It was H. G. Wells, I believe, who wrote a short story about contact with extraterrestrials. It is brought about from a radiohut on an English airfield. After lots of negotiations, and cautionary assurances on all sides, the earthlings finally manage to direct the extraterrestrials down onto the ground. As soon as the guests have landed, there is a thunderous “Hurrah!” in the hut, and they rush out in order to greet the friends from outer space. But these friends and their spaceship are exceedingly tiny, no more than a few millimeters, and they have landed right in front of the door of the hut, between the blades of grass. As the English crew rushes out to greet them, they are immediately crushed.
In this parable, the most daunting question about life elsewhere is asked: Would we even notice each other when they are in our (or we in their) neighborhood?
There are other ways in which this “meeting” can go wrong. In 2017 I read in the newspaper about the Parkes radio telescope in Australia, where mysterious radio waves were registered, possibly emanating from outer space. Intelligent beings? In the immediate surroundings of such a telescope, a very strict regime concerning electromagnetic hygiene is enforced. Not sufficiently strict, it turned out, because after intense scrutiny, it was discovered that impatient astronomers on the premises opened the door of their microwave oven too early.
When talking about extraterrestrial life, we have until now nothing to record but these little mishaps. But undaunted by the absence of any signal, we keep on trying to discover life elsewhere. I wonder why we persist. In what way would the discovery of life out there be illuminating about our position here?
I think this search is hindered by a problem that the Greek philosopher Xenophanes formulated some 2500 years ago: “If horses had gods, they would picture them as horses.” We look for life elsewhere, but the search is only possible if we run into something very much like our own version of life.
This explains the obsessive attention paid to water. If we find water anywhere in outer space, or if it may be surmised that in some location there could have been water millions of years ago (as in the case of Mars), the cosmic divining rod begins to tremble: “Water! Then you’re very close to life!” Life as we know it, that is. But this is silly; you are not close to life when you hit on water. Nor are you close to a thermometer when you find quicksilver on a planet.
Our relation with the space around us is one of growing discomfort and unease. I don’t mean the space around your house—I mean the space into which NASA fires its huge rockets, which every now and then throw some light on things that are so bizarre that you would rather not know about them. I like to moan about planet Earth as a rather mediocre location, but when you hear what the space probe New Horizons ran into on Pluto on July 15, 2015, then you’ll keep very quiet for a long time: between its huge mountains of ice, Pluto contains large plains consisting of frozen nitrogen and methane at a temperature of minus 230 degrees.
These NASA rockets are fired into space just to have a look at what’s happening out there. But there is also an other initiative in this context, and that is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intel-ligence, SETI. A Russian billionaire, Yuri Milner, is spending a hundred million dollars in order to listen to the cosmos. He hopes to pick up radio signals which are broadcast by intelligent beings in order to get in touch with each other, and possibly with us. You get the idea.
Do you? I don’t. The list of presuppositions about other beings who, just like us, happen to hit on radio waves as a means of communication is so impossibly long I wouldn’t even know where to start.
On our own planet there is such a thing as parallel evolution, in the course of which eyes have been “invented” repeatedly. But the use of radio waves? On a different location in space? Do we realize how many billions of turnings were taken before the first mono-cellular wriggled its little tail in earthly slime? And how many turnings after that before we came up with a sharp stone to scrape hides? And so on, to arrive at the manipulation of radio waves for communication? Is there a chance that this happened elsewhere as well? But the improbability does not diminish our longing for company out there.
Looking up at the stars in the night sky, Carlyle said: “A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.” He considered the entire universe to be the place where humans live. What could be the use of space if not employed to some purpose by humans?
This feeling of a huge homestead is now utterly alien to us. The universe is not “our” space at all. The earth may be ours, but as soon as we leave the premises we are nowhere. That is to say, you cannot go anywhere. The fastest space rocket we ever launched was the Helios 2, which ultimately reached the speed of 252,000 kilometers per hour. It would take 16,000 years to reach the nearest star, comically named Proxima Centauri.
There is another unsettling illustration of this “nowhere” in the case of Voyager, the space probe which was launched in 1977. Wiki tells me that sometime in 2010 it left our solar system, but this was not announced by NASA until 2013, because the border of our solar system is a rather elastic concept. On Jupiter, Voyager saw volcanoes erupting in fountains of sulphur. On Triton, a moon of Neptune, it witnessed eruptions at 13 degrees Kelvin, huge black geysers spouting miles high into “the sky.”
J. B. S. Haldane said: “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”
Example? The recently “photographed” black hole situated in the constellation MH87 at 50 million light-years from earth. It turned out to contain 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun. You cannot even try to think what things are like out there.
The most common aspect in the reports we get about circumstances in outer space is that all the locations are at best extremely uncomfortable, but more usually truly horrifying. Sandra Bullock had a point when she cried out in Gravity, “I hate space.”
But to get back to Voyager. Beyond our solar system, there is no longer any danger of collision with comets or asteroids, and it travels through a vacuum, so there is no wear and tear. I do not know what the impact of all kinds of radiation may be on its structure, but as an object of some kind, it may well fly on for thousands, even millions of years. Isn’t that a haunting possibility—that this Voyager may still be floating around, long after the entire human comedy has ceased to be? A salute issuing forth from an incomprehensible grave. From exploring probe, the Voyager changes into a message in a bottle flung into space. There is all sorts of stuff on board to tell the “beings” out there about us. A useless endeavor, I’m afraid, because it is assumed that our “spacemates” are endowed with the same perceptual apparatus as we. They are supposed to see and hear, which I think is asking far too much. But there is one thing that Voyager can signal to anyone: this is a strange object. This thing cannot be secreted from rocks. Even when what we call “light” means nothing to you, and you have to make do with gamma rays, then still, Voyager would provide you with fascinating homework.
But are gamma rays entities which only humans can come up with, within their conceptual system? Oh, dear, this is a philosophical knot I (or is it we?) cannot untie. Be that as it may, so far we have not been sent a Voyager.
In his latest book, Daniel Dennett writes: “If you landed on a distant planet and were hunting along its seashore for signs of life, which would excite you more, a clam or a clam rake?” That is the neatest summary of this quandary. Would our spacemate discern the clam and the rake? For both are contained in the Voyager.
Supposing we did run into other forms of life: could we have a profitable exchange? Have you ever tried to explain something about the Renais-sance, evolution, or music to a dog, a dolphin, or our celebrated nearest cousin, the chimpanzee? Useless; yet they are much closer to us than whatever we may encounter out there. I think that our search for company, preferably good company, is doomed, for we would have nothing to say to each other.
Looking for a form of life elsewhere, based on self-replicating macro-molecules, is pointless. We will not find it. But in spite of all reasonable objections, there is this persistent yearning, and it might be worthwhile to find out just what we are looking for.
Suppose we do find it. What would be the consequence? I think we would be reassured, and we need that reassurance because the emergence of life on earth is too accidental. I will try to explain.
Imagine that in a potato-field you dig up a potato which has the shape of a finely chiseled portrait of Churchill. It’s not one of those potatoes in which, after lots of prodding, you could more or less agree that it might remind you of Churchill; no, it really shows an uncanny resemblance. This is strange. It is improbable. Absurd. How could something like that come about? It is almost as weird as the emergence of life on earth.
But wait. If you find one such potato it is unsettling, but if in the same field you dig up 173 of precisely the same shape and size, then you’ll suspect some underlying mechanism—say, an algorithm which causes a whole chain of CRISPR CAS moves resulting in DNA that produces Churchill-shaped potatoes.
In a similar vein, discovering life elsewhere would be reassuring because it would prove that life is not all that accidental. The possibility was apparently somehow woven into the fabric of matter, and given sufficient time, it will spring forth.
But then a new worry is born. Imagine that on this other planet “they” evolve as far as bacteria. Then we find Dennett’s clam. Which is only partially reassuring, because we earthlings moved on to the rake.
Finding bacteria or related forms of life elsewhere would push us back into a depressing awareness of our uniqueness, because from bacteria we developed into an animal that scratches its head trying to figure out how it ever reached this biologically useless level of worrying. An animal that seeks consolation for its predicament in the presence of similar beings in other places. We are seeking in vain for a relief that we will only experience when we find an arrowhead out there, a wheel, an ornament, a drawing maybe, and at this point I can hear Xenophanes laugh.
What we are looking for in life elsewhere is a less burdensome awareness of our being around at all. I don’t think we are going to find it.
Bert Keizer is a Dutch geriatrician and philosopher who writes regularly on ethical issues in the national press. His latest book, as yet untranslated into English, is From Ashes to Zombies: An Alphabetical Journey Around Death.
