Cosmos - Carl Sagan (1980)

Chapter 12. ENCYCLOPAEDIA GALACTICA

“What are you? From where did you come? I have never seen anything like you.” The Creator Raven looked at Man and was … surprised to find that this strange new being was so much like himself.

—An Eskimo creation myth

The author of Nature … has made it impossible for us to have any communication from this earth with the other great bodies of the universe, in our present state; and it is highly possible that he has likewise cut off all communication betwixt the other planets, and betwixt the different systems.… We observe, in all of them, enough to raise our curiosity, but not to satisfy it … It does not appear to be suitable to the wisdom that shines throughout all nature, to suppose that we should see so far, and have our curiosity so much raised … only to be disappointed at the end … This, therefore, naturally leads us to consider our present state as only the dawn or beginning of our existence, and as a state of preparation or probation for farther advancement.…

—Colin Maclaurin, 1748

We have launched four ships to the stars, Pioneers 10 and 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2. They are backward and primitive craft, moving, compared to the immense interstellar distances, with the slowness of a race in a dream. But in the future we will do better. Our ships will travel faster. There will be designated interstellar objectives, and sooner or later our spacecraft will have human crews. In the Milky Way Galaxy there must be many planets millions of years older than Earth, and some that are billions of years older. Should we not have been visited? In all the billions of years since the origin of our planet, has there not been even once a strange craft from a distant civilization surveying our world from above, and slowly settling down to the surface to be observed by iridescent dragonflies, incurious reptiles, screeching primates or wondering humans? The idea is natural enough. It has occurred to everyone who has contemplated, even casually, the question of intelligent life in the universe. But has it happened in fact? The critical issue is the quality of the purported evidence, rigorously and skeptically scrutinized—not what sounds plausible, not the unsubstantiated testimony of one or two self-professed eyewitnesses. By this standard there are no compelling cases of extraterrestrial visitation, despite all the claims about UFOs and ancient astronauts which sometimes make it seem that our planet is awash in uninvited guests. I wish it were otherwise. There is something irresistible about the discovery of even a token, perhaps a complex inscription, but, best by far, a key to the understanding of an alien and exotic civilization. It is an appeal we humans have felt before.

In 1801 a physicist named Joseph Fourier^* was the prefect of a departement of France called Isère. While inspecting the schools in his province, Fourier discovered an eleven-year-old boy whose remarkable intellect and flair for oriental languages had already earned him the admiring attention of scholars. Fourier invited him home for a chat. The boy was fascinated by Fourier’s collection of Egyptian artifacts, collected during the Napoleonic expedition where he had been responsible for cataloging the astronomical monuments of that ancient civilization. The hieroglyphic inscriptions roused the boy’s sense of wonder. “But what do they mean?” he asked. “Nobody knows,” was the reply. The boy’s name was Jean François Champollion. Fired by the mystery of the language no one could read, he became a superb linguist and passionately immersed himself in ancient Egyptian writing. France at that time was flooded with Egyptian artifacts, stolen by Napoleon and later made available to Western scholars. The description of the expedition was published, and devoured by the young Champollion. As an adult, Champollion succeeded; fulfilling his childhood ambition, he provided a brilliant decipherment of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. But it was not until 1828, twenty-seven years after his meeting with Fourier, that Champollion first set foot in Egypt, the land of his dreams, and sailed upstream from Cairo, following the course of the Nile, paying homage to the culture he had worked so hard to understand. It was an expedition in time, a visit to an alien civilization:

The evening of the 16th we finally arrived at Dendera. There was magnificent moonlight and we were only an hour away from the Temples: Could we resist the temptation? I ask the coldest of you mortals! To dine and leave immediately were the orders of the moment: alone and without guides, but armed to the teeth we crossed the fields … the Temple appeared to us at last … One could well measure it but to give an idea of it would be impossible. It is the union of grace and majesty in the highest degree. We stayed there two hours in ecstasy, running through the huge rooms … and trying to read the exterior inscriptions in the moonlight. We did not return to the boat until three in the morning, only to return to the Temple at seven … What had been magnificent in the moonlight was still so when the sunlight revealed to us all the details … We in Europe are only dwarfs and no nation, ancient or modern, has conceived the art of architecture on such a sublime, great, and imposing style, as the ancient Egyptians. They ordered everything to be done for people who are a hundred feet high.

On the walls and columns of Karnak, at Dendera, everywhere in Egypt, Champollion delighted to find that he could read the inscriptions almost effortlessly. Many before him had tried and failed to decipher the lovely hieroglyphics, a word that means “sacred carvings.” Some scholars had believed them to be a kind of picture code, rich in murky metaphor, mostly about eyeballs and wavy lines, beetles, bumblebees and birds—especially birds. Confusion was rampant. There were those who deduced that the Egyptians were colonists from ancient China. There were those who concluded the opposite. Enormous folio volumes of spurious translations were published. One interpreter glanced at the Rosetta stone, whose hieroglyphic inscription was then still undeciphered, and instantly announced its meaning. He said that the quick decipherment enabled him “to avoid the systematic errors which invariably arise from prolonged reflection.” You get better results, he argued, by not thinking too much. As with the search for extraterrestrial life today, the unbridled speculation of amateurs had frightened many professionals out of the field.

Champollion resisted the idea of hieroglyphs as pictorial metaphors. Instead, with the aid of a brilliant insight by the English physicist Thomas Young, he proceeded something like this: The Rosetta stone had been uncovered in 1799 by a French soldier working on the fortifications of the Nile Delta town of Rashid, which the Europeans, largely ignorant of Arabic, called Rosetta. It was a slab from an ancient temple, displaying what seemed clearly to be the same message in three different writings: in hieroglyphics at top, in a kind of cursive hieroglyphic called demotic in the middle, and, the key to the enterprise, in Greek at the bottom. Champollion, who was fluent in ancient Greek, read that the stone had been inscribed to commemorate the coronation of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, in the spring of the year 196 B.C. On this occasion the king released political prisoners, remitted taxes, endowed temples, forgave rebels, increased military preparedness and, in short, did all the things that modern rulers do when they wish to stay in office.

The Greek text mentions Ptolemy many times. In roughly the same positions in the hieroglyphic text is a set of symbols surrounded by an oval or cartouche. This, Champollion reasoned, very probably also denotes Ptolemy. If so, the writing could not be fundamentally pictographic or metaphorical; rather, most of the symbols must stand for letters or syllables. Champollion also had the presence of mind to count up the number of Greek words and the number of individual hieroglyphs in what were presumably equivalent texts. There were many fewer of the former, again suggesting that the hieroglyphs were mainly letters and syllables. But which hieroglyphs correspond to which letters? Fortunately, Champollion had available to him an obelisk, which had been excavated at Philae, that included the hieroglyphic equivalent of the Greek name Cleopatra. The two cartouches for Ptolemy and for Cleopatra, rearranged so they both read left to right, are shown on p. 000. Ptolemy begins with P; the first symbol in the cartouche is a square. Cleopatra has for its fifth letter a P, and in the Cleopatra cartouche in the fifth position is the same square. P it is. The fourth letter in Ptolemy is an L. Is it represented by the lion? The second letter of Cleopatra is an L and, in hieroglyphics, here is a lion again. The eagle is an A, appearing twice in Cleopatra, as it should. A clear pattern is emerging. Egyptian hieroglyphics are, in significant part, a simple substitution cipher. But not every hieroglyph is a letter or syllable. Some are pictographs. The end of the Ptolemy cartouche means “Ever-living, beloved of the god Ptah.” The semicircle and egg at the end of Cleopatra are a conventional ideogram for “daughter of Isis.” This mix of letters and pictographs caused some grief for earlier interpreters.

In retrospect it sounds almost easy. But it had taken many centuries to figure out, and there was a great deal more to do, especially in the decipherment of the hieroglyphs of much earlier times. The cartouches were the key within the key, almost as if the pharaohs of Egypt had circled their own names to make the going easier for the Egyptologists two thousand years in the future. Champollion walked the Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak and casually read the inscriptions, which had mystified everyone else, answering the question he had posed as a child to Fourier. What a joy it must have been to open this one-way communication channel with another civilization, to permit a culture that had been mute for millennia to speak of its history, magic, medicine, religion, politics and philosophy.

Today we are again seeking messages from an ancient and exotic civilization, this time hidden from us not only in time but also in space. If we should receive a radio message from an extraterrestrial civilization, how could it possibly be understood? Extraterrestrial intelligence will be elegant, complex, internally consistent and utterly alien. Extraterrestrials would, of course, wish to make a message sent to us as comprehensible as possible. But how could they? Is there in any sense an interstellar Rosetta stone? We believe there is. We believe there is a common language that all technical civilizations, no matter how different, must have. That common language is science and mathematics. The laws of Nature are the same everywhere. The patterns in the spectra of distant stars and galaxies are the same as those for the Sun or for appropriate laboratory experiments: not only do the same chemical elements exist everywhere in the universe, but also the same laws of quantum mechanics that govern the absorption and emission of radiation by atoms apply everywhere as well. Distant galaxies revolving about one another follow the same laws of gravitational physics as govern the motion of an apple falling to Earth, or Voyager on its way to the stars. The patterns of Nature are everywhere the same. An interstellar message, intended to be understood by an emerging civilization, should be easy to decode.

We do not expect an advanced technical civilization on any other planet in our solar system. If one were only a little behind us—10,000 years, say—it would have no advanced technology at all. If it were only a little ahead of us—we who are already exploring the solar system—its representatives should by now be here. To communicate with other civilizations, we require a method adequate not merely for interplanetary distances but for interstellar distances. Ideally, the method should be inexpensive, so that a huge amount of information could be sent and received at very little cost; fast, so an interstellar dialogue is rendered possible; and obvious, so any technological civilization, no matter what its evolutionary path, will discover it early. Surprisingly, there is such a method. It is called radio astronomy.

The largest semi-steerable radio/radar observatory on the planet Earth is the Arecibo facility, which Cornell University operates for the National Science Foundation. In the remote hinterland of the island of Puerto Rico, it is 305 meters (a thousand feet) across, its reflecting surface a section of a sphere laid down in a preexisting bowl-shaped valley. It receives radio waves from the depths of space, focusing them onto the feed arm antenna high above the dish, which is in turn electronically connected to the control room, where the signal is analyzed. Alternatively, when the telescope is used as a radar transmitter, the feed arm can broadcast a signal into the dish, which reflects it into space. The Arecibo Observatory has been used both to search for intelligent signals from civilizations in space and, just once, to broadcast a message—to M13, a distant globular cluster of stars, so that our technical capability to engage in both sides of an interstellar dialogue would be clear, at least to us.

In a period of a few weeks, the Arecibo Observatory could transmit to a comparable observatory on a planet of a nearby star all of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, 10,000 times faster than a message attached to our fastest interstellar spaceship. Radio telescopes generate, in narrow frequency ranges, signals so intense they can be detected over immense interstellar distances. The Arecibo Observatory could communicate with an identical radio telescope on a planet 15,000 light-years away, halfway to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, if we knew precisely where to point it. And radio astronomy is a natural technology. Virtually any planetary atmosphere, no matter what its composition, should be partially transparent to radio waves. Radio messages are not much absorbed or scattered by the gas between the stars, just as a San Francisco radio station can be heard easily in Los Angeles even when smog there has reduced the visibility at optical wavelengths to a few kilometers. There are many natural cosmic radio sources having nothing to do with intelligent life—pulsars and quasars, the radiation belts of planets and the outer atmospheres of stars; from almost any planet there are bright radio sources to discover early in the local development of radio astronomy. Moreover, radio represents a large fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. Any technology able to detect radiation of any wavelength would fairly soon stumble on the radio part of the spectrum.

There may be other effective methods of communication that have substantial merit: interstellar spacecraft; optical or infrared lasers; pulsed neutrinos; modulated gravity waves; or some other kind of transmission that we will not discover for a thousand years. Advanced civilizations may have graduated far beyond radio for their own communications. But radio is powerful, cheap, fast and simple. They will know that a backward civilization like ours, wishing to receive messages from the skies, is likely to turn first to radio technology. Perhaps they will have to wheel the radio telescopes out of the Museum of Ancient Technology. If we were to receive a radio message we would know that there would be at the very least one thing we could talk about: radio astronomy.

But is there anyone out there to talk to? With a third or half a trillion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy alone, could ours be the only one accompanied by an inhabited planet? How much more likely it is that technical civilizations are a cosmic commonplace, that the Galaxy is pulsing and humming with advanced societies, and, therefore, that the nearest such culture is not so very far away—perhaps transmitting from antennas established on a planet of a naked-eye star just next door. Perhaps when we look up at the sky at night, near one of those faint pinpoints of light is a world on which someone quite different from us is then glancing idly at a star we call the Sun and entertaining, for just a moment, an outrageous speculation.

It is very hard to be sure. There may be severe impediments to the evolution of a technical civilization. Planets may be rarer than we think. Perhaps the origin of life is not so easy as our laboratory experiments suggest. Perhaps the evolution of advanced life forms is improbable. Or it may be that complex life forms evolve readily, but intelligence and technical societies require an unlikely set of coincidences—just as the evolution of the human species depended on the demise of the dinosaurs and the ice-age recession of the forests in whose trees our ancestors screeched and dimly wondered. Or perhaps civilizations arise repeatedly, inexorably, on innumerable planets in the Milky Way, but are generally unstable; so all but a tiny fraction are unable to survive their technology and succumb to greed and ignorance, pollution and nuclear war.

It is possible to explore this great issue further and make a crude estimate of N, the number of advanced technical civilizations in the Galaxy. We define an advanced civilization as one capable of radio astronomy. This is, of course, a parochial if essential definition. There may be countless worlds on which the inhabitants are accomplished linguists or superb poets but indifferent radio astronomers. We will not hear from them. N can be written as the product or multiplication of a number of factors, each a kind of filter, every one of which must be sizable for there to be a large number of civilizations:

N_*, the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy;

f_p, the fraction of stars that have planetary systems;

n_e, the number of planets in a given system that are ecologically suitable for life;

f_l, the fraction of otherwise suitable planets on which life actually arises;

f_i, the fraction of inhabited planets on which an intelligent form of life evolves;

f_c, the fraction of planets inhabited by intelligent beings on which a communicative technical civilization develops; and

f_L, the fraction of a planetary lifetime graced by a technical civilization.

Written out, the equation reads N = N_*pf_en_lf_if_cf_L. All the f’s are fractions, having values between 0 and 1; they will pare down the large value of N_*.

To derive N we must estimate each of these quantities. We know a fair amount about the early factors in the equation, the numbers of stars and planetary systems. We know very little about the later factors, concerning the evolution of intelligence or the lifetime of technical societies. In these cases our estimates will be little better than guesses. I invite you, if you disagree with my estimates below, to make your own choices and see what implications your alternative suggestions have for the number of advanced civilizations in the Galaxy. One of the great virtues of this equation, due originally to Frank Drake of Cornell, is that it involves subjects ranging from stellar and planetary astronomy to organic chemistry, evolutionary biology, history, politics and abnormal psychology. Much of the Cosmos is in the span of the Drake equation.

We know N_*, the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, fairly well, by careful counts of stars in small but representative regions of the sky. It is a few hundred billion; some recent estimates place it at 4 × 10¹¹. Very few of these stars are of the massive short-lived variety that squander their reserves of thermonuclear fuel. The great majority have lifetimes of billions or more years in which they are shining stably, providing a suitable energy source for the origin and evolution of life on nearby planets.

There is evidence that planets are a frequent accompaniment of star formation: in the satellite systems of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, which are like miniature solar systems; in theories of the origin of the planets; in studies of double stars; in observations of accretion disks around stars; and in some preliminary investigations of gravitational perturbations of nearby stars. Many, perhaps even most, stars may have planets. We take the fraction of stars that have planets, f_p, as roughly equal to ⅓. Then the total number of planetary systems in the Galaxy would be N_*f_p ≃ 1.3 × 10¹¹ (the symbol ≃ means “approximately equal to”). If each system were to have about ten planets, as ours does, the total number of worlds in the Galaxy would be more than a trillion, a vast arena for the cosmic drama.

In our own solar system there are several bodies that may be suitable for life of some sort: the Earth certainly, and perhaps Mars, Titan and Jupiter. Once life originates, it tends to be very adaptable and tenacious. There must be many different environments suitable for life in a given planetary system. But conservatively we choose n_e = 2. Then the number of planets in the Galaxy suitable for life becomes N_*f_pn_e≃ 3 × 10¹¹.

Experiments show that under the most common cosmic conditions the molecular basis of life is readily made, the building blocks of molecules able to make copies of themselves. We are now on less certain ground; there may, for example, be impediments in the evolution of the genetic code, although I think this unlikely over billions of years of primeval chemistry. We choose f₁ ≃ ⅓, implying a total number of planets in the Milky Way on which life has arisen at least once as N_*f_pn_ef₁ ≈ 1 × 10¹¹, a hundred billion inhabited worlds. That in itself is a remarkable conclusion. But we are not yet finished.

The choices of f_i and f_c are more difficult. On the one hand, many individually unlikely steps had to occur in biological evolution and human history for our present intelligence and technology to develop. On the other hand, there must be many quite different pathways to an advanced civilization of specified capabilities. Considering the apparent difficulty in the evolution of large organisms represented by the Cambrian explosion, let us choose f_i × f_c = 1/100, meaning that only 1 percent of planets on which life arises eventually produce a technical civilization. This estimate represents some middle ground among the varying scientific opinions. Some think that the equivalent of the step from the emergence of trilobites to the domestication of fire goes like a shot in all planetary systems; others think that, even given ten or fifteen billion years, the evolution of technical civilizations is unlikely. This is not a subject on which we can do much experimentation as long as our investigations are limited to a single planet. Multiplying these factors together, we find N_*f_pn_ef_lf_if_c ≈ 1 × 10⁹, a billion planets on which technical civilizations have arisen at least once. But that is very different from saying that there are a billion planets on which technical civilizations now exist. For this, we must also estimate f_L.

What percentage of the lifetime of a planet is marked by a technical civilization? The Earth has harbored a technical civilization characterized by radio astronomy for only a few decades out of a lifetime of a few billion years. So far, then, for our planet f_L is less than 1/10⁸, a millionth of a percent. And it is hardly out of the question that we might destroy ourselves tomorrow. Suppose this were to be a typical case, and the destruction so complete that no other technical civilization—of the human or any other species—were able to emerge in the five or so billion years remaining before the Sun dies. Then N = N_*f_pf_lf_if_cf_L ≈ 10, and at any given time there would be only a tiny smattering, a handful, a pitiful few technical civilizations in the Galaxy, the steady state number maintained as emerging societies replace those recently self-immolated. The number N might even be as small as 1. If civilizations tend to destroy themselves soon after reaching a technological phase, there might be no one for us to talk with but ourselves. And that we do but poorly. Civilizations would take billions of years of tortuous evolution to arise, and then snuff themselves out in an instant of unforgivable neglect.

But consider the alternative, the prospect that at least some civilizations learn to live with high technology; that the contradictions posed by the vagaries of past brain evolution are consciously resolved and do not lead to self-destruction; or that, even if major disturbances do occur, they are reversed in the subsequent billions of years of biological evolution. Such societies might live to a prosperous old age, their lifetimes measured perhaps on geological or stellar evolutionary time scales. If 1 percent of civilizations can survive technological adolescence, take the proper fork at this critical historical branch point and achieve maturity, then f_L ≈ 1/100, N ≈ 10⁷, and the number of extant civilizations in the Galaxy is in the millions. Thus, for all our concern about the possible unreliability of our estimates of the early factors in the Drake equation, which involve astronomy, organic chemistry and evolutionary biology, the principal uncertainty comes down to economics and politics and what, on Earth, we call human nature. It seems fairly clear that if self-destruction is not the overwhelmingly preponderant fate of galactic civilizations, then the sky is softly humming with messages from the stars.

These estimates are stirring. They suggest that the receipt of a message from space is, even before we decode it, a profoundly hopeful sign. It means that someone has learned to live with high technology; that it is possible to survive technological adolescence. This alone, quite apart from the contents of the message, provides a powerful justification for the search for other civilizations.

If there are millions of civilizations distributed more or less randomly through the Galaxy, the distance to the nearest is about two hundred light-years. Even at the speed of light it would take two centuries for a radio message to get from there to here. If we had initiated the dialogue, it would be as if the question had been asked by Johannes Kepler and the answer received by us. Especially because we, new to radio astronomy, must be comparatively backward, and the transmitting civilization advanced, it makes more sense for us to listen than to send. For a more advanced civilization, the positions are, of course, reversed.

We are at the earliest stages of our radio search for other civilizations in space. In an optical photograph of a dense star field, there are hundreds of thousands of stars. By our more optimistic estimates, one of them is the site of an advanced civilization. But which one? Toward which stars should we point our radio telescopes? Of the millions of stars that may mark the location of advanced civilizations, we have so far examined by radio no more than thousands. We have made about one-tenth of one percent of the required effort. But a serious, rigorous, systematic search will come soon. The preparatory steps are now underway, both in the United States and in the Soviet Union. It is comparatively inexpensive: the cost of a single naval vessel of intermediate size—a modern destroyer, say—would pay for a decade-long program in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Benevolent encounters have not been the rule in human history, where transcultural contacts have been direct and physical, quite different from the receipt of a radio signal, a contact as light as a kiss. Still, it is instructive to examine one or two cases from our past, if only to calibrate our expectations: Between the times of the American and the French Revolutions, Louis XVI of France outfitted an expedition to the Pacific Ocean, a voyage with scientific, geographic, economic and nationalistic objectives. The commander was the Count of La Pérouse, a noted explorer who had fought for the United States in its War of Independence. In July 1786, almost a year after setting sail, he reached the coast of Alaska, a place now called Lituya Bay. He was delighted with the harbor and wrote: “Not a port in the universe could afford more conveniences.” In this exemplary location, La Pérouse

perceived some savages, who made signs of friendship, by displaying and waving white mantles, and different skins. Several of the canoes of these Indians were fishing in the Bay.… [We were] continually surrounded by the anoes of the savages, who offered us fish, skins of otters and other animals, and different little articles of their dress in exchange for our iron. To our great surprise, they appeared well accustomed to traffic, and bargained with us with as much skill as any tradesman of Europe.

The Native Americans drove increasingly harder bargains. To La Pérouse’s annoyance, they also resorted to pilferage, largely of iron objects, but once of the uniforms of French naval officers hidden under their pillows as they were sleeping one night surrounded by armed guards—a feat worthy of Harry Houdini. La Pérouse followed his royal orders to behave peaceably but complained that the natives “believed our forbearance inexhaustible.” He was disdainful of their society. But no serious damage was done by either culture to the other. After reprovisioning his two ships La Pérouse sailed out of Lituya Bay, never to return. The expedition was lost in the South Pacific in 1788; La Pérouse and all but one of the members of his crew perished.^*

Exactly a century later Cowee, a chief of the Tlingit, related to the Canadian anthropologist G. T. Emmons a story of the first meeting of his ancestors with the white man, a narrative handed down by word of mouth only. The Tlingit possessed no written records, nor had Cowee ever heard of La Pérouse. This is a paraphrase of Cowee’s story:

Late one spring a large part of Tlingit ventured North to Yakutat to trade for copper. Iron was even more precious, but it was unobtainable. In entering Lituya Bay four canoes were swallowed by the waves. As the survivors made camp and mourned for their lost companions two strange objects entered the Bay. No one knew what they were. They seemed to be great black birds with immense white wings. The Tlingit believed the world had been created by a great bird which often assumed the form of a raven, a bird which had freed the Sun, the Moon, and the stars from boxes in which they had been imprisoned. To look upon the Raven was to be turned to stone. In their fright, the Tlingit fled into the forest and hid. But after a while, finding that no harm had come to them, a few more enterprising souls crept out and rolled leaves of the skunk cabbage into crude telescopes, believing that this would prevent being turned to stone. Through the skunk cabbage, it seemed that the great birds were folding their wings and that flocks of small black messengers arose from their bodies and crawled upon their feathers.

Now one nearly blind old warrior gathered the people together and announced that his life was far behind him; for the common good he would determine whether the Raven would turn his children into stone. Putting on his robe of sea otter fur, he entered his canoe and was paddled seaward to the Raven. He climbed upon it and heard strange voices. With his impaired vision he could barely make out the many black forms moving before him. Perhaps they were crows. When he returned safely to his people they crowded about him, surprised to see him alive. They touched him and smelled him to see if it was really he. After much thought the old man convinced himself that it was not the god-raven that he had visited, but rather a giant canoe made by men. The black figures were not crows but people of a different sort. He convinced the Tlingit, who then visited the ships and exchanged their furs for many strange articles, chiefly iron.

The Tlingit had preserved in oral tradition an entirely recognizable and accurate account of their first, almost fully peaceable encounter with an alien culture.^* If someday we make contact with a more advanced extraterrestrial civilization, will the encounter be largely peaceable, even if lacking a certain rapport, like that of the French among the Tlingit, or will it follow some more ghastly prototype, where the society that was a little more advanced utterly destroyed the society that was technically more backward? In the early sixteenth century a high civilization flourished in central Mexico. The Aztecs had monumental architecture, elaborate record-keeping, exquisite art and an astronomical calendar superior to that of any in Europe. Upon viewing the Aztec artifacts returned by the first Mexican treasure ships, the artist Albrecht Dürer wrote in August 1520: “I have never seen anything heretofore that has so rejoiced my heart. I have seen … a sun entirely of gold a whole fathom broad [in fact, the Aztec astronomical calendar]; likewise a moon entirely of silver, equally large … also two chambers full of all sorts of weapons, armor, and other wonderous arms, all of which is fairer to see than marvels.” Intellectuals were stunned at the Aztec books, “which,” one of them said, “almost resemble those of the Egyptians.” Hernán Cortés described their capital Tenochtitlán as “one of the most beautiful cities in the world … The people’s activities and behavior are on almost as high a level as in Spain, and as well-organized and orderly. Considering that these people are barbarous, lacking knowledge of God and communication with other civilized nations, it is remarkable to see all that they have.” Two years after writing these words, Cortés utterly destroyed Tenochtitlán along with the rest of the Aztec civilization. Here is an Aztec account:

Moctezuma [the Aztec Emperor] was shocked, terrified by what he heard. He was much puzzled by their food, but what made him almost faint away was the telling of how the great Lombard gun, at the Spaniards’ command, expelled the shot which thundered as it went off. The noise weakened one, dizzied one. Something like a stone came out of it in a shower of fire and sparks. The smoke was foul; it had a sickening, fetid smell. And the shot, which struck a mountain, knocked it to bits—dissolved it. It reduced a tree to sawdust—the tree disappeared as if they had blown it away … When Moctezuma was told all this, he was terror-struck. He felt faint. His heart failed him.

Reports continued to arrive: “We are not as strong as they,” Moctezuma was told: “We are nothing compared to them.” The Spaniards began to be called “the Gods come from the Heavens.” Nevertheless, the Azecs had no illusions about the Spaniards, whom they described in these words:

They seized upon the gold as if they were monkeys, their faces gleaming. For clearly their thirst for gold was insatiable; they starved for it; they lusted for it; they wanted to stuff themselves with it as if they were pigs. So they went about fingering, taking up the streamers of gold, moving them back and forth, grabbing them to themselves, babbling, talking gibberish among themselves.

But their insight into the Spanish character did not help them defend themselves. In 1517 a great comet had been seen in Mexico. Moctezuma, captured by the legend of the return of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl as a white-skinned man arriving across the Eastern sea, promptly executed his astrologers. They had not predicted the comet, and they had not explained it. Certain of forthcoming disaster, Moctezuma became distant and gloomy. Aided by the superstition of the Aztecs and their own superior technology, an armed party of 400 Europeans and their native allies in the year 1521 entirely vanquished and utterly destroyed a high civilization of a million people. The Aztecs had never seen a horse; there were none in the New World. They had not applied iron metallurgy to warfare. They had not invented firearms. Yet the technological gap between them and the Spaniards was not very great, perhaps a few centuries.

We must be the most backward technical society in the Galaxy. Any society still more backward would not have radio astronomy at all. If the doleful experience of cultural conflict on Earth were the galactic standard, it seems we would already have been destroyed, perhaps with some passing admiration expressed for Shakespeare, Bach and Vermeer. But this has not happened. Perhaps alien intentions are uncompromisingly benign, more like La Pérouse than Cortés. Or might it be, despite all the pretensions about UFOs and ancient astronauts, that our civilization has not yet been discovered?

On the one hand, we have argued that if even a small fraction of technical civilizations learn to live with themselves and with weapons of mass destruction, there should now be an enormous number of advanced civilizations in the Galaxy. We already have slow interstellar flight, and think fast interstellar flight a possible goal for the human species. On the other hand, we maintain that there is no credible evidence for the Earth being visited, now or ever. Is this not a contradiction? If the nearest civilization is, say, 200 light-years away, it takes only 200 years to get from there to here at close to the speed of light. Even at 1 percent or a tenth of a percent of the speed of light, beings from nearby civilizations could have come during the tenure of humanity on Earth. Why are they not here? There are many possible answers. Although it runs contrary to the heritage of Aristarchus and Copernicus, perhaps we are the first. Some technical civilization must be the first to emerge in the history of the Galaxy. Perhaps we are mistaken in our belief that at least occasional civilizations avoid self-destruction. Perhaps there is some unforeseen problem to interstellar spaceflight—although, at speeds much less than the velocity of light it is difficult to see what such an impediment might be. Or perhaps they are here, but in hiding because of some Lex Galactica, some ethic of noninterference with emerging civilizations. We can imagine them, curious and dispassionate, observing us, as we would watch a bacterial culture in a dish of agar, to determine whether, this year again, we manage to avoid self-destruction.

But there is another explanation that is consistent with everything we know. If a great many years ago an advanced interstellar spacefaring civilization emerged 200 light-years away, it would have no reason to think there was something special about the Earth unless it had been here already. No artifact of human technology, not even our radio transmissions, has had time, even traveling at the speed of light, to go 200 light-years. From their point of view, all nearby star systems are more or less equally attractive for exploration or colonization.^*

An emerging technical civilization, after exploring its home planetary system and developing interstellar spaceflight, would slowly and tentatively begin exploring the nearby stars. Some stars would have no suitable planets—perhaps they would all be giant gas worlds, or tiny asteroids. Others would carry an entourage of suitable planets, but some would be already inhabited, or the atmosphere would be poisonous or the climate uncomfortable. In many cases the colonists might have to change—or as we would parochially say, terraform—a world to make it adequately clement. The re-engineering of a planet will take time. Occasionally, an already suitable world would be found and colonized. The utilization of planetary resources so that new interstellar spacecraft could be constructed locally would be a slow process. Eventually a second-generation mission of exploration and colonization would take off toward stars where no one had yet been. And in this way a civilization might slowly wend its way like a vine among the worlds.

It is possible that at some later time with third and higher orders of colonies developing new worlds, another independent expanding civilization would be discovered. Very likely mutual contact would already have been made by radio or other remote means. The new arrivals might be a different sort of colonial society. Conceivably two expanding civilizations with different planetary requirements would ignore each other, their filigree patterns of expansion intertwining, but not conflicting. They might cooperate in the exploration of a province of the Galaxy. Even nearby civilizations could spend millions of years in such separate or joint colonial ventures without ever stumbling upon our obscure solar system.

No civilization can possibly survive to an interstellar spacefaring phase unless it limits its numbers. Any society with a marked population explosion will be forced to devote all its energies and technological skills to feeding and caring for the population on its home planet. This is a very powerful conclusion and is in no way based on the idiosyncrasies of a particular civilization. On any planet, no matter what its biology or social system, an exponential increase in population will swallow every resource. Conversely, any civilization that engages in serious interstellar exploration and colonization must have exercised zero population growth or something very close to it for many generations. But a civilization with a low population growth rate will take a long time to colonize many worlds, even if the strictures on rapid population growth are eased after reaching some lush Eden.

My colleague William Newman and I have calculated that if a million years ago a spacefaring civilization with a low population growth rate emerged two hundred light-years away and spread outward, colonizing suitable worlds along the way, their survey starships would be entering our solar system only about now. But a million years is a very long period of time. If the nearest civilization is younger than this, they would not have reached us yet. A sphere two hundred light-years in radius contains 200,000 suns and perhaps a comparable number of worlds suitable for colonization. It is only after 200,000 other worlds have been colonized that, in the usual course of things, our solar system would be accidentally discovered to harbor an indigenous civilization.

What does it mean for a civilization to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilization is a few hundred years old, scientific ideas of a modern cast a few thousand, civilization in general a few tens of thousands of years; human beings evolved on this planet only a few million years ago. At anything like our present rate of technical progress, an advanced civilization millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bush baby or a macaque. Would we even recognize its presence? Would a society a million years in advance of us be interested in colonization or interstellar spaceflight? People have a finite lifespan for a reason. Enormous progress in the biological and medical sciences might uncover that reason and lead to suitable remedies. Could it be that we are so interested in spaceflight because it is a way of perpetuating ourselves beyond our own lifetimes? Might a civilization composed of essentially immortal beings consider interstellar exploration fundamentally childish? It may be that we have not been visited because the stars are strewn abundantly in the expanse of space, so that before a nearby civilization arrives, it has altered its exploratory motivations or evolved into forms indetectable to us.

A standard motif in science fiction and UFO literature assumes extraterrestrials roughly as capable as we. Perhaps they have a different sort of spaceship or ray gun, but in battle—and science fiction loves to portray battles between civilizations—they and we are rather evenly matched. In fact, there is almost no chance that two galactic civilizations will interact at the same level. In any confrontation, one will always utterly dominate the other. A million years is a great many. If an advanced civilization were to arrive in our solar system, there would be nothing whatever we could do about it. Their science and technology would be far beyond ours. It is pointless to worry about the possible malevolent intentions of an advanced civilization with whom we might make contact. It is more likely that the mere fact they have survived so long means they have learned to live with themselves and others. Perhaps our fears about extraterrestrial contact are merely a projection of our own backwardness, an expression of our guilty conscience about our past history: the ravages that have been visited on civilizations only slightly more backward than we. We remember Columbus and the Arawaks, Cortés and the Aztecs, even the fate of the Tlingit in the generations after La Pérouse. We remember and we worry. But if an interstellar armada appears in our skies, I predict we will be very accommodating.

A very different kind of contact is much more likely—the case we have already discussed in which we receive a rich, complex message, probably by radio, from another civilization in space, but do not make, at least for a while, physical contact with them. In this case there is no way for the transmitting civilization to know whether we have received the message. If we find the contents offensive or frightening, we are not obliged to reply. But if the message contains valuable information, the consequences for our own civilization will be stunning—insights on alien science and technology, art, music, politics, ethics, philosophy and religion, and most of all, a profound deprovincialization of the human condition. We will know what else is possible.

Because we will share scientific and mathematical insights with any other civilization, I believe that understanding the interstellar message will be the easiest part of the problem. Convincing the U.S. Congress and the Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R. to fund a search for extraterrestrial intelligence is the hard part.^* In fact, it may be that civilizations can be divided into two great categories: one in which the scientists are unable to convince nonscientists to authorize a search for extraplanetary intelligence, in which energies are directed exclusively inward, in which conventional perceptions remain unchallenged and society falters and retreats from the stars; and another category in which the grand vision of contact with other civilizations is shared widely, and a major search is undertaken.

This is one of the few human endeavors where even a failure is a success. If we were to carry out a rigorous search for extraterrestrial radio signals encompassing millions of stars and heard nothing, we would conclude that galactic civilizations were at best extremely rare, a calibration of our place in the universe. It would speak eloquently of how rare are the living things of our planet, and would underscore, as nothing else in human history has, the individual worth of every human being. If we were to succeed, the history of our species and our planet would be changed forever.

It would be easy for extraterrestrials to make an unambiguously artificial interstellar message. For example, the first ten prime numbers—numbers divisible only by themselves and by one—are 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23. It is extremely unlikely that any natural physical process could transmit radio messages containing prime numbers only. If we received such a message we would deduce a civilization out there that was at least fond of prime numbers. But the most likely case is that interstellar communication will be a kind of palimpsest, like the palimpsests of ancient writers short of papyrus or stone who superimposed their messages on top of preexisting messages. Perhaps at an adjacent frequency or a faster timing, there would be another message, which would turn out to be a primer, an introduction to the language of interstellar discourse. The primer would be repeated again and again because the transmitting civilization would have no way to know when we tuned in on the message. And then, deeper in the palimpsest, underneath the announcement signal and the primer, would be the real message. Radio technology permits that message to be inconceivably rich. Perhaps when we tuned in, we would find ourselves in the midst of Volume 3,267 of the Encyclopaedia Galactica.

We would discover the nature of other civilizations. There would be many of them, each composed of organisms astonishingly different from anything on this planet. They would view the universe somewhat differently. They would have different arts and social functions. They would be interested in things we never thought of. By comparing our knowledge with theirs, we would grow immeasurably. And with our newly acquired information sorted into a computer memory, we would be able to see which sort of civilization lived where in the Galaxy. Imagine a huge galactic computer, a repository, more or less up-to-date, of information on the nature and activities of all the civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy, a great library of life in the Cosmos. Perhaps among the contents of the Encyclopaedia Galactica will be a set of summaries of such civilizations, the information enigmatic, tantalizing, evocative—even after we succeed in translating it.

Eventually, taking as much time as we wished, we would decide to reply. We would transmit some information about ourselves—just the basics at first—as the start of a long interstellar dialogue which we would begin but which, because of the vast distances of interstellar space and the finite velocity of light, would be continued by our remote descendants. And someday, on a planet of some far distant star, a being very different from any of us would request a printout from the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Galactica and acquire a little information about the newest society to join the community of galactic civilizations.

Civilization Type: 1.8 L.

Society Code: 2A11,
“We Who Survived”.

Star: F0, spectrum variable,
r=9.717 kpc, θ = 0°07’51″,
Φ = 210°20’37″.

Planet: sixth, a=2.4 × 10¹³ cm,
M = 7 × 10¹⁸ g, R=2.1 × 10⁹cm,
p = 2.7 × 10⁶s, P = 4.5 × 10⁷s.

Extraplanetary colonies: none.

Planet age: 1.14 × 10¹⁷ s.

First locally initiated contact: 2.6040 × 10⁸ s ago.

Receipt first galactic nested code: 2.6040 × 10⁸ s ago.

Biology: C,N,0,H,S,Se,Cl,Br,
H₂O, S₈, polyaromatic sulfonyl
halides. Mobile
photochemosynthetic
autotrophs in weakly reducing
atmosphere.
Polytaxic, monochromatic.
m≈3 × 10¹²g, t≈5 × 10¹⁰ s.
No genetic prosthesis.
Genomes: ~6 × 10⁷
(nonredundant
bits/genome: ~2 × 10¹²).

Technology: exponentiating,
approaching asymptotic limit.

Culture: global, nongregarious,
polyspecific (2 genera,
41 species); arithmetic
poetry.

Prepartum/postpartum:
0.52 [30],

Individual/communal:
0.73 [14],

Artistic/technological:
0.81 [18].

Probability of survival
(per 100 yr): 80%.

Civilization Type: 2.3 R.

Society Code: 1H1,
“We Who Became One”.

Interstellar civilization, no
planetary communities,
utilizes 1504 supergiants,
0, B, A stars and pulsars.

Civilization Age: 6.09 × 10¹⁵ s.

First locally initiated contact:
6.09 ×10¹⁵ s ago.

Receipt first galactic nested
code: 6.09 × 10¹⁵ s ago.

Source civilization, neutrino
channel.

Local Group polylogue.

Biology: C,H,O,Be,Fe,Ge,He.
4K metal-chelated organic
semiconductors, types
various.
Cryogenic superconducting
electrovores with neutron
crystal dense packing and
modular starminers; polytaxic.
m various, t≈5 × 10¹⁵ s.
Genomes: 6 × 10¹⁷
(nonredundant bits/mean
genome: ~3 × 10¹⁷).

Probability of survival
(per 10⁶ yr):99%.

Hypothetical computer summaries of two advanced civilizations from the Encyclopaedia Galactica. By Jon Lomberg and the author.

Civilization Type: 1.0 J.

Society Code: 4G4, “Humanity”.

Star: G2, r=9.844 kpc, θ = 00°05’24″,θ = 206°28’49″.

Planet: third, a=1.5 × 10¹³ cm, M = 6 × 10²⁷ g, = 6.4 × 10⁸ cm, p = 8.6 × 10⁴ s, P = 3.2 × 10⁷ s.

Extraplanetary colonies: none.

Planet age: 1.45 × 10¹⁷ s.

First locally initiated contact: 1.21 × 10⁹ s ago.

Receipt first galactic nested code: application pending.

Biology: C,N,O,S,H₂O,PO₄.
Deoxyribonucleic acid.
No genetic prosthesis.
Mobile heterotrophs, symbionts
with photosynthetic
autotrophs. Surface dwellers,
monospecific, polychromatic
O₂ breathers. Fe-chelated
tetrapyroles in circulatory
fluid. Sexual mammals.
m≈7 × 10⁴, t≈2 × 10⁹s.
Genomes: 4 × 10⁹.

Technology: exponentiating/
fossil fuels/nuclear weapons/
organized warfare/
environmental pollution.
Culture: ~200 nation states,
~6 global powers; cultural
and technological
homogeneity underway.

Prepartum/postpartum:
0.21 [18],

Individual/communal:
0.31 [17],

Artistic/technological:
0.14 [11].

Probability of survival
(per 100 yr): 40%.

Hypothetical summary of a newly emerged technical civilization from the Encyclopaedia Galactica. By Jon Lomberg and the author.

*Fourier is now famous for his study of the propagation of heat in solids, used today to understand the surface properties of the planets, and for his investigation of waves and other periodic motion—a branch of mathematics known as Fourier analysis.

*When La Pérouse was mustering the ship’s company in France, there were many bright and eager young men who applied but were turned down. One of them was a Corsican artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte. It was an interesting branch point in the history of the world. If La Pérouse had accepted Bonaparte, the Rosetta stone might never have been found. Champollion might never have decrypted Egyptian hieroglyphics, and in many more important respects our recent history might have been changed significantly.

*The account of Cowee, the Tlingit chief, shows that even in a preliterate culture a recognizable account of contact with an advanced civilization can be preserved for generations. If the Earth had been visited hundreds of thousands of years ago by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, even if the contacted culture was preliterate, we might well expect to have some recognizable form of the encounter preserved. But there is not a single case in which a legend reliably dated from earlier pretechnological times can be understood only in terms of contact with an extraterrestrial civilization.

*There may be many motivations to go to the stars. If our Sun or a nearby star were about to go supernova, a major program of interstellar spaceflight might suddenly become attractive. If we were very advanced, the discovery that the galactic core was imminently to explode might even generate serious interest in transgalactic or intergalactic spaceflight. Such cosmic violence occurs sufficiently often that nomadic spacefaring civilizations may not be uncommon. Even so, their arrival here remains unlikely.

*Or other national organs. Consider this pronouncement from a British Defence Department spokesman as reported in the London Observer for February 26, 1978: “Any messages transmitted from outer space are the responsibility of the BBC and the Post Office. It is their responsibility to track down illegal broadcasts.”