It is clear that in the past seventy-five years American and world astronomy has moved enormously beyond even the most romantic speculations of the late-Victorian astronomers. And in the next seventy-five years? It is possible to make pedestrian predictions. We will have completely examined the electromagnetic spectrum from rather short gamma rays to rather long radio waves. We will have sent unmanned spacecraft to all of the planets and most of the satellites in the solar system. We will have launched spacecraft into the Sun to do experimental stellar structure, beginning perhaps-because of the low temperatures-with the sunspots. Hale would have appreciated that. I think it possible that seventy-five years from now, we will have launched subrelativistic spacecraft-traveling at about 0.1 the speed of light-to the nearby stars. Among other benefits, such missions would permit direct examination of the interstellar medium and give us a longer baseline for VLBI than many are thinking of today. We will have to invent some new superlative to succeed “very”-perhaps “ultra.” The nature of pulsars, quasars and black holes should by then be well in hand, as well as the answers to some of the deepest cosmological questions. It is even possible that we will have opened up a regular communications channel with civilizations on planets of other stars, and that the cutting edge of astronomy as well as many other sciences will come from a kind of Encyclopaedia Galactica, transmitted at very high bit rates to some immense array of radio telescopes.
But in reading the astronomy of seventy-five years ago, I think it likely that, except for interstellar contact, these achievements, while interesting, will be considered rather old-fashioned astronomy, and that the real frontiers and the fundamental excitement of the science will be in areas that depend on new physics and new technology, which we can today at best dimly glimpse.
CHAPTER 22
Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence… Someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.
FRANZ KAFKA,
Parables
THROUGH ALL of our history we have pondered the stars and mused whether humanity is unique or if, somewhere else in the dark of the night sky, there are other beings who contemplate and wonder as we do, fellow thinkers in the cosmos. Such beings might view themselves and the universe differently. Somewhere else there might be very exotic biologies and technologies and societies. In a cosmic setting vast and old beyond ordinary human understanding, we are a little lonely; and we ponder the ultimate significance, if any, of our tiny but exquisite blue planet. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is the search for a generally acceptable cosmic context for the human species. In the deepest sense, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.
In the last few years-in one-millionth the lifetime of our species on this planet-we have achieved an extraordinary technological capability which enables us to seek out unimaginably distant civilizations even if they are no more advanced than we. That capability is called radio astronomy and involves single radio telescopes, collections or arrays of radio telescopes, sensitive radio detectors, advanced computers for processing received data, and the imagination and skill of dedicated scientists. Radio astronomy has in the last decade opened a new window on the physical universe. It may also, if we are wise enough to make the effort, cast a profound light on the biological universe.
Some scientists working on the question of extraterrestrial intelligence, myself among them, have attempted to estimate the number of advanced technical civilizations-defined operationally as societies capable of radio astronomy-in the Milky Way Galaxy. Such estimates are little better than guesses. They require assigning numerical values to quantities such as the numbers and ages of stars; the abundance of planetary systems and the likelihood of the origin of life, which we know less well; and the probability of the evolution of intelligent life and the lifetime of technical civilizations, about which we know very little indeed.
When we do the arithmetic, the sorts of numbers we come up with are, characteristically, around a million technical civilizations. A million civilizations is a breath-takingly large number, and it is exhilarating to imagine the diversity, lifestyles and commerce of those million worlds. But the Milky Way Galaxy contains some 250 billion stars, and even with a million civilizations, less than one star in 200,000 would have a planet inhabited by an advanced civilization. Since we have little idea which stars are likely candidates, we will have to examine a very large number of them. Such considerations suggest that the quest for extraterrestrial intelligence may require a significant effort.
Despite claims about ancient astronauts and unidentified flying objects, there is no firm evidence for past visitations of the Earth by other civilizations (see Chapters 5 and 6). We are restricted to remote signaling and, of the long-distance techniques available to our technology, radio is by far the best. Radio telescopes are relatively inexpensive; radio signals travel at the speed of light, faster than which nothing can go; and the use of radio for communication is not a short-sighted or anthropocentric activity. Radio represents a large part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and any technical civilization anywhere in the Galaxy will have discovered radio early-just as in the last few centuries we have explored the entire electromagnetic spectrum from short gamma rays to very long radio waves. Advanced civilizations might very well use some other means of communication with their peers. But if they wish to communicate with backward or emerging civilizations, there are only a few obvious methods, the chief of which is radio.
The first serious attempt to listen for possible radio signals from other civilizations was carried out at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank, West Virginia, in 1959 and 1960. It was organized by Frank Drake, now at Cornell University, and was called Project Ozma, after the princess of the Land of Oz, a place very exotic, very distant and very difficult to reach, Drake examined two nearby stars, Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti, for a few weeks with negative results. Positive results would have been astonishing because as we have seen, even rather optimistic estimates of the number of technical civilizations in the Galaxy imply that several hundred thousand stars must be examined in order to achieve success by random stellar selection.
Since Project Ozma, there have been six or eight other such programs, all at a rather modest level, in the United States, Canada and the Soviet Union. All results have been negative. The total number of individual stars examined to date in this way is less than a thousand. We have performed something like one tenth of one percent of the required effort.
However, there are signs that much more serious efforts may be mustered in the reasonably near future. All the observing programs to date have involved quite tiny amounts of time on large telescopes, or when large amounts of time have been committed, only very small radio telescopes could be used. A comprehensive examination of the problem was recently made by a NASA committee chaired by Philip Morrison of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The committee identified a wide range of options, including new (and expensive) giant ground-based and spaceborne radio telescopes. It also pointed out that major progress can be made at modest cost by the development of more sensitive radio receivers and of ingenious computerized data-processing systems. In the Soviet Union there is a state commission devoted to organizing a search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the large RATAN-600 radio telescope in the Caucasus, recently completed, is devoted part-time to this effort. Hand in hand with the recent spectacular advances in radio technology, there has been a dramatic increase in the scientific and public respectability of the entire subject of extraterrestrial life. A clear sign of the new attitude is the Viking missions to Mars, which are to a significant extent dedicated to the search for life on another planet.