by Don Lincoln
ALIEN UNIVERSE
ALIEN UNIVERSE
Extraterrestrial Life in our Minds
and in the Cosmos
DON LINCOLN
© 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2013
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lincoln, Don.
Alien universe : extraterrestrial life in our minds and in the cosmos / Don
Lincoln.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-1072-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-1073-9 (electronic)
ISBN-10: 1-4214-1072-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4214-1073-7 (electronic)
1. Life on other planets. 2. Exobiology. 3. Extraterrestrial beings—Social aspects. 4. Extraterrestrial beings in popular culture. I. Title.
QB54.L487 2013
576.89’39—dc23 2012051094
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE THE QUESTION
ONE BEGINNINGS
TWO ENCOUNTERS
THREE FICTIONS
FOUR BLOCKBUSTERS
Interlude
FIVE LIFE-FORMS
SIX ELEMENTS
SEVEN NEIGHBORS
EPILOGUE THE VISITORS
Suggested Reading
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Books are never a solo effort. To convert an idea to a finished product takes the contributions of many.
Even the first idea can incorporate contributions from many people. This book wouldn’t exist in its current form, were it not for my wife, who listened to my initial sketchy ideas and helped me weave them together into a coherent whole. The idea to interleave our evolving idea of Aliens with the concerns of the public at the time is entirely hers, and she also greatly clarified the presentation of several of the scientific topics I covered. Any residual rough spots in the execution are from when I stubbornly didn’t listen to her.
Drs. Hassan Al-Ali, Albert Harrison, Judi Scheppler, Jill Tarter, and Erica Zahnle all provided expert advice on the text, correcting the misconceptions and errors. I am very grateful for their efforts and to Alvaro Amat for making helpful connections.
I would like to thank Patty Hedrick, Dr. Julie Dye, and Meredith Carlson for their assistance in procuring the drawings of Aliens, as imagined by children. I also thank both the Fermilab library and the Geneva Public Library staff for their invaluable assistance in finding original sources. The UFO literature is replete with fakes and manufactured “facts.” To cut through various writers’ agendas, it is imperative to confirm everything with original documents.
I am grateful to Linda Allewalt, Meredith Carlson, Sue Dumford, Vida Goldstein, Lori Haseltine, Dee Huie, Nancy Krasinski, Diane Lincoln, Toni Mueller, Robert Shaw, and Felicia Svoboda for being test readers. In addition to a myriad of typos, they helped identify weaknesses in the original manuscript that I hope I have removed. Michele Callaghan should get special mention for her deft copyediting. Finally, I would like to thank my publicist Kathy Alexander for her tireless efforts.
While these people all contributed directly to this book, it goes without saying that the information and tales recounted here wouldn’t have been possible without generations of historians and scientists. Human knowledge is a cumulative endeavor, and what I’ve gathered here is really the work of hundreds of people.
It is traditional in my books to assign blame to a specific childhood friend of mine for any unnoticed residual errors. However it would be inappropriate to mention his name in a book that talks about Aliens, whom some think already walk among us. It wouldn’t be right to blow his cover.
ALIEN UNIVERSE
PROLOGUE
THE QUESTION
The beginning is the most important part of any work.
Plato
One of the Biggest Questions of All
Of all the things that could change mankind’s outlook, one of the biggest would be contact with intelligent life originating from another world. There have been similar paradigm-shifting episodes before in the history of humanity. When Galileo first saw the moons of Jupiter in about January of 1610, it marked the beginning of the end of the idea that Earth held a unique location in the cosmos. The publication of his manuscript Starry Messenger in Venice just two months later began the spread of the knowledge that someone had incontrovertible evidence that our planet could no longer be viewed as exceptional. The genie was out of the bottle.
Another paradigm-shifting event was the death of human exceptionalism, developed by Charles Darwin and his contemporaries. The idea that humans are but a twig on the vast tree of life forever changed our vision of ourselves as a unique species that had been given the Earth as our birthright. We became animals, like countless others, undoubtedly one with tremendous power to shape the globe, but still just a cousin species among many; one who had been shaped by the same forces that created the bear, the shark, and the kangaroo. Humanity’s exceptionalism was reduced to our ongoing pride of our intellect and technical achievement.
While we know of other species on Earth who use tools and have a degree of intelligence, the discovery of no other species comparable to us has allowed some to continue to believe humanity to be exceptional and that it has been given, as the Bible says, dominion over all living things. Even the non-religious might point to our spread from Africa across the globe, exploiting all environments and all niches, as a kind of Manifest Destiny of species. Taken to an extreme, some dream of a future in which mankind has left the Earth and spread across the cosmos, in a triumphant march of galactic conquest.
But what kind of galaxy will we encounter? Setting aside the very real practical difficulties associated with interstellar travel, is the galaxy a lifeless and sterile place, with the Earth being a unique and precious cradle of intelligent life? Or is the universe instead a cosmopolitan neighborhood, with many planets inhabited by species intellectually and technologically similar to our own? In short, we must ask a single important question.
“Are we alone?”
My purpose in writing this book is to explore that question. While imaginative thinkers have long speculated on the possibility and nature of life on other worlds, it was in the twentieth century that the idea has become common throughout Western culture. Unlike in early centuries, where discussions of alien life was the purview of the intellectual or academic, the idea of aliens has penetrated the literature, newspapers, movies, and other sources of information enjoyed by the public. The idea of Aliens, UFOs, alien contacts, abduction, interspecies reproduction, and so on, all exist to various degrees in the literature available to everyone.
This leads us to the fundamental question of the book. If Aliens exist, what do they look like? Or, even more specific still, what have members of the ordinary public thought Aliens look like over time? If you walked into a coffee shop in Greenwich Village in New York and asked the guy behind the counter what Aliens looked like, wha
t would he say? What sort of answer would you get if you stopped instead for coffee in a diner in Ottumwa, Iowa? Or asked the same question 50 years ago?
Note the capital “A” in the word “Aliens.” This choice is made to explicitly identify intelligent aliens, with which humanity could hypothetically one day compete for galactic domination. I am carefully distinguishing Aliens from alien life in general, which might be much more common in the universe. Aliens might one day appear in our skies and say “Take me to your leader,” or they may attack the Earth for some of its resources. An alien duck flapping happily in the skies of a world circling Betelgeuse is not what I mean by an Alien. An Alien would be a sentient creature on that same world who has written a poem about that duck. An Alien must be intelligent, although not necessarily have extensive technology. An alien caveman counts as an Alien. An alien monkey does not.
Of course, the idea of alien life and Aliens go hand in hand, in the same way that life on Earth and humanity are inextricably linked. So, in parts of the book, we will occasionally expand the conversation to include a more generic discussion of alien life. But the focus will be on Aliens and how mankind’s image of them has evolved and why.
Fiction versus Fact
So let’s talk a little bit about the topics that will be covered in this book. To begin with, several different sources of information have guided our collective image of Aliens, which we can divide into three types: nonfiction, fiction, and a third category in which the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction are totally blurred.
Nonfiction comes from the best scientific thought of the era. Carl Sagan, of “billions and billions” fame, was an astrobiologist and a highly successful science popularizer. He and his colleagues have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about what our knowledge of the physics and chemistry of the physical world tells us about what Aliens might be like. More traditional biologists are finding life in more and more extreme environments, extending our appreciation of the versatility of life of the kind found here on Earth. However, not all planets in the universe are Earth-like, and it is possible that Aliens might be radically different from humans in the kind of air they breathe (if, indeed, they breathe at all), the temperature at which they thrive, the chemicals necessary for their metabolism, and so on. While science does not have a final answer on what an Alien might look like, a tremendous amount of progress has been made in understanding the range of the possible. We will certainly discuss these scientific subjects in this book, but the public’s conception of Aliens tends to come not from the halls of academia, rather from the media and the entertainment industry.
“Space, the final frontier” are the opening words for one of the most successful science fiction television series of all time and the motivation for many a budding young scientist. In Star Trek, the crew of the starship Enterprise zips around the galaxy looking for “new life and new civilizations.” The Star Trek universe consists of a grand diversity of species, where many worlds host life and indeed intelligent life. In fact, if Aliens didn’t exist in the Star Trek universe, the show would have had a very different character. Without the Klingons, Cardassians, and Romulans (to name just a few), the humans on the starship would fly around the galaxy, poking at this barren rock or that, maybe occasionally encountering a nonsentient slime mold living on Epsilon Eridani IV. That wouldn’t be as interesting as the social and political interactions that dominate the series’s myriad plots.
Star Trek is not the only movie or television show that has shaped our thinking of Aliens. The bar scene in the first Star Wars movie showcases a diverse and colorful menagerie of Aliens, a “wretched hive of scum and villainy” as one character put it, socializing as humans would in the corner pub (or maybe a biker bar). In the subsequent Star Wars movies, many other creatures are introduced. Although Jabba the Hutt is an exception, most of the Aliens are vaguely humanoid, bipedal creatures with limbs and features that recognizably correspond to human analogs.
In fact, the bipedal structure of Aliens on both the big screen and little one has shaped the public’s vision of them. In the old days, movie Aliens had to be bipedal because the actors that played them were obviously human. With the currently available techniques of computer graphics, movie makers no longer need to make such human-looking Aliens. However there is still the issue of making movie characters with whom the audience can relate. It’s hard for me to imagine a successful movie that tells the story of star-crossed lovers with a species that involves three genders and has the color and consistency of lime flavored Jell-O. If you forgive the phrase, the storyline would be … well … just too alien to resonate with moviegoers.
This brings up a very important point. No matter how much science fiction buffs might devour the latest novel from the hot writer at the time, the size of the community of science fiction enthusiasts is relatively modest. Even a very popular Alien novel will reach a small number of readers. The written literature of science fiction has only affected the broader public in a brushing and indirect fashion. It is movies and television that have had the largest impact on the range of Aliens that is familiar to the public. In addition to the limitations of human actors and the need to provide a character with which the audience can relate, the stories of science fiction in the movies must be accessible to the audience. For instance, Star Wars has been described as a swashbuckling adventure, with a captured princess, a prince who didn’t know his heritage, and an evil king. Avatar has been called “Dances with Wolves with blue people” and is considered to be a thinly veiled commentary on Western civilization’s interaction with indigenous populations. And the movie Alien is similar to Jaws and any number of teen slasher movies. Science fiction movies are often an indirect commentary on the society and the politics of the time, just as George Orwell’s Animal Farm is simply a metaphor for the Russian revolution (and, indeed, many a human revolution).
Many examples of fictional portrayals of Aliens reflect the cares that concerned humanity when the movie was released. The 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which an Alien and robot warn the Earth of the dangers of nuclear weapons, reflected the fears of post–World War II America. In a similar way, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s stories of John Carter’s adventures on Barsoom (i.e., Mars) in 1912 were clearly shaped by the last vestiges of postcolonialism. And even H. G. Wells’s many stories reflect both the optimism and worries of the Victorian era.
Watch the Skies …
While we’ve briefly discussed the effect of both scientific thought and science fiction on the public’s vision of Aliens, there remains a final, powerful influence on how the public views Aliens that is an indefinable mix of fact and fiction; a mystery wrapped in an enigma, with a blend of conspiracy and religious fervor tossed in to add spice to the tale. I am talking, of course, about UFOs.
Unidentified flying objects are also sometimes called flying saucers and are believed by some to be spaceships, ambassadors to Earth. Passions run high on this subject, ranging from those who believe we are not alone to others who believe the reports of UFOs come from a mix of charlatans, flakes, and well-meaning, but simply misguided, souls. People have reported seeing Alien craft, while others make the even grander claim of being in direct communication with Aliens. More recently some have reported being abducted by Aliens for various purposes, ranging from simple biological testing to interspecies reproduction. On the one hand, there is no doubt that some of the people who report these experiences believe them completely. On the other hand, it is also totally clear that the field is populated by hoaxes, fakes, and con men.
Although many, if not most, of the UFO/contactee/abductee reports are easily dismissed, some always remain unsolved. While “unsolved” doesn’t mean “true Alien contact,” the remaining air of mystery has certainly caught the attention of the public, the media, and even governments. Project Blue-book, administered by the U.S. Air Force, is merely the most well known of dozens of inquiries initiated by various government agencies into the UFO ph
enomenon.
The reports in the press of Alien encounters have an amplifying effect, with people seeing the reports and becoming susceptible to making additional (and confirming) reports. It’s difficult to definitively explain what is going on. UFO believers will tell you that the increase in reported Alien encounters simply reflects a spike in Alien activity. Nonbelievers will tell you that any increase in the number of reports reflects a group delusion in the same way that a new report on the sighting of the Loch Ness monster or the Bigfoot will inevitably spawn more.
Regardless of where you come down on the question of Alien contact with humans, there is no disputing the fact that media reports of Alien contact beget more reports. Similarly they inform the public, science fiction writers, and filmmakers. The entertainment industry often then incorporates details of the reports into their stories. These tales of fiction then reach a larger audience and tell viewers what they should expect. This can induce additional reports, completing the cycle.
The point of this book is not to settle the question of (1) alien life, (2) the existence of intelligent Aliens, and (3) Alien visitation to the Earth. (Although I should probably state my opinion on those three subjects: (1) quite likely, (2) probable but very rare, and (3) exceedingly unlikely, respectively.) The point of the book is to discuss the prevailing vision of Aliens held by the general public both in the past and currently.
Figure P.1 shows some iconic Aliens, made famous by Hollywood and the media. All of these Aliens are recognizable to a majority of Americans, with the central figure being the one most commonly selected by adults when told to describe an Alien. As an exercise, I asked a large group of children, ages 4 to 11, to draw what they thought an Alien would look like. A sampling of these drawings is shown in figure P.2. These pictures were drawn independently, but there are striking similarities. Most of the Aliens are recognizably humanoid, with approximate bilateral symmetry. Those that do not have these properties are unlikely to be viable Aliens, as they apparently lack the ability to use tools. One striking similarity between the drawings is that the Aliens are all smiling and happy. Presumably this reflects responsible parenting and keeping the children from seeing too many scary movies. A few children have seen the archetypal “gray” Alien in the media: humanoid, with a high forehead, small chin, large almond-shaped eyes, and made famous by many an abduction tale.
