Keith Cooper - The Contact Paradox: Challenging our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

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Contents

For Fox, who proves that you dont have to be the same species to be best friends.

The author would like to thank the following people: Gemma Lavender, Stephen Baxter, Paul Gilster, Anna MacDiarmid, Catherine Best, Jim Martin, Jim Benford, Michael Michaud, Marc Dando and all the scientists, academics and researchers who the author spoke to during the writing of this book.

The modern SETI project the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, the scientific attempt to detect the alien in the heavens was initially inspired by an accident of technology. In 1959, not long after the Mark I telescope at Jodrell Bank had been built, two physicist-astronomers called Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi, writing in a paper for Nature , pointed out that the new giant radio telescopes, designed to listen to natural emissions from the stars and planets, happened also to be capable of receiving radio signals from civilisations on the worlds of other stars, and indeed of sending such signals. It was an unexpected opportunity, and since, for all we knew then, the sky might have been awash with the signals of alien cultures, it would have seemed remiss not to at least try to eavesdrop. So the first serious SETI search was made by an American radio astronomer, Frank Drake, in 1960 with negative results.

Since 2008 I have served on a committee advising the SETI project about the possible cultural implications of contact with ETI (extraterrestrial intelligence), and have met many of the pioneers, including Frank Drake and Jill Tarter the model for Ellie Arroway in the novel and movie Contact. It is my personal impression that they expected to detect ETI with their radio-telescope searches, if not immediately, then soon, perhaps after a few years. But, nearly six decades on from Drakes first attempts as I write, no such unambiguous signal has been detected. Where are they all? In a Galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars, shouldnt at least one host a planet with a civilisation motivated to make contact, as we seem to be?

The mystery deepens when you consider that you dont even need a radio telescope to receive the right kind of signal. Consider optical SETI. I once wrote a story called Eagle Song (in my collection Obelisk ) about a culture at a nearby star pinging the Solar System with a laser bright enough for our sunlight-attuned eyes to see. This is technically feasible. A current project by the Breakthrough Starshot group would send a small probe to the stars by using a powerful laser beam to push a light-sail. Such a beam would outshine the brightest star in the sky of a planet of alpha Centauri, say, if aimed that way. The aliens could have made themselves visible to us by means like this even before Galileo turned his first telescope on Jupiter. But, evidently, they havent.

Something seems wrong. Maybe we are alone in the Universe after all.

But as Keith Cooper argues in this timely, sympathetic but critical survey of the past and future of SETI, our apparently scientific quest for contact with the alien or at least for evidence of its presence is actually a deep expression of our humanity: the stars are a mirror, as Cooper eloquently puts it. SETI is perhaps shaped by our deepest impulses, our unconscious prejudices. In which case it may be no surprise that our minds may not be open enough to apprehend the possibilities. Our search is not yet wide or deep enough, our understanding of the null result so far flawed.

So what do we expect, hope and fear of the alien?

As a fiction writer, the humanity mirror of most concern to me personally is popular culture: our collective dreaming. In recent years arguably the most pervasive alien figure in our culture (although it may be a close-run thing with Star Trek s Mr Spock) has been DC Comics Superman, a superhero who first emerged in the American comics in 1938. What can this example tell us about our attitude to SETI?

It is a valid test case, as Superman was created independently of SETI. Indeed, Supermans story had been established and evolving since long before SETI was imagined. The main elements of Supermans story the flight of baby Kal El from the doomed planet Krypton, his landing in a corn field in Kansas and discovery by adoptive parents Jonathan and Martha Kent were established quickly after that 1938 debut. Since then, many talented writers have spent decades brainstorming the implications of having an alien like Superman live with us, for good and ill (and it is generally the ill that drives compelling stories). The elements of the evolving franchise that endure are those that have survived the ruthless Darwinian selection process of success or failure at the bookstands (and latterly in the movies); something in these particular tropes evidently appeals to large numbers of readers.

Superman is not real. But after a decades-long process of storytelling and reader feedback, he may sum up our dream of the alien. So what can he tell us about that dream?

For a start, Superman, though an authentic extraterrestrial alien, is like us. In fact he is enough like a human in appearance to pass as one, with the cunning disguise of a pair of glasses. The chances are, though, that the alien will not be like us outside or inside to the extent that we may not even recognise it as intelligent. Even by 1938 it was a stretch to suppose aliens might be physically indistinguishable from humans; the octopus-like Martians of H.G. Wells The War of the Worlds (1897) were quite unlike us physically (although Wells hinted that they might resemble a future evolution of humanity). That alone may represent a considerable barrier to cultural contact.

And as for their inner nature, as Cooper points out, we have enough trouble assessing the intelligence of the other living things on Earth, even our closest evolutionary cousins such as the chimps and dolphins, to be gung-ho about an easy meeting of minds with creatures from another world entirely.