The Search for Extraterrestrials Could Make Monkeys Out of All of Us
“He was a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people-eater. . . .”
So went the words to a 1960s hit song, inventing an extraterrestrial visitor in the way people have since the beginning of human consciousness. Religions may rule out intelligent life on other planets, but astronomers rule it in. Under their influence, our government just decided to spend $100 million over the next decade sending messages into space to try to contact the critters.
The money will go into something called SETI--search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In 1978, it won Sen. William Proxmire’s “Golden Fleece” award for research that was the biggest waste of Uncle Sam’s money. It was dropped from the budget in ‘82, but now it’s back and bigger than ever. This $100 million is bigger, for instance, than the annual budget for research on breast cancer or lung cancer.
Proxmire was right in ‘78, and Congress was right in ‘82; this is a wacko waste of taxpayers’ money to satisfy the curiosity of a handful of dreamy astronomers. Not because extraterrestrials don’t exist--they most certainly do. But because it’s just plain dangerous, and if astronomers had any understanding of evolution, they would see why.
Evolution predicts the existence of selfishness, arrogance and violence on other planets even more surely than it predicts intelligence. If they could get to Earth, extraterrestrials would do to us what we have done to “lesser” animals for centuries.
First, let’s lay to rest the big question: whether the critters are out there. There is no doubt about it, Earthlings, they are there. Russian astronomer I. S. Shklovskii and our own Carl Sagan joined forces to prove this back in the 1960s in their book “Intelligent Life in the Universe.” Actually the book is pretty good, and an inspiring example of scientific cooperation during the Cold War. It proved that intelligent life must exist not on one but on many other planets, and all work since has confirmed its conclusions.
According to a recent set of calculations by Frank D. Drake, a UC Santa Cruz astronomer, there are between 10,000 and 100,000 “advanced” civilizations (this, dubiously, includes us) in our own Milky Way galaxy alone. It’s a simple matter of estimating the rate of formation of stars, then multiplying by the fraction with planets around them, and the average number of planets per star suitable for life to evolve. This figure is then adjusted downward on the assumption that only some will actually evolve life, that only some of those will end up with intelligent life, and that only a fraction of those will develop advanced civilizations. They even take into account the fact that such civilizations will only be temporary.
With all these assumptions, the number of planets out there with critters as smart or smarter than we are is still widely agreed to be in the thousands, just in our galaxy. Therefore, critics of SETI who claim that no such extraterrestrial civilizations exist are wrong. If you believe that life evolved on Earth under certain physical and chemical conditions that lasted for billions of years--say, lightning cracking endlessly through clouds of water vapor, carbon dioxide and methane--then the same occurrence elsewhere is a matter of probabilities. We are talking about more than 100 billion stars. As for intelligence, once life has evolved it’s only a matter of time.
The trouble is that this is as far as SETI astronomers go in their understanding of evolution. What they miss completely is the essence of evolution: competition. That means competition of every sort, within species as well as between them, aggressive and even violent as well as orderly and benign. Just as it is difficult to imagine life evolving on another planet without progressing toward intelligence, it is virtually impossible to imagine it without selfishness. Whatever the extraterrestrial gene is made of, it has to be a “selfish” gene, because otherwise it wouldn’t have survived the relentless competition leading up from the primordial soup.
The result is that creatures with any complexity will be trying not only to outdo each other but also frequently to do each other in. As Charles Darwin put it in a private letter to another biologist, “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horribly cruel works of nature!”
So the question is not, “Are there more advanced creatures out there?” but “What will they do to us when they find us?” To answer, consider what we have done to chimpanzees and gorillas, creatures that stand in a relation to us that parallels the one we would have to the extraterrestrials. We steal their habitats, we experiment on them, we cage them in zoos to satisfy our curiosity, we train them to do tricks in circuses, we kill them to display their body parts, some of us even eat them, and attempts have been made to get them to do useful work--slave labor. Shklovskii and Sagan’s 500-page book devotes only four sentences to the possibility that anything bad might result from letting extraterrestrial civilizations know of our existence and location, and SETI astronomers today are equally optimistic.
This is naive both philosophically and scientifically. Contrary to the fantasy of advanced extraterrestrials who help us in our own progress, the likely result of contact is the most grotesque disaster that has ever befallen our species. So instead of spending a hundred million searching for them, we should hide for at least a few centuries--until we can protect ourselves from creatures that are likely to treat us as well as we’ve treated rhesus monkeys, cows, dogs and dodos.
