It is unlikely that man will stop until he has roamed over and colonized most of the sidereal universe, or that even this will be the end. Man will not ultimately be content to be parasitic on the stars but will invade them and organize them for his own purpose … By intelligent organization the life of the universe could probably be prolonged many millions of millions of times …
Later writers have talked about the ‘Greening of the Galaxy’, and asked why the stellar sky is so untidy and badly organized … Where, indeed, are the cosmic engineers?
Perhaps – like ants crawling around the base of the Empire State Building – we simply haven’t recognized what’s going on all about us. During the last few decades, astronomers have been discovering some very strange phenomena in space, and have been straining scientific theories to the limit in attempts to find natural explanations.
Pulsars were the first example. In 1967, when Hewish and Bell discovered radio sources ticking away more accurately than any mechanical clock ever made by man, their first wild speculation was that they might be artificial. Indeed, no astronomer before 1920 could have explained how Mother Nature could have contrived such a prodigy unaided.
Well, we are now quite sure that pulsars are indeed natural (though amazing) objects – tiny dying stars acting like cosmic beacons as they spin madly on their axes. But there are other phenomena not so readily explained, and I should not be in the least surprised if the astronomers finally give up on them and admit: ‘We’re sure that nature can’t be responsible. Somebody out there has forgotten to switch off the lights.’ Or worse. The most chilling explanation I have heard of one titanic outpouring of cosmic energies is: an industrial accident.
Nowadays, anyone who considers that alien super-civilizations may exist has to contend not with scepticism but with something much worse – credulity. Although the subject now affects me with uncontrollable fits of yawning, I would be failing in my duty if I did not say something about UFOs. So here, as briefly as possible, are the conclusions I’ve come to after more than fifty years of study (fifty-seven, to be exact, since I first read Charles Fort’s Lo! in 1930: that monument of eccentric scholarship, published long before anyone had ever heard of ‘Flying Saucers’, listed apparent celestial visitations right back to the Middle Ages):
1. There may be strange and surprising meteorological, electrical or astronomical phenomena still unknown to science, which may account for the very few UFOs that are both genuine and unexplained.
2. There is no hard evidence that earth has ever been visited from space.
3. If that does happen, there are at least three independent global radar networks that will know within a matter of minutes. And, in the unlikely event that the US, USSR and Chinese authorities instantly cooperate to suppress the news, they’ll succeed for a maximum of forty-eight hours. How long do you imagine such a secret could be kept? Remember how quickly Watergate unravelled …
I’d like to add one further item in support of the above. A friend of mine, who (before he was promoted to a much bigger job) was Deputy Director of the CIA, once told me a very interesting story. On his first day with the Company, he called together his top scientists – and the CIA has some of the best – and said to them: ‘Come clean with me, boys. What’s the truth about this UFO business?’
And they gave him the two answers which I’ve given everyone for years – and which virtually all scientists who have studied the problem now accept:
1. We all think that there’s probably a lot of life – and intelligence – out there among the stars.
2. There’s not the slightest firm evidence that it’s ever come here …
Having written thousands of words on the subject (and read millions), I refuse to go into further details. If anybody wants to argue, I’ll merely quote one of my favourite book titles: Shut up, he explained.
Finally, if ‘they’ are out there, what do they look like? I suggest you go to the local zoo and take your choice. Nature tries everything at least once – and has lots of time and space for experimenting. But I will tell you what they will not look like. We now understand the principles, if not the details, of human evolution.
We specimens of H. sapiens are the product of thousands of successive throws of the genetic dice – any one of which might have turned out differently. If the terrestrial experiment started all over again at Time Zero, there might still be intelligence on this planet – but it wouldn’t look like us. In the dance of the DNA spirals, the same partners would never meet again. As Loren Eisley wrote thirty years ago in The Immense Journey:
Nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness. There may be wisdom; there may be power; somewhere across space great instruments … may stare vainly at our floating cloud wrack, their owners yearning as we yearn. Nevertheless, in the nature of life and in the principles of evolution we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever.