Eclipse of Man. Charles T. Rubin

       MAKING FRIENDS WITH ALIENS

      After World War II, advances in technology made it possible for the first time to think seriously about what it would mean to communicate across interstellar distances. Thanks to science fiction, the theme of hostile aliens was by then well established in the popular culture. So those who were advocating the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) had a problem: why would we want to have contact with unfriendly aliens? The first efforts at SETI, led by the American astronomer Frank Drake in 1960, were just a matter of listening with a radio telescope for what was hoped might be the background chatter of alien intelligence—the interstellar equivalent of tuning a radio to eavesdrop on conversations among truckers, or police, or ham-radio users. But those first efforts were rather quickly followed by deliberate attempts to send out contact signals of our own, over and above the radio and television broadcast signals that were already leaking into outer space.

      Fortunately for the SETI pioneers, there was a readily available reason not to worry about giving ourselves away. By the 1960s, the prospects for other intelligent life in our own solar system were looking bleak, and the distance to the nearest stars provided a comforting buffer. Messages traveling at the speed of light would take more than four years to reach even just the star nearest to our sun. Any back-and-forth communication given this limit would be difficult enough—likely a project of generations, given that our part of the galaxy is not very densely populated by stars in comparison to some other parts. Visits in person, including marauding fleets of star cruisers, seemed, to say the least, highly implausible. So the scenario of aliens exploiting our world for resources to solve their Malthusian problems did not look plausible. We could reach out safely.

      There was only one catch. Many of the supporters of SETI believed that any contact we would make would be with aliens more scientifically and technologically advanced than we. There is a simple logic to this familiar belief. Our ability to send and receive signals at interstellar distances is still new and remains quite limited. It would be impossible for us to detect signals from anybody much less advanced than we ourselves, since even to detect and distinguish the kinds of signals that we could send out would be difficult or impossible for us. Furthermore, the existence of human intelligence at all on Earth, let alone human intelligence with the technology to begin to contemplate interstellar communication is, cosmically speaking, a very, very recent event indeed. Since on the cosmic clock there has been ample time for life and intelligence to have developed elsewhere long before humanity even began to emerge on the scene, at whatever point we might stand on some general scale of abilities and intelligence, any beings we might contact are likely to be well above it.

      But this argument, made by sober Ph.D.’s who did everything they could to distinguish themselves from those who believed in “flying saucers” and (later) alien abductions, in fact raises troubling questions. How confident ought we to be that our understanding of nature and the technologically possible is sufficiently definitive as to preclude practical interstellar travel? Couldn’t very advanced aliens know how to do things that would look impossible to us, just as some of the things we can do would seem impossible to primitive men? We are regularly told that the universe is a strange and surprising place—might it be even stranger and more surprising than we now suppose? Even if decades have gone by without aliens appearing on our doorstep, perhaps we should not be confident about what tomorrow holds.

      So it proves necessary to attack the very premise of hostile aliens, to turn them from cosmic pirates to cosmic philanthropists. And that effort requires following up on a different aspect of the eclipse of man. For along with this positive view of aliens comes a very dark picture of human beings. As foreshadowed by nearly all of the post-Condorcet thinkers we discussed in Chapter One, the more that alien beings look like our saviors, the less we look worth saving.