescientistsandphilosophersgofurther,and take pleasure in denigrating the human race...
...I could add half a dozen more, andothershaveappearedsince,includingRareEarth (2000), Where Is Everybody...
...It became known as the Fermi Paradox...
...SETI is a religion," he said...
...Others have put it at close to zero, and that's more likely...
...To be placed on a planet was to move upmarket...
...They jeer at the rest of us for ever having considered ourselves to be important in the cosmic scheme...
...We have spent so much time putting mankind in its place--in the basement--that it goes against the grain to think that we might actually be exceptional...
...Walter Sullivan, the late science editor of the NewYorkTimes,wasasoberreporter.Sowhywashis book titled We Are Not Alone, when there was no evidenceforthatclaim?(Thebook'sfirstedition,in1964, had the same title...
...Fermifamouslyasked...
...A little lower than the angels, indeed...
...It was "the physical correlate of humanity'sfallenstate,"wroteJohnHedleyBrooke,a professor of religion and science at Oxford...
...And the physicallawsthatappliedherealsoappliedoutthere...
...The novelist Michael Crichtoncommentedononeaspectofthiscomedyin an entertaining and instructive lecture at Caltech in 2003--"Aliens Cause Global Warming...
...noted that intellectuals of the past century had done all in their power "to denude the human entity of its uniqueness...
...ThencamethesleightofhandthatWalterSullivan called the "step by step dissolution of the difficulties...
...Physics and chemistry are so constructed as to make the origin of life easy," he said...
...I was surprised to find recently that they had a whole shelf of books about the search for extraterrestrial life...
...Anyway, you can see why SETI makes us all a little anxious...
...The Earth, life, mankind, and civilization are humdrum, routine developments...
...1999), Is Anyone Out There...
...2002), and on and on...
...1995), A Brief History of Life on Other Worlds (1998), The Hunt for Life on Mars (1997), After Contact: The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life (1997), Beyond Star Trek (1997...
...Our philosophers want to rub our noses in the dust...
...Since 1981, four books have been published with the title Are We Alone...
...The search for extraterrestrial intelligence started at about the same time as the search for artificial intelligence (here on Earth, beginning in 1956...
Vol. 40 • April 2007 • No. 3
