The second surprise was that the message was not very user-friendly. It was at least pretty clearly divided into “words,” and statistical analyses of their frequency looked a whole lot like what you got from similar analyses of human documents. But beyond that, it was not clear the aliens had considered the audience. Along with everybody else interested in SETI, Camille had given a good deal of thought to how she would design a message that started simple and moved on to more complex topics. At first, the assumption was that the easy stuff had been lost at the undetected beginning of the transmission. After nine months—a dauntingly long letter!—it was clear the message was repeating with no obvious primer at the start. That assumption had to be put aside.
Of course, at the beginning everybody was interested. The discovery galvanized and monopolized media attention at least as much as Sputnik and the moon landing. Like most others in her field, deep in her heart Camille had thought that “first contact” would be . . . well, like a revelation from on high. It would change everything. And the fuss at the beginning had done nothing to dissuade her. Interviews, op-eds, news analysis persisted for months. There were two “instant books” on the market within weeks; a couple of the senior people on Camille’s team were still living down some of the things they were quoted as saying in those early days. As transmitted, the signal was invisible to the human eye, but it was tuned down, analogized and transformed, mixed and remixed by countless artists in visual and audio forms, bits and pieces of it showing up in popular music and on t-shirts. Camille’s prior interest in SETI put her well ahead of the game; there was a huge “catchup” increase in interest in astronomy, optical engineering, linguistics, mathematics, and even astrobiology now that it was a real discipline. A predictable glut of Ph.D.’s in all these areas followed. Even the shifts in government funding for sciences couldn’t produce ways to employ them all, although that’s what funded Camille’s early years. The space program was reinvigorated, two sports teams abandoned Native American names in favor of “ALIENS.” Once the message was complete, three “unauthorized” translations were out within months. The only one that didn’t make it into print didn’t have to, as the author “proved” on his website that the message was none other than the King James Bible.
At the time, Camille had been too busy and too much on the inside to appreciate fully how the message was like a great rock dropped into a small pond. Ripples spread widely, reflected back on each other, interfered and formed a complex pattern. But as time went by and the message remained enigmatic, the disturbance in society at large faded; life returned pretty much to normal. A rump group of enthusiasts stayed focused on translating the message, and some people spent what seemed like all their time trying to show the whole thing was a hoax (“They say the message is transmitted on a light-beam, but YOU CAN’T SEE IT!”), but the vast majority of the world’s population went on exactly as before. That humans now knew there was intelligence “out there” became a historical fact among historical facts, part of the background against which the human drama continued to play pretty much as usual. Despite her own dedication to the project, Camille concluded that the discovery really was not, as some had claimed it would be, “the most significant event in the modern history of mankind”1 or still less “likely . . . the most earthshaking event in human history”2 or “perhaps the greatest discovery in scientific history.”3 It certainly didn’t “change everything,”4 or “cause the most dramatic shift in the status of our human species that has ever occurred in history,”5 which Camille came to count as her fourth surprise. It was not yet her last.
As the academic work of decoding went on and on and on, various schools of thought formed, competing journals were established on the basis of divergent assumptions, there were conferences you went to and those you didn’t. Camille did her best to be a uniter (consistent with keeping favor with her funders) and thank goodness the factions never lost contact with each other entirely, so when her final breakthrough came, nobody ended up a dissident prisoner of his own previous assumptions.
No, the last surprise was not that everybody essentially agreed about what the message said, it was rather the message itself. It proved to be a comprehensive history of the aliens’ world (the science parts proved key to the translation, of course). They wanted us to know where they had been, because they were concerned about where they were going. Their admitted flaws and imperfections were becoming increasingly dangerous, they thought, as their powers over their world (they didn’t seem to have a concept of “nature”) grew. Camille was the one who had first understood how the message began and ended, and it still chilled her when she looked back on it: “Can you help us?”6
WE SAW in the previous chapter how human re-engineering is related to ideas about space exploration—and has been at least since Winwood Reade’s popular 1872 book—and to speculation about alien life in space. The link continues to be significant today in the writings of prominent transhumanists, but with a new twist. Ray Kurzweil has concluded that “it is likely (although not certain)” that there are no alien civilizations.7 Nick Bostrom has written that “in the search for extraterrestrial life, no news is good news. It promises a potentially great future for humanity.”8
Why are transhumanists invested in the idea that we are alone in the universe? Kurzweil and Bostrom each draw their conclusions following out a similar logic. Stars and galaxies are, in comparison with the time it took for life and civilization to evolve on Earth, very old. There would have been plenty of time before we arrived on the scene for an alien civilization to have come into being. So such an alien civilization could be thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years “ahead” of us in terms of its science and technology. Even with the great distances involved, it has been estimated that an alien civilization—one more advanced than ours, but not unimaginably more advanced—could colonize our galaxy in perhaps 60 to 300 million years.9 From a cosmic perspective, that is a relatively short time. If an alien civilization were to evolve in the way some transhumanists believe we will evolve, achieving great powers to manipulate matter and travel great distances, then surely it would have left its mark on the cosmos.10 Yet we see no evidence for such a thing. So, as the great physicist Enrico Fermi is said to have asked, where are they?11 Kurzweil and Bostrom plainly doubt the aliens are there to be found. To understand more fully transhumanist hopes and fears about alien civilizations, it is necessary to take a few steps back, and recall some of the earlier links between aliens and the eclipse of man.
As we saw in Chapter One, human space travel has been proposed as a way to solve the supposed Malthusian consequences of any Condorcet-like vision of material progress. If ever more people are going to be leading longer and wealthier lives, then they will require ever more of the finite resources upon which those lives depend. If we cannot do ever more with ever less, the argument goes, then either human civilization will come crashing down or the resource base will need to be expanded. Space travel, exploration, and settlement, however technically formidable, is conceptually a familiar solution—especially for a civilization, like ours, that was profoundly shaped by its own history of exploration, colonization, and expanding frontiers. So space exploration can seem like a way to protect and extend humanity. However, the genuinely “alien” conditions that prevail in space and on other worlds put a premium on imagining intelligent beings better suited to these environments. Having learned from Darwin that evolutionary diversity is a product of changing environmental circumstances over time, we can readily imagine how evolution might be deliberately helped along to our own advantage. Think of Haldane’s humans, bred to select for qualities conducive to survival on Venus, or Bernal’s attempt to imagine mechanical beings built for hostile extraterrestrial