When we’ve discussed interstellar ‘interlopers’ like ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, the science fiction-minded among us have now and then noted Arthur Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama (Gollancz, 1973). Although we’ve yet to figure out definitively what ‘Oumuamua is (2/I Borisov is definitely a comet), the Clarke reference is an imaginative nod to the possibility that one day an alien craft might enter our Solar System during a gravitational assist maneuver and be flung outward on whatever its mission was (in Rama’s case, out in the direction of the Large Magellanic Cloud).
Since we’ll never see ‘Oumuamua again, we wait with great anticipation the work of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which will be run via the Vera Rubin Telescope (first light in 2025). Estimates vary widely but the consensus seems to be that with a telescope capable of imaging the entire visible sky in the southern hemisphere every few nights, the LSST should produce more than a few interstellar objects, perhaps ten or more, every year. We probably won’t find a Rama, but who knows?
Meanwhile, I’m reminded of another Clarke novel that rarely gets the attention in this regard that Rendezvous with Rama does. This is 1979’s The Fountains of Paradise (BCA/Gollancz). Although known primarily for its exploration of space elevators (and its reality-distorting geography), the novel includes as a separate theme another entry into the Solar System, this time by a craft that, unlike Rama, is willing to take notice of us. Starglider is its name, and it represents a civilization that is cataloging planetary systems through probes scattered across a host of nearby stars.
Starglider has a 500 kilometer antenna to communicate with its home star (humans name this Starholme), and in the words of a report on its activities within the novel, it more or less ‘charges its batteries’ each time it makes a close stellar pass. Having explored the Alpha Centauri trio, its next destination after the Sun is Tau Ceti. The game plan is that each stellar encounter will gather data and open communications with any civilization found there as a precursor to long-term radio contact and, presumably, entry into some kind of interstellar information network.
This is rather fascinating. For Starglider is smart enough to have studied human languages and is able to converse, after a fashion. From the novel:
It was obvious from its first messages that Starglider understood the meaning of several thousand basic English and Chinese words, which it had deduced from an analysis of television, radio, and especially broadcast video-text services. But what it had picked up during its approach was a very unrepresentative sample from the whole spectrum of human culture; it contained little advanced science, still less advanced mathematics, and only a random selection of literature, music, and the visual arts.
Like any self-taught genius,therefore, Starglider had huge gaps in its education. On the principle that it was better to give too much than too little, as soon as contact was established, Starglider was presented with the Oxford English Dictionary, the Great Chinese Dictionary (Mandarin edition), and the Encyclopedia Terrae. Their digital transmission required little more than fifty minutes, and it was notable that immediately thereafter Starglider was silent for almost four hours — its longest period off the air. When it resumed contact, its vocabulary was immensely enlarged, and more than ninety-nine percent of the time it could pass the Turing test with ease — that is, there was no way of telling from the messages received that Starglider was a machine, and not a highly intelligent human.
Clarke slyly notes the cultural differences between species as opposed to the commonality of, say, mathematics, saying that Starglider had little comprehension of lines like this from Keats:
Charm’d casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn…
And it drew a blank on Shakespeare as well:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate…
Well, these are aliens, after all. We have enough trouble with cross-cultural references here on Earth. Humans broadcast thousands of hours of music and video drama to Starglider to help it out, but here, of course, we run into the messaging problem. Just how much do we want to reveal of ourselves to a culture about which we have all too little information other than that it is markedly more advanced than our own? You’ll find that aspect of the METI debate explored as a core part of the Starglider subplot.
Some have panned Starglider’s appearance in the novel because it seems intrusive to the plot (although I suppose I could argue that autonomous probes cataloging stellar systems almost have to be intrusive to get their job done). But in the midst of the Starglider passages, we learn that the chatty aliens, now freely talking to humans via radio, catalog the civilizations they find on a scale based on their technological accomplishments. Is this Clarke channeling Nikolai Kardashev?
Whatever the case, Clarke as always takes the long view, and the long view by its very nature always pushes out into mystery. Consider the scale used by Starglider:
I. Stone Tools
II. Metals, fire
III. Writing, handicrafts, ships
IV. Steam power, basic science
V. Atomic energy, space travel
VI. “…the ability to convert matter completely into energy, and to transmute all elements on an industrial scale.”
On this scale of one through six we can place our species at level 5, as Starglider sees us. But are there further levels? Clarke is wise to imply their existence without exploring it any further, as this lets the reader’s imagination do the job. He’s expert at this:
“And is there a Category Seven?” Starglider was immediately asked. The reply was a brief “Affirmative.” When pressed for details, the probe explained: “I am not allowed to describe the technology of a higher-grade culture to a lower one.” There the matter remained, right up to the moment of the final message, despite all the leading questions designed by the most ingenious legal brains of Earth.
When the University of Chicago’s Department of Philosophy transmits the whole of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica to Starglider, all hell breaks loose. I turn you to the novel for more.
Image; Hubble took this image on Oct. 12, 2019, when comet 2I/Borisov was about 418 million kilometers from Earth. The image shows dust concentrated around the nucleus, but the nucleus itself was too small to be seen by Hubble. We are on the cusp of a windfall of ‘interstellar interloper’ data as the LSST comes online within a few years. Will we ever find a Rama, or a Starglider, amidst our observations? Credit: NASA, ESA and D. Jewitt (UCLA).
As I mentioned, some critics fault The Fountains of Paradise for Starglider’s very presence, noting that there are essentially two plots at work here. In fact there are in fact three plots taking place on different timescales here, one of them dating back several thousand years, and recall that the voyage of Starglider itself spans millennia, the mission having began some 60,000 years before the events of the main part of the novel – construction of the space elevator – take place. This kind of chronological juggling, allows Clarke to inspire deeper reflection on humanity’s place in the universe and I find it enormously effective.
Wonders fairly pop out of Clarke’s early novels and much of his later work. On that score, I likewise refuse to fault him severely because he cannot achieve complex characterization. A case can be made (James Gunn makes it strongly) that science fiction of Clarke’s ilk needs to put the wonder first. Rich, strange and complicated characters confronting rich, strange and wondrous events may lead to one richness too many. For we, the readers, to absorb the mystery, we need to see how a relatively straightforward character reacts. It’s that contrast that Clarke aims to mine.
That’s only one way of doing science fiction, but much science fiction of the 1950s, which I consider the genre’s true golden age (with a nod to the late 1930s, as one must) often operated with precisely this conceit. And that’s okay, because when writers of greater literary style began to emerge – writers like Alfred Bester, say, with his staggering The Stars My Destination (1956) we were able to see complex characters confronting the deeply strange in ways that simply added depth to the experience. Look at Robert Silverberg in the 1960s as an exemplar of an almost magical insight into what makes the individual human tick. Once you’ve begun on that journey, the field is altered forever, but that doesn’t negate its rich past.
In fact, none of this subsequent growth nullifies Clarke’s accomplishment in the realm of big ideas. Consider him a writer of a kind of SF that flourished and fed a mighty stream into what has now become a river of wildly untamed ideas and insights. And sometimes only Clarke will do. Thus when i read, for the umpteenth time, The City and the Stars, I’m again dazzled by the very title, and the first few pages take me back into a realm where there are suns not quite our own casting a numinous glow over landscapes we learn to navigate through characters who learn with us. Like Stapledon’s, like Asimov’s, Clarke’s is a voice we’ll celebrate deep into the future.
It is intriguing to think that 45 years after the publication of TFoP, Clarke’s novel has Earth improving Starglider’s ability to converse by throwing a lot of verbiage at it to digest. This exactly mimics what we currently do to train Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. Of course, Starglider, being a much more advanced technology, needed far less data input to reach its comparable level of conversation.
But was it hallucinating that response about the discovery of the origin of the universe? ;-)
Starglider is a nice alternative view of the universe compared to the enigmatic Rama, with the ETI at Starholme apparently willing to communicate with Earth. Is a level 7 civilization more like the disembodied ETI of many of Clarke’s novels reaching back almost to the beginning and emulating Olaf Stapleton’s views on God-like intelligence – and ending, in 3001: The Final Odyssey, with the merged entity of Bowman and HAL9000 helping Frank Poole and Earth from being destroyed?
The ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov encounters have us all excited with the prospect of extrasolar visitors. The occurrence of natural objects like planetoids or comets is certainly intriguing, but the possibility of artifacts, ships, probes and so on, is really exciting. What can we reasonably expect will be the kinematic properties of these objects?
Clarke’s Rama flies through the solar system at a relatively low velocity, the Earth ship sent to investigate it is able to match velocities with it and still have enough fuel (reaction mass?) to make it to base afterwards, so Rama is certainly not traveling at a velocity comparable to the technological level of its builders. The Earth ship (I don’t recall if it was reassigned to explore Rama, or if it was on a specific mission to “board and search”; either way, Rama was within the performance envelope of the Earth vessel sent to investigate it.
Natural objects traveling within the solar system typically have velocities on the order of several tens of kilometers per second. Today, our spacecraft achieve these speeds, sometimes a bit faster, by engaging in clever gravity assist rendezvous maneuvers. I would expect machines from other stars would probably be traveling at speeds greater than typical for objects drifting in the general stream of the solar neighborhood. This would mean velocities greater than several 10’s of Km/sec. The Local Standard of Rest (LSR) velocity of the the solar neighborhood around the galactic center is on the order of several hundred km/sec, but most of Sol’s neighbors share this general orbital drift. A look at the radial velocities and proper motions of nearby stars show velocities relative to Sol of well under a 100 km/sec. I suspect alien probes would be going faster than the general drift of the other “islands in the stream”. There are high-velocity stars (and, I presume, high velocity comets and asteroids) intersecting the galactic disk at several hundred km/sec, but of Sol’s 5 parsec neighbors, only one exceeds a relative radial velocity of 200 km/sec, Kapteyn’s Star. The next fastest, Barnard’s star, is about half of that. Proper motion velocities are similarly distributed.
I’m taking a leap of faith here to suggest that natural obects’ velocities would be distributed similarly (except for those coming out of the Halo), that is, roughly comparable to the speeds exhibited by our two interstellar visitors.
No one can second-guess alien strategy, but I suspect any object traveling less than several hundred km/sec is a natural object. Why would a highly advanced civilization launch a probe if it couldn’t exceed the LSR drift by at least an order of magnitude? Even higher speeds could easily be orbital debris originating somewhere in the Galactic Halo. If an intruder zips through the system at several hundred km/sec or faster, the odds of it being a probe of some sort are certainly worth considering! Anything slower than that is probably just a rock or a snowball.
As a long time Clarke fan, I enjoy The Fountains of Paradise and read it through several times. But I absolutely love the Starglider sequences and have listened to them so many times on audio I know them verbatim. I had no idea critics actually criticised them, and harshly it seems. They frame the terrestrial story IMHO, and bookend well when the actual aliens arrive 15 centuries after the Tower is built. I just enjoy the wonder of the idea, so I guess I won’t be reading what critics have to say.
I feel the same sense of wonder, potentially anyway, regarding the (I suppose remote) possibility that the Vera Rubin detects something technological passing through the solar system. To use an obscure quote from 3001 (another Clarke work i’m supposed to dismiss apparently but can’t help enjoying), Hope I live to see it!
Very interesting as always Paul. Tiny typo (can’t DM otherwise I would have) “one richness to many”
Thanks, Tom! Now fixed.
Are these objects a way to the expanse?
If an object fits the desired parameters (size vs trajectory vs make up) could we plant a colony to “go”???
Yes : theoretically, in the future.
Currently, no. We don’t have the technology to send a colonization ship to the required velocity – say 100 km/s. We do not have the ECLSS needed for long-term survival. We don’t have the fusion energy technology to make use of the hydrogen isotopes. If hoping to reach another star system, then it would be trapping a population in deep space with no hope of escape. It would make even St. Helena in the Atlantic (where Napoleon was finally exiled) seem like a luxury, and possibly Devil’s Island a preferable location to live.
If you just want to occupy a suitable resource body in the solar system, Ceres would be a good bet, and if your colony wanted more privacy, a Kuiper Belt or even Oort cloud object might fit the bill. All these options allow for trade and escape back to the inner system. [Of course, the belters in the S A Corey “The Expanse” books did not live great lives on Ceres, although life on that future Earth wasn’t great for most of the population, too.] However, you still need the ECLSS to work, and on Ceres fusion energy might be optional.
Once again, I would like to remind my fellow Centaurs of a convenient and frequently updated source of astronomical information of great value to students of SETI and related topics: The “Observer’s Handbook” of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. This handy pocket almanac is crammed full of useful astronomical data. Ephemeral tables for solar system objects are provided, as well as observing lists, stellar and DSO catalogues, the year’s astronomical events such as occultations, eclipses, oppositions, conjunctions, meteor showers, comets, and objects favorably placed for observation, like asteroids.
Also included are informative articles that are frequently updated. One of the many items I consult frequently is the “catalog of nearby stars”, listing every stellar system within 5 parsecs, along with every one of the multiple star members, brown dwarfs, and all major exoplanetary discoveries up to the time of publication. The list is kept up to date and is revised every year. It gives a valuable glimpse at our nearest stellar neighbors and is a useful sampler of our corner of the galaxy. Information such as name, coordinates, spectral class, proper motion, radial velocity, parallax and so forth are provided for both the nearest stars as well as the brightest, and observing lists for the special objects, such as binaries and variables..
This data is all available in the literature, and can be tracked down on the internet, but its nice to have it all in one compact volume that easily fits in your observing kit. It is invaluable for amateur astronomers, but written at a level of technical detail sufficient to satisfy any professional. Older copies can be given away to your friends, or kept in the bathroom for emergency reading material!
I logged on to the RASC website last night and ordered the 2024 edition. Highly recommended, eh?
A solid resource! Thanks, Henry. I plan to order mine today.
If Starglider could connect to and commandeer the Internet, its unknown capabilities may lead to unforeseen consequences.
In that YouTube piece, it almost seems that John Michael Godier hasn’t read Charlie Stross’ 2005 novel “Accelerando”.
“Unintended consequences” are not to be feared, but enjoyed. Our civilization has been built on them. Did those ancient hunter-gatherers think of the consequences of agriculture? Apart from Jared Diamond suggesting this may have been a mistake, do we want to return to that hunter-gatherer way of life? While civilizations have upended cultures, most notably the indigenous cultures of the Americas, do we really believe that the accomplishments of technological civilization should be given an even greater extreme Thanos treatment in some attempt to “correct” this outcome?
Humans have created their own, pre-technological “AIs” – we call them organizations that are built of hive minds, that create rules for thoughts (e.g. religion) and action (corporations, nations). When the Soviet Union collapsed, Francis Fukuyama suggested that the era of Western liberal democracy had conquered all and it was the “end of history“. [A bit premature, as it turned out.]
What Godier is implying, is that humanity should now fear a new enemy, that of machine intelligence. That is a fear of humans being toppled from our perch at the top of the social pyramid. I don’t believe it is necessarily worse than the corporate juggernaut that seeks to increase profits at the expense of our planet’s habitability for most humans, starting with the populations near the equator and where weather patterns will deprive many populations of fresh water. We may find their actions make many places look like what is being done in Gaza.
It would be an interesting turnaround if AIs become “benevolent dictators” ensuring a better world, even if some actions seem as repressive as those in “Colossus: The Forbin Project” that prevent human self-destruction.
Lastly, there is no reason to believe AIs would force technological civilizations to become solipsist (to explain the Fermi Paradox). Far more likely it seems to me, that they would attempt to find out what is out there, both attempting to communicate with other [AI] civilizations both remotely and physically.
AI is painted as some malevolent supermind that will take over human civilization like some sort of mechanized dictatorship. You’ve hit the nail squarely. AI is no different in principle from any government, church, bureaucracy, religion, etc. AI is only the latest in a string of automated soulless bureaucracies that have changed human life periodically since the Paleolithic. Every new technology has altered us irrevocably; language, fire, stone tools, agriculture, urbanization, metallurgy, writing, gunpowder, printing, steam, electricity, internal combustion, electronics, digital computers. AI is different (maybe) only in kind, but not in degree.
My fear is not that AI will “take over”/ My fear is that IT will be taken over for purely commercial purposes. I’m old enough to remember when television was being introduced, and how it was expected to revolutionize education and public information. They used it to sell soap and cigarettes. The internet was supposed to usher in a new age of information freedom and enlightened citizenry. We got porn and fake news instead.
Any new technology has the potential to take us to the stars, IF we don’t let the business majors hijack it first.
As for “unintended consequences”, they’re all well and good when the world is a vast wilderness dotted with a few scattered city-states. But have you noticed things are fundamentally different this time? Yes, we may yet enjoy a brief, brilliant flash of pure civilized glory. But for now, we’re all locked up behind the city walls, the Spartans are rampaging through the countryside, a plague has broken out in the Agora, a tyrant is marching on the Acropolis, and new world-threatening menaces are arising in the West and North..
Comment *Hello,
About a 7th Starglider ladder: I don’t remember if it was Kardhasev who said that after a certain level of energy mastery, a highly advanced civilization (type IV or higher) would be all-powerful in the universe. It would then be able to travel close to the speed of light, and thus find all the materials it needed to manufacture or transmute whatever it wanted, or even better, bend space-time (Alcubiere). It would no longer need to travel, and would become a universal “spiritual” civilization. We can then imagine anything we like about a civilization that possesses infinite energy and could explore a black “hole”, or break Planck’s wall :)
I have a radio amateur question: do you know of a website where it is possible to listen to the frequencies of radio telescopes that are listening to space? I’ve found this one, http://websdr.camras.nl:8901/ but I’d be more interested in listening to the universe on 1,420.4 MHz, the hydrogen line.
WebDSR is interesting for visualizing how difficult it is to detect a signal in the ocean of noise and the multitude of frequencies…just on earth. So imagine in the univers !
F5CEY 73 QRT Fred
Maybe one of the readers can weigh in on this, Fred. There must be a resource out there somewhere.
I’ve done some research but I haven’t found any possibility of listening to the universe via webSDR (including the 21cm line). On the sites of radio astronomy observatories like Parkes, you can find some archive files, sometimes accessible to non-researchers but not always, but these files are huge and in a format that isn’t standard for us. On the other hand, there’s plenty of fun radio tinkering to be done. Here are a few links:
https://radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov/gettingstarted/
https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/opendatasearch?project=GBT&file_type=all&ra=&ra_range=&decl=&decl_range=&mjd=&mjd_range=&freq=&freq_range=&target=&perPage=&search=Search
https://lea.hamradio.si/~s53rm/Radio%20Astronomy.htm
by the way, I was wondering if ET couldn’t communicate in binary on the two states of the hydrogen atom :)
The pressure variations of a human voice can be represented by squiggles on an oscilloscope screen, but you can stare at those all day long and not be able to decipher the content of human speech from them. In fact, unless you have prior knowledge of what they are, you will not be able to determine any content in them. Some familiarity of the physiologic parameters of human speech and hearing (not to mention a familiarity with the language being spoken) is required before the raw data can be translated to meaningful context The oscilloscope trace may allow us to preserve and transmit the original signal precisely, but without the additional ‘metadata’ it will make no sense at all. When you consider that the original signal will probably be transmitted with some form of formatting to allow redundancy, error correction or to take advantage of engineering requirements and limitations (such as peculiarities of the transmitters or the expected receivers), it is unlikely any information will be extracted from the signal, except possibly that it is not of natural origin.
The aliens may be eavesdropping on old episodes of “The Honeymooners”, or “I Love Lucy”, but I doubt they’ll be even able to identify them as audio/visual data, much less than that they are artificially stylized representations of the domestic lives of the transmitting species. The best sense they’ll probably be able to make of them is that they are not of some astrophysical origin.
An analog signal (say, old style TV) will be made up of alternating lines of an image, flickering at 60 Hz (determined by the frequency of alternating current and the ability of the human eye to stop motion) with the pixel brightness represented by a signal strength, as opposed to a binary number. There is no way some alien will be able to unscramble that mess and make sense of it. They may be able to interpret its artificial origin by noting no natural process creates that signal, but that’s about it.
And it was precisely the recognition of those squiggles that was an important clue in this week’s episode of Dr. Who “The Giggle”. ;-)
Slow Boat to Centauri
Being older than most of you, I read many of the iconic Science Fiction works of the masters beginning in 1955 (when I cut my foot and had to take a week off school). As much as I love this stuff, our modern imaginations are too small. I won’t recant what you all know, I’ll jump right to my point. Humans won’t travel interstellar unless we use a generational ship. Going anywhere just takes too long. If you get real, there won’t be any “suspended animation”, there aren’t any “wormholes”, there is no “hyperspace”, and going into a black hole will both crush you and not let you out. Because of everything you know already, the distances, the radiation, the limits of power/mass ratios, the limited life spans, and all the rest, prevent practical “ships” as we conceive them from being built.
What we need is nothing less than a plantetoid. We need enough mass to provide functional gravity (humans wither without gravity). We need large amounts of water which functions both as radiation shield and fuel. We need a large population in order to avoid deterioration of our genomes, and we need to be able to grow many generations of large crops to feed them. We also need animal protein in order to thrive. In order to travel far, we need to be able to write books, school children, make movies, create songs and stories, and go out to a bar in the evenings. In short, we need a cultural life to sustain us along the way.
In order to travel to another solar system, we essentially need a small planet and a lot of patience. Once you have all that capability pulled together, why go anywhere? Just take up an orbit around our current star. Within a few tens of cycles, collecting water and mineral bearing asteroids and comets as we go, perhaps we could sling shot around the sun and head off on a 300 year journey.
I don’t worry about the fuel and the propulsion – those are technical things. Instead, I worry about the human animal and whether we will ever develop the culture that would generate such a project, and I worry about whether that same animal can sustain a functional society and culture over those long generations.
BRStockton: Yes indeed – while flesh holds many possibilities for evolution, it falls short when stressed in ways to which it was not adapted through biological evolution. Hence a provision of the necessary resources to cover those shortcomings would be mandatory. And the consequences of the breeding program for humans can only be guessed.
Biological humans as crew probably won’t go without technologies we don’t know about yet, and may never have. But we don’t need them.
A robotic ship does not need the life support of a biological crew to make the journeys.
If a future human society wants to seed the stars with human beings, then we will send seed ships instead, with machines to nurture human life until it is ready to colonize another, suitable world. The morality to allow this will be very different from today, but well within what has been done historically.
How small could such ships be? It depends on how much self-assembly is possible. Ships that can acquire resources at a target star system to build out the needed equipment to gestate the human eggs/embryos and the machines to take care of the first few generations until the human population can take care of itself. This might be quite small, and certainly much smaller and more efficient than moving planets.
No planets are needed to make the journey.
Alex,
I’m all in for robotic exploration! Another weird thing is that, due to communications delays, the sponsoring organization may never know the outcome of its “seeding” operation. Sigh..
You do make valid points, Ben. Humans don’t necessarily want to go to the stars, space enthusiasts want to go to the stars. And let’s face it, when we get there, we are not going to find a planet as suitable as the one we live on now. If we want to terraform, we can do that to Mars, or just clean up our own world. Both will be cheaper, and faster..
We can hollow out an asteroid and take generational voyages to other systems, but all we’ll find there are comets, asteroids and starshine, and we have plenty of that here! Once we have the tech to build space habitats, we’ll have no need to haul them out into the void. Just park them right here.
On the other hand, if there are other cultures out there, they may feel very differently about it…
To avoid extinction, it might be prudent to colonize a few nearby stars, but after that, the need to expand further out rapidly diminishes. Besides, as a species, we’ve never exhibited much talent for long term planning.
Henry,
“as a species, we’ve never exhibited much talent for long term planning.” Exactly. Even worse, there is no “we” from a species perspective. I hope we can keep this planet and all of our co-inhabitants alive long enough that the challenges considered in this forum can actually arise!
Hello Benjamin
You wrote : “as a species, we’ve never exhibited much talent for long term planning.” I don’t think we’re capable of envisioning the distant future (except on this website ;) because the human species needs a certain “slowness” to develop, step by step, and there are an infinite number of possibilities for the future we are not able to imagine. It’s the story of the butterfly that was crushed in prehistoric times… What would happen if an ETI civilization suddenly brought us 10,000 years of technological knowledge? Would our current civilization be able to withstand such a shock? Not sure…
in a way, we are IN the world and we let ourselves be carried along by it, believing that the little impulses we give it make us its masters.
Fred
Hi Paul
The idea of a garrulous alien probe has a certain appeal – Greg Benford did it before Clarke with Nigel Walmsley’s brief encounter with the Snark probe, a herald of the inimical machine intelligences that would follow. The Snark itself was friendly, but with a covert agenda. Starglider had no covert agenda, but was seemingly oblivious to the philosophical impact of its off-hand responses to the monuments of human reasoning. Not that St Thomas Aquinas didn’t have it coming – Starglider’s replies echo the kind of Humean scepticism that eventually rotted the core out of philosophical arguments for so-called “natural religion”. Bad arguments for a Creator haven’t gone away because the need for ‘God’ hasn’t gone away. It’s just less of a scandal philosophically to admit the limits of human knowledge either side of the question of God’s existence. As much as the Rationalist tradition hates to admit it, but there are some things which we must just take on faith, even if we can hope for future updates and revisions of our understanding. The Post-Modernist critique – and the post-Post-Modernism we’re now a part of – have taught us to be sceptical of the power structures and motives that are typically behind any philosophical position.
Which segues neatly into my next thought – that imagining alien intelligences and how they might differ to our own, helps us gain perspective on what we take for granted in our human point of view. Starglider’s revelation that intelligent species with sexual differentiation and family life are the only ones that develop a concept of God is a bit obvious. Human gods are usually in our own Image, just like most imagined aliens aren’t much better than “Star Trek” humanoids. With such a diversity of animal life on just one planet, our ability to relate to Other Life seems terribly parochial.
Which makes me wonder just how we’d relate to completely different evolutionary histories. Nature is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we CAN imagine. That’s why the quest for Other Life is so compelling.
As a side-note, I’m intrigued by the recent genetic detective work that hints strongly that we have at least two independent animal lineages – the one which led to the Ctenophores (Comb Jellies) and the lineage with just about everyone else. What else can Nature dream up?
I’m glad you reminded me of Greg’s ‘Snark.’ I need to write that one up as well.
This is where we realize the limits of our species. I don’t know if this point has already been made here, but many biologists are adamant that it’s virtually impossible for any other form of life in the universe to be similar to ours, i.e. to the fact that we’re symmetrical beings; from the point of view of biochemistry in the Universe, it’s something quite disturbing (and it always makes me laugh to see movie ETs with 2 skinny arms 2 legs and big eyes, they’ll never have that shape :) I reread Solaris: the idea is much more appealing, and Stan LEM’s genius must be recognized.
@Fred. There are both visible and invisible differences. Convergent evolution resulted in sharks, ichthyosaurs, and dolphins taking on very similar forms even though their internal biologies are rather different. IOW, we might just find humanoid ETI if that form is highly adapted to technological development.
But even if that is not the case, is it possible that our intellectual output = e.g. math, science, even engineering, take on the same forms as ours, simply because much of it reflects the nature of the universe and may be the best way to deal with it? ETI may be like spiders, but their technologies might be surprisingly familiar to us.
Hi Fred
My favourite Lem is “Fiasco”, with all its insights into Alien and human motivations, as well as the tragedy of the misunderstanding between the two. It’s a possibility that will haunt SETI until we do make Contact. And there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to understand anything about Alien consciousness or experience. We might be able to share universals – if such exist – and completely miss the essence of what makes us different. Only an existence proof can settle the question.
Thank you, Adam. It’s terrible, I realize that my “classic” SF section in the library is very poor! I’ll take note of all your reading suggestions. In the 60s and 70s we had a lot of great authors translated in France, but it was their main novels like Lem’s, Bradbury’s or Clark’s; their other productions remained in the shadows. Some authors are still not translated, and as I used to draw during my English lessons, it’s a bit hard :) For the past few years, science fiction here seems to me to be more oriented towards fantasy novels – I personally don’t like them – or towards a “social” side (I’m thinking of SILO). “Hard-fiction” literature, which I think is more interesting, is becoming rare. I’d have to decide to come to the USA :)