Lost in the Cosmos

(17) The Lonely Self (II): Why Carl Sagan is so Anxious to Establish Communication with an ETI (Extraterrestrial Intelligence)

CARL SAGAN IS RIGHT in ridiculing the absurd pseudosciences now so popular. He is admirable in his defense of science as a reliable and self-correcting method of attaining truth.

Yet the fact is that nowadays there is no piece of nonsense that will not be believed by some and no guru or radio preacher, however corrupt, who will not attract a following.

Question: Why are people these days generally indifferent to science and yet willing to believe any absurd claim and any rascal who puts it forward?

(a) Because there is a need in humans for myth, for symbols, to construe and order a confusing and hostile environment — just as there is a need for food, water, shelter, and sex — and the abstract truths in science do not provide this myth.

(b) Because, as Chesterton said, when man stops believing in God, he will believe in anything at all.

(CHECK ONE)

Sagan is right in saying that despite all the claims of UFO sightings and encounters of a third kind, extraterrestrial creatures, and such, not a single artifact, e.g., a piece of metal, a bit of clothing of a visitor, a piece of tissue, a fingernail, has been recovered.

Yet Sagan has written whole volumes promoting the probability of the existence of intelligent life on the billions of planets orbiting the billions and billions of stars in our galaxy, let alone the billions of other galaxies — this in spite of the fact that there is no evidence that life exists anywhere else in the Cosmos, let alone intelligent life. Of all the billions of electromagnetic waves from the Cosmos received here on earth, not a single one can be attributed to an ETI.

Therefore, one might ask Sagan the same question he put to UFOers: Of all the countless bits of data received from outer space, the observations of astronomers, the millions of units recorded by radio telescopes, why has not a single bit of information been received which could not be attributed to the random noise of the Cosmos?

Question: Why is Carl Sagan so lonely?

(a) Sagan is lonely because, as a true devotee of science, a noble and reliable method of attaining knowledge, he feels increasingly isolated in a world in which, as Bronowski has said, there is a failure of nerve and men seem willing to undertake anything other than the rigors of science and believe anything at all: in Velikovsky, von Daniken, even in Mr. and Mrs. Barney Hill, who reported being captured and taken aboard a spacecraft in Vermont.

(b) Sagan is lonely because, after great expectations, he has not discovered ETIs in the Cosmos, because chimpanzees don’t talk, dolphins don’t talk, humpback whales sing only to other humpback whales, and he has heard nothing but random noise from the Cosmos, and because Vikings 1 and 2 failed to discover evidence of even the most rudimentary organic life in the soil of Mars.

(c) Sagan is lonely because, once everything in the Cosmos, including man, is reduced to the sphere of immanence, matter in interaction, there is no one left to talk to except other transcending intelligences from other worlds.

Thought Experiment: You are Sagan and you are monitoring the Cornell University radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, when, after years of reception of random noise, you receive a signal which can only be interpreted as representing the prime numbers, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23 … Communication is established! The source of the transmission must be Alpha Centauri because of the direction and the transmission time: four years. Years pass. A code is agreed upon. But time is running out. You are growing old. What with the difficulties of encoding and decoding and the period of transmission, there is only time for five simple questions. Which questions would you ask, and how would you answer these five questions from Alpha Centauri?

(1) Are you in continuity with other organisms on P-3, S-G2V (third planet = earth, star G2V = our sun)?

(2) If not, what is nature of discontinuity?

(3) Are you in trouble?

(4) If so, specify.

(5) What information do you need? (E.g., what can we do for you?)