examined did not anticipate some of the technological advances that today’s transhumanists hang their hopes on—none foresaw the rise of digital computing, for example—some elements of the dehumanization they envisioned are already in place around us. Genetic engineering means that we would not necessarily require generations of careful breeding to create our Venusians. The “conquest of space” is in principle at least an established fact, and if the prospects for space colonies, planetary exploration, and interstellar travel still seem distant, that is less because of what we don’t know or can’t do than because of how we choose to arrange our funding priorities. Increasingly sophisticated and intimate man-machine interfaces are being developed; we are seeing impressive, if admittedly still early, advances in artificial ears, eyes, and limbs.150 We may not yet have the organ that Bernal imagined for detecting radio waves, but we do have t-shirts that can display the presence of wi-fi signals.151
It is not just what we do that links us with the authors we have looked at, but what we expect. We don’t yet know there is alien life, let alone intelligence, but the idea is widely accepted by scientist and layman alike—if not always for the same reasons. It is likewise a commonplace that we live in a world with an accelerating rate of change.
We might not yet normally place these ideas and achievements within a framework of efforts to overcome the merely human—but they are there to be placed. The eclipse of man is underway. However amazing our present might look from the perspective of a not-so-distant past, there remain those who look down on the human because they can imagine something far better, whether it involves immortality or resurrection of the dead or brains transplanted into machines.152 Even if, as Bernal warns, we should also be wary of thinking that the future is going to work out just as we envision it today, it would certainly be the height of folly to assume whatever in these visions has not yet happened could never happen. Some (like Malthus) would have said that what we have today is impossible.
The main home for the hopes and fears that define the eclipse of man as we have examined it from the past may be transhumanism, but as we will see in the chapters that follow they are also at work elsewhere—including in the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence, to which we turn next. The general public is fascinated by hostile alien invaders. The scientists who look for extraterrestrials are fascinated by contact with advanced, benevolent intelligence. Some transhumanists would be surprised if there are any aliens at all. All these prospects are working out the consequences of ideas about human-alien relations that we have seen in this chapter. The differences among them are not so great as they might first appear.
PROLOGUE: ONLY CONNECT
WHEN SHE accepted a postdoc position to be part of the team decoding the first message ever received from extraterrestrials, Camille never expected that the effort would occupy the better part of her career—would really be her career. That was actually the third surprise about the message. The first was that it came in on a tightly focused, extremely powerful beam of modulated UV light, when most of those engaged in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) still worked on radio telescopes detecting microwave radiation. At first, the speculation was that whoever was sending the message must be quite technologically advanced to have lasers on a scale that humans were just beginning to think about. But the intensive study of the alien sun that followed showed it to be far more active than Earth’s sun; the frequency and intensity of solar storms that Earth astronomers inferred from the data would have made radio communication on their planet so unreliable as to be nearly worthless. Unlike humans, they had probably started and stayed with light as they developed long-distance communication.
The second surprise was that the message was not very user-friendly. It was at least pretty clearly divided into “words,” and statistical analyses of their frequency looked a whole lot like what you got from similar analyses of human documents. But beyond that, it was not clear the aliens had considered the audience. Along with everybody else interested in SETI, Camille had given a good deal of thought to how she would design a message that started simple and moved on to more complex topics. At first, the assumption was that the easy stuff had been lost at the undetected beginning of the transmission. After nine months—a dauntingly long letter!—it was clear the message was repeating with no obvious primer at the start. That assumption had to be put aside.
Of course, at the beginning everybody was interested. The discovery galvanized and monopolized media attention at least as much as Sputnik and the moon landing. Like most others in her field, deep in her heart Camille had thought that “first contact” would be . . . well, like a revelation from on high. It would change everything. And the fuss at the beginning had done nothing to dissuade her. Interviews, op-eds, news analysis persisted for months. There were two “instant books” on the market within weeks; a couple of the senior people on Camille’s team were still living down some of the things they were quoted as saying in those early days. As transmitted, the signal was invisible to the human eye, but it was tuned down, analogized and transformed, mixed and remixed by countless artists in visual and audio forms, bits and pieces of it showing up in popular music and on t-shirts. Camille’s prior interest in SETI put her well ahead of the game; there was a huge “catchup” increase in interest in astronomy, optical engineering, linguistics, mathematics, and even astrobiology now that it was a real discipline. A predictable glut of Ph.D.’s in all these areas followed. Even the shifts in government funding for sciences couldn’t produce ways to employ them all, although that’s what funded Camille’s early years. The space program was reinvigorated, two sports teams abandoned Native American names in favor of “ALIENS.” Once the message was complete, three “unauthorized” translations were out within months. The only one that didn’t make it into print didn’t have to, as the author “proved” on his website that the message was none other than the King James Bible.
At the time, Camille had been too busy and too much on the inside to appreciate fully how the message was like a great rock dropped into a small pond. Ripples spread widely, reflected back on each other, interfered and formed a complex pattern. But as time went by and the message remained enigmatic, the disturbance in society at large faded; life returned pretty much to normal. A rump group of enthusiasts stayed focused on translating the message, and some people spent what seemed like all their time trying to show the whole thing was a hoax (“They say the message is transmitted on a light-beam, but YOU CAN’T SEE IT!”), but the vast majority of the world’s population went on exactly as before. That humans now knew there was intelligence “out there” became a historical fact among historical facts, part of the background against which the human drama continued to play pretty much as usual. Despite her own dedication to the project, Camille concluded that the discovery really was not, as some had claimed it would be, “the most significant event in the modern history of mankind”1 or still less “likely . . . the most earthshaking event in human history”2 or “perhaps the greatest discovery in scientific history.”3 It certainly didn’t “change everything,”4 or “cause the most dramatic shift in the status of our human species that has ever occurred in history,”5 which Camille came to count as her fourth surprise. It was not yet her last.
As the academic work of decoding went on and on and on, various schools of thought formed, competing journals were established on the basis of divergent assumptions, there were conferences you went to and those you didn’t. Camille did her best to be a uniter (consistent with keeping favor with her funders) and thank goodness the factions never lost contact with each other entirely, so when her final breakthrough came, nobody ended up a dissident prisoner of his own previous assumptions.
No,
