Trixie & Me
Page 9
The photo of Berry and his cat caught her eye.
She pulled the photograph off the control panel and smiled, looking at Berry in happier times. He looked content. His hair was messy. His blue shirt had grease stains on the sleeves. He was laughing, holding his cat up close to his face so it would make it into the photo.
The cat was pretty, with black hair like hers. The eyes looked warm and friendly. A cute collar encircled the cat's neck, hidden slightly by its dark fur. Strands of the rainbow-colored cord were just visible in the photo, as was the silver tag hanging from the collar along with a shiny silver bell. In her mind, Trixie could hear the bell ringing even back then.
There were words written on the photo. She couldn't read them. Trixie didn't know how to read, but she understood what they said, months before someone on the Rift Valley confirmed it for her. They explained everything, they told her all she needed to know.
Those few words were, Trixie & Me .
The Beginning
Afterword
Trixie & Me is the second of four stories in the novel Galactic Exploration.
During the 1950's, Physicist Enrico Fermi was renowned for asking hypothetical questions over lunch at the Fuller Lodge in Los Alamos. One afternoon, Fermi casually asked, “ Don't you ever wonder where everybody is? ” The scientists present, including George Gamow and Edward Teller, immediately knew what Fermi was talking about, and a discussion started in earnest about the prospect of intelligent life in outer space.
The basis for Fermi's question was the realization that the advent of interstellar travel would allow an intelligent alien race to colonize the entire galaxy in roughly a hundred million years, following the law of geometric expansion. This would be a mere afternoon in cosmological time.
With mankind going from drawing cave paintings of the moon to walking upon the lunar surface in roughly ten thousand years, it is possible that Homo sapiens will gain a mastery of interstellar travel within the next couple of centuries and will begin their own conquest of the Milky Way. Such a conquest, once technically feasible, would expand rapidly, branching throughout the galaxy until all the habitable systems had been identified and colonized.
TRIXIE & ME
Trixie & Me poses an alternative reason for the Rare Earth Hypothesis. Rather than being the first to emerge into the interstellar environment, we may be the last, or at least the latest in a long line.
Given the length of time it took for intelligence to arise on Earth, numerous other civilizations may have risen and fallen, having gone extinct long before we first stepped out onto the savannah. It could be that we inhabit a celestial graveyard with only the remnants of previous burnt-out civilizations still clinging to existence.
Recently, Stephen Hawking popularized the notion that one should not shout in a jungle. His point was that we are being rather loud, clumsy and naive about the prospect of alien intelligence, assuming aliens either don't exist or that they would be benign.
In a documentary for the Discovery Channel, Hawking stated his thoughts:
We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet... 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.
Rather than being paranoid, Hawking is encouraging prudence. We have only one planet, one opportunity to emerge into the galaxy.
Is it likely that a hostile alien race would seek to exploit resources on Earth? Probably not, for a number of interrelated reasons.
Our current electromagnetic footprint is so small as to be insignificant. Given the size of the Milky Way, our radio wave emissions extend less than a hundred light-years from Earth, barely 0.1% of the one hundred thousand light-year span of our galaxy. We have made barely a ripple in this pond. In light of this, and the immense distances involved with interstellar travel, only a local alien civilization existing in the same portion of the spiral arm as our solar system could ever possibly discover and contact or reach Earth. Given that the speed of light imposes what appears to be an iron-clad limit on travel, even if someone close to us was to discover our presence and mount an expedition, it is unlikely to reach us any time soon.
If alien civilizations are subject to the same economic realities we observe both in commerce and in nature, we can assume that any alien race undertaking such a voyage would probably do so for scientific rather than exploitive reasons. There are just too many other, easier ways to gain resources than flying zillions of miles through space to our tiny planet.
The only reason for such a journey would be to sample life, and not for conquest. It's a case of investment versus return. To mount such an undertaking would require a vast investment of time and resources for any alien race, and would only offer a minor return, one that was centuries removed from its initial point of investment. Therefore, the only plausible reason for such an action would be for the scientific exploration of exotic life on Earth. In this story, I've portrayed hostile intent, but I think this is highly unlikely.
When it comes to the concept of alien conquest, it's interesting to consider the evolution of life on Earth. Within nature, we see a food chain, but we also see numerous species coexisting peacefully, occupying different niches so as to avoid direct competition for limited resources. In the same way, any alien species that were to discover life within our solar system and wanted to move into the neighborhood would probably be more interested in one of the other planets than Earth, simply because their biological origins probably came from a highly different environment, perhaps one closer to Neptune or Titan. Earth might be balmy for us, but it's probably hellish to our neighbors.
In The Descent of Man , Charles Darwin discusses at length the proposition that the difference between mankind and animals is one of degree not type. The emotions, instinct, intellect and intelligence we so richly enjoy is not unique but rather the most advanced example we know of in the animal kingdom. That cats, dogs, birds, whales, dolphins etc, feel emotions and have a sense of conscious awareness is beyond dispute.
In the finest traditions of the classic science fiction stories of the 50s and 60s, Trixie & Me has a twist intended to vividly ask the question, what if the conscious awareness of a “lower” animal could be transported into the mind and body of a human. How would they react, how would they adapt, what would they think?
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