Eclipse of Man. Charles T. Rubin
early in the twentieth century, Flammarion articulates what is often called the “assumption of mediocrity”: that there is nothing special about Earth’s place in the universe, and so life likely exists elsewhere. “On what pretext could one suppose that our little globe which, as we have seen, has received no privileges from Nature, is the exception; and that the entire Universe, save for one insignificant isle, is devoted to vacancy, solitude, and death?”67 If outer space looks unfriendly to life at first glance, we learn even from terrestrial observation that the environment that is hostile to one form of life is favorable to another. So the fact that extraterrestrial conditions may appear hostile to life as we know it is no warrant that life is impossible.
Furthermore, Flammarion argues that extraterrestrial life will likely be different from life as we know it, perhaps with a different chemical basis and very different capabilities. Perhaps it will in some respects be superior to us. Might not nature
have given to certain beings an electrical sense, a magnetic sense, a sense of orientation, an organ able to perceive the ethereal vibrations of the infra-red or ultra-violet, or permitted them to hear at a distance, or to see through walls? We eat and digest like coarse animals, we are slaves to our digestive tube: may there not be worlds in which a nutritive atmosphere enables its fortunate inhabitants to dispense with this absurd process? The least sparrow, even the dusky bat, has an advantage over us in that it can fly through the air. Think how inferior are our conditions, since the man of greatest genius, the most exquisite woman, are nailed to the soil like any vulgar caterpillar before its metamorphosis! Would it be a disadvantage to inhabit a world in which we might fly whither we would; a world of scented luxury, full of animated flowers; a world where the winds would be incapable of exciting a tempest, where several suns of different colors—the diamond glowing with the ruby, or the emerald with the sapphire—would burn night and day (azure nights and scarlet days) in the glory of an eternal spring; with multi-colored moons sleeping in the mirror of the waters, phosphorescent mountains, aerial inhabitants—men, women, or perhaps of other sexes—perfect in their forms, gifted with multiple sensibilities, luminous at will, incombustible as asbestos, perhaps immortal, unless they commit suicide out of curiosity?68
For Flammarion, the possibility of life elsewhere—indeed, life everywhere—raises the question of the ultimate destiny of human life. For it is life, he believes, not matter, that is the key to understanding the universe, yet life eventually seems to give way to mere matter; individually we are built on death and proceed unto death ourselves, and the same is true for our planet as a whole. Hence “Let no one talk of the Progress of Humanity as an end! That would be too gross a decoy.”69 Flammarion believes that progress is the law of life,70 but, as Fedorov also suggested, material progress alone would mean that in the end we would still fall prey to entropy itself—that each of our lives, and that human life as a whole, will be extinguished. We reject this gloomy possibility, he says, as being “incompatible with the sublime grandeur of the spectacle of the universe.”71 So while “Creation does not seem to concern itself with us,”72 this appearance may be deceiving. He even goes so far as to ask if “distant and unknown Humanities”—that is, alien races—might not be “attached to us by mysterious cords, if our life, which will assuredly be extinguished at some definite moment here below, will not be prolonged into the regions of Eternity.”73
One would be hard pressed today to find a popularizer of science who, like Flammarion in this poetic and confusing passage, seems to hover between a fairly traditional notion of heaven and a suggestion of interstellar reincarnation. But he seems to have felt that our intuition that our lives cannot end had support from his astronomy: “As our planet is only a province of the Infinite Heavens, so our actual existence is only a stage in Eternal Life. Astronomy, by giving us wings, conducts us to the sanctuary of truth. The specter of death has departed from our Heaven. The beams of every star shed a ray of hope into our hearts.”74
For Reade and Fedorov, the prospect of a universe that can be enlivened by human action, which involves transcending the natural order even to the point of inventing immortality, gives hope and meaning to the human future. For Flammarion, on the other hand, the conclusion that alien life is already omnipresent and diverse calls attention to the parochialism of our own view of ourselves, fostering scientific imagination of beings different from and even superior to us. We see the limitations on our own lives by imagining beings with different capacities, and in that light our own limits appear simply arbitrary. Yet at the same time, the likelihood of alien life suggests to him the insignificance of brute matter. The ascendance of life that he imagines we will see in the universe as a whole opens the door to a hope for the yet greater victory for life that would be personal immortality.
BECOMING ALIENS
Our next thinker shared Fedorov’s and Flammarion’s concern about the limited prospects for material progress if we are confined to Earth, and so believed that humanity was destined to explore outer space—but that, in the long term, we would become something no longer recognizably human at all. J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964) was a distinguished scientist, a major public intellectual, and an outspoken Marxist. His main contributions to science were in quantitative analysis of genetics and evolutionary biology—from which one would not necessarily adduce the humor, imagination, and charm of his popular writing. His influence was such that he helped inspire two of the greatest works of anti-utopian literature of the twentieth century: his acquaintance Aldous Huxley based some of Brave New World on Haldane’s ideas, and C. S. Lewis is said to have had Haldane in mind for various speeches and characters in his space trilogy.75
Haldane most vividly sketched out his vision of the human future in “The Last Judgment,” a piece of writing from 1927 that is part essay, part science fiction story.76 (Lewis considered it “brilliant, though to my mind depraved.”77) Haldane begins by looking at how the Earth and our sun might come to their natural ends. He soon turns to consider a theme that we will see become increasingly common, how we might destroy the Earth ourselves, imagining an account of the last millennia of human life on Earth as it might be told by a distant descendant living on Venus.78 The premise of this story is that as a consequence of having “ridiculously squandered” tidal power over a period of some five million years, humans have changed the moon’s orbit until it comes so close to Earth that it is pulled apart, in the process making Earth uninhabitable.79
While this result was long predictable, humans “never looked more than a million years ahead” so few were ever concerned with this consequence of using tidal power.80 Instead, in the course of their three-thousand-year-long lives, most people concentrated on “the development of personal relationships” and on “art and music, that is to say, the production of objects, sounds, and patterns of events gratifying to the individual.”81 Natural selection having ceased, the only substantial change to humanity was “the almost complete abolition of the pain sense.”82 Real advances in science came to a halt; rather than try to develop the human race, attention was paid to breeding beautiful flowers.
Having foreseen what was to come, however, a few did what they could to assure the existence of life elsewhere after the anticipated disaster. That is no small task as Haldane paints it; even simple steps like managing to land explorers successfully on the moon, Mars, and Venus takes a couple of million years. The technical difficulties of landing and return are compounded by the disinclination of individualistic humans to give up their long lives on what amount to suicide missions. Those who finally land alive on Mars are destroyed by sentient alien life already established there, as Flammarion might have expected. Those who land on Venus find extremely hostile environmental conditions under which humans cannot possibly survive. Efforts at further exploration are dropped for the time being.
About eight million years later, the approaching moon having disrupted earth’s geology and ecosystems, a minority undertake renewed efforts to colonize Venus. “A few hundred thousand of the human race . . . determined that though men died, man should live forever.”83 By a ten-thousand-year-long effort at selective breeding, humans create a new race that can survive on Venus.84 These colonists are sent out in 1,734 ships; eleven manage to land.85 Such life