Intelligence, SETI, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
Given the distances between stars, and thus between us and extra-solar planets, we can hardly be surprised not to have received indisputable knowledge of another intelligent civilization. Besides distance, other factors may militate against “us and them” getting together. Because animal species—and we are one —come and go, intelligent life on far-off planets may have developed, thrived, declined, and vanished hundreds of millions or even billions of years ago.
In other words, some civilizations with the technological ability to travel to Earth might have gone extinct long before human life, or any life at all, developed here. Civilizations elsewhere could have perished from employments of nuclear weapons, local wars with deadly accumulative effect, or a global war.
Worldwide pandemics might have destroyed alien civilizations; other disasters include climate change (natural or induced by the civilization), catastrophic volcanic activity, the worldwide incompetence of governments and subsequent collapse of alien systems, a superbug created by careless synthetic biology— even a malevolent artificial intelligence.
Of course, the death of one civilization, one era of civilization, or one species doesn’t militate against the later rise of others on the same planet. A progression of that sort would require many millions of years, which certainly affects any calculations about the number of planets with technologically advanced life.
For about the past fifty years, variously focused and funded “search for extraterrestrial intelligence” (SETI) programs from around the world have tried to communicate with, or capture communication from, alien intelligences. This has been done by monitoring electromagnetic radiation, scanning for patterns in radio signals, launching space probes, creating physical messages (such as the gold-plated copper discs sent aloft with the 1977 Voyager missions), and radio- telescope arrays (such as the forty-plus dishes at Northern California’s Hat Creek Radio Observatory, and the famous Mauna Kea setup on the big island of Hawaii).
In August 1977, Ohio State University astronomer Jerry R. Ehman homed in on the “‘Wow!’ signal,” a radio transmission some thirty times louder than competing, natural radio noise, and lasting seventy-two seconds—just the time needed for Earth to rotate out of alignment with the signal’s presumed source, somehow near Tau Sagittarii, an orange star more than 122 light years away. In the years since, we have had no confirmation that the “‘Wow!’ signal” was intelligence-or nature-based. But we do know that it was anomalous. SETI work continues around the globe.
What Do They Think of Us?
If alien visitors travel to Earth in sophisticated spacecraft, the visitors possess a superior intelligence. To be sure, the whole UFO phenomenon is predicated on extraterrestrial intellects greater than ours is. (Only occasionally, as with Marvin Martian of the Bugs Bunny cartoons, are aliens portrayed as comic dunces.) Putting aside the issue of whether human beings possess the capability to decide what is “intelligent,” there is the possibility that extraterrestrial visitors have observed us and decided we’re just too dumb to bother with. That possibility worries astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who reminded us in 2013 that we may appear to aliens the way earthworms appear to us: inconsequential.
Another possibility, one that has even more heft than the “too dumb” theory, has been posited by Stanton Friedman and others: aliens haven’t formally revealed themselves because they perceive the danger we pose. Near the close of 2015, Paris was shocked by mass murder perpetrated by terrorists. The fact that the killers are of a particular ethnicity and pursue specific, purportedly religious goals hardly matters; the point is that this sort of brutality isn’t an aberration but the very definition of human interaction here on Earth. Killing is what we do.
Few of us could summon a rational reason for parachuting ourselves into the exercise yard of a penitentiary. Why, then, should extraterrestrials be eager to make themselves known in an alien landscape of inexplicable murder and other violence?
According to some UFOlogists and contactees, extraterrestrials are not corporeal creatures, but physically insubstantial things, such as a pair of atmospheric life forms a climber named Frank Smythe met on Mount Everest in 1933. He described them as dark, winged “balloons.” A 1958 book, Trevor James Constable’s They Live in the Sky, posited that such creatures live in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Are such beings organic or semi-organic?
So extraterrestrials may be geniuses, or so far beyond our conceptions of genius as to be incomprehensible. Then again, they may be mere messengers or drones in the service of higher intelligences, motivated by rote learning, or even functioning on instinct. Or perhaps, as American scientist and electrostatics expert John M. Cage offered a half-century ago, the creatures are the UFOs, and keyed to follow human aircraft. Cage called these entities “life fields.” The idea is hardly less reasonable than the notion of extraterrestrials that, in defiance of very long odds, look more or less like us. But Cage’s idea never really caught on. Why should that be?
Because there is no comfort in it.