Science and the Human Prospect

Ronald C. Pine 





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      Carl Sagan
 

Chapter 9
image of world Darwin's Universe Revisited: Intelligence, Communication, and Extraterrestrial Life
 
We have little more personal stake in cosmic destiny than do sunflowers or butterflies. The transfiguration of the universe lies some 50 to 100 billion years in the future; snap your fingers twice and you will have consumed a greater fraction of your life than all human history is to such a span. . . . We owe our lives to universal processes. . . and as invited guests we might do better to learn about them than to complain about them. If the prospect of a dying universe causes us anguish, it does so only because we can forecast it, and we have as yet not the slightest idea why such forecasts are possible for us. . . why should nature, whether hostile or benign, be in any way intelligible to us? All the mysteries of science are but palace guards to that mystery. Timothy Ferris
 

I don't think there's one unique real universe. . . . even the laws of physics themselves may be somewhat observer dependent. Stephen Hawking

Natural selection does only one thing: it produces organisms better adapted to the local environment. It contains no built-in 'self-perfecting' principle that guarantees a particular outcome, such as intelligence . . . . the evolutionary process is more subtle than the operation of some law of nature which unfailingly generates complex intelligent creatures. Edward C. Olson

 
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The Egocentric Illusion
 
















Man has undergone agonizing decentralization. He has waged a steady struggle against
decentralization, but at the same time -- paradoxically -- his accumulating knowledge has gradually forced him to abandon all illusions about his centrality.
James Christian

Nature is a relentless teacher. The results of quantum physics may be difficult to understand, but from a broad historical and philosophical perspective a pattern of realization emerges. Every age suffers from the same philosophical stumbling block: we consistently underestimate the role our human perspective plays in observing and learning. History shows that we succumb easily to what Brian Stableford calls the "egocentric illusion" in his The Mysteries of Modern Science: the unconscious tendency to think of human concepts and perceptions as central or privileged in depicting the nature of reality and the structure of the cosmos.

From the very beginning of our struggle to know, we have acted, in one sense or another, as if we are the center of it all. Every age has been able to recognize the egocentricity of the past generation, but incapable of recognizing its own version. With quantum physics the pattern continues; nature will not allow human awareness and its principle analytic tool, science, to continue to the next stage until it discards another vestige of anthropocentric thinking. We have learned that the laws of nature may not be observationally independent as science has always assumed. This possibility has a profound implication for the major topic of this chapter: the existence of extraterrestrial life and the possibility of communicating with such life. To understand what it means to say that the laws of nature are observationally dependent, let's first review where we have been by sketching the egocentric pattern revealed by the history of science.

It was natural for early people to believe that they were the center of the universe. Objective perceptions provided abundant evidence for believing this. Every morning the Sun rises in the east and moves above us to its western setting; every night the Moon, planets, and stars all seem to move around us, as if we are the center of a vast cosmic show. As we have seen, Aristotle, Ptolemy, and their followers provided a sophisticated astronomical, philosophical, and physical explanation for these common sense observations. The Earth could not possibly move because if it did there would be an incredible east wind and objects would fly away when thrown into the air, and there would be terrible centrifugal forces that would make everything fly apart, like people and objects on a merry-go-round moving too fast. Objects were thought to have a natural tendency to move down toward the center of the Earth, and this motion could not be accounted for if the Earth moved. The motion of the planets could be made predictable, according to Ptolemy's model, if the Earth was the center and all celestial bodies revolve around it. Later, Tycho added the idea that the Sun could not be the center, because this would imply that the stars are too far away. It was inconceivable based on human standards that there would be this much "wasted space." Surely an economical, fastidious God would not have created such a situation. Finally, there was purpose in the universe just as there was in human life; even the planets were striving to fulfill their God-given goal to move in elegant circles, just as humans were supposed to strive to fulfill God's higher purpose. It was a tidy universe, almost everything made sense. Almost everything.



In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of "world history" -- yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die .... There have been eternities when [human intellect] did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. 
Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense"

















For Newtonians our knowledge and our point of view still had a privileged status.  God's time was our time. What we observed to be true here on Earth -- the laws of nature, space and time -- were true throughout the universe.  Extraterrestrial creatures would still do some of the things we do, because some of the things we do are special.

But there were puzzles. How could the planets physically revolve on an epicycle around an invisible point? What were those strange objects Galileo was observing through his telescope? Why did the Moon appear to have mountains?  Why did the planet Venus seem to show phases like the Moon. And most important of all, why was Ptolemy's system so messy? If God was the creator of a mathematically harmonious universe, could He not have created a more elegant mathematical system than that modeled by the crazy complex circles of Ptolemy?

For Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler it was obvious that He could. So by the seventeenth century we discovered, somewhat painfully, that our home is not the central physical stage of creation. We began to realize that our apparently sturdy residence was not at some cozy resting point, but just another planet with no centralized importance geometrically speaking. But note that in spite of their boldness, these men clung to their own version of egocentrism. Our Sun was still considered special. The central importance of our God in this mathematically elegant universe must be matched by the central importance of our Sun. The entire cosmos, even the now very distant stars, must revolve around our Sun.

The universe was no longer a comforting place; it became frighteningly big. In the eyes of de Cusa and Bruno this vastness was no problem; it was simply consistent with a greater God. Newton's theory of gravitation provided an answer as to how the Earth could spin without an uncontrollable east wind and destructive centrifugal forces and explained how the orbits of the planets had to be exactly as described by Kepler. We were, however, still the center of creation in a very important sense. We were obviously still the special creatures of a benevolent God. No other creature was allowed to read the mind of God, to read the special laws of nature and the harmonious mathematics that made everything work. Either one believed with Descartes that these ideas were planted innately in our minds by God, or that we possessed, according to the British philosopher John Locke, a special empirical ability to discover God's floor plan through experience. The epistemological theories of how we came to know God's plan may have been different, but the result was the same: We were special.

For Newtonians our knowledge and our point of view still had a privileged status. As the Greeks believed, there was one objective world and it was full of details for us to know. The details of forces and interaction of material particles played out the dance of existence independent of our human measurements, but the perspective of space and time in which the dance took place was still a very human perspective. The space and time of this new universe was still Earthlike. The universe was now much larger, but the successful Earthlike spatial geometry of three dimensions was thought everywhere to be the same. Similarly, time flowed everywhere as it does on Earth in terms of a uniform, absolute direction of past, present, and future. God's time was our time. What we observed to be true here on Earth -- the laws of nature, space and time -- were true throughout the universe. It all seemed so well established that the German physicist-philosopher Kant declared that no future experience could ever be inconsistent with this viewpoint, the French philosopher-mathematician Leibniz announced that we are obviously living in the best of all possible worlds, and the physicist Laplace alleged that God's omniscience (if such a supreme intelligence existed) could be given a scientific definition. Everything made sense -- almost everything.

But what was all that space for? Some of the Enlightenment period such as Christian Huygens began to speculate that we were not alone and not the only creatures that could read the mind of God. There must be many planetary systems; otherwise God would have "wasted" a sun. There would have to be inhabitants of these planets, of course; otherwise God would have wasted a perfectly good planet. Even though Huygens acknowledged, in the nonegocentric spirit of his age, that these creatures could be physically and culturally different from ourselves, they would still have writing and geometry! It did not yet occur to many that this vast sea of stars might exist for no purpose, or for one not at all related to human concerns. Extraterrestrial creatures would still do some of the things we do, because some of the things we do are special. Humankind was still a part of a well-designed, purposeful universe, and geometry was now God's special gift to all His intelligent creatures, whether terrestrial or extraterrestrial.








Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal. 
Albert Camus

The steady realization of the implications of natural selection would eventually show evolution as a tree with no special branch and no special creature. Millions of creatures had lived and died since the beginning, all as wonderful as the human species in their special adaptable way. The human species could now be seen as a relative newcomer, "a flash in the pan," with no guarantee of any special status. Soon some scientists and philosophers would begin to think the unthinkable -- that our "intelligence" may not be a special adaptable trait that will guarantee a special survival.

This realization was not immediate. Darwinism was first supported uncritically by humanists and social Darwinists, who, despite of their different political perspectives, saw in evolution a philosophical tool with which to overcome the otherworldliness of religion and replace such preoccupations with humankind and worldly business. For the humanists and the social Darwinists, evolution became mistakenly synonymous with their presupposed brand of "progress" and was used to justify their business and social philosophies.







Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. 
Arthur Schopenhauer
While the full implications of Darwinism were being discussed, astronomers were unveiling another shocking picture of our physical place in the universe. Although the idea of a universe with no center had been proposed by Democritus as early as the fifth century B.C., and again in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by de Cusa and Bruno, it was not until the first quarter of the twentieth century that astronomical methods provided impressive evidence for a radical new cosmology. Although Arabian astronomers recorded the brightest and nearest galaxies (the Clouds of Magellan and the Andromeda galaxy) as early as the eleventh century (with ideal viewing conditions, they are visible to the naked eye) and after the development of the telescope systematic cataloging of mysterious spiral nebulae took place from the seventeenth century on, until the twentieth century the universe was thought to be equivalent to the Milky Way. Then as quantum physicists were learning how to make beams of radiation in their laboratories and realizing that a classical representation of reality would not work in understanding the electron, astronomers discovered unmistakable evidence that the Milky Way was just one of millions of galaxies, and that, except for a few near galaxies, all the other galaxies were rushing away from our galaxy. By analyzing the light from these galaxies, the astronomers Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason established a mathematical relationship between the distance and the speed at which each galaxy is receding from our galaxy. Soon some galaxies were measured to be hundreds of millions of light-years away and receding at speeds close to half the speed of light.
 



We cannot doubt the existence of an ultimate reality. It is the universe forever masked. We are a part of an aspect of it, and the masks figured by us are the universe observing and understanding itself from a human point of view. 
Edward Harrison

At first it would be easy for many to believe that there must be something special about our galaxy. If almost all of the other galaxies were moving away from us, perhaps we are the center after all. Einstein's General Theory of relativity shattered this comforting thought. By applying the insights gained from his Special Theory to problems of gravitation, a new geometry and physics of "stretched" space was used to understand how all the galaxies were receding from ours, and each other as well. As de Cusa had noted centuries before, it was possible to be living in a universe with no center at all. The work of Einstein and Hubble now provided reasonable evidence that it was true. The universe was now thought to be like an expanding balloon. On its surface were not only all the galaxies but space as well, expanding along with the galaxies. It is impossible to visualize the universe using this analogy -- remember that there is no space inside or outside the balloon -- but a mathematical description is now commonplace, and the astronomical evidence gathered throughout this century overwhelmingly supports it.

Einstein also shattered the idea that the way we experience space and time on Earth is the same throughout the universe. With no privileged observational location from which to view space and time, different observers can view different histories. The observer for the first time was implicated in what is real; what is real depends to some extent on the existence of a conscious perspective. The belief that reality could in part be observationally dependent gained scientific respectability, and the floodgates of the strange were opened.









In quantum physics we receive what may be the ultimate egocentric shock.  The laws of nature we discover cannot be thought of as pointing to or representing independent cosmic laws. To think otherwise is as egocentric as concluding that we are the physical center of the universe because a practical world view can be constructed out of the apparent motions of the celestial bodies.

The Special and General theories combined to provide fertile ground for incredible scenarios. Mothers can become younger than their sons and the universe itself can contradict human logic by being finite but unbounded.(1) Places, such as black holes, can exist where space and time freeze into eternity, and the physical universe itself with its space and time included can be thought of as emerging from a mathematical point, a singularity with space and time inside.

In Einstein, however, we see still perhaps another vestige of the egocentric illusion. Although strange compared to Newtonian cosmology and common sense, Einstein's overriding goal was to save the absoluteness of the laws of nature. For Einstein our knowledge is still privileged. We are still describing an objective reality, the "things-in-themselves," not just a human view. With Einstein we are still assuming that the universe is like a grand mysterious clock with hidden distinct parts, ultimately intelligible to us. Our job is to observe the external motions of the clock and deduce the hidden details. The world still consists of separate things and these things consist of parts; our job is to figure out how the parts all fit and how the forces that bind the parts interact and make them move.

In quantum physics we receive what may be the ultimate egocentric shock. In spite of all our progress, since the time of the ancient Greeks the myth of total objectivity has prevailed. We have assumed that our perceiving, measuring, and knowing something can be dualistically separated from that something. We have assumed that our experience of the outer world is somehow privileged and more real, somehow superior in the knowing process compared to our subjective experiences. Although different philosophers had suggested this possibility before, and the entire culture of the East had taken it for granted for centuries, we now begin to realize, experimentally and mathematically, that the conscious awareness of the observer is intimately bound up with the results of measuring, observing, and knowing. The idea of an observer must be replaced with the idea of a participant: We do not objectively observe nature, we participate with it. We do not "re-present" what is already out there independent of our tools of representation. Our involvement with the universe creates or makes manifest, to some extent, a reality-for-us from a flexible, faceless, potential reality.

 









Every where we look the laws of nature appear to be the same.  Perhaps this is only because we are doing the looking.

Although, as we have seen, there are other interpretations, the results of experiments in the subatomic realm at least show that such talk of consciousness-created reality is no longer just philosophical gibberish. The thought of ourselves as little privileged gods who can stand back and take it all in, as if we do not touch the world at all with our presence when we do science -- this thought is revealed to be just another human assumption. Quantum physics clearly reveals this assumption in the shipwreck of this assumption. We cannot think of electrons, photons, and quarks as independent things with independent characteristics until we participate, through observation, with nature, and our participation will always carry with it the imprint of ourselves.

Can this concept be extended one step further? Are the laws of nature themselves also dependent existences, not something that we discover, but rather, as with the spin of an electron, something made manifest upon our participation with nature? "Every where we look the laws of nature are the same," boasts Carl Sagan. Perhaps this is only because we are doing the looking. According to Niels Bohr, the mathematical laws of quantum physics are best understood as describing not an independent existence but rather the relationship between the macroscopic reality of physicists and the quantum realm. It is a mistake to think that we can go "deeper," to think that we will discover some new mathematics that will allow us to measure this strange reality. There is no deeper reality. There is nothing there to measure -- not that there is absolutely nothing there, but nothing that can be conceptualized by human beings. Thus, the concepts that we use, and the laws of nature we discover on the basis of these concepts, cannot be thought of as pointing to or representing independent cosmic laws. To think otherwise is as egocentric as concluding that we are the physical center of the universe because a practical world view can be constructed out of the apparent motions of the celestial bodies.

For the people of the Middle Ages it was consoling to believe that they were the center of the universe. In the twentieth century it was consoling to believe that our perspective on the universe is privileged; that the laws we discover, that work for us, are the laws that any intelligent form of life would eventually discover. The most recent experiments in physics, however, cast doubt on whether this will be believable in the twenty-first century. Quantum physics may well be the Copernican inversion of our time, and we have only begun to reflect on all the ramifications. As we will see next, the possibility of the observational dependence of the laws of nature may mean that we are not only alone in a biological sense, but alone with our thoughts of the universe as well.


Extraterrestrial Life
 


Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering. 
Buckminister Fuller

Most often optimists argue for the probability of extraterrestrial life based on an extension of the Copernican principle. It would be incredibly egocentric of us to think that in this vast universe, we are the only ones who can be artists, philosophers, scientists, and have a religious faith. But there is another possibility that we must take equally seriously. It may also be incredibly egocentric of us to believe that our way of interfacing with reality is so special that the universe would allow for anything remotely like us to be created again.

How consoling it would be if we are part of a purposeful, God-crafted mathematical universe. How alienating it would be if the universe is like a deserted island and we the only inhabitants. Much more meaningful would be a universe full of intelligent creatures, many of which have discovered the same objective laws of nature that we have. Besides validating our science and the specialness of our existence, such a universe would allow for profound, mutually beneficial communication amongst its intelligent inhabitants by using the laws of nature as a universal standard.




It may also be incredibly egocentric of us to believe that our way of interfacing with reality is so special that the universe would allow for anything remotely like us to be created again.





















The idea that we shall be welcomed as new members into the galactic community is as unlikely as the idea that the oyster will be welcomed as a new member into the human community. We're probably not even edible. 
John Ball

The important questions of whether or not life exists elsewhere, and whether communication with any form of extraterrestrial life is possible necessarily involve all that we think we know. Involved is what we think we know about the cosmological structure of the universe -- its size, its age, and layout in terms of galaxies and stars, their number and types, the distances that separate them, the chemicals they consist of, and how they have evolved and will evolve. Also involved, of course, are what we think we know about life and intelligent understanding of the universe. Do we know what life is? Have we agreed upon a definition of life? Do we know the essentials behind the origin of life? If life has arisen on other planets, do we live in a Darwinian universe? Is the process of natural selection universal? Is the type of intelligence possessed by humans rare or inevitable?

As part of our attempt to understand our home from the big picture, we have spent considerable resources trying to answer the questions relevant to the formation of life elsewhere in the universe. With the Viking project we tested for life on Mars, but the results appeared to be negative. In the mid-1990s some scientists believed that an ancient meteorite from Mars found in Antarctica (named ALH 84001) showed fossilized evidence of microbial life (organic looking "ovoids"), but other scientists made a case for an interpretation based on chemical and/or contamination processes.(2) With an infrared telescope in Earth orbit and then with the Hubble telescope, large amounts of dust and debris have been detected circling distant stars. Astronomers believe that this dust and debris may naturally form planetary systems.  By the end of the twentieth century many astronomers were convinced that other planetary systems had been discovered with sophisticated methods of analyzing the light from some relatively close stars in our galaxy.  By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, astronomers were convinced that over four hundred planets had been discovered revolving around other stars.  By 2011, data was announced from the Kepler planet-hunting satellite that indicated over 1,000 possible planets.

The question of extraterrestrial life is so important to us that it is the one area of scientific endeavor that scientists seem most willing to speculate. As the chemist Robert Shapiro and the physicist Gerald Feinberg have described in Life Beyond Earth

    The question of the extent of life in the Universe....affects the framework of values through which we perceive the purpose of our lives, the goals of humanity, and the place of mankind in the Universe....If our civilization continues on its present course, we will be faced with many choices involving our intentions toward the rest of the Universe. Very different sets of goals may occur to us if we learn, on the one hand, that life is extremely rare and we are essentially alone, or on the other, that the Universe is alive with fascinating and diverse living beings. The question concerning extraterrestrial life is one which we will want answered before we come to more final decisions on our goals and the meaning of our existence.(3)

The optimistic scientific speculation on the extent of life in the universe can be summarized as follows. Although the origin of life is a relatively improbable event because of relatively few hospitable biological locations, given that the basic chemical building blocks (organic molecules) for life exist throughout the universe, and given the enormous number of stars, galaxies, and most likely planets (many have now been detected outside our solar system), life existing throughout the universe is a high probability. Furthermore, although evolution is Darwinian, not Lamarckian, given the survival value of being smart, on at least some planets intelligent life forms are also likely to exist capable of forming technological civilizations. Just within our own galaxy there should be at least 20 billion yellow dwarf stars like our Sun. If just one fifth of these have planetary systems, and only one percent of these in turn have life, this would still leave a half million chances for intelligence to evolve. And there are at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe. How marvelous it would be if we could exchange information and views on technology, values, religion, philosophy and meaning in life with members of a galactic civilization.







If there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they cannot be very important gods.  Arthur C. Clarke

However, the vast majority of scientists who believe in the high probability of extraterrestrial life do not take seriously the claims that we have already been visited by any ETIs (extraterrestrial intelligent creatures). Put simply the claims do not stand up to scientific scrutiny. Given the scientific evidence, the claim that they are already here is not a reliable belief.

Assume for the moment that other intelligent creatures exist in our galaxy, and that they have evolved to the point of understanding how to use the laws of electromagnetism and hence radio communication. How would they know of our existence? The human species has developed the capability of electromagnetic communication only within the last century. Only within the twentieth century have we begun to "leak" the radio signals of our existence into deep space.(4) Our signals are traveling at the speed of light, but there are only 200 stars within 30 light-years of Earth, 15,000 stars within 100 light years, and 1,000,000 stars within 500 light years. So not until the twenty-fifth century will our existence be announced to any ETIs living within a sphere of .1% of the stars in our galaxy. Furthermore, the greater the distance, the greater the sensitivity of receiving equipment needed to detect these signals. It is, of course, possible that some superior intelligence could develop a communication technology that exceeds the present speed limit of light, such as some sort of quantum physical technology. But we cannot proceed on the basis of "maybes," and what we know (Einstein's theory reliably supported) indicates that information cannot be communicated faster than the speed of light.(5) Thus, given also that most UFO occurrences as indicative of ETIs lack the kind of evidence required by the scientific method, most scientists are very skeptical about the Earth being visited at this early stage of our technological adolescence.

We must remember also that we are living in Darwin's universe. Once life begins it is subject to the law of natural selection. That life on Earth began shortly after the Earth formed could mean that, given the right conditions, life may be common elsewhere. However, just as the weather conditions experienced by a tree over the course of its life can significantly affect its shape, and the number, length and type of its branches, so enumerable conditions on Earth had to be just right to produce the life we see today.

 






Both competition and cooperation are observed in nature. Natural selection is neither egotistic nor altruistic. It is, rather, opportunistic. 
Theodosius Dobzhansky





















Evolution is irreversible and nonrepeatable. The lesson of natural selection is clear: There was no inevitable progressive march from a fish with fins to a four-legged terrestrial walker to a four-legged tree swinger, and finally to a two-legged runner.

Billions of coincidental events were necessary on Earth to produce the human species. Overcrowded conditions in primitive water basins, coupled with the right mutations, eventually produced land animals. If a primitive fish had not developed a lung and legs, there would be no amphibians, reptiles, or mammals today. Two hundred million years ago the giant continent Pangaea began to split apart, drastically changing the climate and isolating different animals on different continents. Sixty million years ago the dinosaurs became extinct, allowing for the proliferation of the mammals. At about the same time flowering plants and fruit trees evolved. This new method of plant reproduction provided a rich food source not only for insects, but also for any creature who could adapt to life in trees. Thus, instead of perhaps reptilian monkey-like creatures, the primates evolved with stereoscopic vision to better judge distances between branches and grasping hands with which to navigate in this new environment.

What nature giveth, she also taketh away. As the continents continued to drift, the climate changed and large sections of lush forest began to disappear some 10 to 15 million years ago. In the place of the forests large sections of grass land appeared, and species of apelike creatures either adapted to this new environment, remained in isolated pockets of forest, or became extinct. Eventually, the relentless sorting of natural selection produced a relatively physically weak creature, who for reasons much debated by evolutionary biologists, began to walk and run upright. Its grasping hands, which originally evolved for an entirely different purpose, were put to use to create tools for food gathering and defense against the terrifying, physically superior, creatures that were everywhere. Its disadvantageous situation forced it to be very clever and cooperate; otherwise it would have perished.

Evolution is irreversible and nonrepeatable. The lesson of natural selection is clear: There was no inevitable progressive march from a fish with fins to a four-legged terrestrial walker to a four-legged tree swinger, and finally to a two-legged runner. Evolution on Earth has been a jerky, messy affair; were life to start over again on Earth, no creature would evolve into its exact present form. The evolution of humans was the result of massive contingency, and the product of the evolution of any ETI is likely to be very different.

Natural selection, like a diversified stock portfolio, is in the business of producing diversity to enhance life's chances against the unpredictable contingencies of a fussy, heedless environment. Starting from a common ancestor, perhaps a single cell, perhaps a naked strand of DNA, life on Earth has diverged into an astonishing variety of ways for dealing with the many environmental niches on this planet. There are microbes that can exist above the boiling point and below the freezing point of water; some eat oil; some are even purple, because they process a different wave length of light than normal bacteria. Some insects farm; others build elaborate insect skyscrapers complete with air conditioning; many hear with their legs, and some have antifreeze in their blood. In the great depths of the ocean there are light-bulb creatures producing their own light through bioluminescence. There are plants that catch and eat insects, fish with lungs, flying frogs and squirrels, animals with armor, and mammals that lay eggs, birds that talk, and birds that build little nestlike houses and even paint the interiors. There are even animals that express feelings through sound and "see" through objects. And there have been creatures impossible to imagine without nature's fossil record for guidance: millipedes as long as a cow, birds 12 feet tall, anteaters as big as a horse, a reptile that looked and acted like a dolphin, and the great dinosaurs, some as large as a six-story building.








Based on the best evidence available to us, we can conclude that we are the only human beings ever to have evolved or will evolve in this vast space and time. We are unique and alone in this sense.

If natural selection can produce this much divergence on a single planet, what could it do given trillions of planets, revolving around billions of stars, within millions of galaxies? Here is how science writer Gene Bylinsky summarizes this theme:

    From all we know now about evolution of life on Earth and the evolution in interstellar space of molecules that make up life, to assume that we represent the only life in the universe would be to return to the egocentricity of the Dark Ages, which placed the Earth at the center of the cosmos and proclaimed man life's crowning achievement.

    The variety of animal life on Earth, with more than a million species, which walk, crawl, hop, swim, fly, burrow, squirm, stay fixed to one spot, and range in size from malarial parasites one eighth thousandth of an inch long to whales more than one hundred feet in length, represents only a fraction of life-forms that have, or could have lived on Earth.

    Multiplied by billions of life-bearing planets circling other suns, the total number of cosmic species staggers the imagination.(6)

We must constantly remember that this diversity strongly suggests that there is no ultimate goal of evolution. Nothing will ever be repeated exactly the same, because nowhere will there be exactly the same conditions with the exact same sequence of circumstances. Based on the best evidence available to us, we can conclude that we are the only human beings ever to have evolved or will evolve in this vast space and time. We are unique and alone in this sense.

Intelligence and Evolutionary Convergence





It is better to be smart than stupid, so there should be a lot of smart creatures in the universe. But evolution is capable of playing the same game with a different cast of players.

So why should we expect other intelligent technological civilizations to exist? If human beings are unlikely, why is intelligence likely? The answer, according to the advocates of the probable existence of ETIs, is that we must also remember that there are two aspects to the process of natural selection: (1) the randomness of mixing and mutating of genes and (2) the determinism of environmental selection. Randomness produces divergence, but environmental selection, given similar environments, tends (from time to time) to produce convergence. In other words, because the environment tends to select those forms of life that are best adapted, it molds life into similar channels given similar environments and optimum ways of life within these environments. Intelligence, it is argued, is more likely to be a convergent property than a divergent property of life. Evolution tends to repeat in broad outline the best survival strategies. Intelligence is a highly adaptable trait, so it is likely to occur again given the right circumstances. The laws of nature represent the environment that is common to every place in the universe. Thus, given the astronomical odds, it is likely that creatures will evolve many times that will "resonate" with these laws. It is better to be smart than stupid, so there should be a lot of smart creatures in the universe.

To understand how this might be possible, let's look at some examples of convergence on Earth.

Given the density of the Earth's atmosphere, it is not surprising that the development of wings occurred several times -- in insects, reptiles (pterosaurs), birds, and bats. Being able to fly is an obvious survival trait. North American tourists visiting Hawaii are often surprised to find what they think are North American hummingbirds living on these tropical islands. What they are seeing, however, is not a bird at all but an insect, the hummingbird moth. It looks and acts very much like a hummingbird. This moth and the hummingbird obviously have no recent common ancestor, but their body structure and way of life have converged.

Similarly, given the density of water it is not surprising to find so many creatures that have developed streamlined fishlike bodies. The dolphin and the shark are different in many ways. The dolphin is a mammal with a four-chambered heart; it breathes with lungs, has mammary glands, and even some hair. The shark has the two-chambered heart of more primitive creatures, breathes with gills, and does not take care of its young. But both have the same basic shape, because it is an optimal shape for swimming fast and catching food in an aquatic medium. The ichthyosaur, an extinct reptile, was an even more striking example. It looked and probably acted very much like a modern dolphin -- breathing with lungs and giving birth to live young. But the ichthyosaur evolved from a lizardlike land creature, whereas a dolphin evolved from a doglike land creature.

 






If this [humankind's extinction] happens I venture to hope that we shall not have destroyed the rat, an animal of considerable enterprise which stands as good a chance as any ... of evolving towards intelligence. 
J.B.S. Haldane, "Man's Destiny"

Finally, given the lifestyle of a land hunter, it is not surprising to find wolf, cat, and doglike shapes developing many times, in many unrelated creatures. In South America and Australia at various times there existed the marsupial (pouched mammal) mirror images of the North American wolf and cat. Although both groups are mammals, their common ancestry is very remote.

Thus, evolution is capable of producing a complex mixture of differences and similarities. On other planets where life evolves, it is unlikely that we will find animal and plant life exactly like that on Earth; too many circumstances must be repeated. But on other planets, so the argument goes, given similar environments, there should be some recognizable similarities of structure and behavior.(7) Because the laws of nature will be the same, no matter what the particular circumstances, natural selection will tend to pick, given countless chances, some solutions of survival as optimal.

However, optimal selections are not direct or inevitable. Computer simulations show the optimal solution of an upright, intelligent reptile was possible on Earth. Because of the same radical environmental change that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, it did not happen. On another planet, especially one with a desert climate favoring reptilelike creatures, this optimal solution might exist. On Earth, if just a few circumstances had been different in the evolution of a two-legged runner from a four-legged tree swinger, no intelligent creature may have evolved

To summarize, given that the laws of nature are the same everywhere, an optimal survival solution would be for creatures to evolve that learn to be cognitively aware of these laws and learn to manipulate their physical circumstances accordingly, rather than simply reacting instinctively to the results of these laws. Life will always take advantage of environmental opportunities, and understanding the laws of nature is the ultimate in environmental opportunities. But this optimal survival solution will not be inevitable because of the many chance elements involved in the evolution of any branch on any planet. Thus, so the optimistic argument goes, intelligence as a convergent property, as an obvious optimal solution to the problem of survival, may not be inevitable, but given the astronomical odds its occurrence is probable in many locations even within our own galaxy.

Because convergence is so important for the possibility of other intelligent creatures, let's look at one more example. Let's return for a moment to our playful example we used in Chapter 3, the basketball environment. There we noted that if our cultural environment changed radically, such that everyone must play basketball to survive, we would not be puzzled if tall people were the norm for the human species after a period of time. Members of the black race may be more numerous, not because of any inherent genetic superiority, but because of the relationship in the United States between prejudice, social isolation in ghettos, lack of job opportunities, a lot of free time, and basketball as one adaptation. Many tall, talented black adolescents would have an unintentional head start, just as the mammals were able to escape from their oppressed nighttime ghetto and exploit other environmental niches when the dinosaurs became extinct.




Evolution does not guarantee that optimal solutions will always emerge or that they are sustainable. As the tree sloth demonstrates, a new species is not necessarily a biological improvement.

However, evolution is capable of playing the same game with a different cast of players. Not only would tall socially disadvantaged black adolescents have a head start, but so would tall socially disadvantaged white adolescents, who also had very little opportunity to do anything else and a lot of free time. So might this new niche be taken advantage of by short, agile adolescents, who could jump three or four feet off the ground. Hence, similar circumstances could produce divergence. But it would also tend to produce convergence: Over a period of time, regardless of the different cast of characters and circumstances, good basketball players would tend to be favored.

The word tend is important. Evolution does not guarantee that optimal solutions will always emerge or that they are sustainable. A special disease could strike all the tall players -- perhaps a strange bone disease that coupled with gravity renders all tall players extinct. Or, the optimal nature of tallness could progress to the point that the new tall people became too tall for the human heart to handle such big bodies, and fatal heart attacks became a common occurrence during games. Short mediocre players, if the timing was right and they were still alive, could rush in to fill the vacated niche. If there were no competition from better players, they could stay mediocre. Alive today are "living fossils," primitive forms of life that have inhabited narrow niches for hundreds of millions of years. Their survival in not due to a superior design, but because they occupy a niche where competition and predators are few. Similarly, as the tree sloth demonstrates, a new species is not necessarily a biological improvement.
  Sagan's Cosmic Rosetta Stone



The ideal universe for us is one very much like the universe we inhabit. And I would guess that this is not really much of a coincidence.  Carl Sagan

One of the most popular advocates of this convergence-resonance thesis was the late astronomer and science writer Carl Sagan. Unlike most scientists, Sagan came out of the ivory tower of scientific research and attempted to draw the attention of the general public and the world's political and business leaders to the acute practical value of the cosmic perspective. He attempted to communicate the abstract and esoteric thoughts of scientists to a world that is often too busy to romance the universe and see the relevance of the intellectual embrace of science to their daily lives. Like the man in Plato's cave he risked much ridicule in attempting to broaden our horizons.

In The Cosmic Connection, The Dragons of Eden, Cosmos, and Contact he advocated the convergence-resonance theme. Mindful of the importance of divergence in understanding the development and preciousness of human life and the possible development of life and intelligence elsewhere, he did nevertheless much to popularize the notion that intelligent extraterrestrial life most likely exists and that communication with such life forthcoming. According to Sagan, what makes such communication possible is the universality of the laws of nature and the capability of understanding these laws as an optimal survival trait.

Sagan argued that the principles of mathematics and the laws discovered by science make up an interstellar or cosmic Rosetta stone. Just as the French archaeologist and linguist Jean-Francois Champollion finally deciphered the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing by comparing the hieroglyphics and Greek written on a stone discovered in 1799 near Rosetta, Egypt, so the principles of mathematics and laws of science provide the common key that will enable us to communicate with, or at least discover the existence of, a very different extraterrestrial culture.

 




In our time this search [for extraterrestrial life] will eventually change our laws, our religions, our philosophies, our arts, our recreations, as well as our sciences.  Space, the mirror, waits for life to come look for itself there. 
Ray Bradbury


















[Civilization] is a highly complicated invention which has probably been made only once. If it perished it might never be made again....But...it is a poor thing. And if it is to be improved there is no hope save in science. 
J.B.S. Haldane, "Man's Destiny"

It is a compelling and consoling thought that in this vast lonely space and time there might be others at least a little like us with which we could exchange insights on the meaning of existence. We have acted on this possibility in designing the message contained on the Voyager spacecraft. To play the record described in Chapter 6, an intelligent extraterrestrial Champollion must be able to decipher a scientific code. Such a creature would know about hydrogen atoms and be able to count starting with the number one. We have also spent some time and resources listening with our radio technology for the unmistakable mathematical footprints of the existence of other intelligent life. According to Sagan, a reception of the series of prime numbers, numbers that can be divided only by themselves and one, would prove the existence of an intelligent sender.(8) Such an event would mark a turning point in human history as significant as the Copernican revolution, and hopefully, according to Sagan, would lead to a more enlightened and saner world.

It is an encouraging thought, but will it ever happen? We must confront the possibility of considerable egocentricity in this theory.

First of all, consider the conception of life assumed by this theory. All life that we know of, life on Earth, is carbon and water based. The carbon atom is an excellent molecular connector. That is, its particular atomic properties allow for the creation of long molecular chains such as the molecule of DNA. Without some way of storing and transferring vast amounts of information -- information necessary for the development of a living organism from a single cell to a complex creature consisting of trillions of cooperating cells -- life would be impossible. DNA serves this purpose for all life on Earth, and without the carbon atom such a long chain of stored information is impossible. Most scientists believe that no other atomic element is capable of entering into such long molecular chains. Life, so the argument continues, also needs a solvent -- some sort of liquid medium for energetic reactions to take place. Water, consisting of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, is not only an excellent solvent, but also remains a liquid over a relatively large temperature range. Thus, Sagan unashamedly called himself a carbon-water chauvinist and argued that a reasonable person has no other alternative than to believe that if life exists elsewhere it will have the same fundamental basis as life on Earth.

But it is a big universe, and if science has taught us anything, it is that there are surprises in every corner. That life has taken a particular form on Earth is no guarantee that this form is universal. In Life in the Universe, Feinberg and Shapiro refer to carbon-water chauvinists as "carbaquists" and argue that our particular form of DNA based life on Earth is more likely to be a special case. By assuming a different definition of life, emphasizing organization and information processing rather than particular elements, they argue that carbon and water need not be essential ingredients of life. Given radically different conditions than that on Earth, chemical reactions and molecular combinations that would be rare or impossible on Earth could produce the necessary forms of organization for life.

In very low-temperature environments, Feinberg and Shapiro argue, life could flourish in liquids such as ammonia or even oil, and chains of nitrogen atoms, explosive on Earth, would be stable enough to form the long molecular information chains analogous to DNA. In high-temperature environments where the carbon combinations of Earth-based life would be destroyed, a silicate-based life could exist. Given such possibilities, what would be the implications for intelligence and communication? Would we have anything in common at all with such creatures? Would they develop mathematics and science? Although the possibility of alternate chemistries will increase the chances of life elsewhere in the universe greatly, it also increases the likelihood that our particular way of relating to the universe is a divergent property of evolution. Mathematics and science could be very rare, perhaps existing no where else but here on Earth.









Man is a symbolic animal.  Ernst Cassier

A second, and perhaps more serious, consideration is the obvious circularity in believing that intelligence is a convergent evolutionary property. That our species is alive and possesses a certain characteristic hardly by itself proves that this characteristic is an optimal survival trait. That we have the ability to reason and think naturally leads us to conclude that the ability to reason and think is a positive characteristic. That we relate to the universe through the analytic tools of science and mathematics leads us to conclude that the scientific evidence supports the view that science would be the preferred method of relating to the universe by any advanced creature.

The computer scientist Marvin Minsky once argued that if advanced extraterrestrial creatures exist, no matter how strange they are, they will reason the same way we do. Assuming that any form of life will be an information-processing creature of some sort, Minsky used an advanced computer to simulate supposedly "all" possible thought processes, all possible ways of processing information from an external environment. The computer showed that the only simulations of information processing that responded to input in an interesting, creative way performed a kind of counting operation. In other words, the only kind of coherent processing of input -- input mimicking information from an external environment -- was accomplished by machines that could do arithmetic. The machines that could not count stopped thinking altogether or ran in nonproductive circles.(9)

Although Minsky's result is interesting, aside from assuming that all forms of life are essentially machines, this is hardly convincing considering that a computer, whose thinking is based on counting, was used to prove that counting is the only way to think.(10)

 










Looking back over the geological record it would seem that Nature made nearly every possible mistake before she reached her greatest achievement Man -- or perhaps some would say her worst mistake of all .... At last she tried a being of no great size, almost defenseless, defective in at least one of the more important sense-organs; one gift she bestowed to save him from threatened extinction -- a certain stirring, a restlessness, in the organ called the brain. 
Arthur Stanley Eddington, Science and the Unseen World

Let's consider what is meant by "intelligence" in the convergent-resonance argument. Humans have evolved the powerful and flexible capability of a cognitive awareness of the environment. That is, we have the ability to figure things out, to use symbols and abstractions to map how the environment works, to "re-present" artificially the things-in-themselves, and to reflect in a self-conscious way on the details of our representations with a sense of history and a possible future.  Humans can anticipate and plan. We have the capability to do more than just react to say the threat of a tiger.  We can have an abstract concept of a tiger, count them, think about them, and protect ourselves or them in a very planned way.  

This capability has enabled our species to respond in a flexible way to environmental change; we are not limited to reacting with the wrong physical characteristics or skills to a radical environmental change -- a situation that causes extinction -- but can predict, and plan with a sense of purpose. In short, human nature implements Lamarckian evolution at a cultural level. If the environment changes radically, humans can respond by acquiring new ways of living, and we can pass these acquisitions on to future generations.(11)

However, comparing humans with other forms of life on Earth shows that many creatures are more directly superior, physically speaking, in terms of information gathering. Many creatures have better eyesight and hearing, and many are capable of the most subtle detection of chemicals at great distances. Some can directly experience electromagnetic fields, some use sonar, and some even have infrared sensors for night vision.. Sharks are so sensitive to magnetic fields that they can locate a wounded fish by detecting the electrical signals its struggling motion produces. Because bats directly sense where they are going by bouncing sound waves off objects, they have no use for a flight traffic controller using a mathematically programmed computer (and the cognitive skills this implies) to determine flight paths. Dolphins are able to "see" through bodies. In one case a dolphin knew his trainer was pregnant before she did. Modern humans have developed infrared sensors for the covert operation of its soldiers, but rattlesnakes beat us to this mode of information gathering by millions of years. Insects with their small brains do not need a sophisticated science laboratory to detect the temperatures, sounds, and scents they require for survival; they directly sense this information -- temperature with feet, sound with special organs on legs, and scents from miles away with antennae. A blue crab can detect amino acids (indicative of the creatures it eats) with its antennae.

The human species has learned to duplicate these modes of information gathering, possessing indirect methods for obtaining different slices of reality. We are an evolutionary irony. Our physical inferiority coupled with the other contingencies of our evolution -- as mammals we require a long period of parental care, allowing for a slow but durable learning process, and our apelike ancestors' environment required an upright posture for survival, freeing hands for tool creation and use -- have led to an indirect power and control over, and understanding of, our environment. What we observe on Earth, however, is what one would expect from a law of natural selection that focuses on survival in a local environment: direct methods of interfacing with that environment are common; indirect methods are extremely rare.

Furthermore, arguably direct methods allow for less violence and environmental disruption, and perhaps longer survival. Direct methods will be powerful, but focused and limited. A creature that uses only a few informational channels directly related to its survival will have much that it is ignorant and will not be developing weapons of mass destruction.  A shark can detect electromagnetic fields, but it is incapable of understanding the atomic foundation and thus building atomic bombs and delivering them via missile guidance. A blue crab can detect amino acids but is incapable of the full range of microbiological knowledge that would enable it to produce biological weapons.

 


Expecting science and mathematics to be optimal survival solutions may be as unlikely as believing that the best way to learn softball is from a physics textbook.





























Optimists on the existence of ETIs argue that it is egotistical of us to believe that we are alone, but it may also be egotistical of us to believe that we are so biologically special that evolution would produce many creatures like us
.

Thus, from a biological perspective the lesson from evolution on Earth seems to be that a direct sensing of the environment is the healthy norm, the optimal convergent evolutionary property, rather than an indirect intelligence.

From this point of view, our indirect method is the result of one peculiar branch of Earth's evolution. So, even if the laws of nature are the same everywhere, an assumption we must examine more closely, cognitive intelligence would seem to be an unlikely evolutionary response. It is more probable that creatures elsewhere would converge around the direct methods so many of Earth's creatures display. If the direct method is a convergent evolutionary property, there should be little need to develop the indirect methods of science and mathematics.

Consider the story of the physicist who was invited to play softball with a group of colleagues. He had never played before and his first attempt was disastrous. He could not hit a single pitched ball, and his attempts to throw and catch were dangerous. So embarrassing was this first attempt, he vowed to be an expert at this silly game by the next time he was asked to play. So he purchased a ball, glove, and bat and submitted each to a rigorous mathematical analysis. By the next time he was invited to play he knew everything there was to know "cognitively" about the physics of catching, hitting, and throwing, but to his consternation and repeated embarrassment, he still could not do any of these things. The philosopher Nicholas Rescher once commented, "Expecting extraterrestrials to be doing natural science as we do on Earth is like expecting a newly discovered desert-island race to be speaking grammatical English." Expecting science and mathematics to be optimal survival solutions may be as unlikely as believing that the best way to learn softball is from a physics textbook. The universe may allow for many optimal ways to play the game of survival. According to the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr,

    Nothing demonstrates the improbability of the origin of high intelligence better than the millions of . . . lineages (on Earth) that failed to achieve it. . . . Adaptations that are favored by selection, such as eyes or bioluminescence, originate in evolution scores of times independently. High intelligence has originated only once, in human beings. . . . high intelligence is not at all favored by natural selection, contrary to what we would expect. In fact, all the other kinds of living organisms, millions of species, get along fine without high intelligence.(12)

In the sixteenth century it was difficult to believe that the Sun was the center of planetary motion because this implied that God had wasted a lot of space. In the seventeenth century it was difficult to believe that other planets did not have inhabitants with writing and geometry; otherwise God would have wasted a planet. In the twentieth century it has been difficult to believe that the universe could waste all this space on non-intelligent creatures. Renaissance scientists sought to understand the "music of the spheres," the elegant mathematical laws originating in the mind of God, proving in the process the exceptional nature of humankind's place in the universe. Twentieth-century scientists listen for mathematical signals from space hoping to validate our way of knowing, to prove that we are special and that our minds resonate with the way things are. Optimists on the existence of ETIs argue that it is egotistical of us to believe that we are alone, but it may also be egotistical of us to believe that we are so biologically special that evolution would produce many creatures like us.


Our logic, our mathematics, our natural science could have no parallel anywhere in the universe. We could be totally alone with our thoughts.

Finally, we must face the possible message of quantum physics. In claiming that the laws of nature are the same everywhere, the convergence-resonance hypothesis assumes that we can "re-present" reality just as it is. We have seen, however, that just as relativity theory demonstrates that space and time are not the same everywhere, quantum physics implies that the laws of nature may not be the same everywhere unless the same type of conscious receiver is the same everywhere. Because there are no "things-in-themselves" independent of a conscious receiver, conscious awareness of an environment implies participation, not objective observation. Thus, like a radio receiver our particular form of consciousness has evolved on one channel; it is only one of possibly many forms of conscious awareness capable of collapsing an ambiguous reality into a concrete reality. Thus, aside from the fact that the origin of life elsewhere may be improbable, aside from the possibility of different chemistries for life, aside from the many difficult, improbable paths life must take to evolve intelligence, aside from the possibility that a direct intelligence is more likely than an indirect cognitive one, we must also consider very seriously that even if extraterrestrial intelligent creatures evolve, they could be on a completely different conscious channel. Our logic, our mathematics, our natural science could have no parallel anywhere in the universe. We could be totally alone with our thoughts

(For a more detailed analysis of the contingencies discussed here, see the Drake Equation. Also see NASA's Astrobiology Web pages.)

  The Ontological Status of Mathematics










A mathematical truth is timeless, it does not come into being when we discover it. Yet its discovery is a very real event, it may be an emotion like a great gift from a fairy.  Erwin Schrödinger

In the claims made about mathematics, the convergence-resonance theory crosses over from scientific to philosophical speculation, particularly metaphysics. In Chapters 4 and 5 we raised the question of why mathematics works so well. For the advocates of the convergence-resonance theory, the workability of mathematics is very important. We have seen that for Renaissance scientists it was believed that mathematics represented a direct channel to the mind of God and His secret, underlying plan for the universe. For the advocates of the convergence-resonance theory, it works so well that it is still easy to believe that mathematics represents a direct channel to understanding the secrets of the universe. Even in quantum physics it is mathematics that reveals that our mathematical representations may not be absolute.

In some old science fiction movies, when contact is made finally with extraterrestrial creatures, an expert mathematician is summoned to communicate with them. As we have seen, many assumptions lie behind this innocent Hollywood notion. There is also a philosophical history. Recall that Plato, struggling to answer the relativism of the sophists, found in mathematics the apparent certainty and universality needed and concluded that mathematical truths were not of the physical world. For Plato, mathematical truths existed in an eternal nonmaterial realm, another dimension from the material world of our everyday experience -- a realm of truth that we could tap into with our thinking and then apply to the confusing, shadowy realm of daily life, saving the phenomena and establishing order in the process. For Plato, our mathematical applications can never be totally accurate, but aside from being the best we can do, mathematics at least demonstrates that we are capable of knowing absolute truth. Plato was a metaphysical idealist who believed that ideas are more real than the things they are supposed to represent. The number "2" is not a physical thing, but it is a very powerful concept that can be applied to an infinite number of physical things. For Plato, the entire universe could be destroyed, but 2 + 2 would still be 4.

For Aristotle, Plato's most famous student, this mystical interpretation of absolute truth had too many problems to be defended. Aside from seeing the technical problem of how our minds could participate with this eternal realm, Aristotle was an epistemological realist who was more comfortable believing that the truths of logic and mathematics were in the physical world. In a sense, for Aristotle "2 + 2 = 4" is a physical fact. Just as a sculptor's statue has a form, so the objects of the world have formal relationships that humans can recognize. And just as the form of the statue could not exist unless there was a physical substance to form, so the truths of mathematics could not exist unless there were physical objects to count. For an Aristotelian, mathematical principles work because they represent formal truths of reality. They are the invisible floor plan, the skeletal structure that supports all existence. In philosophical terms, mathematical (and logical) truths represent the formal structure of Being. Thus, for an Aristotelian when we apprehend a mathematical truth on Earth, when a child finally understands the difficult abstraction of "2," a truth is known that applies to the entire universe. For an Aristotelian, mathematical principles represent independent objective truths about the physical universe, truths that we discover just like other physical facts.

For an Aristotelian, mathematical principles work because they represent formal truths of reality. They are the invisible floor plan, the skeletal structure that supports all existence.  When we apprehend a mathematical truth on Earth, when a child finally understands the difficult abstraction of "2," a truth is known that applies to the entire universe.




















For Kant mathematical truths were not the formal structure of reality but formal filters by which human beings understand and organize their experience of reality. They represent "our way" of filtering reality.

Thus, for a modern Aristotelian, it is easy to understand why we are able to fly our spacecraft billions of miles from Earth and arrive at precise points at precise times. The mathematical principles we discover on Earth are universal; these principles can be applied anywhere with the same success. The nineteenth-century mathematician Charles Hermite demonstrated the historical pervasiveness of this belief when he said, 

    I believe that the numbers and functions of analysis are not the arbitrary product of our spirits: I believe that they exist outside of us with the same character of necessity as the objects of objective reality; and we find or discover them and study them as do the physicists, chemists and zoologists.

The convergence-resonance theory is consistent with the Aristotelian position. In our modern period what was previously a religious harmony between our minds and nature has now developed into an evolutionary resonance. The core foundation for all environments in the universe is mathematics. We have been lucky enough to evolve to read that foundation.

The philosopher Kant, however, offered a very different interpretation as to why mathematics works so well. Recall from Chapter 7 that faced with the problem of induction and the skepticism of Hume, Kant concluded that it is impossible to claim with any certainty that our thoughts of nature represent the things-in-themselves. For Kant a more epistemologically honest position was to believe that mathematical truths were not the formal structure of reality but formal filters by which human beings understand and organize their experience of reality. For Kant, the principles of mathematics were still objective and universal, and not relative to a particular culture or period of time in human history. But the universality of these principles was relative to the human mind. They represented "our way" of filtering reality. In the words of the twentieth-century physicist Sir Arthur Eddington,

    Where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature. . . . We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And Lo! it is our own.

In short, small wonder that everywhere we look, everywhere we go, mathematics works. Everywhere we go, we take our minds with us! Kantianism implies that the principles of mathematics are not truths of the real world, but simply a way of conceptualizing or filtering the world. Would other forms of consciousness evolve the same filters. At the very least, Kantianism introduces another unlikely variable into the convergence-resonance scenario.

Another interpretation of the status of mathematics, one that is as old as Protagoras, is known as conventionalism. The conventionalist argues that mathematical truths are not descriptions at all. For an Aristotelian, mathematical truths describe objective facts about the physical world; for a Kantian, mathematical truths describe the formal structure of human experience. For a conventionalist, a mathematical system is not a system of truth, but a "game," and the principles themselves are not descriptions -- they are "rules." There is nothing magical, durable, or absolute about the rules of a game. To play a game some set of rules is needed to prevent chaos and anarchy. But there is nothing absolute about what rules are used. The only thing that may matter is which rules are most convenient for the type of game you want to play.








For a conventionalist, a mathematical system is not a system of truth, but a "game," and the principles themselves are not descriptions -- they are "rules." There is nothing magical, durable, or absolute about the rules of a game.








The conventionalist claims there are many different ways of playing the game of life; the Kantian implies that there may be many different kinds of glasses with which to see the universe. Both views introduce possible divergent variables that make it more unlikely that our science and mathematics represent a cosmic Rosetta stone. For another intelligent form of life to possess mathematics and some day send us a message encoded with prime numbers may be as unlikely as someday receiving a message in English.

Consider a basketball game. There is nothing absolute about the dimension of the court, the height of the basket rim, the distance of the free throw line. No god has decreed that this is the only way basketball can be played. Any rule could be changed tomorrow. Because of the height of most basketball players today, a more interesting game might result if the rim were moved up to 12 feet from the floor, rather than its current 10 feet. It might be more convenient, given particular goals, to change the rules.

Suppose you played some one-on-one basketball with a new friend. Suppose at first there is nothing unusual about the style of play of your opponent; he seems to know the game well and follows the normal rules. As the game progresses suppose you get ahead by 10 points. Suddenly your opponent picks up the ball, pushes you out of the way, runs down the court without dribbling, and does a lay-up. Shocked you ask him what in the world he thinks he is doing. He replies that this is his rule: When he gets 10 points behind this style of play becomes legal. What has he done? He has not violated a law of a god. He has not foolishly flaunted an objective law of nature, such as jumping out of a sixth-floor window claiming that the law of gravity does not apply to him. He has simply violated a rule that was freely created by human beings. In this case you would have several choices: You could decide not to play with this person, attempt to persuade him to follow the normal rules, or adopt his rules. Convenience and order are the only things that matter in playing games.

According to this view, "2 + 2 = 4" does not describe any kind of fact, it is simply a rule human beings have made up to organize our experience. It is a convenient rule for most situations, but not all. Two things and two things are not always four things. Two female rabbits and two male rabbits do not remain four rabbits for very long. Because of a chemical reaction, two quarts of alcohol and two quarts of water do not exactly equal four quarts. In quantum physics there are many states of existence in which ordinary arithmetic is inaccurate and hence not very useful. In relativity theory we have seen that ordinary addition does not work in adding velocities that are high relative to the speed of light. In all these cases it is more convenient to use a different mathematics than ordinary arithmetic. In the case of rabbits it would be better to use the statistical procedures of the population geneticist; in chemical reactions, the transformations of the chemist; in quantum physics, bizarre imaginary numbers such as the square root of -1.

Just as the world is flexible enough to allow for many different successful cultures, so the universe is flexible enough to allow for many different forms of organization. On some strange planet the environmental conditions might be so strange that by the time an object is counted it splits in two. On such a world it might be more convenient to use the rule "2 + 2 = 8." In some South Pacific island communities "2 + 2" is not "4," because their method of counting does not use the number "4." Instead, their numbering system is: one, two, three, many! Is this an indication of the backwardness, an ignorance of an important feature of nature, or simply a different successful way of relating to nature, one consistent with the life-style and goals of this culture?

The conventionalist claims there are many different ways of playing the game of life; the Kantian implies that there may be many different kinds of glasses with which to see the universe. Both views introduce possible divergent variables that make it more unlikely that our science and mathematics represent a cosmic Rosetta stone. For another intelligent form of life to possess mathematics and some day send us a message encoded with prime numbers may be as unlikely as someday receiving a message in English.






Insofar as mathematics is about reality, it is not certain, and insofar as it is certain, it is not about reality. 
Albert Einstein


















For the advocates of conjecturalism, mathematical ideas are informed guesses or conjectures that we create, and to be accepted, they must face the test of experience. Something is out there, and it "kicks back" unmindful of our wishes.

But even our conventions must work. The advocates of conjecturalism acknowledge the enlightened and nonprovincial characteristics of Kantianism and conventionalism, but are uncomfortable with the relativism implied. Mathematical ideas, as with all ideas, may be free creations of the human mind and thoughts we impose on reality, but not just anything will work. Even in our games the rules we adopt must be "constrained" by the physical circumstances of the external environment. According to this view, mathematical systems are in many ways very much like our physical theories. We create different styles of thought and then try them out on the universe for acceptance. Some work, many do not. The result implies objectivity once again; there must be something in nature captured by those mathematical theories otherwise it is a miracle that they work. As with all scientific theories in general, mathematical ideas are informed guesses or conjectures that we create, and to be accepted, they must face the test of experience. Something is out there, and it "kicks back" unmindful of our wishes.

Before Kepler discovered that elliptical orbits work and the other laws of planetary motion, he thought he had discovered in a flash of insight God's secret mathematical plan for the planets. There were only six known planets and five perfect geometric solids. Often called the Pythagorean or Platonic solids, mathematicians considered why there could be only five a beautiful mystery. Each solid is a three-dimensional figure that consists of two-dimensional shapes with some number of equal sides. For instance, a cube has 6 squares for its faces, and a pyramid has four equilateral triangles for its sides and base. Within Euclidian geometry logical demonstrations can prove that there can be only five such solids. By nesting the planets within the shapes of the five perfect solids, Kepler thought he had discovered not only why there must be only five perfect solids and six planets but also why the planets had the spacing that they did. The theory was so elegant and grand that it must be true. But no matter how hard he tried, no matter how many models of nested perfect solids he constructed, he could not get his theory to save the empirical facts of planetary motion. God may have constructed the universe based on an elegant mathematics, but the nested solids postulate was not it. As empiricists, the lesson conjecturalists draw from this example is that no matter how beautiful a theory, no matter how elegant the mathematics, it still must fit the observational facts.

Does conjecturalism provide the objective basis needed by the convergence-resonance theory? If there is something out there that our successful mathematics captures, then given the enormous number of possible places for life to evolve, is it not likely that some, perhaps many, intelligent forms of life, struggling against a heedless environment to survive, will evolve a system of thought to capture this same reality? As a realist, Einstein supported conjecturalism. We are free to boldly create whatever ideas we want, but the cosmic clock responds regardless of the apparent elegance of our ideas. Einstein was genuinely puzzled by the fact that any of our ideas work, when there are always an infinite number of possible ideas. How do we discover the reasonable ideas from the overwhelming number of conceivable ideas? Einstein was sure that we were not just fooling ourselves. Over time we really do find, in the words of Xenophanes, "ideas that are better." But in an age when it is unpopular to believe that we are God's special creature, deserving special gifts, it was a great mystery to Einstein how we do this.



I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day.  Albert Camus









We are all part of a grand mystery; the more opinions on its meaning, the more likely we will approach an understanding of it. We yearn to understand our existence and we wish to have some company in this endeavor.

The conventionalist can still argue that our science and mathematics work, not because of any special correspondence between these forms of organization and an objective reality, but because reality allows for many forms of organization to work to some extent. From a scientific point of view, however, the conjecturalist seems to have the last say. What is needed at this point is for reality to kick back a little via experiment. We do not know the answers to the questions posed in this chapter. It is premature to conclude much at all. The purpose of this chapter has not been to refute the convergence-resonance theory or to ridicule spending our resources on the radio listening for a message using prime numbers. The important philosophical and scientific questions raised in this chapter can only be tested by further extraterrestrial research. Our purpose has been to make clear the different possible scenarios of extraterrestrial existence and communication, and the philosophical assumptions and historical background behind the thinking on these possibilities.

During the 1960s and 1970s a flurry of related activity took place in attempting to communicate with animals. It was popular to think for a time that animals relatively close to our species, such as dolphins, gorillas, and chimpanzees, could be taught a special language. By learning to communicate with a few special animal emissaries, it was thought that we could tap into the thoughts and feelings of these creatures, learning in the process another perspective on the meaning of existence. This research is still very controversial. Some scientists argue that early encouraging results were the result of egocentricity. Having animals mimic a language to get food, does not mean that anything like human thought initiates this activity. Nevertheless, it is important to remind ourselves at this point the noble thought behind this and ETI research. We are all part of a grand mystery; the more opinions on its meaning, the more likely we will approach an understanding of it. We yearn to understand our existence and we wish to have some company in this endeavor.


Consider also the daunting technological and value issues we face. For us to receive some feedback from another civilization that may have had experience with the same issues would be of great benefit. Because of the Human Genome project and commercial applications of molecular biology, in the twenty-first century we will be able to manipulate genes to design babies, produce an enormous number of new species, and design biological weapons to target specific ethnicities. The medical benefits of this technology also will be enormous. The decisions we must make on the applications of this new knowledge will be very difficult.




To have arrived on this earth as the product of a biological accident, only to depart through human arrogance, would be the ultimate irony. 
Richard Leakey

In many ways we are already part of a grand experiment related to the issue of ETIs. We are testing at this very moment the survivability of intelligence. No creature that we know of is capable of such extensive awareness of the universe. Yet no creature that we know of is capable of such extensive violence. Will we be able to intelligently decide on the right values to control our technological power and implement those values globally to insure the survival of the human species?

The human prospect in many ways is a human predicament. Our problems are great, our future existence unclear, our survival hardly guaranteed. In considering the very difficult choices we must make, we must consider the full ramifications of the cosmic perspective. For one, we must consider very seriously the possibility that our entire existence -- our culture and history, our values and mammalian heritage, our unique combination of emotion and cognitive thinking, and messy struggle to know, as well as our mathematics and science -- may have no parallel anywhere else in the universe. There could well be many other forms of life in Darwin's universe, yet our species could be but a brief crazy accident, never to be repeated. In the words of Richard Leaky, "To have arrived on this earth as the product of a biological accident, only to depart through human arrogance, would be the ultimate irony."




 
 
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Notes: (Click Back to Return to Text.)

1. Unlike de Cusa who arrived at a centerless universe as a deduction from an infinite universe, Einstein makes us work harder. The universe can have no center, but still be finite. (Click Back to Return to Text.)

2. See The Hunt for Life on Mars, by Donald Goldsmith (Plume, 1998).

3. Robert Shapiro and Gerald Feinberg, Life Beyond Earth (New York: Morrow, 1980), pp. 20, 214.

4. Much of this leakage is from the powerful military warning radars used by the former Soviet Union and the United States, and TV broadcasts. Because of the length of the electromagnetic wave used, much of the AM broadcasting is reflected back to Earth by our atmosphere.

5. After the Aspect experiments in the early 1980s, the physicist Jack Sarfatti suggested that an "instantaneous communication device" could be constructed using a principle similar to the instantaneous quantum correlations obtained with particles in the Aspect experiment. Other scientists, however, scoffed at this suggestion, pointing out that even if there are instantaneous correlations in particle spins over vast distances, no information could be transported in this way, since the results at either finish line are random. See the runner's analogy in Chapter 8. But at present, quantum teleportation is being taken seriously as a key ingredient in the eventual construction of quantum computers. See Dik Bouwmeester and Anton Zeilinger, "Experimental quantum teleportation,'' Nature, Dec. 11, 1997.

6. Gene Bylinsky, Life in Darwin's Universe (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981), p. 70.

7. Some may be very strange though. For instance, on a planet with a very thick atmosphere, one approaching the density of water, we might find fishlike and jellyfishlike creatures swimming in the air! On another planet perhaps marsupial humanlike creatures would live with a very large head and brain.  This possibility is due to the obvious head size problem of natural placental mammalian births that would limit the evolution of brain and skull size.  Marsupial creatures would not be hindered by this limitation, since birth takes place at an early developmental stage.

8. We have also sent signals. The 1000-foot diameter Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico has been used to send a message to another galaxy.

9. For Minsky's work in this and related matters see, his comments and participation in Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, edited by Carl Sagan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1973), the proceedings of an important international conference; his article, "Communication with Alien Intelligence," Byte, 10, no. 4 (April, 1985): 126-138; the "Space" section by Edward Regis, Jr., Omni, 8, no. 6 (March, 1986): 18, 82; Minsky's article "Why People Think Computers Can't," Technology Review, 86, (Nov-Dec. 1983); 67-70, 80-81; and his book, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986).

10. Minsky's approach is based on a metaphysics of materialism and the assumption that the human mind is just a very complex computer programmed on the basis of Western logic and mathematics. For criticism and discussion of the standard artificial intelligence assumptions, see John Searle, "Minds, Brains, and Programs," Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3 (1980): 417-424, Minds, Brains and Science (Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), and The Mystery of Consciousness (New York: NY Review of Books, 1997); Bart Kosko, Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic (New York: Hyperion, 1993).

11. Sagan once claimed that a race of poets would not be optimal. For long term survival comet debris and asteroids smashing into planets will be a common problem. A scientific, technologically literate culture will be required that understands the basic laws of nature -- in this case gravity. (See the Web debate between Ernst Mayr and Sagan.)

12. Ernst Mayr, "Can SETI Succeed? Not Likely," The Bioastronomy News, vol. 7, no. 3, 1995. See the debate between Mayr and Sagan.

Concept Summary

Suggested Readings 

Life in Darwin's Universe: Evolution and the Cosmos, by Gene Bylinsky, with illustrations by Wayne McLoughlin (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981).

On Civilized Stars: the Search for Intelligent Life in Outer Space, by Joseph F. Baugher (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1985).


Natural Acts: a Sidelong View of Science and Nature, by David Quammen (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), and Evolution of the Vertebrates: a History of the Backboned Animals through Time, by Edwin H. Colbert, 3rd ed. (New York, Wiley, 1980).


The Mysteries of Modern Science, by Brian Stableford (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, 1977).

Intelligent Life in the Universe, by I.S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan (San Francisco: Holden-Day, 1966), The Cosmic Connection; an Extraterrestrial Perspective, by Carl Sagan (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1973), and Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI), edited by Carl Sagan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1973).
Life Beyond Earth: the Intelligent Earthling's Guide to Life in the Universe, by Gerald Feinberg and Robert Shapiro (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1980).


Extraterrestrials, Where are They?, edited by Michael H. Hart and Ben Zuckerman (New York: Pergamon Press, 1982).


The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler (Oxford, England: Claredon Press, 1986).

For a completely different perspective on the role of intelligence in the universe, this controversial book is recommended. Rather than seeing intelligence as a by-product of cosmological, chemical, and biological evolution, the authors discuss the possibility that the many apparent coincidences needed to produce intelligent life are too numerous to be coincidences, that intelligence must come into existence and the universe is here because intelligence is here. The authors also argue that we are alone because intelligent life is inevitable and if there were other versions of it, we would have observed their presence by now. Because this view is similar to ancient teleological and design anthropocentric theories (the universe "strives" to create intelligence just as a planet strove to maintain circular motion in the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology), this book has received a great deal of expected criticism. See Martin Gardner's review in the New York Review of Books, 33, no. 8 (1986): 22-25. If for nothing else, however, the authors's discussion of history, cosmological theory, Earth science, and biochemistry serves as a scholarly compendium of factual information related to the questions of life and intelligence.