Lonely Planets

by David Grinspoon

occasional lone cry of consciousness, or a cacophonous jungle of talk

  radio, hinges on how long technological species can survive.

  This realization adds cosmic poignancy to the question of how

  humans will fare in the long run. If we are in some way representative,

  then our own prospects contain a hint about the prevalence of conscious

  *The squiggly equals sign means “is approximately equal to.”

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  souls in our entire universe. Our own nebulous future may be loosely

  tied to the psychozoic density of the cosmos. The largest unknowns in

  the equation lead us back to the unknowns of our own nature.

  The guys at Green Bank realized all this, and their ideas are still rep-

  resentative of mainstream thought in SETI. Although innumerable

  caveats and alternate scenarios have been described and proposed, the

  Drake Equation has survived as the scaffolding of all discussions about

  intelligent ETs.

  B A C K I N T H E U S S R

  Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union a small group of astronomers and the-

  orists were discussing the same questions and planning their own alien

  hunts. Because of the tradition of Cosmism, in Russia mainstream sci-

  ence has long tolerated such far-out thoughts more than it has in the

  United States. Perhaps because of a Marxist faith in an inevitable pro-

  gression of historical stages, some of the boldest notions about the evo-

  lution of advanced societies came from Soviet scientists.

  Certainly, while it lasted, the Soviet Union gave much more official

  support to SETI than the United States ever has. As I mentioned in

  chapter 14, in 1962 Iosif Shklovskii published Universe, Life, Mind,

  which included discussions of interstellar radio communication with

  other civilizations. Shklovskii independently arrived at many of the

  same conclusions reached by Cocconi, Morrison, and Drake.

  The Soviet counterpart to the Green Bank meeting, the First All-

  Union Conference on Extraterrestrial Civilizations and Interstellar

  Communication, was held in May 1964, at the Byurakan Astrophysical

  Observatory in Soviet Armenia. In his opening remarks Academician

  V. A. Ambartsumyan, head of the Byurakan Observatory, stated:

  We have no doubt whatsoever that life and civilizations exist on a

  multitude of celestial bodies, but . . . modern technological civi-

  lization (on Earth) has its origin no more than two hundred years

  in the past. And yet, the ages of planets may differ by as much as

  millions of years. Hence it seems that Earth civilization is not yet

  past the diapers age, and that there should be enormous disparity

  with extraterrestrial civilizations.

  The problem is therefore essentially a problem of communication

  between civilizations on entirely different levels of development. . . .

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  In practical terms, our aim is therefore to obtain rational technical

  and linguistic solutions for the problem of communication with

  extraterrestrial civilizations which are much more advanced than ter-

  restrial civilization.

  Echoing these comments in the first scientific paper presented at the

  Soviet meeting, Iosif Shklovskii respectfully critiqued the work of

  Drake, Cocconi, and Morrison: “It seems to us that Project Ozma was

  doomed from the very start, for the following reasons: (a) It assumed

  that civilizations may occupy the nearest stars. (b) Cocconi and

  Morrison’s idea and its realization by Drake assumes that the extrater-

  restrial civilizations are approximately on the same technological level

  as terrestrial civilizations. But . . . we are only infants as far as science

  and technology are concerned.”

  At Byurakan, Nicolai Kardashev, Shklovskii’s young colleague (and

  former star student) at Moscow State University, pondered what a tech-

  nological civilization that survives for thousands or even millions of

  years might look like. Pointing to the exponential increase in energy

  resources available to human societies in the last couple of centuries,

  Kardashev proposed that expanding energy use will be a universal hall-

  mark of advanced civilizations.

  Starting from this assumption, Kardashev devised a classification sys-

  tem for technological civilizations. Those that have the approximate

  energy resources of their entire home planet at their disposal he termed

  Type I. Humanity, he said, will become a Type I civilization sometime

  in the twenty-first century. Kardashev defined Type II civilizations as

  those using the power output of their entire home star. Finally, Type III

  civilizations have access to the resources of an entire galaxy.

  Kardashev observed that on Earth a Type I civilization took several

  billion years to develop. He predicted that the transition to Type II

  would take, at most, a few thousand years, and that to Type III no

  more than a few tens of millions. If these numbers are typical, then our

  level of civilization is a brief stage, and our own kind should be rare.

  Type II and even III civilizations should be common, since they tend to

  stick around for a long time.

  These considerations, Kardashev pointed out, have practical conse-

  quences for our search strategies. If any Type II or Type III civilizations

  are out there, they might be easier to detect even than Type I civiliza-

  tions located much closer to us—just as a stadium rock concert miles

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  away is easier to hear than a ukulele across the street. A supercivili-

  zation might have constructed a beacon reaching a wide expanse of

  galactic space, to attract the attention of fledgling species like ours just

  turning on their radios. Or, their artifacts and internal communications

  might be visible from vast distances. With a million years of progress

  under their belt, perhaps they would have undertaken vast “astroengi-

  neering” projects, rearranging or reconstructing stars for their own

  inscrutable purposes. Such cosmic-scale works of civil engineering

  might be visible across the galaxy, or even from other galaxies.*

  Shklovskii and Kardashev concluded that most civilizations out there

  must be at least Type II. This, they pointed out, suggests an entirely dif-

  ferent kind of search strategy from that used for Project Ozma. Drake,

  in effect, was searching for Type I civilizations who are broadcasting

  toward the nearest stars likely to have similar planets. This type of tar-

  geted search of nearby stars should only be successful if the galaxy is

  loaded with Type I civilizations. If we think that Type II or III civiliza-

  tions might be out there, then perhaps we should forget about looking

  at nearby stars and instead scan large areas of the sky, looking for the

  Big One. Kardashev’s ideas, like Drake’s, became part of the lexicon of

  SETI. Scientists in the field still refer to Type I, II, or III civilizations.

  East met West at the First International Conference on Communication

  with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, held at Byurakan in 1971. Later,

  Shklovskii wrote, “Never, before or afterwa
rd, have I taken part in a more

  imposing scientific gathering.” In addition to astronomers, physicists, and

  biologists, the organizers made an effort to include representatives of vari-

  ous relevant fields from the humanities, including linguists, philosophers,

  anthropologists, and historians. All of the Soviet and most of the American

  SETI pioneers were there. Several Nobel laureates were in attendance,

  including Francis Crick, who had discovered the structure of DNA. The

  proceedings make for lively reading because of the fiery clashes between

  Crick, who thought that we could not really say anything about the prob-

  ability of intelligence elsewhere, and Sagan, who thought we could.

  The assembled polymaths discussed the value of L (the lifetime of

  civilizations) in the context of the nuclear arms race, population

  *Type III civilizations always make me think of those talking galaxies in the opening scene of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. In the film they are actually angels, but we might be hard-pressed to tell the difference between angels and wise old type III aliens who have mastered and internalized technology that we cannot even dream of dreaming about.

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  dynamics, and conflict resolution theory. Discussions spun off into fas-

  cinating debates about the universality of mathematics, the meaning of

  progress, and whether the laws of physics can be changed. These con-

  siderations did not, however, really nail down the answer to the Drake

  Equation.

  Near the end of the conference, the historian William McNeill of the

  University of Chicago concluded, “I must say that in listening to the

  discussion these last days, I feel I detect what might be called a pseudo

  or scientific religion. I do not mean this as a condemnatory phrase.

  Faith and hope and trust have been very important factors in human

  life and it is not wrong to cling to these and pursue such faith. But I

  remain, I fear, an agnostic, not only in traditional religion but also in

  this new one.”

  W O W ! : F A L S E A L A R M S A N D R E A L H O P E

  As long as I’ve been aware of anything beyond the street where I lived,

  I’ve been aware of SETI. In the 1960s and early 1970s there were many

  small-scale, independent observing programs, mostly targeting nearby

  stars. Since no one had ever tried to look before, it seemed plausible

  that success could come quickly and easily. I first became conscious of

  SETI during this hopeful period, when the search was young and any-

  thing was possible. With my impressionable mind warped by science

  fiction and rock ’n’ roll radio, and with some of the SETI pioneers in

  my family’s social circle, searching for alien signals seemed like a per-

  fectly respectable and smart thing to do.

  I remember going to the Boston premiere of 2001: A Space Odyssey

  in the spring of 1968 with my family and the Sagans. It was the single

  most influential, moving, exhilarating, and terrifying moviegoing expe-

  rience of my life (at least up to now). That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept

  opening my eyes, half expecting to see a large, black, humming monolith

  standing sentinel in my bedroom. The movie was powerful, exciting,

  and frightening because it seemed completely realistic. That all these

  smart adults took it seriously heightened the aura.* There was nothing

  *I remember my dad and Carl on the way home discussing all the scientific flaws they had noticed in the film: stuff like dust swirling on the moon, which it wouldn’t do in a vacuum, and Dr. Heywood Floyd’s head resting in the wrong position when he was sleeping in weightlessness. But 2001 is one of the few movies that even attempts to be scientifically realistic and everyone gave it high marks.

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  in it that couldn’t happen in my lifetime. By century’s end, we’d be

  sending humans to the far corners of the solar system. Maybe I’d even

  go myself. Radio contact with extraterrestrials was bound to happen

  before too long. Lying awake, I felt that I was rushing through a

  Stargate, with the future approaching fast.

  Iosif Shklovskii later referred to this early period of SETI as the time

  of “adolescent optimism,” a time when we imagined creatures not too

  different from ourselves pointing their dishes right back at us from

  planets around nearly every star. This hopeful attitude was reflected in

  that, back then, it was not called SETI but CETI, for “communication

  with extraterrestrial intelligence.” Shklovskii became much more pes-

  simistic about the prospects for contact in his later years. He came to

  believe that L (the average lifetime of a civilization) was small, because

  most technological civilizations were destined to destroy themselves

  before long. As Shklovskii put it, in his 1991 memoir, published six

  years after his death at age sixty-nine, this adolescent optimism was

  “based on faith in human society’s unbounded progress and places

  exaggerated emphasis on the radio-technological prospects for extrater-

  restrial communication, while ignoring both the humanities and biolog-

  ical aspects.” Gradually the term SETI (the search for ETI) replaced

  CETI. With the adoption of this more humble acronym, we admit that

  we are only playing a game of solitaire until someone else shows up at

  the table. If and when SETI is successful, then CETI may begin.

  In the seventies, NASA started supporting small observing programs

  to the tune of a few million dollars per year (a couple of pennies from

  each American). Whereas Ozma had listened in on two stars, the new

  plan called for the world’s largest radio dishes to sample radio waves

  from a thousand promising suns.

  What was it Einstein said about great spirits always receiving violent

  opposition from mediocre minds? NASA’s SETI program was easy prey

  for politicians who wanted to pose as fiscally responsible. A SETI pro-

  gram might not succeed for decades or centuries or millennia, so it was

  easy to ridicule and portray as wasteful. In 1978, famously anti-

  intellectual Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin awarded one of his

  notorious Golden Fleece awards for stupid government spending to the

  NASA SETI program, and in 1981 he succeeded in deleting all funding

  for radio searches. Frank Drake retaliated by nominating the senator

  for membership in the Flat Earth Society, and supporters rallied to the

  SETI cause. The National Science Foundation and the International

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  Astronomical Union called upon Congress to restore funding. Sagan

  visited with Senator Proxmire for an hour and reasoned with him. A

  year after the shutdown, funding was restored and SETI was saved, for

  the time being. But, in 1993, Nevada senator Richard Bryan introduced

  a successful amendment to the 1994 NASA appropriations bill that

  eliminated all funding for SETI. That was it. NASA SETI was DOA.

  In a press release celebrating his victory, the senator from Nevada

  sneered that even after several years of searching, NASA “had failed to

  bag a single little green fellow.” Yet, two years later, his own state gov-

  ernment pro
udly christened state highway 375 “the Extraterrestrial

  Highway.”* Apparently Nevada politicians are not against aliens as long

  as they generate tourist revenue. In any case, Senator Bryan’s amendment

  dealt a fatal blow to government-supported SETI in the United States.

  Meanwhile, Soviet SETI had collapsed along with the Soviet Union. So,

  who on Earth would listen for the whispering of the sky?

  Fortunately, a couple of billionaires, as well as many ordinary folks,

  came to the rescue, and American SETI was privatized and run out of

  the nonprofit SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. SETI bene-

  fited from the 1990s information technology bubble in Silicon Valley,

  when rich, altruistic visionaries were swarming the South Bay. Much of

  the funding to privatize SETI was provided by Bill Hewlett, Dave

  Packard, Gordon Moore (cofounder of Intel), and Paul Allen (cofounder

  of Microsoft). Each kicked in a million bucks of his pocket change.

  The new project, risen from the ashes of government SETI, was

  appropriately named Project Phoenix. Its director is astrophysicist and

  SETI veteran Jill Tarter (the field, along with the rest of science, has

  progressed and is no longer completely male-dominated). Phoenix

  began observations in February 1995. At present, Phoenix receives 5

  percent of the observing time at the world’s largest radio telescope—the

  thousand-foot dish built into a giant natural crater in Arecibo, Puerto

  Rico.† Phoenix has scanned more than half of its initial target list of a

  thousand stars, all within two hundred light-years of Earth.

  *This road passes near “Area 51,” where, surely you’ve heard, the government is hiding and experimenting on the bodies and wrecked saucer of aliens who crashed in 1947 outside Roswell, New Mexico. More on this later, if I’m not silenced by government black ops agents.

  †Bizarrely, the enormous size of the Arecibo dish is the result of a large mathematical error. The designers calculated that they needed a thousand foot dish to detect radar reflections from the Earth’s ionosphere. A hundred-foot dish would have sufficed. But, as

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  To date, the longest-running continuous SETI search was the Big Ear

  project at Ohio State University. It scanned large areas of the sky near

  the hydrogen channel for twenty-five years until it was scrapped in

  1998 to make room for a golf course.* On the evening of August 15,