by David Toomey
Suppose Vinge is right. Is it possible that with vast knowledge comes humility and a deep sense of history, and that our machine offspring will remember us—and perhaps even find a reason to respect us? More than forty years ago, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke imagined extraterrestrials who, over millennia, traded worn-out bodies for machines and, many millennia later, worn-out machines for pure energy. Although they had become “godlike,” Clarke writes, “they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea.”12 But we are, phylogenetically, a lot nearer one-celled organisms than are Clarke’s godlike energy beings, and when we see warm slime washed up on the beach many of us feel no particular intimacy. It is as possible that they will be what H. G. Wells and many after him described as “something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful.”13 Will they decide, as in so many science fiction movies, that we should be exterminated, or merely shuffle us off to some sort of global assisted-living facility and go on without us?
On all these questions we may take some comfort in the existence of the Singularity Institute, a think tank founded in 2000, whose members consider means to ensure that our machine offspring remain “human friendly.” Its members work in and around Berkeley, which happens to be a few miles from the SETI Institute in Mountain View, which happens to be a ten-minute drive from NASA Ames. The future arrives in some places sooner than others, and it seems to arrive in northern California sooner than anywhere else.
WEIRD MACHINES
Let’s return now to the question: Would senders of a radio signal be descended from beings with a weird biology? If they are machines, any answer might be moot. Following Shostak’s reasoning, they would be designed from scratch by other machines that had been designed from scratch, and they would be designed for specific purposes. New designs would appear with each generation, and each generation might last a fraction of a second. Such beings would have no practical need to retain any vestigial physical characteristics, and the evolutionary break with their past might be clean. Even if an observer could examine such beings on the molecular scale, he would be unable to tell whether the biology or biochemistry of their ancestors was weird. Of course, the beings themselves would have great capacities for information storage, and would retain the knowledge somewhere. Some among them might have an interest in ancient history, and a few might harbor a sentimental need to recall their origins. But on the aggregate they would have no practical need for such memories, and it’s possible they wouldn’t care.
DECIPHERING A SIGNAL
Serious thinking about the “what if we receive a signal?” question has advanced further than you might suppose. There is a “SETI protocol” whose relevant paper is entitled “Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence.” Its signers have agreed, among other things “to inform the Secretary General of the United Nations as well as the public and the international scientific community, to the greatest extent feasible and practicable, of the nature, conduct, locations and results.”14 But what, exactly, would we be responding to? What might that message be?
Frank Drake has a recurring dream in which he detects a signal from a civilization some 20,000 light-years distant and is unable to decipher it. In his waking hours, he and his colleagues have considered the problems of understanding such a missive at length. Certainly its content would be constrained by the nature of our universe. Although radio waves travel at the speed of light, interstellar distances are very large. The first confirmed planet in a traditional habitable zone—Kepler-22b—is 600 light years from us, meaning that any message we receive tomorrow would have been sent about the time Henry V defeated the French at the Battle of Agincourt. The time lag might be inconvenient, but it is an inevitable consequence of the way our universe is, and civilizations wishing to communicate would have no choice but to adapt. They would design messages on matters that they judged important and useful, and they would transmit those messages with no hope of a quick response.
This was the expectation of Shklovskii and Sagan’s Intelligent Life in the Universe, the primer of SETI, and remains the assumption of many practitioners. More specifically, Sagan suggested that there may be three overlapping signals: first, an unmistakable artificial beacon like a sequence of prime numbers; second, a primer to the language of interstellar discourse; and third, at the same wavelength but perhaps at a higher frequency, an “Encyclopedia Galactica”—that is, a catalogue of the civilizations known to the sender of the message, including descriptions of themselves and everything they know about the universe.
Marvin Minsky once posited a universal. Any intelligent species will use symbols simply because they are the only way to communicate a great deal of information economically. The word “apple” for instance, is made of five letters arranged in a specific sequence. It is far easier to reproduce those letters than an actual apple or a detailed image of an apple. Intelligent beings would recognize a kind of law of communication economics, and would abide by it. Any message sent by intelligent beings would be in a symbolic language. Moreover, it would be designed to be deciphered, and it would teach its recipients to decipher it with mathematics.
The reasoning here is twofold. First, anyone with the savvy to build a radio telescope must have learned enough mathematics to grasp the physics of electromagnetic radiation and enough three-dimensional geometry to design and build a high-gain antenna. Since the senders and receivers would both need radio telescopes, they would have this background in common, and both would know it.
Second, despite differences in their means of perceiving the world, even radically different minds are likely to share certain views. Physicist Max Tegmark notes that a cat seeing only black and white, a bird seeing four primary colors, a bee seeing polarized light, a bat using sonar, and a robotic vacuum cleaner—all would agree on whether a door is open or closed.15 Radically different minds might also agree on more complex information, like that embodied by mathematics.
In fact, in the view of many (but certainly not all), mathematics is the very warp and woof of the cosmos, there waiting to be found, and waiting to be used as the basis for a universal language. The sum of 1 and 1, the number of degrees in a triangle, and the value of pi are the same everywhere in our universe. So are all mathematical theorems. This is why mathematicians speak of “discovering” a theorem, not inventing or creating one. Even supposing that mathematics can be used as a universal language, it does not follow that all of the hypothesized extraterrestrial civilizations use it. Certainly it is possible to imagine a civilization of poets and philosophers who manage with nothing beyond arithmetic. It is even easier to imagine one without engineering. But those are not civilizations that SETI expects to hear from.
COSMIC INTERCOURSE
It may surprise many that these ideas have progressed much further than theory, that linguists in our own galactic neighborhood have already designed languages built from mathematics. Dutch mathematician Hans Freudenthal, for instance, invented a simple language of long and short radio pulses for what his English translator called “cosmic intercourse.”16 Unless Freudenthal had a goal far more ambitious than that of most SETI programs, the unintentional double entendre is a lesson in humility for interpreters of Earthbound languages and, perhaps especially, for interpreters of signals from out there.
Inventor and software developer Brian McConnell has combined ideas from genetics and research in artificial intelligence to create another such language. In 2001, he argued that a message from extraterrestrials that could be deciphered might appear as a very long string of binary numbers—that is, ones and zeros—and they would present a visible pattern or structure, the equivalent of words and sentences. A decipherer would assume such a pattern was in there somewhere and begin her work by finding it. She would also assume that the message would begin by teaching mathematical symbols, and it would do so with examples. The equal sign, for instance, would be a certain sequence of ones and
zeros, and a “not equal” sign would be another such sequence. Both would appear between other ones and zeros, but only the equal sign would appear between identical sequences.
Teaching other symbols and sets of symbols through more examples, McConnell’s message would present a carefully staged curriculum, working on up through algebra, Boolean logic, and branching statements. Using bitmaps, it could teach with images in gray scale and color. By adding to the bitmaps a third dimension representing time, the message could use moving images. And with a set of moving images, it could convey an abstract concept. The idea of gravity, for instance, might be expressed by moving images of a falling weight, a planet in orbit around a star, two stars in mutual orbit, and a single star imploding. If the message attached the same sequence of ones and zeros to each of those images, it would identify them as representing the same phenomenon, and in all subsequent lessons it could dispense with the images and signify gravity more economically, with that sequence of ones and zeros.
If the message were something like an “Encyclopedia Galactica,” McConnell thinks the main challenge to the message maker would be mediating its own knowledge with the lesser knowledge of the decipherer. The remedy would be a curriculum staged so carefully that when the decipherer reached a certain level in the message—a point at which that she could not decipher, despite all efforts—she would know that her capacity to understand had reached its limit.
You may see assumptions here. Perhaps the civilization that created the message does not conceive of spatial dimensions as we do. Perhaps that civilization does not conceive of time in such a way that it can be represented as a spatial dimension. Perhaps the SETI folk are too optimistic.
THE CHALLENGE OF UNDERSTANDING
Suppose, though, that we could communicate. How much might we understand? A similar question was addressed by philosopher Thomas Nagel in his essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Nagel chose the sensory experience of bats from among many others because in his view, it is alien to our own. His answer to the titular question is that because we are not bats, we probably can’t really know.17 He may be right, but there is something defeatist in his answer, and it certainly runs counter to what may be a universal human impulse. We spend much of our lives trying to understand others and trying to make ourselves understood by them. On our best days, we are excited by communicating and understanding those who are truly different. In fact, much of art and literature attempts to communicate a particular awareness, sensibility, or emotional state, and some despairs of the possibility of such communication. This may be the very reason why Nagel’s question is intriguing and challenging—too much so to leave to science fiction writers and spoilsport philosophers.
The large field of study called animal cognition is concerned with questions in areas of animal reasoning, problem solving, and language. Practitioners in the field study many animals, especially primates, cetaceans, and elephants. Some researchers are interested in consciousness, asking, in so many words, what it’s like to be that animal. A great many nonscientists have asked the same questions; some have gone so far as to supply answers.
Numerous writers have tried to give expression to awareness that is nonhuman. There is a surprisingly large body of literature, for instance, that assumes the voice of dogs. Virginia Woolf penned an autobiography of the spaniel belonging to Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning; more recently there appeared a collection of poems written by poets using their dogs’ voices (or at least what the poets imagined were their dogs’ voices), with such refreshingly candid titles as “Are You Gonna Eat That?” and “Squirrel!”18 Of course, as Nagel would remind us, not being dogs, we can’t really know whether such renderings have any fidelity to the actual experience. All we can say is that they seem right. Dogs, of course, are near all of us phylogenetically, and many of us literally. It is possible that the gulf between human and canine experience is relatively narrow and easily bridged. A noteworthy attempt to bridge a wider gap—by someone who has given a great deal of thought to the creatures on the other side—is Edward O. Wilson’s novel Anthill, parts of which are told from the point of view of an ant colony—a collective intelligence.19
Which brings us to John C. Lilly. In 1961, when Frank Drake and a staff officer on the Space Science Board of the National Academy of Sciences named J. Peter Pearman were planning the conference at Green Bank, they quickly came up with a fairly impressive guest list that included astronomers, chemists, and electronics experts. Drake joked, “All we need now is someone who has spoken to an extraterrestrial,” at which point Pearman, taking the “terrestrial” in “extraterrestrial” to mean dry ground but otherwise not missing a beat, said, “John Lilly.”20
Lilly was the director of the Communications Research Institute in the Virgin Islands, the communication of interest being that of bottlenose dolphins. In 1961, Lilly was fairly well known even outside academic circles, mostly thanks to a best-selling book called Man and Dolphin, which made the case that dolphins are as intelligent as humans, that they have a sophisticated language and perhaps an equally sophisticated culture. Lilly’s work (and his capable promotion of it) exalted the dolphin in the popular imagination. It is thanks to Lilly that many of us regard the dolphin as wise, gentle, in intimate contact with nature, and, when called upon, heroic. Drake agreed with Pearman that Lilly might make an interesting contribution to the conference; he was among the invited, and his presentation, rich with anecdotes of dolphins demonstrating all manner of intelligence, was by all accounts enthralling. His stories of the challenges and exhilaration of communicating with dolphins also gave a hint of what might come with encountering a signal from the stars.
Some years later, Lilly designed a “communications laboratory,” a half-flooded living room where humans and dolphins could communicate as equals and where they would develop a common language. That language failed to emerge, and Lilly came to believe the limitation was on his end. His solution was to attempt to make changes in his own mind. He began experimenting with LSD, ketamine, and a sensory deprivation tank, sometimes in combination, and “communed” with dolphins while using LSD. In the view of some, Lilly’s work set back the study of dolphins by decades.21 Carl Sagan mentioned Lilly’s work in his best-selling book The Cosmic Connection, and he visited Lilly at the institute. But Sagan eventually concluded that Lilly’s experiments lacked scientific rigor, and in time SETI and Lilly went separate ways.
There have been many other attempts to understand a very different awareness or consciousness. Some, interestingly enough, disregard scientific rigor altogether.
A TRAVELOGUE FOR PLANTS
Jonathon Keats is a San Francisco–based conceptual artist who would prefer to be called an “experimental philosopher.” Many of his works explore the largely unmapped spaces separating law, philosophy, and science—places where few of us have thought to go. He used the legal framework of air rights to sell properties in other dimensions; he copyrighted his own mind, claiming that it is a sculpture that he created in the act of thinking; and—this of most interest to us—he filmed travelogues for plants. In March 2010 he created an installation of houseplants sitting on a floor beneath a video screen on which was projected a six-minute film loop of the sky over a part of Italy. By way of explanation, Keats deadpanned to The New Yorker that plants are more sensitive to certain parts of the light spectrum, and the makeup of the spectrum differs according to location.22 Plants may never visit Italy, and they would be more interested in the sky than in sites favored by more ambulatory tourists. Thus, a good travelogue for plants—good from the plants’ point of view, that is—would focus on the sky.
On the subject of his own artistic development, Keats further deadpanned that, like many other filmmakers, he had begun in pornography, although in his case it was pornography for plants, by which he meant a film of bees pollinating flowers. He further explained, with, one assumes, tongue temporarily out of cheek, “What I’m always doing is trying to pose thought experiments in the o
ld-fashioned philosophical way . . . imagining from a radically different perspective circumstances that are very familiar to us, in order to make them unfamiliar and force us to start to pull them apart.”23
It is telling that some of the most interesting thinking about the experience of radically different minds comes from a scientist whose experiments led well outside established scientific practice, and from a self-styled conceptual artist and experimental philosopher. We are near or past some sort of boundary here, and perhaps we should recognize that. We might also recognize that, with regard to extraterrestrial intelligence, science gets us only so far. Science historian Steven J. Dick puts it directly:
Science can as yet add nothing to the question of the physical, mental, and moral nature of intelligence beyond the Earth. At best, science may shed a pale light on the question of the possible physical forms of the alien, but it can say nothing about its mental evolution—much less about whether good or evil or some compromise of the two rules such intelligences as might exist in the universe.24