UFO, page 22
“I believe we should go to the moon. But I think every citizen of this country as well as the Members of the Congress should consider the matter carefully in making their judgment, to which we have given attention over many weeks and months, because it is a heavy burden, and there is no sense in agreeing or desiring that the United States take an affirmative position in outer space, unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful.”
Sagan was rapt, feeling the course of human history changing before his eyes. This, he thought, was how we would find the answers to all of our questions.
* * *
That same summer, Frank Drake got a telephone call from a staffer on the National Academy of Sciences’ Space Science Board. In a strong Oxford accent, J. Peter Pearman explained to the astronomer that he had been quietly testing support within government and science circles for a more focused quest to identify intelligent life, and that he believed it was “crucial that a meeting be organized as soon as possible to investigate the research potential.” Pearman asked Drake to host the meeting at Green Bank—symbolic, given Ozma’s roots—and within moments, they were enthusiastically talking dates and invitees.
The three-day conference came together quickly, with only one notable twist: mid-planning, Pearman informed Drake that one of its attendees, Melvin Calvin, was likely set to receive the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work describing photosynthesis. This news was exciting, but presented a logistical challenge: How do you celebrate a Nobel Prize in the middle of nowhere?
Drake knew that procuring spirits would be difficult in the mostly dry state of West Virginia—there was only one state liquor store in each county, and ahead of the conference, he couldn’t find it even in the small town. Confused, he asked the only person in sight if he knew the location of the liquor store. “Yup,” the man replied, “but I ain’t gonna tell you.” (Looking up, Drake realized the man was sitting outside the local Baptist church.) After more wandering, he finally found the store and purchased a case of champagne.
The conference began on Halloween 1961. Scientific luminaries descended on Green Bank, filling every available room at the observatory. Many had kept word of the gathering—and their participation in it—private, in part to avoid ridicule and unwanted attention, but now, meeting their intellectual colleagues for the first time, they marveled at the opportunity they’d been given and the company they found themselves in; several of them noted how striking a figure Drake cut. He had gone prematurely gray by thirty, and with swept-back hair, bold glasses, bushy eyebrows, and his navy pedigree, he seemed a natural leader for the group, despite being the second-youngest attendee.
Altogether, there were ten of them: Drake, J. Peter Pearman, Otto Struve, Carl Sagan, Melvin Calvin, and Cornell’s Philip Morrison, as well as Boston radio expert Dana Atchley, who had helped donate his firm’s parametric amplifier to Ozma, Hewlett-Packard executive Barney Oliver, and neuroscientist John C. Lilly, who was experimenting with consciousness and communication by attempting—semi-successfully—to communicate with dolphins.III Rounding out the group was one of Struve’s former students, a Chinese optical astronomer named Su-Shu Huang, who had joined NASA and conceived of the idea that stars had “habitable zones” that could support life within specific bands of planetary orbits. At the time, the group constituted the totality of the scientists known to be interested in the field.
As everyone settled in, attention turned to the centerpiece of the conference’s discussion: a rough equation that Drake had scribbled down in advance:
N = R* · fP · ne · fl · fi · fc · L
This, he now explained, could break down the likelihood of life elsewhere by calculating that the number of detectable civilizations in space (N), equaled “the rate (R) of star formation, times the fraction (fp) of stars that form planets, times the number (ne) of planets hospitable to life, times the fraction (fl) of those planets where life actually emerges, times the fraction (fi) of planets where life evolves into intelligent brings, times the fraction (fc) of planets with intelligent creatures capable of interstellar communication, times the length of time (L) that such a civilization remains detectable.” It was a remarkable leap of deduction and imagination, one clearly born of its time, as the existential risk of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race forced the realization that humanity might be capable of its own utter destruction.IV
As the scientists at Green Bank eagerly debated the various factors of the calculation over the next three days, they realized that small changes in the numbers could lead to vastly different estimates of the universe’s habitability. Just considering the possibilities of our own solar system—where in theory three of nine planets, Venus, Mars, and Earth, all existed in that habitable zone—and where thousands of years ago advanced civilizations had arisen separately in China, the Middle East, and the Americas, the math seemed encouraging. Closer examination, though, raised more questions. The Incas and Aztecs, some argued, lagged hundreds or thousands of years behind European civilization in scientific development; Philip Morrison also pointed out that the Renaissance, which had kicked off the modern technological and scientific revolution, had occurred in only one of those three independent centers of civilization. Would China or the Americas have ever had their own Renaissances someday in the future, if they had continued to develop in isolation? Perhaps, but perhaps not, or perhaps it would have taken many more millennia.
Together, John Lilly and Morrison were particularly focused on the trickiness of (fc). Lilly used the sophistication of dolphins, whose enormous brains seemed perhaps even more complex than humans, who had a communication system all their own, and who clearly demonstrated concern and care for each other (and even, in some cases, for humans), as evidence that they would meet the standards of “intelligent life.” Morrison agreed that the cetaceans did meet all the traditional markers of “intelligent life,” but pointed out that they were still a long way from contacting alien civilizations—no dolphin had ever glimpsed a star and thus pondered what life might look like beyond our solar system. The universe might have all manner of dolphin-equivalent species, incredibly smart animals that would never communicate beyond their own planet. At one point, Su-Shu Huang joined in the debate, adding that dry land and the ability to make fire seemed almost prerequisites for interstellar communication—the idea of a purely aquatic world communicating beyond itself seemed far-fetched, almost no matter how intelligent the life within those oceans could be.
At 4 a.m. West Virginia time, on November 2, the night watchman at the observatory received a call from Stockholm: Melvin Calvin had indeed been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Drake retrieved his champagne and the men celebrated together.V
Over the next two days, conversations continued about the Drake equation, and other topics, like what life might be like among intelligent extraterrestrial beings. “Let’s imagine what these creatures are,” Calvin said during one session. “We have no idea what they look like, of course, but I think we can safely assume that they’ll have organs for sight and sound, because the universe in which they live is a universe of light and sound. Maybe they don’t see what we call visible light. Maybe they see in the ultraviolet or the infrared, but they must see and hear something. They probably have sensing organs for touch, so they don’t bump into each other, and they must have some way to process the information from their sensors—something like a brain, though what shape it might take, I can’t tell.”
Morrison argued that considering human evolution itself was another piece of the puzzle—man had eliminated all close competitors and humanlike species so long ago that we don’t even understand why: Was it done with violence or simple out-competition? If intelligent life on a planet only ended up with one or two truly advanced species, that math would fundamentally alter the equation. Life might take many forms and thrive almost anywhere—from frozen arctic peaks to deep in the ocean—but advanced intelligent life was another matter. And would the nature of further civilizational and technological advancement lead to ever-greater curiosity—or to slothfulness and laziness? Lilly, for his part, raised a final challenge from his work with dolphins: he had only come to understand how dolphins communicated by observing the effects of dolphin sounds on other dolphins. Perhaps mankind would need to find two alien civilizations in conversation with one another to understand either—seemingly a vanishingly and impossibly rare proposition.
As they talked, they came to understand that basically the entire discussion hinged on the L in Drake’s equation, the length of time an advanced civilization capable of interstellar communication could sustain itself. Civilizations that imploded quickly, even on the scale of thousands or tens of thousands of years, would effectively be forever unknown across the universe, while intelligent beings who managed to sustain their civilization for millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of years, might have the time and inclination to search beyond their own solar systems, sending or receiving messages or even exploring in interstellar crafts.
By the conference’s end, Drake saw things generally as N = L. The group concurred, estimating that across the Milky Way there were probably “somewhere between one thousand and one hundred million advanced extraterrestrial civilizations.” In any case, it was clear that they’d together arrived at a massive project, one that surely would consume not just their professional lives but generations yet unborn. “This is work for society, not for individuals,” Barney Oliver concluded. “The distances we’re talking about mean that communication will proceed over decades, maybe even centuries. It isn’t going to be one human talking to one alien. The search itself must be a group effort.” And they, the ten of them, would be the first to take on the effort. Just before they went their separate ways, they cheerfully dubbed themselves the Order of the Dolphin, splitting the final bottle of champagne to make it official. (Sagan also offered a name for the larger effort: CETI, Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence.VI)
“To the value of L,” Struve toasted. “May it prove to be a very large number.”
A few weeks later, Calvin mailed each of the participants a little memento: a lapel button made from an ancient Greek coin, depicting a dolphin.
I. In fact, later analysis after Miller’s death in 2007 found that his experiments actually created more than twenty amino acids.
II. By 1958, Calvin viewed the results of this experiment as conclusively pointing to the possibility of life—or at least its building blocks—all over the galaxy and the universe beyond: “We can assert with some degree of scientific confidence that cellular life as we know it on the surface of the Earth does exist in some millions of other sites in the universe.”
III. Lilly’s book Man and Dolphin had caused a national sensation upon publication earlier that year, and Pearman considered him as the closest scientist they could find who had, in effect, communicated with an alien species.
IV. The concern was hardly abstract for the group: Morrison had worked on the Manhattan Project, driven the core of the world’s first nuclear bomb to its test site in New Mexico, and helped arm the Nagasaki bomb. He’d walked, too, through the ruins of Hiroshima as part of the US government’s damage-assessment team and become an outspoken critic of nuclear weapons afterward.
V. Calvin’s own recollection of the events are slightly different and involve a phone call from his wife notifying him of the prize, but I’ve used Drake’s story here.
VI. CETI would be used in the field for a decade, then replaced with the term SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, of which CETI was reconceived as a single branch of SETI. For ease of reading, I primarily use SETI in the book.
21 The Search Expands
As isolated as members of the Order of the Dolphin may have felt, they were hardly alone in considering life beyond planet Earth. In fact, among others, scientists in Europe and behind the Iron Curtain were hard at work solving the very same puzzle in what a later generation of scientists would define as the “adjacent possible,” the idea derived from biological evolution that human knowledge and curiosity similarly can only evolve a bit at a time, building on the shared knowledge of humanity at any given moment.I
Luckily, it didn’t take too long before some of them found one another. Drake, for one, found a thrilling new colleague at Green Bank in 1962, the German radio astronomer Sebastian von Hoerner; the two men shared a passion for exploring caves and as they explored the dark reaches on Earth, they discussed the darkness beyond. Drake shared his equation with von Hoerner, who began to eagerly unpack the qualities of L, for the longevity of detectable civilizations. Before long, von Hoerner came to the conclusion that while many—or even most—civilizations might fail in relatively short order, even a few small outliers could dramatically change Drake’s calculations. At some point in their evolution, he argued, civilizations might very well establish a healthy stasis that would allow them to survive for eons. The hiccup for most civilizations was probably getting to that stasis in the first place, but once achieved there’d be nothing to stop it from surviving not just tens of millions of years, but hundreds of millions or even a billion years.
He showed Drake that if just 1 percent of alien civilizations made it to a billion years, the value of L would leap by orders of magnitude, soaring from ten thousand to ten million. “It makes a compelling argument to continue the search,” the German asserted.
Others far from Green Bank agreed. In fact, as the 1960s unfolded, the search for extraterrestrial life was proceeding in the Soviet Union much faster than it was in the United States, seen by Soviet astronomers as another area of Cold War and space race competition in which the Soviets could potentially best the US. Astronomers and scientists had read Cocconi and Morrison’s 1959 paper in Nature, and in 1962, as part of the celebrations marking the fifth anniversary of Sputnik, Soviet astronomer Iosif S. Shklovsky had published a book, Universe, Life, Intelligence, based on an article he had published in the Soviet journal Nature in 1960 about communicating with extraterrestrial civilizations.II The book was a huge success, selling out its entire initial fifty-thousand-copy print run in the Soviet Union, and was rushed into translation by NASA and delivered to curious US government agencies, including the CIA. “The early world-leading space exploration program was the most remarkable positive achievement of the USSR in the post–World War II period,” noted one history of Russia’s SETI efforts. “Not surprisingly, in those years, anything related to space used to attract a lot of attention in the USSR among scientists and general public alike.”
Among the key differences between the US’s and USSR’s approaches to the UFO question was how the involvement of the scientist in the quest was viewed. While Sagan, Drake, and others had to meet in near-secret to avoid ridicule, the fact that an astronomy luminary like Shklovsky would be curious about extraterrestrial intelligence largely legitimized focus on the field in the Soviet Union. Born in Ukraine to a rabbi, he hadn’t finished middle school, and spent his teen years building railroads in Siberia. A talented artist—lacking paper or pencils, he’d started drawing on his family home’s walls with coal—he’d never given much thought to science until the age of sixteen, when he read an article in a magazine on the discovery of the neutron. He was instantly fascinated, and found his way to the university in far-flung Vladivostok, where it was mandated that the twenty-five boys in his class study astronomy instead of physics. Later, married, poor, and desperate for a job, he pursued graduate work in astronomy that took him to Moscow; when World War II began, his poor eyesight saved him from conscription into the military and he ended up at the Sternberg Astronomical Institute rather than on the brutal front lines of the Nazi invasion.
By the mid-1940s, Shklovsky established a name for himself in the discipline when he predicted the existence of the hydrogen line, the twenty-one-centimeter part of the radio spectrum, a central discovery that would ultimately help astronomers map and understand the spiral shape of the Milky Way itself.III After reading the Cocconi and Morrison paper in 1959, he immediately understood that the hydrogen line might be a communication corridor for other civilizations, too.IV
The following year, in 1960, Shklovsky and Sagan met for the first time at a gathering of the International Astronomical Union in Moscow. (“It was impossible not to like him—impossible not to be won over by his warmth and optimism,” Sagan recalled. “I thought he’d make a great maitre d’.”) At first, neither of them realized the other was interested in extraterrestrial intelligence, but when Sagan learned of Shklovsky’s forthcoming book, he made clear his desire to translate it into English for a general audience, beginning a yearslong collaboration. When Universe, Life, Intelligence was published stateside in 1966 as Intelligent Life in the Universe, it was a landmark achievement—Sagan made contributions that doubled the book’s size, each addition with his name printed alongside to shield Shklovsky from Soviet censors. The book went through fourteen printings over the next decade, and many still consider it to be Sagan’s best book, “a chance to write at length on his personal and passionate subject,” his biographer noted.
In May 1964, the next major milestone in the US-USSR quest for intelligent life was reached when the Soviet Union hosted its own scientific gathering, known as the First All-Union Conference on Extraterrestrial Civilizations, at Armenia’s Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory. There, over three days, perched on the southern side of the thirteen-thousand-foot Mount Aragats—and looking out at the distant Mount Ararat, the rumored resting place of Noah’s ark—“Such a rare conference had to take place against the background of the ancient stones of Armenia, witness to bygone civilizations,” Shklovsky wrote later—astronomers, physicists, and mathematicians debated the details of communicating with interstellar civilizations, from the likelihood of such civilizations existing to the question of what language might be shared, and adopted a resolution together “emphasiz[ing] that the problem of establishing contact with extraterrestrial civilizations is a perfectly mature and timely scientific problem.” Together, they called for a systematic, experimental, and theoretical SETI study, and, in doing so, embraced the Cold War ethic underlying their work: Soviet philosophy, as they saw it, all but guaranteed the existence of other civilizations, as their Marxist “materialistic philosophy has firmly rejected the concept of anthropocentrism.”
