Alone in the Galaxy?

The following is a letter that I sent to get published in Analog. "Epona" refers to a world developed during a writer's workshop in which half the group works out an alien evolution and society, and the other half tries to figure out how to relate to the first half. Stan Schmidt, the editor of Analog, told me I had the seeds of several stories, here, and should write them! He'd pay me, too.

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I'd never believed in the notion of "extra-terrestrial intelligence," but after reading and enjoying the Epona story and thought-exercise, my mind continued to work through some "what-ifs" until I arrived at a rather startling (to me) conclusion: not only is it likely that there really are "little green men," but also that humans are not part of Galactic Civilization because we are too powerful and too scary. Please read on and let's see if I can bring you to the same conclusion.

Enrico Fermi asked (paraphrased slightly) "Where is Everybody?" This is a brilliant question, it seems, given the literally astronomical odds involved regarding the likelihood that the Galaxy is populated. I believe that anyone reading this periodical is at least open to the notion of the existence of extraterrestrials. I assume Aliens do exist. An ET Galactic Federation would consist of Races who had been tinkering with Space Flight for a long time. So they need to have evolved faster, and they need to have had a less effortful emigration into Space. I'm going to tackle the question of faster evolution first.

We can establish a boundary for how long the possibility for Life has existed, and we can infer how long it takes for Life to mature into Intelligence. We can also hypothesize a mechanism by which Evolution speeds up or slows down. The building blocks of Life didn't exist until enough stars had forged enough heavy elements in their cores and blasted these elements into space when becoming supernovae. Life couldn't have started earlier than the second or third round of elemental "seeding", so there are no "ancient races" based on a chemistry anything like ours. If anything Life probably evolved at about the same time all over our Galaxy. Once begun, Life does seem very tenacious and also seems bent on developing complexity.

Complexity is a result of perturbing a system. Imagine something as simple as the motion of a pendulum. Only by introducing perturbations (new parts, or cataclysmic adjustments), do we create complexity (for example, place a repulsing force at the nadir of the pendulum's swing, and notice how the motion then becomes unpredictable, or complex). Complexity in living organisms is actually an adaptive response to a perturbation, or a cataclysm of some sort. Aerobic bacteria evolved in response to the cataclysmic production of the waste product of anaerobic bacteria, oxygen, and Life on Earth grew more complex. The more a system is perturbed, the more it adjusts (unless it collapses altogether). The lock the dinosaurs had on Life was broken by some perturbation. Currently we believe it was an asteriod fall from the source that seems to hit us every 26,000 years or so.

But what if 26,000 years isn't the optimal selective period to drive Life's thrust to complexity? Using basic rules of breeding and genetics, we can create new animals in the duration of a human lifespan. On volcanic islands, natural selection is accelerated due isolation and to seperation of animal colonies during lava flows. Can we imagine a situation in which there is a mild but frequent push to drive Evolution?

What is required for Life to evolve in the first place? Looking at our own solar system (the best referrent I've got) we can tell that for carbon and water based creatures, the star must be stable. There must be planets within the zone where water can exist as a liquid. There must be enough minerals in the crust of the planet for organisms to form hard, supportive tissues. There must be a recycling atmosphere, which implies plate tectonics. And there must be a source of perturbations. Earth, Venus and Mars have a stable star. Mars and Earth lie within the habitable zone. Venus and Earth had recycling atmospheres, although Venus seems to have lost that capability. All seem rich in heavier elements. Perhaps even too rich, for metal poisoning is not unknown. Earth is the only one of these with a massive enough satellite to produce a periodic activity independent of the day/night rhythm. It seems likely that the Moon is also responsible for our flexible, replenishing crust and our recycling atmosphere. Its pull on us keeps the Earth's surface in flux. I supppose much of Evolution's early progress can be attributed to Lunar Tides. No other planet in our system sports such a large satellite and a recycling atmosphere. In our solar system, the physical place we call Earth is the anomoly. Given how quickly Life sprang into being after our world cooled, it would seem that although Earth is unique, Life is not necessarily rare.

Just how likely are Earth-like worlds in the Galaxy? Not very, judging by what we're currently discovering about planets around other stars. Gas giants are popping up all over. Is this an indicator that we're alone? On the contrary, it's the best evidence that we've got company. Earth-like worlds are probably uncommon, but is there a type of body that is very common? Why, yes! There are dozens of moons orbiting the outer planets of our own system. Imagine what could happen to a satellite of a gas giant within a star's habitable zone. Look at Jupiter or Saturn for inspiration, and simply move them closer to the Sun. All those low-mass water/rock moons are now potential nurseries. Put them to our test outlined above: these hypothetical moons are within the liquid water zone and have the requisite supply of minerals, coelesced out of the dust cloud that formed the planet. Recycling atmosphere? Jupiter's moon Io gets pulled so many ways by the other moons of the system that there's a chance it's liquid all the way through, and with its constant eruptions, it has an atmosphere. What of a regular catastrophe to drive the system towards complexity? For one thing, these moons' orbits offer weeks of sunlight then weeks of darkness. Or would an hour-long eclipse of the primary star every few weeks from passing through the gas giant's shadow be enough? If not, I'm sure we could invent some sort of commonplace force that would be powerful enough to drive Evolution faster, such as a greater mutation rate caused by intense radiation from the gas giant.

Now I'm ready to take on the question about how to get Intelligence out into Space. Suppose Evolution on one of our water/rock moons orbiting a massive planet within the habitable zone of a star develops a race of primitives. Their tide-locked home always faces the gas giant on one side, always open space on the other. The primary star circles in the sky once every several weeks. Quakes are common, as the other moons pull on the ground under these peoples' feet. Plants must make enough food to survive the long night. Animals are adapted to a few weeks of activity and a few weeks of torpor, and Living will be good for a small population. When the sun has set, and before their hibernation response sets in, they can see other moons, although on one entire hemisphere, the glare of the planet drowns out all but the brightest stars.

May I bring you to the realm of Theology for a moment? No primitive race on our world developed without a mystical explanation of "How Things Are." On the side of our hypothesized moon facing the planet, it will be apparent (from celestial motions) that the great orb in the sky is the Center of the Universe. It will have visible features, as Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune do. If it has an eye storm, then when its Eye is red (or white, or aquamarine), it is time for Holy War. When the Eye breaks up into many Eyes, it is time for Soul Inspection. When its Eyes are all "closed," it is time for Mardi Gras. Will they equate persistence with dominance, and live to serve their heavenly master, the gas giant? Or will they favor the other, starry night, side of their world, and seek ever to escape the planet's influence? Whatever is the reality of living under a large parent body, my point is that these people will develop knowing they are not the centers of the Everything, and will have an intrinsically different view from ours of their place in the Cosmos.

The directions they take with their research pursuits will be different from ours, as well. I believe that the search for meaning is a fundamental byproduct of Intelligence, but that the direction that search takes is highly variable. In our own society, we see how many others jump into whatever the exciting, profitable avenues of research are. Excitement is caused by success. On Earth, we have enough metal and hydrocarbons that we were successful at forging weapons and building machines early in our Industrial History, and succesful with genetic manipulation later. We can well suppose that on a metal poor world, the opposite would be true, and the folks living there would learn to breed animals to perform the tasks for which we now use tractors and airplanes. On a high gravity world, the move into space occurs later in a society's technological development than it would on a low gravity world. It's a function of available fuels and the mass fraction of the launch vehicle.

Now suppose that on our hypothetical moon, they've had their Agricultural Revolution and are in the middle of their Industrial Revolution. As they turn their spectroscopes onto their neighboring moons, it's not unreasonable to declare they find one with a limitless supply of clean water (like Europa), one with a limitless supply of hydrocarbons (like Titan), and one with more metal ore than they could ever imagine using up.

They will have spaceships plying their stellar neighborhood not long after they have railroad tracks covering their homeworld. Because of the proximity of their neighbor satellites and the low escape velocity from their home, they won't need to develop computers to get out there, they won't need highly reactive fuel and oxidizer, they won't need high exhaust velocities. A 500 kph bullet train is conceivably a launch vehicle! They will not have to invest the gross national product of a nation to mount expeditions, and they will see greater returns on their investment. Their version of the Rockefellers will be Space Tycoons.

And as their local resources are depleted? Well, they'd have developed all the tools for space exploration already, and would inevitably proceed outward. From their heritage of long nights, they have bodily functions that are geared to the weeks of inactivity that a long space flight requires. So we have a race with a cultural heritage that they are not masters of all they survey (ingrained by the ever-present gas giant hanging in the sky) who are plying the starlanes in low-tech vehicles left over from their Industrial Age. If they do discover nuclear fusion, it will be in one of their colonized habitats, and then they will use it to move faster than any chemical rockets can travel. If super-luminal travel is possible, they will discover it long after they are already familiar with spaceflight. Their whole Cultural Development will have been one of Abundance and Ease and Expansion. I picture in my mind's eye space-faring Polynesians, using shell and bamboo tables for navigation.

What happens when aliens of this type come upon Earth and Her inhabitants? The aliens have less minerals in their bodies (recall their world coalesced in a narrow zone in which the heat of a forming planet precluded great concentrations of heavy elements), and our body chemistry (our entire world!) is poisonous to them. Our gravity is so great that we are inordinately strong compared with their physiology. Our weapons are bigger and stronger, having to overcome the Earth's greater attractive force. We've experimented with and learned how to control energies they never needed to, such as combusting liquid hydrogen and fissioning atomic nuclei. Since we haven't had any real success in harvesting the fields of space, our technology has moved in other directions. We are unlocking the secrets of the design of organisms at a very basic level. We've discovered and used nuclear devices in our own atmosphere! We are discovering the applications of beamed weapons, and we haven't even established a foothold on our nearest orbital body.

Soon, though, we will escape our deep, deep gravity well and loose our collective knowledge and power all at once, with no tempering of centuries of learning how to behave in Space. What is a Galactic Civilization to do with us? If it truly is a long-lived organization, then they've been getting along with each other for eons, whereas we can't even get along with ourselves. We are an ignorant race endowed with powerful tools, more frightening than a banana republic with a nuclear device. I know how I'd choose, were I an alien overseer: sometimes I come across my son wielding a dangerous implement of torture or destruction. If it's a marking pen and he's not trying to draw on me, I'll let him color himself as much as he wants. If it's a pair of scissors, I take them away and discipline him. Will we be welcome in a Galactic Culture?

I think not.

Professional