Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

Feedback of at least a hundred db will be required to stabilize the amplifier’s A.C. gain characteristic... . The Thinker’s pipe had burned down to a bitter dottle in the bottom of the bowl. The fitful firelight cast only occasional candle-bright glimpses of the room where he sat. The dog snored gently and stirred in its deep sleep. Electromagnetic excitation of the moving diaphram requires objectionably large quantities of A.C. fundamental energy...

At last the Other could wait no longer. It descended the stairs with haste and entered the living room. Its claw found the switch of the living room light, but it hesitated.

Its incarnadine labia gaped and it spoke.

“Dear, aren’t you ever coming to bed?”

I do not know which was the most pleasantly startling: that this article was written by Ray Bradbury, genius of anti-science-fiction; that Life magazine devoted fourteen beautifully illustrated pages to it; or that the United States Government, in I960, should have provided the basis for it.

In the shadows of a West Virginia valley, a Giant wakes —and listens. Owls sweeping the Green Bank wilderness see the Giant turn sleeplessly hour on hour, its vast 85-foot Ear cupped to the showering radiation of the Milky Way. Jabberings, cacklings and maniacal chitterings of electromagnetic star-talk bombard the Ear. Calmly the Ear feeds this static to tape machines and memory systems humming in its metal Brain nearby. Afflicted by ghost voices of lightnings which prowl far-traveling suns, the Ear, nursed by men, sleeps at dawn.

Does this sound like science fiction? Ten seconds from now will the Martian spider-kings invade, capture the Ear, and disintegrate the mad scientists who built it?

No. The Ear is a competently machined, absolutely real radio telescope finished in March 1959 at Green Bank, W. Va. The scientists of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory moving in its vast shadow are not mad. Their daring but dead-serious work is called Project Ozma.

Named for the princess of the faraway Land of Oz, the project began work on April 8, 1960. Periodically since then it has been searching for life on other worlds. Some fine evening the scientists of Ozma hope to hear a faint echo of humanity calling back down the vast slope of space.

Simultaneously, in nearby Sugar Grove, W. Va., the Navy is rearing an even greater beast out of mythology via technology. The Navy’s electronic ear will stand half as high as the Empire State Building. Its dish will stretch 600 feet from rim to rim. Cradled in two titanic Ferris wheel structures, the Sugar Grove ear will gather cosmic signals from 60 light years deep in space.

How many stars are there in the universe for our radio-telescope ears to listen to? Write the number 10. Then add 19 zeros after it. Of this unthinkable number, how many stars have planets rushing about them? A conservative estimate, says Harlow Shapley, Harvard professor emeritus of astronomy, is one in a thousand.

How many such one-in-a-thousand worlds will lie just the right distance from their suns so that a moderate temperature will encourage life? One in a thousand.

How many of these far fewer worlds will be large enough to bind and keep an atmosphere? One in a thousand.

And finally, how many of this vastly reduced number will have a proper atmosphere, with carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen enough to stir up cellular life such as exists on Earth? Again, says Shapley, one in a thousand.

But with the number ruthlessly cut, we are still left with one hundred million planets in the universe on which some kind of life is not only possible but probable.

“It follows then,” say Professors Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison of Cornell, “that near some star rather like the sun, there are civilizations with scientific interests and with technical possibilities much greater than those available to us.

“To the beings of such a society,” they continue, writing in the British publication, Nature, “our sun must appear as a likely site for the evolution of a new society.... We shall assume that long ago they established a channel of communication that would one day become known to us, and that they look forward patiently to the answering signals from our sun which would make known to them that a new society has entered the community of intelligence.”

Cocconi and Morrison were delighted when they learned that Dr. Frank D. Drake, director of Project Ozma at Green Bank, convinced of the same views, was putting the matter to a test.

As to whether Ozma will succeed and how long it might take before we hear intelligent cosmic broadcasts, Professor Morrison says, “We are in the position of a man who has bought a lottery ticket, not knowing what kind of lottery it is. It may be a great international sweepstakes with odds of 10 million to one against anyone winning. Or it may be a neighborhood raffle where chances of winning are high. I hope that Dr. Drake’s experiment may succeed shortly, but it may go on for generations before success or abandonment.”

Intergalactic party lines may have been established ages ago, Dr. Drake believes. Professors Morrison and Cocconi agree. Civilizations in space may have contacted each other with strong, directed radio beams and formed a club talking back and forth. Consequently, the better the club, the more members are in it. So each member looks around for stars with worlds having indications of advanced technology. When they see a promising star, they cast their beam toward it. It is like waving a flashlight. They have been waving it for thousands of years.

The disquieting thought arises, however, that if politicians in other universes are like our own home-grown variety, little or no waving of flashlights would be done on such an unproductive basis. Unless assured of economic or technological gains, it is hard to imagine a government on Earth, Mars or one of Alpha Centauri’s planets handing over funds for what could be the most expensive wrong number ever dialed. For that matter, is there any reason to think that beings on far worlds would be able to invent and perfect such a thing as radio?

“In our view,” says Professor Morrison, “life on most planets would be maintained by light from its neighboring star, just as Earth life is maintained by light from our star, the sun. Therefore, any scientific civilization would certainly seek to understand the nature of light which is the basis of their life. Once you understand the nature of light, you are led to the whole electromagnetic spectrum of which radio is a necessary part.”

How do we tune in on other worlds? How do we know the right “station” to fix our attention on? After much study, Project Ozma has picked a listening frequency of 21 centimeters (1420 megacycles). This frequency was chosen to cut down on natural interference. The air surrounding planets like Earth cannot be penetrated successfully by signals above 10,000 megacycles. Below 1,000 megacycles, on the other hand, the static from galactic space is too loud. Faced with atmospheric noise on one hand and radio gibberish on the other, the Ozma scientists compromised on the 21-centimeter frequency. They chose it for another reason as well: it is the natural vibration most commonly heard on our radio telescopes, the vibration of neutral hydrogen that we get when we study giant hydrogen clouds in the sky.

Neutral hydrogen, we know then, is richly strewn throughout the universe. Other radio-advanced worlds cannot help but note this same truth. Guessing that we will have already tuned in on this natural intergalactic wave-length, intelligent beings on other worlds may be expected to do a most sensible thing: they will probably broadcast at a frequency close to that of the neutral hydrogen band, just as small U.S. radio stations sometimes sneak over and rub shoulders with big-brother radio-station bands in order to pick up stray listeners. So our Ozma scientists, listening to the moronic outbursts of neutral hydrogen, will test both sides of its narrow band, hoping for sounds more intelligent.