First Contact (26 page)

Another ongoing effort involves searching for the potential existence of “Dyson spheres,” hypothetical structures built by very advanced civilizations to shroud and thereby better utilize the energy from their sun. The logic and possible creation of these spheres was first put forward by physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson. In a thought experiment in the late 1950s, Dyson concluded that because energy is the key to all advanced civilizations and the central star is the key to all planetary energy, it would make sense that any technologically sophisticated society would seek to maximize the energy available. This is especially true because all suns eventually lose their strength. In SETI terms, a Dyson sphere would give off strong signals that would establish the existence of an advanced civilization. Richard Carrigan, a particle physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, and who is now active in SETI work, has been using data from an infrared satellite that covered 96 percent of the sky to search for stellar signatures that would resemble a Dyson sphere.

But the biggest, most consequential challenge to traditional SETI involves active searching for distant civilizations through sending out radio beams and laser pings, rather than remaining almost exclusively in a listening mode. An international protocol discourages “active” SETI (or METI, Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence) but some have gone out anyway. The first came from the United States, or rather from the American-run Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. It was a much-debated digital message, featuring symbolic and coded illustrations of who we are and where
we live, sent in the direction of a star system in the Hercules constellation about twenty-five thousand light-years away.

In 2008, the National Space Agency of Ukraine beamed a radio message in the direction of the star Gliese 581, which is known to have planets orbiting it. The next year,
Cosmos
magazine in Australia, with the support of the Australian government and NASA, solicited messages from around the world to beam in the same general vicinity, and some twenty-five thousand messages were collected from 195 nations. The 160-character text messages were transmitted from the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex at Tidbinbilla, Australia. Both the Ukrainian and Australian transmissions will take about twenty years to reach their destination. But while these efforts were undertaken with benign intentions, they actually entered into a very controversial minefield. Some see active SETI as a logical next step, a shortcut to a shortcut. Others see it as dangerous, bordering on suicidal. The differences in approach are grounded in the most basic of human emotional responses: fear of the “other” versus a belief in the essential goodness, or at least the peacefulness, of the “other.”

The proponents of active SETI assume that any civilization they would have the good fortune to contact would be harmless and interested in who we are and what we know. There's no evidence that this is true or false; it's just what they believe. They also hold that other technologically advanced civilizations would, by definition, be more advanced than us since we are just now reaching the stage where we can think about intergalactic communication. Perhaps they're waiting for us, and other civilizations like ours, to show we are here and capable and worthy of some form of contact. Doug Vakoch of the SETI Institute is one vocal advocate of sending out messages. He assumes that other and more advanced civilizations would not only be able to direct and tailor their intergalactic messages, but would almost certainly be able to decode messages from us much better than we could decode messages from them. Active SETI could speed up a possible “contact” in so many ways.

Vakoch believes his community is moving in the direction of active SETI, just as it is moving from radio listening to optical viewing. While
freelance METI efforts are still frowned on—seen more as public relations than as science—more well-founded messages conceived by reputable groups or national space agencies are seriously considered and debated. METI advocates, he said, talk of the “zoo hypothesis,” where humans would take the initiative and send out messages in all directions, to see who in the “galactic zoo” might respond. “Some people are concerned that alien life will come and eat us up but, well, it's not a concern of mine.”

But it definitely is a worry for others. Opponents of active SETI assume intelligent extraterrestrial life, if it exists, will be warlike and intent on domination or destruction—rather like humans have often been as they overspread the Earth over the past two hundred thousand years. A sobering corollary to this view is that the number of technologically advanced civilizations in the universe may well be small because they tend to self-destruct, with the example of Earth as exhibit A. Our own shortsightedness about the stewardship of our planet and our inherent aggressiveness, in this view, will limit long-term survival. When the SETI community met in Valencia, Spain, as part of the 2006 International Astronautical Congress, the group voted against promoting active SETI, though it did not move to forbid it, either. The reasons why were numerous, including a desire to better focus the use of limited resources, but Harvard's Paul Horowitz captured an intellectual position that, oddly, tracks a key argument of the advocates of active SETI. “Statistically,” he said, “it is extremely unlikely that our first contact with an ETI civilization will also be its first contact with an ETI civilization. Thus the advanced technology we detect will have experienced this type of encounter many times before.”

In a 2010 documentary, none other than Stephen Hawking took concern about active SETI several steps further, warning that trying to actively contact possible intelligent life out there is way too risky and dangerous. Convinced that other higher life forms do exist in the galaxies, he doubted they would come in peace but rather would more likely raid Earth for its resources and then move on. As someone who also advocates in favor of terra-forming Mars as a sanctuary for Earthlings after we ruin the planet, there is a certain irony to Hawking's views.

“We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet,” he wrote. “I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach. If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

It all reminded me of the evening I spent with Shin-ya Narusawa after the SETI observation, a cold, clear night when a good number of astronomy enthusiasts came to Nishi-Harima to hear about Sazanka and to observe the sky. Narusawa had begun to get reactions from the public about his effort, and some of it was shrill. I watched him wince as a woman on the phone admonished him for letting potentially hostile aliens know where we are, with the assumption that they would then do us harm. Narusawa said that any SETI experiment results in calls like that—it just goes with the territory. That Narusawa and his colleagues were listening and watching rather than beaming out signals or messages was lost on the caller, as was the possibility that distant civilizations might actually be benign. But both the excitement and the fear about extraterrestrial life tend to be primal, a blank screen on which people project their own feelings and beliefs. Untold generations of humans have told stories about who or what might be out there, without having any evidence to guide them. At least now scientists are actually making an effort to search out and collect that evidence.

Standing on the observatory deck in Sayo, many of the guests wanted to see where the Sazanka team had pointed their instruments the nights before. What they saw was all a blur, even with the help of several smaller telescopes brought out for the occasion, but the people were fascinated just the same. They shivered as they waited their turns, and delighted in focusing on a planet or a star or a distant galaxy. Some lingered and seemed to be squinting hard, as if they might see something moving, some sign of life if they only looked hard enough. Just a little more effort—better instruments, better science, a little luck—and the world could change forever.

Science has yet to discover extraterrestrial life, but there's a sense at the top of some of the world's dominant faiths that they must be prepared for the possibility: to defend the faith, to enhance the faith, to expand thinking about the role of humans in the universe, to make sure any confirmed extraterrestrial news of that sort is presented, and received, with calm and maybe even some awe. If finding extraterrestrial life would represent a coming full circle from the times and discoveries of Copernicus—who first persuasively demonstrated that the Earth circles the sun, and not the other way around—then religious leaders want to make sure their official views are ready. Copernicus, after all, famously refused to publish his revolutionary work until he was on his deathbed, for fear of ecclesiastical repercussions, and Galileo ran afoul of Church authorities for his astronomical findings and spent his last decade under house arrest.

But most damning of all, the Inquisition put to death the former monk, writer, and Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno for, among other heresies, his belief in a “plurality of worlds”—the existence of life on other celestial bodies. Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 at Campo de' Fiori in Rome. A statue of him now dominates the square just a half mile from the Vatican where, in 2009, the Church's Pontifical Academy of Sciences held its first major conference on astrobiology. Convened on private Vatican grounds in the elegant Casina Pio IV, formerly the pope's villa, the
gathering of prominent scientists and religious leaders discussed for four days the tenacious worlds of extremophiles, the burgeoning list of exoplanets, the discovery of methane on Mars, and how to read “biosignatures” throughout the cosmos.

“Astrobiology is a mature science that says very interesting things that could change the vision humanity has of itself. The church cannot be indifferent to that,” is what Pierre Léna, a French astrophysicist and member of the Pontifical Academy, told me about the closed gathering.

The possibility of extraterrestrial life is not so much of an issue for Eastern religions, which speak explicitly of other inhabited worlds. Ancient Hindu texts describe innumerable universes inhabited by life forms both material and spiritual, as do early Buddhist holy books. Islam's Quran states, “All praise belongs to God, Lord of all the worlds,” a phrase generally interpreted to mean the existence of many universal bodies and even multiple universes that may be inhabited. Some Western faiths also appear to make room for extraterrestrials: The Jewish Talmud refers to God “flying through eighteen thousand worlds,” which later scholars have written implies that some or many are inhabited. Modern Christian groups including the Mormons also make a specific reference to extraterrestrial life—beings on other planets thought to be the same as humans or similar to them. It is with more traditional Christianity, where the coming of Christ to save sinners on Earth, and seemingly Earth alone, is so central, that astrobiology would seem to pose the biggest challenge. Some scientists are bracing for what they believe will be an inevitable and ugly conversation with leading conservative Christians, especially if the universe produces evidence of intelligent life.

“If there are beings elsewhere in the universe, then Christians, they're in this horrible bind,” says Paul Davies, the physicist-astrobiologist and someone who has written extensively on the question. “They believe that God became incarnate in the form of Jesus Christ in order to save humankind, not dolphins or chimpanzees or little green men on other planets.”

A more street-level view of the coming showdown comes from Cynthia
Crysdale, a theology professor at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and formerly of the Catholic University of America, during a NASA-supported workshop in 2006 on the implications of astrobiology. The problem, she said, is that the discovery of extraterrestrial life will push humans further still from the cosmic limelight. Copernicus and Galileo told us that the Earth was not the center of the universe, Darwin told us that we are the result of random mutation and the survival of the fittest, and now we're on the threshold of learning that life may well exist elsewhere. “This,” she said, “won't go down lightly.” In some conservative evangelical circles, it already hasn't. Gary Bates, the head of Creation Ministries in Atlanta, speaks regularly about the danger to Christianity of an acceptance of extraterrestrial life. “My theological perspective is that ET life would actually make a mockery of the very reason Christ came to die for our sins, for our redemption,” he told me in connection with the Vatican conference. Bates believes that “the entire focus of creation is mankind on this Earth” and that intelligent, morally aware extraterrestrial life would undermine that view and belief in the incarnation, resurrection, and redemption drama so central to the faith. “It is a huge problem that many Christians have not really thought about.” Bates, a sober, thoughtful, and anything but fire-and-brimstone speaker, traveled to Roswell, New Mexico, in 2009 to make similar warnings at a fundamentalist Christian counterconference on the officially designated anniversary of the supposed crashing of a UFO with “aliens” there in 1947.

But to assume an implacable response from the Christian corner may underestimate the faith's imagination and historical adaptability. If you listen to what some Catholic leaders, at least, have said on the subject of extraterrestrial life, the tone is generous and the argument even accommodating. In a front page story in the official Vatican newspaper,
L'Osservatore Romano
, José Gabriel Funes, a Jesuit astronomer from Argentina who is the director of the centuries-old Vatican Observatory, referred to our potential “extraterrestrial brothers” out in space and explained there was no theological reason to fear them.