Walker Percy - Lost in the Cosmos

I know that’s a high civilian casualty factor, but it will save lives in the end.

A demonstration? A demonstration of what? How to kill a few hundred reindeer in Siberia? No way, General.

You’re really putting me on the spot, General.

Okay, I’m going to surprise you. I’m going to give you an opinion. I think we got to go with it. For the ultimate good of man. Indeed, in the interests of peace. In fact, why don’t we call it Project Peace?

You like that? Yes, that’s right. Go. You can tell them.

I say go.

After hanging up, he picks up the cylindrical double-walled container, carefully pastes on a sticker containing the address of a California laboratory which collects the sperm of Nobel Laureates for the purpose of inseminating thousands of genetically screened women. Still holding the container, he opens the door, walks rapidly down the corridor to the ice machine.

Question: Do you think the U.S. gene pool and the future quality of life will be improved by the contribution of Dr. F___'s ejaculate?

() Yes

() No

(CHECK ONE)

SCENE III: The following conversation occurs in a momentarily stalled elevator in the Rockefeller Foundation building.

SCIENTIST A (a post-Darwinian evolutionist): All phenomena in the Cosmos can be explained by the scientific laws that govern matter in interaction. This principle applies to the simplest chemical reaction between atoms to the most complex, including the behavior of organisms, the origin of the species, and the ascent of man. Like any other organism, man evolved when mutant forms and functions such as the opposable thumb for tools and weapons, the cortex, and the larynx-pharynx conformation for the language gave him an advantage over other primates in adapting to the environment.

SCIENTIST B (a post-Wallacian evolutionist): Then how do you account for the fact that with the appearance of man there also appeared for the first time in the Cosmos, as far as we know, language, mind, self, and consciousness, and almost immediately thereafter a train of disasters and triumphs which seem to have very little to do with adapting to an environment — such as organized warfare against himself, composing Don Giovanni, Charlie Manson, John Keats, suicide, joy, madness, murder, heroism, modern medicine, child abuse, loving care for the genetically malformed — and in recent years the appearance of the demoniac spirit of the erotic and the violent expressing itself in every conceivable variety of florid sexual behavior which has nothing to do with reproduction or survival of the species, and that with the very rise of science there has occurred the spectacular rise in technological violence, so that more men have been killed in this century than in all others put together — and that finally there should have come to pass the present state of affairs which surpass all belief, not merely that this very “matter” you speak of, which Democritus and Darwin and even Dalton and Boyle saw as peaceable little miniballs of atoms colliding and joining, is in fact possessed of an energy of such an order that one-quarter teaspoon will destroy Greater New York, but that this very secret and this very matter — and here the mind reels — should find itself in the hands of this selfsame demoniac autonomous self, itself a creature of science?

Scientist A opens his mouth to reply, but the elevator doors open at last and there enters a somber-looking Hasidic rabbi, The two scientists exchange glances and fall silent.

Question: How do you think Scientist A would have answered Scientist B?

A STARSHIP FROM EARTH is traveling in the galaxy, its mission to establish communication with extraterrestrial intelligences and civilizations. *

For years SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has explored the 200 billion stars of the galaxy, huge dish antennae searching for something, anything other than the random noise of the Cosmos. At last, the computer of the spectrum analyzer which reads the tapes of all the received transmissions picked up a pattern, that is, a repeated signal, which, however, could not be interpreted. Was it a signal from an intelligence or was it like the Coke bottle in the movie On the Beach, which was leaning on a telegraph key in deserted California and which a fitful breeze blowing a curtain caused to send out a random letter or two?

The starship has a transmission-receiver capability for the entire electromagnetic spectrum, but especially in the range of radio signals, since it is known of course that the Cosmos is filled with emissions in this part of the spectrum, from pulsars, quasars, radiation belts, and so on.

The objective of the starship is to exchange information with other civilizations comparable with or superior to our own. It has been calculated that the probability that such civilizations exist is overwhelming. What the designers of the project hoped to learn was the level of technology of other civilizations, the degree of evolution, biology, type of metabolism, etc.

The time is the year 205 °C.E. (Common Era, so called because, though the era is post-Christian, it proved useful to retain the year of Christ’s birth). The acceleration of vehicles to speeds approaching the speed of light is possible, the aging process is accordingly reduced, and the problems of communication delays are minimized.

The assumption was made that as organisms evolve in the Cosmos, a level of intelligence will be reached so that it will be possible to transmit information. Mathematics and science might be used as the basis of a common language. Mathematics is the same everywhere. The prime numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 … are prime everywhere. The physics of the Cosmos is the same. For example, since hydrogen is the most abundant atom in the Cosmos, one might use the proton and electron spin of the neutral hydrogen atom as the binary number 1. Using such a binary system, the project designers hoped that it might be possible to establish a vocabulary and transmit information about the earth and its star, for example, its position in relation to the fourteen major pulsars of the galaxy, and to put similar questions to other intelligences.

Organisms transmitting signals were, in fact, encountered. The trouble was that the responses received were not acknowledgments or statements of information but were rather countersignals of one sort or another, responses which seemed to express something like excitement or alarm or anger, often actual movements of the organisms themselves. Thus, rather than information being obtained, various behaviors were encountered — hostile, aversive, coming close or going away, flight or fight, and in one case what appeared to be an attempt at sexual union.

In fact, two such creatures were encountered in the solar system.

(1) In the outer atmosphere of Jupiter, large gaseous clouds were sighted. It was determined that they were self-contained organisms of some intelligence because they were self-propelled, moving about by emitting jets of hydrogen. They injested organic molecules and excreted helium and methane, and were observed to reproduce by fission. But despite every effort to communicate, e.g., by transmitting prime numbers in various frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, the only response of the clouds was to speed away or come close and surround the ship like a sportive school of whales — or to rise and sink like so many hot-air balloons.

(2) Skirting Saturn’s moon Titan with its heavy atmosphere of methane, another sort of creature was encountered, small glittering anemone-like organisms with spicules of methane crystals and a beak-and-sucker mouth for devouring the brown sludge of organic molecules formed on Titan’s surface by the ultraviolet light of the sun. Upon the transmission of radio waves of the frequency 1420 megahertz, the creatures were thrown into violent excitement, for all the world like the behavior of male gypsy moths upon the reception of the female pheromone. They flocked to the ship and attached themselves to its tiles and windows, using their sucker-like mouths. It was not clear whether such a response was a manifestation of hunger or hostility or an attempt at sexual union.