practitioners were condemned as early as the fifth century B.C. by the Ionian philosopher Heraclitus as “night-walkers, magicians, priests of Bacchus, priestesses of the wine-vat, mystery-mongers.” But science is more intricate and subtle, reveals a much richer universe, and powerfully evokes our sense of wonder. And it has the additional and important virtue—to whatever extent the word has any meaning—of being true.
* For example, Lady Wonder, a horse from Virginia, could answer questions by arranging lettered wood blocks with her nose. Since she also replied to queries posed privately to her owner, she was pronounced not only literate but telepathic by the parapsychologist J. B. Rhine (
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 23
, 449, 1929). The magician John Scarne found the owner would intentionally signal the horse with a whip as Lady Wonder moved her head over the blocks, preparatory to nudging them into words. The owner seemed to be out of the horse’s field of view, but horses have excellent peripheral vision. Unlike Clever Hans, Lady Wonder was an accomplice in an intentional fraud.
CHAPTER 6
WHITE DWARFS
AND LITTLE GREEN MEN
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle,
unless … its falsehood would be more
miraculous than the fact
which it endeavors to establish.
DAVID HUME ,
Of Miracles
HUMANITY HAS already achieved interstellar spaceflight. With a gravitational assist from the planet Jupiter, the Pioneer 10 and 11 and the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft have been boosted into trajectories that will leave the solar system for the realm of the stars. They are very slow-moving spacecraft despite the fact that they are the fastest objects ever launched by our species. They will take tens of thousands of years to travel typical interstellar distances. Unless some special effort is made to redirect them, they will never enter another planetary system in all the tens of billions of years of future history of the Milky Way Galaxy. The star-to-star distances are too large. They are doomed to wander forever in the dark between the stars. But even so, thesespacecraft have messages attached to them for the remote contingency that at some future time, alien beings might intercept the spacecraft and wonder about the beings who launched them on these prodigious journeys. *
If we are capable of such constructions at our comparatively backward technological state, might not a civilization thousands or millions of years more advanced than ours, on a planet of another star, be capable of fast and directed interstellar travel? Interstellar spaceflight is time-consuming, difficult and expensive for us, and perhaps also for other civilizations with substantially greater resources than ours. But it surely would be unwise to contend that conceptually novel approaches to the physics or engineering of interstellar spaceflight will not be discovered by us sometime in the future. It is evident that for economy, efficiency and convenience, interstellar radio transmission is much superior to interstellar spaceflight, and this is the reason that our own efforts have concentrated strongly on radio communication. But radio communication is clearly inappropriate for contact with a pretechnological society or species. No matter how clever or powerful the transmission, no such radio message would have been received or understood on Earth before the present century. And there has been life on our planet for about four billion years, human beings for several million, and civilization for perhaps ten thousand.
It is not inconceivable that there is a kind of Galactic Survey, established by cooperating civilizations on many planets throughout the Milky Way Galaxy, which keeps an eye (or some equivalent organ) on emerging planets and seeks out undiscovered worlds. But the solar system is very far from the center of the Galaxy and could well have eluded such searches. Or survey ships maycome here, but only every ten
* For example, Lady Wonder, a horse from Virginia, could answer questions by arranging lettered wood blocks with her nose. Since she also replied to queries posed privately to her owner, she was pronounced not only literate but telepathic by the parapsychologist J. B. Rhine (
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 23
, 449, 1929). The magician John Scarne found the owner would intentionally signal the horse with a whip as Lady Wonder moved her head over the blocks, preparatory to nudging them into words. The owner seemed to be out of the horse’s field of view, but horses have excellent peripheral vision. Unlike Clever Hans, Lady Wonder was an accomplice in an intentional fraud.
CHAPTER 6
WHITE DWARFS
AND LITTLE GREEN MEN
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle,
unless … its falsehood would be more
miraculous than the fact
which it endeavors to establish.
DAVID HUME ,
Of Miracles
HUMANITY HAS already achieved interstellar spaceflight. With a gravitational assist from the planet Jupiter, the Pioneer 10 and 11 and the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft have been boosted into trajectories that will leave the solar system for the realm of the stars. They are very slow-moving spacecraft despite the fact that they are the fastest objects ever launched by our species. They will take tens of thousands of years to travel typical interstellar distances. Unless some special effort is made to redirect them, they will never enter another planetary system in all the tens of billions of years of future history of the Milky Way Galaxy. The star-to-star distances are too large. They are doomed to wander forever in the dark between the stars. But even so, thesespacecraft have messages attached to them for the remote contingency that at some future time, alien beings might intercept the spacecraft and wonder about the beings who launched them on these prodigious journeys. *
If we are capable of such constructions at our comparatively backward technological state, might not a civilization thousands or millions of years more advanced than ours, on a planet of another star, be capable of fast and directed interstellar travel? Interstellar spaceflight is time-consuming, difficult and expensive for us, and perhaps also for other civilizations with substantially greater resources than ours. But it surely would be unwise to contend that conceptually novel approaches to the physics or engineering of interstellar spaceflight will not be discovered by us sometime in the future. It is evident that for economy, efficiency and convenience, interstellar radio transmission is much superior to interstellar spaceflight, and this is the reason that our own efforts have concentrated strongly on radio communication. But radio communication is clearly inappropriate for contact with a pretechnological society or species. No matter how clever or powerful the transmission, no such radio message would have been received or understood on Earth before the present century. And there has been life on our planet for about four billion years, human beings for several million, and civilization for perhaps ten thousand.
It is not inconceivable that there is a kind of Galactic Survey, established by cooperating civilizations on many planets throughout the Milky Way Galaxy, which keeps an eye (or some equivalent organ) on emerging planets and seeks out undiscovered worlds. But the solar system is very far from the center of the Galaxy and could well have eluded such searches. Or survey ships maycome here, but only every ten
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