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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Astronomer and science writer David Whitehouse takes us on a journey through the evolving cosmos as he considers humankind's place in the universe - and how our survival depends on otherworldly perspectives. From the Earth to the depths of outer space, this inspiring book shows how human evolution has been intertwined with the workings of the cosmos from the very beginning, and what the far-distant future may hold, both for the universe and for ourselves. Given enough time, Whitehouse contends, we must communicate with intelligent aliens whose divergent perspective will transform our understanding of the universe. First contact may even come sooner than we think. We have already transmitted signals towards promising exoplanets. If, say, Gliese 581d harbours life, the return signal could reach us in 2051. Drawing the thread of human consciousness from the cave to the cosmos, the acclaimed author of Apollo 11: The Inside Story charts our future journey to the end of space and time and considers whether something of humanity could remain at the end of it all.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Praise for Space 2069
‘It is rare to read something that so closely mixes science fiction with reality, but Space 2069 does just that … [It] packs a sizeable punch … an intelligent portrait of where we may be in the next half-century.’
BBC Sky at Night
‘Rich, topical and informative’
Physics World
‘[A] skilful history of space exploration … A realist, Whitehouse emphasizes that, without a major breakthrough in rocket technology, travel to Mars will test the limits of human endurance and willingness to bear the expense. His forecast for 2069 is a struggling eighteen-man international base on Mars. China will have its own. A fine overview of the past and future of human space exploration.’
Kirkus Reviews
Praise for Apollo 11
‘Terrific and enthralling’
New Scientist
‘An authoritative account of Apollo 11 and the end of the space race, shedding light on the true drama behind the mission.’
The Observer
‘Fascinating’
The Herald
ii‘Fast-paced and tremendously readable … What makes this book really stand out from other Apollo-based books is the inclusion of long quotes from interviews with astronauts such as John Glenn (the first American to orbit Earth), Eugene Cernan (the last man to walk on the Moon) and, of course, Neil Armstrong himself.’
BBC Sky at Night
‘The book is at its most successful when Whitehouse gets out of the way of its protagonists, letting the astronauts and cosmonauts offer their own verbatim accounts of their often perilous – and occasionally fatal – missions. The real strength of this book is its tribute to the human qualities of these men – and they are all men, with the exception of the brief but gripping story of one female cosmonaut – who were willing to sacrifice so much.’
The Irish News
‘In the most authoritative book ever written about Apollo, David Whitehouse reveals the true drama behind the mission, telling the story in the words of those who took part based around exclusive interviews with the key players … [An] enthralling book.’
All About Space
‘David Whitehouse’s masterly narration of what he calls “the inside story” is profoundly gratifying.’
The Spectator
‘Whitehouse has a reporter’s gift for uncomplicated storytelling’
Financial Times
‘One of the best books ever written about the lunar landing … absolutely brilliant.’
Engineering and Technology
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The Alien Perspective
A New View of Humanity and the Cosmos
DAVID WHITEHOUSE
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To Jill
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‘But the barriers of distance are crumbling; one day we shall meet our equals, or our masters, among the stars.’
ARTHUR C. CLARKE, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, 1968
‘Far away, hidden from the eyes of daylight, there are watchers in the skies.’
– EURIPIDES, THEBACCHAE, 406 bc
‘Thoughts, silent thoughts, of time and space and death.’
– WALT WHITMAN, ‘PASSAGE TO INDIA’, 1869
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CONTENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr David Whitehouse is a former BBC science correspondent and editor. He studied astrophysics at the world-famous Jodrell Bank radio observatory under Sir Bernard Lovell. He is the author of several books, including most recently Space 2069: After Apollo: Back to the Moon, to Mars, and Beyond and Apollo 11: The Inside Story. He has written for many newspapers and magazines and regularly appears on TV and radio programmes. He has won many awards, including the very first Sir Arthur Clarke Award as well as the European Internet Journalist of the Year. Asteroid 4036 Whitehouse is named after him.
PREFACE
For me, the question of whether there is intelligent life in space is, alongside that about the existence of God, the most important question I know. After a lifetime of thinking about the subject, I was hesitant to write a book about it and initially prepared proposals for a book that skirted around the issue. It was my publishers, Icon Books, and my literary agent, Laura Susijn, who asked me questions and homed in on the essence of what I was stumbling towards. The question of whether there is intelligent life in space is a big one indeed.
During its writing, the project acquired several titles. One was What If?, which was very early on written on a folder containing my notes. There were so many questions, but I worried about a book that asked too many. I soon changed my mind because when it comes to looking for life, especially intelligent life in space, all we have are questions, and in asking them we illuminate the problems, our prejudices and our ignorance. At other times I joked that the book should be called Everything We Know About Aliens and should consist of 252 pages, all of them blank!
At one time I had in mind the forthcoming 50th anniversary of Carl Sagan’s book, The Cosmic Connection, thinking that it was time to assess our cosmic perspective once more, as many others have successfully done, but the alien kept reappearing, and I thought more and more about the search for intelligent life in space and the gap left in the subject by Carl Sagan’s absence. xiv
I thought of demotions, of humanity not being the centre of creation, of the Earth not being the centre of the universe. I thought that finding intelligent aliens would be another in a long line of demotions of humankind, but as you will see I changed my mind, thinking that whatever or whoever is out there, if at all, we should not feel any the lesser for their existence.
And I worried about the contrast between the public interest in life in space and the relatively small number of people who have shaped the philosophy of looking for intelligent aliens, and I thought it was time for new voices, new ways of thinking and perhaps fewer bad jokes and brush-offs that cover up legitimate concerns.
Are we alone? There couldn’t be a shorter yet more profound question, let alone one that strikes to the very core of what we are. What hubris, I thought, attempting to write a book about such questions.
Yet the question is there behind every corner on Earth, behind every ecosystem and living creature, behind every tenet of philosophy, every religious impulse, inside us all. Are there others? Is this wondering common in the cosmos? How much is parochial, how much universal?
Science is not driven by logic. It is driven by desire, a desire to find out, to experience something wonderful, bigger than ourselves and, in the case of aliens, beyond ourselves. It is strange that we should feel so passionate about beings we have never met. Or is it?
And so, a few thoughts and a few ideas about aliens and the place and prospects for life in the cosmos. If we ever encounter xvthem, perhaps the thing we will have most in common are the questions.
I would like to thank Nick Booth for his help and insightful comments throughout this project, and Rebecca Charbonneau for showing me her doctoral thesis on the history of searching for intelligent life in space, which I thoroughly recommend. Thanks also to Carol Oliver of Macquarie University in Australia. I also thank Michael Rappenglück for discussions some time ago about caves and the cosmos.
I would like to thank Duncan Heath and James Lilford of Icon Books, my amazing literary agent Laura Susijn for all her support and of course my children Christopher, Lucy and Emily. My wife, Jill, has given me unwavering support and so many ideas. I cannot thank her enough.
David Whitehouse Hampshire 2022 xvi
A QUESTION ASKED DIFFERENTLY
According to a recent survey, there are 540 objects within 33 light years of our Sun – next door in astronomical terms. This includes 373 stars, 88 brown dwarfs, which are failed stars, 21 white dwarfs, which are dense remnants of dead stars, and 77 planets that circle some of the nearby stars. Most of the stars are red dwarfs that are smaller and dimmer than our Sun but there is a scattering of stars like our Sun. A radio signal sent from Earth in the late 1980s would by now have reached all of them. Because most of the stars that comprise our constellations are much further away, many of our constellations would be recognisable in the sky as seen from these nearby stars and worlds. The view from the nearest one, a red dwarf called Proxima Centauri, which has at least one planet orbiting it, would have an additional star in the constellation we call Cassiopeia. This is our Sun. In a way, to any inhabitants of that system we are Cassiopeians. They might look at our Sun from time to time, but if they judged it by its rather average characteristics they might not pay it much attention. But if they had the ability to detect radio emissions then perhaps they might take a second look.
There is a greater number of stars, 2,034 to be precise, that have a unique view of our planet, even from the greater depths of space beyond Proxima Centauri. These are stars which currently or in the not too-distant past or future could detect our 2Earth passing across the face of our Sun. If there are aliens on any planets orbiting those stars with at least our level of technology, they would be able to spot our world. Should they have telescopes only slightly more advanced than ours, they would be able scrutinise the atmosphere of our tiny rocky world as it transits our home star. They would find the atmosphere unusual: a lot of oxygen, which in the absence of life wouldn’t last long, and perhaps looking along the spectrum of light from this planet a hint that something on its surface might be absorbing light from its star, perhaps powering a metabolism and by implication an ecology.
Perhaps it, they or them might send us a radio signal or a laser flash. Perhaps they might dispatch a probe knowing it will take hundreds, possibly thousands, of years to get here, and perhaps that is trivial to them. Or perhaps there is nothing, and all those worlds and voids are lifeless.
How do we prepare ourselves for contact with aliens? We have only our logic, our assumptions, our emotions and especially our fears to prepare us. It has been said that until we have alien contact, humanity will be blind and afterwards it will be too late.
Our own planet is the only place we know of where there is life. Planets are not the only places where life could exist and possibly not the main place. Where else life could arise may surprise you, and I do not mean the much-talked-about prospects for life in our own planetary system.
Of these there is of course Mars, for some the best hope for nearby life. Perhaps life arose independently there, or perhaps life on Earth and possibly Mars are related in some way, as we shall see. We have sent more than 30 missions to this world, 3many carrying sophisticated instruments on rovers to explore its surface. We see a world we recognise: deserts of sand, boulders, dried-up river beds, sand dunes blown by a thin wind and a peach-coloured sky. But we haven’t found life.
Beneath the icy surface of Jupiter’s moons Ganymede, Europa and Callisto there is water. Protected for perhaps hundreds of millions of years, these oceans would have access to nutrients and possibly have hydrothermal vents, like the ones on the sea floors of Earth around which so much strange life congregates. Saturn’s moons Rhea and Enceladus are the same, and like Europa, they have recently been found to have explosive jets of water vapour that erupt into space through fractures in their crusts known as ‘tiger stripes’. Saturn’s major moon is Titan, which has a chemically rich, thick atmosphere and oceans of liquid hydrocarbons. Even further out in our solar system, Uranus’ moons Titania and Oberon, and Neptune’s large moon Triton, also possibly have sub-surface oceans. The dwarf planets Pluto and Eris may also possess similar oceans, as may the hundreds or thousands of the distant members of the Kuiper Belt. Each may harbour life.
We have our imagination. The Dune novels have their stars and planets. The fictional Arrakis is described as the third planet around the bright star Canopus in the southern hemisphere constellation of Carina the Keel, itself part of the great ship Argo Navis that took the Argonauts on their mythical quest for the Golden Fleece. Buzzell is a water world populated only by tiny islands. There is the forest world of Endor in Return of the Jedi, the overpopulated Coruscant seen in several Star Wars films, Bespin with no solid surface in The Empire Strikes 4Back and the iconic and mysterious desert world of Tatooine, Luke Skywalker’s childhood home. Star Trek has the United Federation of Planets, and in the year 2267 Captain James Tiberius Kirk said that humanity was on a ‘thousand planets and spreading out’. The Federation promises a hopeful future, but we also imagine the ruthless Xenomorph of Alien and the marauders of Independence Day.
What does an alien look like? How would it or they think? What is their perspective on, well, life, the universe and everything? How would we make contact with them? And what exactly is life? Would we recognise it if we saw it?
We have only our imagination, logic and emotions to guide us when contemplating these questions and all of those are flawed if not misleading. But we have no choice, they are all we have. We need scientists and artists, philosophers and poets and perhaps clichés like those of Star Trek, Star Wars, Alien, Independence Day and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, however enjoyably unbelievable they might be. By the way, The War of the Worlds won’t work, the biology in Alien is impossible and the alien at the end of Close Encounters is far too human-looking.
Would aliens arrive and say to us, as Klaatu the humanoid did in the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, ‘If you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder. Your choice is simple: join us and live in peace or pursue your present course and face obliteration.’ No they wouldn’t. That is science fiction, naïve and psychological. Our speculations about aliens illuminate much about the cosmos and humans, but aliens are aliens. How can we ever know them? 5
We once thought we were the centre of all things and that the universe was ours, in fact made for us. The Sun circled the Earth as did everything else and God was intimately involved in our affairs. There was a great chain of being that linked us and our world to heaven and eternity. But now we know differently. The Earth circles the Sun, which is an average star, one of billions in our galaxy, which itself is one of billions in the universe. Although we have yet to find an analogue of Earth, we know that planets are plentiful. Our origin and environment seem commonplace. Everything we’ve ever learned about the universe tells us that we are nothing special, except for one thing.
That one thing is you. Intelligent life, indeed, life of any sort. As far as we know, it only exists here on our planet circling our ordinary star. Humanity has been demoted many times – from the centre of the universe, from a supernatural creation, from living in an unusual star system. But our status as the only life we know of in the cosmos remains. We are special, unique, nobody can yet show otherwise.
But for how long? How would we react if we found out we were not alone? It could happen tomorrow or never. Some believe it already has. Suddenly humanity would be incomplete, not the pinnacle any more but a subset of what is possible. Finding out we are not alone, either in terms of a signal, an artefact or even a visitation, would not just tell us there is someone or something else, it would tell us that the universe is teeming with life, for as we have acknowledged there is nothing special about our insignificant corner of it.
We are passing through a crucial historical threshold. Within the past few decades we have arrived at a point where we could 6contact aliens. Many expect to do so, some are surprised we haven’t already done so. Where are they? What are they like? What is their history? What is their outlook? Do they know about us? The first stars appeared over 10 billion years ago and the Earth is 4.6 billion years old, so perhaps the first intelligent species appeared billions of years ago. Imagine aliens older than our planet.
Think of that, a universe full of life, many different ways of being. We would ask ourselves, what is our place among them? Does it change our future? Does it make it better, hopeful or perhaps introduce a new fearfulness as we cower in the face of what could be an incomprehensible cosmic power? We should think about these things while we can, as the story of humanity might take a turn into the unknown when even our dreams are changed, or one might say, invaded.
Einstein said that the experience of the mysterious was the most beautiful thing and the source of all truth in art and science. He went on to say that he to whom the emotion of the mysterious is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead – his eyes are closed. I will add to that. We must face the experience of the alien, a different creature’s views and philosophy, intelligent but without our human mentality, even if this is perhaps beyond our imagination. Immortal possibly and, as far as we could appreciate, maybe almost omnipotent, transcending our history, our morals and our religions. They would not see the universe the way we do. As the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer said: ‘In another world the basic questions may have been asked differently.’
Everything could be different from the alien perspective.
THE BIG SKY
On the beach at night,Stands a child with her father.Watching the east, the autumn sky.
– WALT WHITMAN, ‘ON THE BEACH AT NIGHT’, 1871
Walt Whitman’s poem ‘On the Beach at Night’ is about a child holding her father’s hand. They are looking at the night sky, at the ascent of the lordstar Jupiter and higher to ‘the delicate sisters the Pleiades’, as he puts it. But the clouds are coming, and the little girl silently weeps as one by one they obscure the stars. Weep not child, says her father, for they shall not long possess the sky. Watch again another night and the Pleiades will return. All those stars both silvery and golden, he adds, shall shine again. But then he does something unexpected. I imagine he crouches down to put his head next to hers and says softly, ‘Mournest thou only for Jupiter? Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars.’
The stars are magnificent but temporary and I wonder if it is the same for life. There will come a time when all the stars are gone, every last one, when there will be no more hopeful sunrises, no more beautiful sunsets, never again a perfect day. Just as there must have been a first star to end the early cosmic dark ages there will be a last, and when it goes out then the cosmic age of light will be over, occupying an ever-smaller sliver of the receding past. As we contemplate our universe, 8we are beginning to see endings and how things will fall apart. In our story, we will meet those twin undertakers infinity and entropy who do not wait for us at the end of time. They are here, they always have been. There is an inscription on the tomb of Tutankhamun that could have been written by them: ‘I have seen yesterday, I know tomorrow.’
The comfort that the father gives his daughter – that the clouds will not devour the stars – is true in her lifetime and for far beyond the lifetime of the Earth. But he then takes away that temporary respite when he talks of the very end of those stars. Perhaps he then feels he has gone too far, so he whispers, ‘Something there is more immortal even than the stars.’ As we shall see, there are many things more immortal than the stars, but will life be one of them? Especially conscious life that can foresee how the universe will change as it ages and how it must change to survive? Can life ever secure a beachhead on eternity’s shoreline, or is its fate in the universe one of desolation, a brief tale wrecked on the rocks of ruined power and splintered space time?
I wonder if some intelligence will occupy a future shore 10 trillion years hence – a frozen beach that aeons ago lost the warmth needed to save it. It may look at a sky of eternal dark with nothing visible beyond its own desolated galaxy. Everything else will have been pulled beyond the observable horizon by the expansion of the universe. Will it, wretched and unhappy perhaps, wonder what it used to be like when life was easier? Will it look to the future with optimism and joy? Will the unanswered questions loom larger then?
How do we know this? How can we imagine trillions of years into the future? The information we have obtained about 9the universe in just over 400 years since the invention of the telescope has been remarkable even if it has torn humankind away from a place in paradise.
By a long way, most of the energy that reaches the Earth from the cosmos comes from the Sun, which gives the Earth 170 petawatts (a petawatt is 1,000,000,000,000,000 watts) of radiant energy – the power for our planet. The energy that arrives from the rest of the universe is miniscule in comparison, but we have used it well, and more is gathered every day.
At any dusk in northern Chile, the Paranal Observatory, some 2,635 metres above sea level, swings into action. Its four large telescopes are flanked by a coordinated array of smaller ones. They follow a laser beam projected into the sky that allows their adaptive optics to partly compensate for the distortion introduced by the turbulence of the atmosphere. The telescopes are so powerful that they could see the headlights of a car on the Moon and objects 4,000 million times fainter than those that can be seen with the unaided eye. Tonight, it is looking at star formation regions in the Tarantula Nebula – one of the most spectacular star formation regions in the solar neighbourhood. Not far away, the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array) of 66 interlinked radio telescopes is looking for radiation from a trio of planets orbiting an infant star.
On mainland USA, the main radio telescope at Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia – the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope at 100 metres across – is looking for molecules in the Orion Nebula, the nearest stellar nursery to Earth. We shall come to know Green Bank well. Further west at Kitt Peak, Tucson, the Mayall Telescope is gathering data to assemble the 10largest 3D map of the universe ever made, and in California the historic giant Mount Palomar 200-inch Hale Telescope is looking for stars that vary in brightness among the dust and gas lanes in the outer regions of a distant galaxy.
The Keck Observatory in Hawaii is looking at several bizarre objects near the galactic centre. Their true nature is difficult to discern as they are mostly hidden behind tracts of interstellar dust, but analysis of their light suggests they are moving extremely fast around a supermassive black hole that will one day devour them. Also on Hawaii, the Gemini North Telescope is looking for the light of planets orbiting nearby stars, and the nearby Subaru Telescope peers at the environment of quasars – supermassive black holes devouring stars, gas and dust partially obscured in a newborn galaxy visible from near the edge of the observable universe. The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, another instrument placed in this atmospherically favourable area, is looking at how magnetic fields influence the birth of stars.
China, with its newly built record-breaking radio telescope, is sifting the cosmic static for signs of a signal from intelligent life. At the same time, as radio telescopes are not limited to night-time observing, the Effelsberg Radio Telescope in Germany is scrutinising a jet of superheated ionised gas propelled out into space by a massive black hole. The e-MERLIN array of telescopes centred on Jodrell Bank in the UK is joining in.
In underground chambers there are sub-atomic particle detectors that are so sensitive they need shielding in, for instance, a cavern built beneath the Alps. Scientists hope they might detect the passage of such a sub-atomic particle that 11actually comprises most of the universe. At the South Pole, detectors frozen into a square kilometre of ice look for ghostly particles from exploding stars or from the dawn of time.
In space, a flotilla of spacecraft continues the watch. The Hubble Space Telescope is undertaking an ultraviolet light survey of nearby galaxies and looking for the furthest star ever seen. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite looks for dips in the brightness of stars due to planets moving in front of them. Another space observatory looks out for flashes of gamma rays from the hot and violent parts of the cosmos. The James Webb Space Telescope peers back to the first stars ever formed.
Sentinel satellites keep a watch on the Sun looking for the first signs of solar flare that might in a few days’ time cause disruption on Earth. Passing over the Moon’s south pole, a spacecraft is making observations of ice scattered in the lunar dust. Data is also sent back from spacecraft on the surface of Mars and orbiting it. Information from Jupiter comes in, as it does from mankind’s most distant emissaries – Voyager 1 and 2. Voyager 1 is the most distant object we have ever sent into space. It’s over 14 billion miles away. Light, which can reach the Moon in just over a second, takes 21 hours and 25 minutes to get back from it.
We have learned so much from so little. Some years ago, there was a dinner held for astronomers and at each place setting was a card that read: ‘Not to be turned over until the meal has commenced.’ On the other side of the card was the message: ‘In turning over this card you have expended more energy than that received by all the telescopes ever turned towards the sky.’ That tiny amount of energy has taught us so much. 12
Humans have emerged silhouetted against the cosmos as much a part of it as the stars and the black holes we observe. Everything about us reflects the history of our universe. Subtle, seemingly random events 13.7 billion years ago during the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang have shaped us as they have the structure of atoms and logic, the nature of numbers and chaos, the flow of time. All have found their way inside us in a great cosmic connection that few are aware of. In our daily lives and travails, we do not appreciate that each of us is a masterwork – an expression of a fundamental and perhaps purposeless logic. Our atoms come from the Big Bang and the stars. We would not be here but for a puzzling alignment of electrons in two elements that allow stars to exist. Our DNA and form are intertwined with our planet and its ecology. In the future it will weave itself even tighter into the cosmos. But will something of the essence of us survive into the countless aeons to come? A faint distant cry of what we used to be or wanted to become. And will there be cries from others born under the light of alien suns or escapees from altered flows of time that will join ours in a desperate chorus for long-term survival in a changing universe?
I often stare at the Hubble Space Telescope’s Ultra Deep Field images. One is a small region of space in the constellation of Fornax – the Furnace. Hubble looked intently at a patch a tenth of the apparent diameter of the full Moon as seen from Earth and produced the deepest image of the universe ever taken. There are over 10,000 objects, most of which are galaxies. Scientifically, it shows high rates of star formation during the very early stages of galaxy development less than a billion 13years after the Big Bang. These young galaxies are smaller than ones we see today. Ten years after it was first obtained, Hubble scientists homed in on a section of the Hubble Deep Field to take an even closer look. This was named the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field. Here there are about 5,500 galaxies, the oldest of which are seen as they were 13.2 billion years ago.
I get lost in this image, and in the subsequent James Webb Space Telescope’s Deep Field, in their galaxies of many shapes and colours: bright ones, so-called spirals and ellipticals, some distorted by gravitational interactions with each other, others faint and mysterious at the limits of detection. Each one has its own stars, lanes of gas and dust, stellar nurseries, the wreckage of dead stars – hundreds of thousands of millions of them, all there when the universe was a fraction of its current age. There are streams of galaxies outlining giant space voids like the surface of a bubble. Some of them are crackling with newborn stars full of potential. Others have the dull red leer of ageing stars, ancient tales and tragedies. All this in just a handful of the 2 trillion galaxies in the known universe. And planets? From what we now know about the frequency of planets there are billions of planets in this image, every second there are countless sunrises and sunsets, countless opportunities and stories. The poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote that the universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
What of the stories of life, of the many ways of living? If life began there, was it stillborn on millions of worlds? Did it flounder on many more, flourish on some? The stories that make up the cosmos have been told countless times in each of those immense blurs of light, civilisations like ours in the outer rim of 14galaxies, federations in their crowded central regions, biological beings, mechanical ones and who knows what else.
The galaxies of the Deep Field images are not like that now. They will have evolved, grown larger, while many of their stars will have died or changed. To see what they would have become we just have to look around us. In those long-gone galaxies there were billions of stellar nurseries bequeathing a dusting of bright young stars. Not long, cosmically speaking, after these galaxies, there was one unremarkable and indistinguishable among all the rest, which in one of its spiral arms birthed a cluster of stars, one of which was our own Sun.
We stand at the threshold of a transformative age in astronomy and space science – a time when we plan telescopes beyond the imaginations of previous generations; the incredible amounts of data collected by these instruments will be crunched not by ourselves but by artificial intelligences. As we peer deeper into the cosmos and contemplate our first voyages to the stars, we also contemplate others and our ties to them that may increase our connection to the cosmos and enlarge our conception of experience.
This book is about us and the others we might share the cosmos with; why and how we must look for them, and what it would mean if we found them or if they found us. But it is about more than that. It is about our common future and the most difficult thing one can contemplate in the universe: long-term survival.
The girl in Walt Whitman’s poem was introduced to the fact that the universe changes. It was so very different at the beginning to as it was just before the first stars were formed, and it 15will be again very different when they are all gone. It is said, mistakenly in my view, that the beauty of all things is that they must end. Jean-Paul Sartre said that life is drained of meaning when the illusion of life being eternal is lost. But is there any beauty to be found when the time comes when everything has nothing to do and nowhere to go?
Eventually I will take you to a place to show you what I mean. It’s a place we will come to know well, though it is by no means the end of the journey we shall undertake. It is a place where time is older than you can imagine and where everything you ever knew is gone, left far behind as an infinitesimal flash growing ever more distant before the almost countless subsequent aeons of darkness. If you are drawn here by the eternal questions, you will be disappointed for there is nothing here for you, or anyone, or anything. Time and space are almost irrelevant.
But first we have to stay in the here and now and look around us.16
JIG OF LIFE
‘“So deep is the conviction that there must be life out there beyond the dark,” he says. “One thinks that if they are more advanced than ourselves they may come across space at any moment, perhaps in our generation. Later, contemplating the infinity of time, one wonders if perchance their messages came long ago, hurtling into the swamp muck of the steaming coal forests, the bright projectile clambered over by hissing reptiles, and the delicate instruments running mindlessly down with no report.”’
– LOREN EISELEY, THE IMMENSE JOURNEY, 1957
‘In the case of every other predominant animal the world has ever seen … the hour of its ascendancy has been the eve of its entire overthrow.’
– H.G. WELLS, ‘THE EXTINCTION OF MAN’, 1897
The 19th century Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle said that the universe was a sad spectacle: ‘If they [the stars] be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.’
If you look at images of distant clusters of galaxies knowing that each galaxy is 100,000 million or so stars, or at images of much closer starfields where there seem to be so many stars like grains of sand on a beach, Carlyle’s sentiment is understandable. There is such a lot of space out there, more than is imaginable to us. But then I look at life on Earth, and I disagree with Carlyle. If there were no life found anywhere in the cosmos, not around 18any of those stars or in any of those galaxies, other than that on Earth, then it would not be a waste of space, not a tragedy. Life on our own planet is glorious in its designs, diversity and abundance. On our world, everywhere that it is possible for life to be we find it, and our ideas about what is possible for life are changing all the time. If the universe offered up only one place for life, then the Earth has done it justice. If you look to the skies, to those stars and galaxies, you may find life and intelligence, but I contend that nothing out there will detract from the magnificence of what you see here, of what you and I are a part of. Made from the same atoms as stars, on this world nature has woven a magnificent tapestry, and its threads are time and death.
Any thought of there being life elsewhere in space, on the various planets and moons of our own planetary system, on worlds circling other stars and beyond, must consider what is here as a reference. Life as we know it is our starting point.
