surprise was not that everybody essentially agreed about what the message said, it was rather the message itself. It proved to be a comprehensive history of the aliens’ world (the science parts proved key to the translation, of course). They wanted us to know where they had been, because they were concerned about where they were going. Their admitted flaws and imperfections were becoming increasingly dangerous, they thought, as their powers over their world (they didn’t seem to have a concept of “nature”) grew. Camille was the one who had first understood how the message began and ended, and it still chilled her when she looked back on it: “Can you help us?”6
WE SAW in the previous chapter how human re-engineering is related to ideas about space exploration—and has been at least since Winwood Reade’s popular 1872 book—and to speculation about alien life in space. The link continues to be significant today in the writings of prominent transhumanists, but with a new twist. Ray Kurzweil has concluded that “it is likely (although not certain)” that there are no alien civilizations.7 Nick Bostrom has written that “in the search for extraterrestrial life, no news is good news. It promises a potentially great future for humanity.”8
Why are transhumanists invested in the idea that we are alone in the universe? Kurzweil and Bostrom each draw their conclusions following out a similar logic. Stars and galaxies are, in comparison with the time it took for life and civilization to evolve on Earth, very old. There would have been plenty of time before we arrived on the scene for an alien civilization to have come into being. So such an alien civilization could be thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years “ahead” of us in terms of its science and technology. Even with the great distances involved, it has been estimated that an alien civilization—one more advanced than ours, but not unimaginably more advanced—could colonize our galaxy in perhaps 60 to 300 million years.9 From a cosmic perspective, that is a relatively short time. If an alien civilization were to evolve in the way some transhumanists believe we will evolve, achieving great powers to manipulate matter and travel great distances, then surely it would have left its mark on the cosmos.10 Yet we see no evidence for such a thing. So, as the great physicist Enrico Fermi is said to have asked, where are they?11 Kurzweil and Bostrom plainly doubt the aliens are there to be found. To understand more fully transhumanist hopes and fears about alien civilizations, it is necessary to take a few steps back, and recall some of the earlier links between aliens and the eclipse of man.
As we saw in Chapter One, human space travel has been proposed as a way to solve the supposed Malthusian consequences of any Condorcet-like vision of material progress. If ever more people are going to be leading longer and wealthier lives, then they will require ever more of the finite resources upon which those lives depend. If we cannot do ever more with ever less, the argument goes, then either human civilization will come crashing down or the resource base will need to be expanded. Space travel, exploration, and settlement, however technically formidable, is conceptually a familiar solution—especially for a civilization, like ours, that was profoundly shaped by its own history of exploration, colonization, and expanding frontiers. So space exploration can seem like a way to protect and extend humanity. However, the genuinely “alien” conditions that prevail in space and on other worlds put a premium on imagining intelligent beings better suited to these environments. Having learned from Darwin that evolutionary diversity is a product of changing environmental circumstances over time, we can readily imagine how evolution might be deliberately helped along to our own advantage. Think of Haldane’s humans, bred to select for qualities conducive to survival on Venus, or Bernal’s attempt to imagine mechanical beings built for hostile extraterrestrial conditions.
So some human beings become aliens to explore and settle new worlds. Bernal acknowledges that this result may be problematic from the point of view of any who choose to remain merely human. Perhaps there is some further reflection of that problem in the complete equanimity with which Haldane’s Venusians report the end of humanity on Earth—the humanity that had created them and made Venus habitable for them.
But there is an additional problem. If we can expect to become alien and indifferent to ourselves, what if the universe is not waiting for us to enliven it? What if Flammarion is correct, and life establishes itself at the slightest opportunity? If there is alien life, then why should there not be alien intelligence? And if there is alien intelligence, why would it not eventually find itself facing the same limits and opportunities that, based on Malthusian assumptions, would drive us into space? If, as Haldane saw, we could become alien invaders faced with an imperative to destroy or be destroyed, why shouldn’t extraterrestrials behave in exactly the same way?
Of course, based on complete ignorance, we can say anything we wish about alien motives and abilities, a freedom much employed by those who write both fictional and speculative non-fiction works on this topic. So it is not hard to find grounds for happier outcomes, starting from skepticism about the Malthusian dilemma itself. But for our present purposes, the significant point is this: concerns about hostile aliens do not have to arise from commonly identified factors like primitive xenophobia or Cold War paranoia. They do not have to depend on any quirk of human history or psychology. As we have seen, when we imagine dangerous aliens we are imagining beings that are acting no better and no worse than we would act if we fulfill the hopes articulated by today’s transhumanists.12
Starting from this worldview, then, it is not immediately obvious that contact with aliens would be a good idea. Leave aside all prospects for tragic cultural misunderstandings; on the essential point we may understand each other only too well: they may not come in peace. Unless we are confident we would have the upper hand in the relationship, it might well be thought best to lay low, cosmically speaking.
MAKING FRIENDS WITH ALIENS
After World War II, advances in technology made it possible for the first time to think seriously about what it would mean to communicate across interstellar distances. Thanks to science fiction, the theme of hostile aliens was by then well established in the popular culture. So those who were advocating the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) had a problem: why would we want to have contact with unfriendly aliens? The first efforts at SETI, led by the American astronomer Frank Drake in 1960, were just a matter of listening with a radio telescope for what was hoped might be the background chatter of alien intelligence—the interstellar equivalent of tuning a radio to eavesdrop on conversations among truckers, or police, or ham-radio users. But those first efforts were rather quickly followed by deliberate attempts to send out contact signals of our own, over and above the radio and television broadcast signals that were already leaking into outer space.
Fortunately for the SETI pioneers, there was a readily available reason not to worry about giving ourselves away. By the 1960s, the prospects for other intelligent life in our own solar system were looking bleak, and the distance to the nearest stars provided a comforting buffer. Messages traveling at the speed of light would take more than four years to reach even just the star nearest to our sun. Any back-and-forth communication given this limit would be difficult enough—likely a project of generations, given that our part of the galaxy is not very densely populated by stars in comparison to some other parts. Visits in person, including marauding fleets of star cruisers, seemed, to say the least, highly implausible. So the scenario of aliens exploiting our world for resources to solve their Malthusian problems did not look plausible. We could reach out safely.
There was only one catch. Many of the supporters of SETI believed that any contact we would make would be with aliens more scientifically and technologically advanced than we. There is a simple logic to this familiar belief. Our ability to send and receive signals at interstellar distances is still new and remains quite limited. It would be impossible for us to detect signals from anybody much less advanced than we ourselves, since even to detect and distinguish the kinds of signals
