By Victor Greto
NEWARK — Ever wonder about that gold-coated copper record sent into space with the Voyager spacecraft nearly 30 years ago by NASA, created for aliens to play eons from now?
Renowned science and alien-life popularizer Carl Sagan had filled the LP with 118 photos of life on Earth, 90 minutes of music, scattered earth-bound sounds, and greetings in 54 different languages in the hope that, “billions of years from now,” an extra-terrestrial disc-jockey would listen.
Less than three decades later, during an era of digital music and CDs back here on Earth, would an 18-year-old earthling even know how to play the thing, let alone a green creature with five eyes, three feet and, maybe, no fingers?
And, if the creature lost the needle or stylus that NASA provided to play the record, where would it go to get another one if it broke during shipment? Do they even sell them on Earth anymore?
Think of the assumptions – arrogance? – behind believing there might be creatures out there so much like us that they’d know how to play a record made during the heyday of leisure suits, white shoes and disco.
George Basalla did think of them, in his latest book, “Civilized Life in the Universe: Scientists on Intelligent Extraterrestrials” (Oxford University Press, $29.95).
In the book, Basalla traces the human longing to believe in intelligent extra-terrestrial life, and finds any scientific basis for it wanting.
In fact, what he finds is that all those gorgeous worlds and funky-looking aliens we have envisioned in the past and today are fundamentally figments of our people-centered, quasi-religious, I-wanna-believe biases that began as far back as the ancient world and which flowered during the Middle Ages.
“What we think we see out in the universe is really what we want to see,” Basalla said in his reasonable, gentle voice.
Dressed in a cozy dark tweed jacket and green sweater, topped by close-cut white hair, Basalla doesn’t look or sound like much of a spoil-sport.
But when he says stuff like, “I remember not liking (Carl Sagan’s breakthrough popular science 1980 TV program) ‘Cosmos’ very much because it was superficial,” well, now he’s getting tough.
A lot of people liked that TV series, from which Sagan gained an unquestioned popularity. He parlayed that popularity into a rabid advocacy for searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life.
Sagan almost single-handedly stirred up the late-20th-century excitement about the probability that not only was there intelligent life out there, they were probably trying to talk to us via radio waves, and we should spend millions of dollars to check it out.
We did. And in nearly a half-century, we have found nothing.
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Many people of science think it’s well worth the effort to try.
“I think SETI (“Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence”) is far out, but it’s the kind of thing we ought to be doing,” said Fred Bortz, a physicist and children’s science book author. He thinks Basalla’s book is good, but Bortz takes a more “middle of the road” approach toward the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligent life, believing that it’s worth the effort to hunt and peck for signs.
“I liked Sagan’s work, especially when he was willing to go out on a limb and say, ‘What if this is so?’” Bortz said.
SETI projects, some of which have been funded by the U.S. government, have surveyed the sky through radio telescopes to detect alien transmissions.
Basalla likes some of Sagan’s work, too.
But he also thinks the ideas that have propelled such heavy-hitting modern scientists such as Sagan and Freeman Dyson into thinking there may be intelligent life out there have more to do with the context of their times, especially the influence of religion and science fiction and a kind of spiritual hunger, than with any sort of proof.
Call it an anthropomorphic projection into a rather cold and indifferent universe.
These scientists are part of line that goes back to Percival Lowell’s contention that there were networks of canals on Mars.
Those lines, or il canale, were first observed on Mars by the Italian Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877. Translatable from Italian to English as either channels or canals, il canale was invariably translated as “canals,” and taken up by Lowell in the 1890s. He soon argued that these canals were built by superior beings a long time ago.
He was wrong.
What interests some scientists about Basalla’s book is its point of view, said William C. Burger, Curator Emeritus at the Field Museum in Chicago. Burger published a book three years ago called, “Perfect Planet, Clever Species: How Unique are We?”
“Basalla comes from a different angle, the cultural historical story of our species, and how we began to think about the outside universe, and so instead of coming out of a natural science, he comes from history and culture and philosophy, and that I found nice,” he said.
The skewering of Lowell’s ideas was impressive, Burger said.
“Canals were thought to be seen on Mars just after the Suez Canal opened, and Lowell was seeing canals being built throughout the southwest (he worked in Flagstaff, Ariz.) as it was happening then,” he said.
Only a few years after Lowell argued his point, H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” appeared, with its fantastic notion that Martians, living in a world that had dried up, were desperate for water, and thus turned their rheumy eyes toward Earth.
Then came those 11 books by Edgar Rice Burroughs (the author of “Tarzan”) about life on Mars – which he called Barsoom.
Both Wells and Burroughs were writing blatant science fiction, of course.
That would be only slightly interesting if it wasn’t for the fact that Sagan sometimes referred to Mars as Barsoom.
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There is no scientific proof that life exists anywhere else in the universe, let alone intelligent life that, somehow, resembles us.
But the idea that life exists in another part of the universe is based on the probabilities both theologians and scientists separately have devised.
Those probabilities, Basalla writes, are rooted in three perennial ideas that began in the ancient world, flowered during the Middle Ages and grew hoary with wisdom by the 20th century.
They are: 1) Because the universe may be very large, if not infinite, 2) we probably are not alone, and 3) those potential beings out there are not only different but probably very superior to us.
The first two many scientists still subscribe to.
Even Basalla admits that if the universe is infinite, some sort of intelligent life is bound to have grown.
A doctrine called “the principle of mediocrity” argues that if our solar system is typical of many others, it’s probable that life evolved on many other planets.
But why assume it would resemble you and me in any sense? Basalla asks. Because it’s really the only thing we know.
The complexity of circumstance that drove our evolution argues for our uniqueness, Burger said.
“There are 300,000 million stars in our galaxy, so let’s say there’s a low probability where you might find life,” he said. “But whether that can build telescopes, that’s unlikely. Even the likelihood of having them near enough to us to pick up signals, it’s relatively small. We are very much alone in that sense.”
The third idea — the assumption that extraterrestrial life is superior to us — is much more problematic, and more religion-centered.
The first great scientists, from Galileo to Kepler to Christian Huygens, were religious men who often assumed that superior alien beings existed on worlds as close to us as the Moon.
The theology that there must be others out there was attributed to the infinite nature of God, and the assumption that in such a universe, all things that possibly could exist, do exist.
Basalla writes it’s no coincidence that the man first responsible for trying to detect alien signals via a radio telescope, Frank Drake, had been a fundamentalist Christian.
“A strong influence on me, and I think on a lot of SETI people, was the extensive exposure to fundamentalist religion,” said Drake, who devised a complex formula to show the likelihood of intelligent life elsewhere.
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But nor is this simply about religion, Basalla writes.
Even Sagan, whose passionate atheism grated against many religious ears, longed for spiritual guidance from the stars.
During the Cold War in which he grew up, Sagan looked for a superior, peaceful civilization that could remedy the world’s ideological fissures.
“You could look at this book and say he’s the ‘skunk in the garden party,’” said Bortz, “but that wasn’t what he was trying to do. He was trying to provoke thought.”
Bortz has problems with Basalla’s contention that even mathematics, considered to be the ultimate universal language, is as human-centered as any other.
“All living organisms respond to patterns at some level,” Bortz said. “I think that makes it universal. If there is or was a civilization beaming signals, there will be a pattern that we can recognize that’s artificial, and that’s mathematical.”
Basalla said he did not write the book to discourage anyone from searching for alien life in the universe. The book was an intellectual adventure, he said, “something that had been brewing in my mind for a long time.”
Although the reaction has been mostly positive, there are many who think he’s just, well, a spoil-sport.
“People have called me or written me to say, ‘Well, it’s still worth trying for,’” Basalla said of those who argue to continue the search.
As one critic wrote in an Amazon.com review: “While perhaps a necessary corrective to Sagan’s over-enthusiasm, this book swings the pendulum to the other side with its insistence that even if ‘they’ were ‘out there,’ we would never be able to communicate with them. How can we know for sure without a thorough search?”
Basalla has an answer, and then a parable. “But how do you know what to try for?” he asked.
“It’s like the drunk who lost his wallet on a dark street, but only looks under the lamppost. Why does he look there? ‘It’s the only place where I can see anything,’ he answers.”