Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience by Colin Wilson

that mankind periodically goes through what Hawkins calls a ‘cosmic mindstep’, a new, revolutionary change in man’s perspective on the universe.
    Hawkins is talking about ‘mindsteps’ in astronomy, but they could apply just as well to the whole field of human evolution.
    To begin with, says Hawkins, man was little more than an animal, stuck firmly on Earth. Then he began to take notice of the heavens, and to invent myths in which the heavenly bodies are gods—he demonstrates that the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh is about gods who are also the sun, moon and planets. This was Mindstep 1. Then came the Greeks, who studied the heavens, and tried to explain the movements of the heavenly bodies—Mindstep 2. But, since Ptolemy placed the Earth firmly at the centre of the universe, his scheme was impossibly complicated. It was not until Copernicus placed the sun at the centre of the solar system that the next great mindstep took place. The invention of printing also brought about a ‘knowledge explosion’.
    The next step was the age of space, when man began looking to other galaxies, and finally began to grasp the size of the universe. This was Mindstep 4.
    And the next mindstep? Could it be some totally new technology, enabling us to explore the universe? Or perhaps contact with extraterrestrial civilisations?
    And now, suddenly, I began to see why, unlike most of his fellow scientists, Hawkins was willing to admit the possibility that the crop circles might be some form of intelligent communication. Mindsteps to the Cosmos is a book about a vision—a clear recognition of how far man has come in a few thousand years. But, as man looks outward to a universe of black holes and cosmic gushers, the question of meaning becomes more insistent. Is man alone in the universe? Or is he a part of some vast and intelligible pattern of life? Should our knowledge of the size of the universe make us feel more lonely and frightened? Or should it make us feel that, in some strange sense, we ‘belong’, that we are a part of the universe, as our individual cells are a part of our bodies?
    A few decades ago, a scientist who looked for ‘meaning’ in the universe would have been regarded by his colleagues as downright dishonest. The universe is self-evidently made of matter, and it operates according to material laws. Man is merely a product of these material laws, and has no more ‘meaning’ than the wind and the rain. Man’s notion that he is a priveleged species is a delusion. He is a product of mere chance.
    But there were a few scientists who questioned these views—on purely scientific grounds. Around the turn of the century, a Harvard biochemist, Lawrence J. Henderson, noted that life could not exist without certain unique and quirky properties of water, such as surface tension and the tendency to expand when frozen. Similarly, the astronomer Fred Hoyle has argued that the universe seems oddly suited to the existence of life: alter just one or two of the conditions very slightly—like the way carbon is converted into oxygen by collision with a helium atom—and life would be impossible. It is, he says, as if some ‘superintendent’ has ‘monkeyed with the physics’ to make life possible.
    In the early 1970s, the astronomer Brandon Carter, of the Paris Observatory, also noted these ‘coincidences’ that made life possible. For example, if the relative strength of the nuclear force and the electromagnetic force were different, carbon could not exist, and carbon is the basis of life. Noting the high number of such ‘extraordinary coincidences’, Brandon Carter suggested that the universe had to create observers (i.e., us) at some stage. This became known as the ‘strong anthropic principle’—the notion that intelligent life had to come into existence.
    In their book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986), John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler—an astronomer and a physicist—point out that, so far, life seems to