Double Down
or, what not to do
One of my browsers likes to feed me sciency clickbait, no doubt inferred by my cookies; I suppose it should bother me more, that it fails to make any distinction between Astronomy and Astrology, but I figure the canny algo knows its audience. Anyway, the other day it presented a story about an extrasolar planetary system, “only” a hundred light years away, with six extremely synchronized planets. This is, true, more than we tend to find all at once, but the thing that caught my eye ( and indeed, caused me to click on the article) was that it was framed as a story about extraterrestrial intelligences: specifically, beings powerful enough to move planets. Now, the actual science publication, as I expected, proved to have discovered nothing of the kind. A negative result. And yet real scientists had thought to ask…and why in the world would they do that?
One might trace this particular idea back to 1964 and Nikolai Kardashev (although it owes its wider vogue to Shklovsky and Sagan): the strangely simpleminded grading of technological civilizations according to how much energy they used. Clearly, the humans of today consume a lot more energy now than our grandparents or great-grandparents, and the assumption is made that this is a generalizable phenomenon that can scale. Now, such a notion is really about as scientific as Voltaire putting Micromégas on Sirius, but nevertheless, it stuck. In the meantime, as science-fictioneers and others (sometimes not as innocuous) have tried to apply the Great Chain of Being to humans and human societies, there has been a certain amount of speculation as to what, if anything, a superior (non-supernatural!) being to ourselves, higher up the ladder, might be like. H G Wells took a cold-blooded look at comparative embryology (one supposes), and came up with “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic”: they just had to be smarter than us.
All of this is inescapably imbricated with that ugly and as-yet still unravelling chapter of history in which Europeans used weaponry of a slightly improved killing power, in order to heist vast tracts of the Earth’s surface from its erstwhile inhabitants. In other words, what we did to them, someone else (from Mars or Sirius or Andromeda) might do to us. People are still writing those stories—as well as acting them out. Bad ideas die hard.
For longer than that, nevertheless, there has existed a counter-story: that a superior being might exhibit kindness and generosity on a greater than human scale. A little of this lingers, even in the wake of 20c depredations, among certain saucer cults. Otherwise it’s been exiled to the non-material realm, as if to admit: you can’t have that in the game we are playing, by the game’s rules.
Two other thoughts, not so poignant or so threatening, have also been mooted: that aliens might simply be different from us, possibly so different as to preclude communication—e.g. having completely unfamilar senses (hardly anyone but David Lindsay has gone there)--; and that what we have been conditioned to believe is an upward march of technological progress, might actually turn out to be a dead-end: in which case the next higher rung of the latter might consist of aliens who have learned to live with less waste, less expenditure—and less destructiveness. These guys might, according to our lights, hardly seem civilized at all.
Long ago I read something, possibly apocryphal, that has stayed with me over the years: that the dolphins are so good at learning, that they only make a mistake once. Though I have less patience with the very basis of such judgments as “superior” and “inferior” as they are invariably used, this is I think a pretty good definition of the thing we should look for. And possibly aspire to.
Those clockwork planets might appeal to the God of the Deists, but I’m afraid we live in a realm ruled by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Speaking of thermodynamics, as of Jan 2024, we are not only going to miss the target of limiting Global Warming to 1.5 C, we are virtually “locked in” to an increase of 2.0 (CSAS). Despite reams of data and even a good supply of suggested solutions, the human race as a whole has not learned what it needs to be learning. I suspect we’re about to find out the meaning of the Great Filter.
You can go back to talking about Taylor Swift.
6 Mar 2024