9 - Where Are They?

Arthur C. Clarke writes:

One morning in 1979 I opened the local morning paper to be greeted with the news, CLARKE TO HEAD UNIVERSITY. 'How interesting,' I thought. 'I wonder who that can be - I don't know any other Clarkes in Sri Lanka ...' Then I read on, and was both astonished and flattered to learn that President J.R. Jayawardene had appointed me Chancellor of our leading technical institution, the University of Moratuwa, about five miles south of Colombo.

Fortunately for the educational system of Sri Lanka, the Chancellor is not involved in the day-to-day running of the university, and his main duty is to present the graduates with their degrees and give a suitably inspiring address at the annual Convocation.

Each year I try to find a new subject, and it so happened that in 1986 I came back to one that - inevitably - took up a whole programme in the Mysterious World television series, as well as Chapter 10 of the associated books. (How odd: I've just noticed that whereas there were thirteen parts to the series, the book has only twelve chapters. Have my co-authors become superstitious as a result of investigating too many mysteries?)

Over the last forty years I have written quite a number of essays on UFOs and on life in outer space - two subjects which are not necessarily connected. In the aftermath of Halley's Comet, which focused so much attention on matters astronomical, the time seemed ripe for a summing-up. I attempted to do this in my Chancellor's Address, delivered in the splendid Bandaranaike Memorial International Hall, Colombo, on 20 June 1986.

I sincerely hope I can now give the whole subject a few decades of benign neglect, but from previous experience I'm not too optimistic. All I can say is that these are my Latest Last Words on UFOs.

Early in December 1985 a group of distinguished astronomers gathered in Colombo - under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union, the Institute of Fundamental Studies, and the Arthur C. Clarke Centre - to discuss a subject which has long fascinated the general public, but which has only become scientifically respectable during the last two decades. I refer, of course, to the possibility of life on other worlds.

Now, this is a fairly new idea in Western thought - for the simple reason that from Aristotle onwards it was assumed that the earth was the centre of the universe and that anything beyond it was some vague celestial realm inhabited only by supernatural beings. The sun was obviously a mass of fire, so no one except the gods could live there, and as for the moon, it probably wasn't big enough for many occupants.

The five planets visible to the naked eye -Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn - had been known to mankind since prehistoric times, and their curious movements had been the cause of much speculation. But no one except a few eccentric philosophers had any idea that they were all worlds in their own right - two of them enormously larger than the earth.

It's an extraordinary fact that the East had guessed the true scale of the universe, both in time and in space, centuries before the West. In Hindu philosophy there are aeons and ages long enough to satisfy any modern cosmologist; yet, until only a dozen generations ago much of Europe believed that the world was created around 4000 B.C. (I'm sorry to say that, owing to their misreading of the Bible, thousands of foolish people still believe such nonsense.)

The turning point in our understanding of the universe may be conveniently dated at 1600, just before Galileo pointed his first telescope towards the stars. Shakespeare belongs to the century before the great intellectual revolution.

Doubt that the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move ...

he wrote, circa 1600. He was wrong on both counts.

Of course, we know that the sun does move - but not in the way that Shakespeare imagined. He thought it moved around the earth, as common sense seems to indicate, and had no idea how distant - and how big - it really is. And the stars aren't fire - although for reasons that were not understood until well into this century. They are much too hot! Fire is a low-temperature phenomenon in the thermal range of the universe - much of which is simmering briskly at several million degrees, where no chemical compounds can possibly exist.

During the seventeenth century the telescope revealed for anyone who had eyes to see that the moon provided at least one other example of a world with mountains and plains - though not rivers and oceans. The moving points of light that were the planets now turned out to have appreciable discs - and one of them, Jupiter, had its own retinue of moons. Clearly, the earth was not unique; nor, perhaps, was the human race.

This was a shocking - even heretical - thought, at least to those brought up in the Aristotelean school. Anyone who preached it too loudly, especially near Rome, was likely to get into serious trouble with the Inquisition. The classic example is, of course, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), who was one of the first European advocates of the doctrine of an infinite universe and the 'plurality of worlds'. Refusing to recant, he was burned at the stake in 1600. I wonder how many modern scientists would be prepared to emulate him in defence of their theories.

A couple of years ago, to my great surprise, I was asked to present a paper to the Pontifical Academy of Science, and could not resist having a little dig at the Vatican Astronomer.

'When I was invited to speak here,' I told Dr George Coyne mischievously, 'my first choice of subject was: "After Giordano Bruno - Who?"'

George didn't hesitate for a moment. 'If you had used that title, Arthur,' he said deadpan, 'the answer would have been - "You."'

And while we're on the subject of Jesuit astronomers, I'd like to remind you of one of the greatest ironies in the history of science. In 1582 that remarkable man, Father Matteo Ricci, arrived in China with all the latest wisdom of the West. The Chinese regarded Occidentals as barbarians (and probably still do, though they're too polite to say so), but by tact, intelligence and sheer goodness Father Ricci persuaded them that their superstitious concept of an enormous universe enduring for vast aeons was all nonsense: God put the earth in the centre of everything, and Adam and Eve in the garden, only a few thousand years ago.

As he proudly wrote: 'The Fathers gave such clear and lucid explanation on all these matters which were so new to the Chinese, that many were unable to deny the truth of all that they said; and, for this reason, the information on this matter quickly spread among all the scholars of China.' Well! Poor Father Ricci! While he was persuading the Chinese to take a Great Leap Backward to Ptolemaic astronomy, Copernicus was destroying its very foundations in Europe. A few decades later Galileo (with an anxious glance over his shoulder at Bruno) would finish the job of demolition.

For the last 300 years - not very long in human history -all educated persons have known that our planet is not the only world in the universe, and that its sun is one of billions. The great voyages of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during which European explorers 'found' whole cultures that didn't even know they'd been lost, also prompted speculation about life on other planets. It seemed only reasonable that our enormous cosmos must be populated with other creatures, some of them perhaps far more advanced than we are. The alternative - that we are utterly alone in the universe - seemed both depressing and wildly megalomaniac.

But how to prove it, one way or the other? We children of the Space Age can no longer remember how enormous even the solar system seemed, only a lifetime ago. Now the Voyager spaceprobe is heading for its appointment with Neptune - which, as recently as 1930, marked the frontier of the Empire of the Sun. That is an impressive achievement; even so, it will be tens of thousands of years before Voyager can cross the gulf to the nearest star.

Fortunately, we do not have to rely on physical contact to discover if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. We now assume that any contact is likely to be by radio. Yet this in itself would have seemed incredible until well into this century. We take radio so much for granted that we forget how miraculous it is. Even the most far-sighted prophet could not have predicted it - which is yet another example of what I call Comte's Fallacy.

Around 1840 the French philosopher, Auguste Comte (1798-1857), was rash enough to make the following pronouncement about the limits of our knowledge concerning the heavenly bodies: 'We see how we may determine their forms, their distances, their bulk, their motions, but we can never know anything of their chemical or mineralogical structure; and much less, that of organized beings living on their surface.' Comte's monumental gaffe was in the same class as Father Ricci's. Within a few decades, the invention of the spectroscope had utterly refuted his assertion that it was impossible to discover the chemical nature of heavenly bodies. By the end of the century, precisely that was the main occupation of most professional astronomers. Only the amateurs were still concerned with what Comte believed must always be the entire body of their science.

So it is very dangerous to set limits to knowledge or to engineering achievements. No one could have anticipated the spectroscope; and no one could have imagined radio. They both exemplify Clarke's well-known Third Law: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'

There may be 'magical' inventions or discoveries in the future which will settle the question of intelligent life in the universe, but I do not think we really need them. Today's electronics can probably do the job - given a few more decades of determined application. The giant radio telescopes which have been built for purely scientific purposes are quite capable - and this is a splendid example of 'serendipity' - of detecting the sort of radio signals one would expect from an advanced civilization in our immediate galactic neighbourhood. As is well known, a number of such searches have been made - and are being made right now - though so far with negative results. It would be ridiculously optimistic to expect success, since we have had the capacity for making such a search for less than half a human lifetime.

Yet already this 'failure' has produced a kind of backlash, and has prompted some scientists to argue, 'Perhaps we are alone in the universe.' Dr Frank Tipler, the best-known exponent of this view, has given one of his papers the provocative title, 'There Are No Intelligent Extra-Terrestrials'. Dr Carl Sagan and his school argue (and I agree with them) that it is much too early to jump to such far-reaching conclusions.

Meanwhile the controversy rages; as has been well said, either answer will be awe-inspiring. The question can only be settled by evidence, not by any amount of logic, however plausible. I would like to see the whole debate given a rest while the radio-astronomers, like goldminers panning for gold dust, quietly sieve through the torrents of noise pouring down from the sky.

There is another - and much more speculative - line of approach to this problem. Let me give an analogy to explain what I mean. If a visiting traveller had surveyed our planet from space 10,000 years ago, he would have seen many signs of life - forests, grasslands, great herds of animals - but no trace of intelligence. Today, even a casual glance would reveal cities, roads, airfields, irrigation systems - and, at night, vast constellations of artificial light. (Incidentally, you'll never guess where the most conspicuous of those displays are to be found.

The people who operate the military reconnaissance satellites were amazed to find that enormous areas of the Pacific Ocean are brighter than London or New York. You can blame the Japanese fishing fleets: they're pouring megawatts of light into the sea to attract squids - and doing heaven knows what to the local ecology in the process.)

These 'advertisements' of terrestrial civilization would have been beyond the imagination of our Stone Age ancestors. Can one set any limits to what might be achieved by a really advanced, long-lived society, with thousands of centuries of spacefaring behind it? In particular, might it not have - literally - set its sign among the stars, as we have done upon the earth? As long ago as 1929 the physicist, J.D. Bernal, in one of the most daring works of scientific imagination ever penned, wrote:

It is unlikely that man will stop until he has roamed over and colonized most of the sidereal universe, or that even this will be the end. Man will not ultimately be content to be parasitic on the stars but will invade them and organize them for his own purpose ... By intelligent organization the life of the universe could probably be prolonged many millions of millions of times ...

Later writers have talked about the 'Greening of the Galaxy', and asked why the stellar sky is so untidy and badly organized ... Where, indeed, are the cosmic engineers?

Perhaps - like ants crawling around the base of the Empire State Building - we simply haven't recognized what's going on all about us. During the last few decades, astronomers have been discovering some very strange phenomena in space, and have been straining scientific theories to the limit in attempts to find natural explanations.

Pulsars were the first example. In 1967, when Hewish and Bell discovered radio sources ticking away more accurately than any mechanical clock ever made by man, their first wild speculation was that they might be artificial. Indeed, no astronomer before 1920 could have explained how Mother Nature could have contrived such a prodigy unaided.

Well, we are now quite sure that pulsars are indeed natural (though amazing) objects - tiny dying stars acting like cosmic beacons as they spin madly on their axes. But there are other phenomena not so readily explained, and I should not be in the least surprised if the astronomers finally give up on them and admit: 'We're sure that nature can't be responsible. Somebody out there has forgotten to switch off the lights.' Or worse. The most chilling explanation I have heard of one titanic outpouring of cosmic energies is: an industrial accident.

Nowadays, anyone who considers that alien super-civilizations may exist has to contend not with scepticism but with something much worse - credulity. Although the subject now affects me with uncontrollable fits of yawning, I would be failing in my duty if I did not say something about UFOs. So here, as briefly as possible, are the conclusions I've come to after more than fifty years of study (fifty-seven, to be exact, since I first read Charles Fort's Lo! in 1930: that monument of eccentric scholarship, published long before anyone had ever heard of 'Flying Saucers', listed apparent celestial visitations right back to the Middle Ages):

1. There may be strange and surprising meteorological, electrical or astronomical phenomena still unknown to science, which may account for the very few UFOs that are both genuine and unexplained.

2. There is no hard evidence that earth has ever been visited from space.

3. If that does happen, there are at least three independent global radar networks that will know within a matter of minutes. And, in the unlikely event that the US, USSR and Chinese authorities instantly cooperate to suppress the news, they'll succeed for a maximum of forty-eight hours. How long do you imagine such a secret could be kept? Remember how quickly Watergate unravelled ...

I'd like to add one further item in support of the above. A friend of mine, who (before he was promoted to a much bigger job) was Deputy Director of the CIA, once told me a very interesting story. On his first day with the Company, he called together his top scientists - and the CIA has some of the best - and said to them: 'Come clean with me, boys. What's the truth about this UFO business?'

And they gave him the two answers which I've given everyone for years - and which virtually all scientists who have studied the problem now accept:

1. We all think that there's probably a lot of life - and intelligence - out there among the stars.

2. There's not the slightest firm evidence that it's ever come here ...

Having written thousands of words on the subject (and read millions), I refuse to go into further details. If anybody wants to argue, I'll merely quote one of my favourite book titles: Shut up, he explained.

Finally, if 'they' are out there, what do they look like? I suggest you go to the local zoo and take your choice. Nature tries everything at least once - and has lots of time and space for experimenting. But I will tell you what they will not look like. We now understand the principles, if not the details, of human evolution.

We specimens of H. sapiens are the product of thousands of successive throws of the genetic dice - any one of which might have turned out differently. If the terrestrial experiment started all over again at Time Zero, there might still be intelligence on this planet - but it wouldn't look like us. In the dance of the DNA spirals, the same partners would never meet again. As Loren Eisley wrote thirty years ago in The Immense Journey:

Nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness. There may be wisdom; there may be power; somewhere across space great instruments ... may stare vainly at our floating cloud wrack, their owners yearning as we yearn. Nevertheless, in the nature of life and in the principles of evolution we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever.

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