Cosmic Connection (6 page)

Even within a human lifetime, the change is so great that many people are alienated from their own society. Margaret Mead has described older people today as involuntary immigrants from the past to the present.

Old economic assumptions, old methods of determining political leaders, old methods of distributing resources, old methods of communicating information from the government to the people–and vice versa–all of these may once have been valid or useful or at least somewhat adaptive, but today may no longer have survival value at all. Old oppressive and chauvinistic attitudes among the races, between the sexes, and between economic groups are being justifiably challenged. The fabric of society throughout the world is ripping.

At the same time, there are vested interests opposed to change. These include individuals in power who have much to gain in the short run by maintaining the old ways, even if their children have much to lose in the long run. They are individuals who are unable in middle years to change the attitudes inculcated in their youth.

The situation is a very difficult one. The rate of change cannot continue indefinitely; as the example of the rate of communication indicates, limits must be reached. We cannot communicate faster than the velocity of light. We cannot have a population larger than Earth’s resources and economic distribution facilities can maintain. Whatever the solutions to be achieved, hundreds of years from now the Earth is unlikely still to be experiencing great social stress and change. We will have reached some solution to our present problems. The question is, which solution?

In science a situation as complicated as this is difficult to treat theoretically. We do not understand all the factors that influence our society and, therefore, cannot make reliable predictions on what changes are desirable. There are too many complex interactions. Ecology has been called the subversive science because every time a serious effort to preserve a feature of the environment is made, it runs into enormous numbers of social or economic vested interests. The same is true every time we attempt to make a major change in anything that is wrong; the change runs through society as a whole. It is difficult to isolate small fragments of the society and change them without having profound influences on the rest of society.

When theory is not adequate in science, the only realistic approach is experimental. Experiment is the touchstone of science on which the theories are framed. It is the court of last resort. What is clearly needed are experimental societies!

There is good biological precedent for this idea. In the evolution of life there are innumerable cases when an organism was clearly dominant, highly specialized, perfectly acclimatized to its environment. But the environment changed and the organism died. It is for this reason that nature employs mutations. The vast majority of mutations are deleterious or lethal. The mutated species are less adaptive than the normal types. But one in a thousand or one in ten thousand mutants has a slight advantage over its parents. The mutations breed true, and the mutant organism is now slightly better adapted.

Social mutations, it seems to me, are what we need. Perhaps because of a hoary science-fiction tradition that mutants are ugly and hateful, it might be better to use another term. But social mutation–a variation on a social system which breeds true, which, if it works, is the path to the future–seems to be precisely the right phrase. It would be useful to examine why some of us find the phrase objectionable.

We should be encouraging social, economic, and political experimentation on a massive scale in all countries. Instead, the opposite seems to be occurring. In countries such as the United States and the Soviet Union the official policy is to discourage significant experimentation, because it is, of course, unpopular with the majority. The practical consequence is vigorous popular disapproval of significant variation. Young urban idealists immersed in a drug culture, with dress styles considered bizarre by conventional standards, and with no prior knowledge of agriculture, are unlikely to succeed in establishing Utopian agricultural communities in the American Southwest–even without local harassment. Yet such experimental communities throughout the world have been subjected to hostility and violence by their more conventional neighbors. In some cases the vigilantes are enraged because they themselves have only within the previous generation been accepted into the conventional system.

We should not be surprised, then, if experimental communities fail. Only a small fraction of mutations succeed. But the advantage social mutations have over biological mutations is that individuals learn; the participants in unsuccessful communal experiments are able to assess the reasons for failure and can participate in later experiments that attempt to avoid the causes of initial failure.

There should be not only popular approval for such experiments, but also official governmental support for them. Volunteers for such experiments in Utopia–facing long odds for the benefit of society as a whole–will, I hope, be thought of as men and women of exemplary courage. They are the cutting edge of the future. One day there will arise an experimental community that works much more efficiently than the polyglot, rubbery, hand-patched society we are living in. A viable alternative will then be before us.

I do not believe that anyone alive today is wise enough to know what such a future society will be like. There may be many different alternatives, each potentially more successful than the pitifully small variety that face us today.

A related problem is that the non-Western, non-technological societies, viewing the power and great material wealth of the West, are making great strides to emulate us–in the course of which many ancient traditions, world-views, and ways of life are being abandoned. For all we know, some of the alternatives being abandoned contain elements of precisely the alternatives we are seeking. There must be some way to preserve the adaptive elements of our societies–painfully worked out through thousands of years of sociological evolution–while at the same time coming to grips with modern technology. The principal immediate problem is to spread the technological achievements while maintaining cultural diversity.

An opinion sometimes encountered is that the problem is technology itself. I maintain that it is the misuse of technology by the elected or self-appointed leaders of societies, and not technology itself, that is at fault. Were we to return to more primitive agricultural endeavors, as some have urged, and abandon modern agricultural technology, we would be condemning hundreds of millions of people to death. There is no escape from technology on our planet. The problem is to use it wisely.

For quite similar reasons, technology must be a major factor in planetary societies older than ours. I think it likely that societies that are immensely wiser and more benign than ours are, nevertheless, more highly technological than we.

We are at an epochal, transitional moment in the history of life on Earth. There is no other time as risky, but no other time as promising for the future of life on our planet.

J
okes are a way of dealing with anxiety. There is a class of jokes dealing with extraterrestrial life. In one, the extraterrestrial visitor lands on Earth, walks up to a gasoline pump or a gumball machine–the accounts differ–and asks, “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”

Elsewhere, beings are doubtless very different from us. But the joke assumes that extraterrestrial organisms will be, if not like human beings, then like gasoline pumps or gumball machines. The most likely circumstance is that extraterrestrial beings will look nothing like any organisms or machines familiar to us. Extraterrestrials will be the product of billions of years of independent biological evolution, by small steps, each involving a series of tiny mutational accidents, on planets with very different environments from those that characterize Earth.

But such jokes underscore a general problem and a general virtue in thinking about life elsewhere. The problem is that we have only one kind of life to study, the co-related biology of the planet Earth, all organisms of which have descended from a single instance of the origin of life. It is difficult for the biologist, as well as the layman, to determine what properties of life on our planet are accidents of the evolutionary process and what properties are characteristic of life everywhere. The assumption that life elsewhere has to be, in some major sense, like life here is a conceit I will call chauvinism.

While such chauvinism has been common throughout human history, clearer views have occasionally surfaced, for example, by the great French astronomer Pierre Simon, the Marquis de Leplace. In his classic work
La Mecanique Celeste
he wrote: “[The Sun’s] influence gives birth to the animals and plants which cover the surface of the Earth, and analogy induces us to believe that it produces similar effects on the planets; for it is not natural to pose that matter, of which we see the fecundity develop itself in such various ways, should be sterile upon a planet so large as Jupiter, which, like the Earth, has its days, its nights, and its years, and on which observation discovers changes that indicate very active forces. Man, formed for the temperature which he enjoys upon the Earth, could not, according to all appearance, live upon the other planets; but ought there not to be a diversity of organization suited to the various temperatures of the globes of this universe? If the difference of elements and climates alone causes such variety in the production of the Earth, how infinitely diversified must be the production of the planets and their satellites?” Laplace wrote these words near the end of the eighteenth century.

The virtue of thinking about life elsewhere is that it forces us to stretch our imaginations. Can we think of alternative solutions to biological problems already solved in one particular way on Earth? For example, the wheel is a comparatively recent invention on the planet Earth. It seems to have been invented in the ancient Near East less than ten thousand years ago. In fact, the high civilizations of MesoAmerica, the Aztecs and the Mayas, never employed the wheel, except for children’s toys. Biology–the evolutionary process–has never invented the wheel, in spite of the fact that its selective advantages are manifest. Why are there no wheeled spiders or goats or elephants rolling along the highways? The answer is clearly that, until recently, there were no highways. Wheels are of use only when there are surfaces to roll on. Since the planet Earth is a heterogeneous, bumpy place with few long, smooth areas, there was no advantage to evolving the wheel. We can very well imagine another planet with enormous long stretches of smooth lava fields in which wheeled organisms are abundant. The late Dutch artist M. C. Escher designed a salamander-like organism that would do very well in such an environment.

The evolution of life on Earth is a product of random events, chance mutations, and individually unlikely steps; small differences early in the evolution of life have a profound significance later in the evolution of life. Were we to start the Earth over again and let only random factors operate, I believe that we would wind up with nothing at all resembling human beings. This being the case, how much less likely it is that organisms evolving over five billion or more years, independently in a quite different environment of another planet of a far-off star, would closely resemble human beings.

Thus, the hoary science-fiction standby of the sexual love between a human being and an inhabitant of another planet ignores, in the most fundamental sense, the biological realities. John Carter could love Dejah Thoris, but, despite what Edgar Rice Burroughs believed, their love could not be consummated. And if it could, a viable offspring would not be possible. Likewise, the category of contact story, now quite fashionable in some UFO enthusiast circles, of sexual contact between human and saucerian–most recently described in a weekly newspaper headline with the modest title “We Sexed a Blonde from a Flying Saucer!”–must be relegated to the realm of improbable fantasy. Such crossings are about as reasonable as the mating of a man and a petunia.

A popular phrase–often encountered in popular books on the planets–is “life as we know it.” We read that “life as we know it” is impossible on this planet or that. But what is life as we know it? It depends entirely on who the “
we
” is. A person who is unsophisticated in biology, who lacks a keen appreciation of the multitudinous adaptations and varieties of terrestrial organisms, will have a meager idea of the range of possible biological habitats. There are discussions, even by famous scientists, that give the impression that an environment that is uncomfortable for my grandmother is impossible for life.

At one time it was thought that oxides of nitrogen had been detected in the atmosphere of Mars. A scientific paper was published on this apparent finding. The authors of the paper argued that life on Mars was, therefore, impossible, because oxides of nitrogen are poisonous gases. There are at least two objections to this argument. First, oxides of nitrogen are poisonous gases only to some organisms on Earth. Second, what quantity of oxides of nitrogen were thought to be discovered on Mars? When I calculated the amount, it turned out to be less than the average abundance above Los Angeles. The oxides of nitrogen are an important constituent of smog. Life in Los Angeles may be difficult, but it is not yet impossible. The same conclusion applies to Mars. The final problem with these particular observations is that they are very likely mistaken; later studies–for example, observations Tobias Owen and I made with the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory–have shown no oxides of nitrogen in the atmosphere of Mars.