That was a very good final project, Adam.
Thank you.
[LAUGHTER]
It's a no final--
My other students will now talk about me.
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you.
That was really sweet.
I will not do a loggerhead shrike impersonation.
They are really cool birds, though.
Thank you.
And thanks for being here on a chilly night.
And also, as always and ever, thanks to the Poetry Center,
and Cybele especially, for the last minute technology roadie
stuff that she had to do.
So yeah, let me--
let me begin.
I don't want to take up too much time here
since we got a late start.
What I want to do tonight is read from this project.
This is the new-- the new book I'm working on.
And so I'll read a little bit from what I think
will be the first chapter.
And then, if there's time, I'll read like a page or two
about being in Antarctica and looking for meteorites.
So this new project, Looking Up from the Lone
House of the Earth: The Lives of Our Quest
for Intelligence in Space, is something
I've been working on-- been thinking
about for a long time-- and I've been working
on it for the past few months.
So I feel a little anxious in sharing this writing
because this is it.
This is all I have at this point.
I'm really in-- I'm in researcher mode right now.
I'm thinking and reading and note-taking.
But I thought it might be kind of fun to do
a little bit of a preview.
So let me just jump into this.
Is the first chapter, which is also going to function,
I think, as an introduction.
So I begin with a narrative about a pre-Socratic
philosopher, and I break off, and I sort of do
an introduction to what I think this book is going to be.
So this is the first chapter, "What the Atoms Came to Mean."
If our modern fascination with alien life
has an ancestral landscape, it is the windswept coast
of Thrace on the northern edge of the Aegean Sea.
Strewn along seven hills, below ruins of ancient Abdera,
are all that remain of the port a philosopher once called home.
It was here, some four centuries before the birth of Christ,
that Democritus would have heard the sounds of the sea,
and the sounds of sea birds, and all the human chatter
of his small city.
Well-traveled, Democritus might have
found the walk of several miles from Abdera
to the mouth of the Nestos, where
it empties into the Aegean, merely a pleasant stroll,
a time to clear his head and think.
He would have encountered, in season,
noisy flocks of wetland birds--
ibis, cranes, herons, and more.
We can never know if the dirt crushed underfoot had
Democritus, headed toward such cacophony,
gave rise to his enduring idea, a theory
called atomism, which posited that all matter was
made of tiny, indivisible particles, a theory whose
larger consequences would come to mean that there was
a universe beyond the marshes of Nestos,
beyond the agora of his hometown, beyond what we now
call Greece, beyond all the earth--
an infinite universe teeming with particles,
combining into other worlds, and therefore, necessarily
into other lives.
Perhaps atomism took hold in Democritus
not from a dusty footpath, but from the glittering shore,
with how many handfuls of sand that make a beach.
Perhaps the philosopher was inspired
by the buds of olive trees, or the knife of a butcher,
or the way sandstone crumbles between fingers
till all that remains is an invisible, but felt,
coarseness of the skin.
Perhaps he was inspired by the stars themselves.
We can never know.
And unknowability, along with life's reaching after life,
are two of the grand themes in the lives of our continuing
quest for intelligence in outer space.
Some of us are lucky enough to be able to set up telescopes,
or to visit a public observatory, our breath
fogging and eyepiece as we spy the latest star that's
been found to host another planet
outside our solar system.
Through such instruments, stars with planets
look like any other stars--
simply, points of light.
But if you look at such a star, 51 Pegasi,
say, lean back from the telescope
and register what quivers, stocks, floats, scuffles,
cries, and laughs all around you, or beyond the observatory
walls, hundreds of extrasolar planets--
exoplanets-- have been and will continue
to be discovered around stars in the Milky Way.
What grows on those worlds, if anything?
What lives?
What learns?
On this world, stars look all the lovelier, some of us
think, for having risen behind the tangles of trees
at the end of the day.
There is a kind of lyricism to the ancient lineage
of our thinking about and looking toward other worlds
where life might thrive.
Though one might not know it from reading popular science
journalism, which focuses on concepts and late-breaking
research, nor plowing through important, if dense,
academic histories, which treat our interest
in extraterrestrial intelligence-- or ETI--
as a thematic march of ideas.
But Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that there is probably
no history--
only biography.
And if we recast the narrative of our interest
in life beyond the earth as a kind of biography,
we can see even more clearly that our thinking about aliens
is deeply suffused with feelings--
with fear, hope, persistence, love, and curiosity.
Science is, after all, systematized curiosity.
Though ideas, themselves, are not curious--
people are.
Ideas don't have childhoods, happy marriages, divorces,
sicknesses, or love.
They don't arrive in Athens as a stranger seeking recognition,
only to be ignored by Plato.
They don't get burned at the stake.
They don't eat strawberries, wander
the grounds of a French chateau, discuss the museums
with a beautiful woman under the gaze of statues of Greek gods,
then write the first popular book on extraterrestrials
in the 17th century.
Ideas don't grieve a lost wife in the Master's Lodge
at Trinity College in Cambridge.
They don't dream of Mars, invent radio, sail on yachts,
build labs in Colorado.
They don't persuade the US military
to observe radio silence in order
to listen to the Red Planet or sit in a Nebraska farmhouse
during one forgotten night of hope and static.
Ideas don't write science fiction,
frequent a backwoods diner near a radio observatory
whose dish would soon be aimed at Tau Ceti,
they don't host a TV show, and write a novel.
They aren't raised in religious households,
then grow up to be atheists, as well as alien hunters.
They don't write the word "wow" in the margins of a computer
printout showing a still unexplained radial pulse,
build telescopes, write code, transmit messages
from the world's largest radio telescope plunked
in the middle of a rainforest.
No idea has been hired with the best job
title in the universe--
Director of Interstellar Messaging.
The story of setting the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence is the story of lives--
those accessible and those that resist knowing--
and lives not only human.
There are animals in this biography who may have more
to show us about otherworldly creatures
than we might at first suspect.
It is only through lives in actual places,
on actual days and nights--
kitchens at 2:00 AM, bicycle rides to a museum,
dives beneath the ocean--
that we can trace, as accurately as we
can, a more lyrical, a more human,
history of our thinking about extraterrestrials--
From atomism's brief suggestive appearance
to its eclipsed by Aristotelian and Christian
privileging of a single human-centered cosmos,
from the Enlightenment decentering
thereof and Christianity's sudden,
odd embrace of the plurality of worlds,
for why would God waste all that space
and not fill it with planets and very smart creatures?
Yet would he allow Christ to be sacrificed endlessly
for the sins of aliens on other worlds?
From dreams of a Martian frontier
at the end of the American frontier
to a theory of planetary formation that crushed
hopes of finding worlds beyond our solar system,
from science's sometimes awkward embrace
of searching the sky for signals to today's culture of contact
expectation, which has been fueled in no small measure
by science fiction.
And science fiction, which itself has ancient roots,
emphatically belongs in this biography.
The dreams and nightmares of science fiction writers
and filmmakers have inspired scientists and the public
alike.
Alas, real science is less sexy than a movie
like Star Wars, the first of a modern myriad
of blockbuster space alien fictions
that seem to have cultivated an inchoate public sense
that the universe is well-populated and easy to get
around in, rather like a suburb.
There's even a bar where we can toss back shots with neighbors
and galactic riffraff.
Wide-eyed as surreal cats or reptilian as impossible
dinosaurs, the things from other worlds
are as iconic, profitable, and strangely bracing as Coca-Cola.
We shiver to see slimy creatures with multiple mouths amuse
or threaten us in movies and computer games.
When it comes to aliens, most of us don't want science,
we want fiction.
We want our easiest dreams, our most trite nightmares,
reflected back to us on screens.
We want to know ourselves almost exclusively
in narratives contrived, understandable,
and less than two hours long.
This may not be the same thing as amusing ourselves to death,
but it doesn't do much to provoke clear thinking
about the possibilities and difficulties of searching
for extraterrestrial intelligence.
No wonder, then, that the theatrical film
versions of Solaris, perhaps the classic tale
of an incomprehensible encounter with alien sentience,
have never been very popular, despite the presence
in the American remake of star actor George Clooney
and a shot of his butt.
[LAUGHTER]
He's in it, what can I say?
Nowadays, the occasional news story
about actual searches for ETI cautions
to keep our presents under wraps.
And documentaries on television garner enough attention
to be a kind of mini-industry for science geeks.
We argue at the office water cooler for a few minutes
when Stephen Hawking warns us not
to broadcast to what might be real-life Klingons.
The public television sofa set watches Carl Sagan,
Timothy Ferris, and Brian Greene lyrically
explain the nature of outer space and life itself.
If we derive pleasure from these entertainments and meditations,
we mostly ignore the small group of scientists
who, against budget cuts and lack of political support,
continue the real search for real extraterrestrial
intelligence, using radio dishes to listen to something
called "the cosmic watering hole" and optical telescopes
to sift from starlight possible artificial beacons.
The alien writers-- the alien writers--
the alien hunters have--
[LAUGHTER] that's good, I should work that in.
[LAUGHTER]
The alien hunters have, as of this writing
and perhaps as of this reading, failed.
This is disappointing to some of us, but also in a way,
unimportant.
This failure to find any kind of life
beyond our thin skin of air is instructive and somewhat
misleading, as the search is young,
our viewpoints often narrow, and the universe large.
Because those who have made their days and nights
a seeking for cosmic lives, especially intelligent ones,
can teach us about what we value and why in living on the earth.
Ceti must include an understanding
of terrestrial intelligence, and therefore an understanding
of terrestrial evolution, and all this at a time
when we imperil so many countless plants and animals
on this planet, one that will anyway vanish in a few billion
years.
If our hoping for life beyond the earth is an expression
of an emotional void-- what some would call spiritual longing--
then it is also today shot through with guilt and worry
about the fragility of the present
and the darkness of tomorrow.
We are the children of chaos, Peter Atkins
writes in his book, The Second Law,
and the deep structure of change is decay.
At root, there is only corruption
and the unstemmable tide of chaos.
Gone is purpose, all that is left is direction.
This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply
and dispassionately into the heart of the universe.
Life, intelligent or otherwise, alone on the earth or scattered
on other worlds full of song or silence, perhaps both,
faces finally the death of the universe itself.
Life dies.
The universe grows cold.
In our own lives, we may relish solitude,
but we recoil from bleakness, from loneliness.
E.O. Wilson claims we have a trait called "biophilia,"
his word for our tendency to affiliate with and love
the non-human, non-built world, which is where we evolved.
Biophilia helps to explain our ingrained
expectation of plenitude.
Seeing life everywhere on this planet,
we expect it on other worlds, as well.
Seeing species disappear here, we send our hopes elsewhere.
The journalist Timothy Ferris says in his evocative film Life
Beyond Earth that long distance contact with aliens
would mean, quote--
there's hope for translation, and with translation and end,
perhaps, to the long twilight of human loneliness.
So is Ceti, then, a cosmic displacement of biophilia?
Do we feel more alone now because our connection
to the natural world is marked by gaudy postmodernity
with its technological uplift and ruin,
its bright and jagged promises, its freneticism,
and extinctions?
Are we even more alone now that the human hand
is on the weather of the sky itself?
We are lonely, Ferris and others would
say, because our consciousness appears, to some,
be unique on the earth.
And we would like to find kin who share such consciousness.
Psychologists once conducted a study
in which lonely people were shown photographs
from the Hubble Space Telescope.
The loneliest showed-- this is a quote--
the loneliest showed a stronger tendency
to see the celestial objects as having human characteristics,
even as acting on the basis of lessons
learned from past experience.
The researchers concluded that, quote--
like our ancient ancestors who first name the constellations
and gave them life stories, our lonely Chicagoans
had anthropomorphized the objects
we see in the distant sky.
From our lone house, we look for fires in the dark, encampments
that might appear on some far ridge, little flares
of sentience of thought that might give us solace
that we humans are not alone.
Those words have the resonance of poetry.
We are not alone.
Are we?
This is a profound question, one with ancient pedigree--
with an ancient pedigree and enduring power.
The yearning for company--
rational, intelligent, feeling company-- drives
our quest for alien cultures.
Yet if we are the outcome of utterly contingent
circumstances, as much science seems to suggest, how likely
is it that another technologically communicative
species exists around another star right now
within ear's reach, so to speak, in a universe that
is really, really, really big?
Some have concluded that the odds
are solid that intelligent species, even technologically
sophisticated civilizations, come and go in the universe.
But they may be separated by an incompressible abyss
of time and space.
Even if we are not alone, we always are.
The science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon advised
ask the next question.
So while the important one that Ceti asks is are we alone,
the important question about Ceti is why should that matter?
We may never answer the first question,
but history can help us answer the second.
Why does it matter whether we are alone or not
in the universe?
Can we not be sufficient to each other here?
Is the earth too little for us?
And alone in what sense?
What do the animals of this world
tell us about the nature of intelligence and of kinship?
What does life and language and civilization on earth
suggest about life and language and civilization
on other planets?
And when we speak of loneliness, are we being slipshod?
Are we asking ourselves not whether we have cosmic company,
but rather cosmic purpose?
In the end, is this all about our discomfort with mortality?
Dr. Sartorius, the scientist in Stanislaw Lem's novel,
was right.
We do need mirrors.
Also, he was wrong.
We may well need other worlds as consolations, if not
destinations.
I'll stop there with that.