Maverick Genius

by Phillip F. Schewe

  Cultural historians divide up the years into periods: classic Mayan, late Mayan, Renaissance, Baroque, Song Dynasty, Ming Dynasty, and so forth. Can we do the same for civilizations residing on a nether arm of the Milky Way? Novelists do this. Olaf Stapledon writes of the succession of civilizations, even assigning them numbers.

  Dyson does this too. Taking his cue from Stapledon and from Russian scientist Nikolai Kardashev, Dyson recognizes three advanced civilization types: those that command respectively the entire resources of a planet, a star, and a galaxy.14 Our current terrestrial civilization wouldn’t rate even as Type I. It certainly has a global reach and seems to be altering worldwide climate by vigorously unleashing various gases and minerals. On the other hand, nature still strikes back easily in the form of hurricane and earthquake. Human efforts at engineering, such as cities and agriculture, are easily upended.

  Dyson believes that we can achieve Type I status in a few centuries. To be Type II, commandeering an entire star, the civilization will have to be capable of making a Dyson sphere for itself. That involves doing something like disassembling Jupiter for its raw material. Since we’ve just started sending robot scouts there in the past few decades it would seem that Type II technology lies at least several thousand years in our future.

  Type III civilizations, those that use the resources of whole galaxies, are so advanced as to be almost unimaginable. Even here, though, conceivable arrangements can be pondered. The Milky Way is a big place, but traveling at 1 percent of light speed, a craft could cross the galaxy in 10 million years.15 It would take much longer actually to command the resources of the galaxy, but at least one can set a rough scale for a Type III accomplishment. How can one achieve such high-energy feats? At a birthday party for Hans Bethe in 1965, Dyson gave a talk that expanded on his earlier Dyson sphere ideas. One way we could tap really large amounts of energy would be to reposition stars or, more grandly still, smash stars together in order to extract their contents.16

  In the scientific and engineering realms, Dyson’s ideas for advanced civilizations were no more than speculation, as he cheerfully conceded. But in the realm of art, Dyson’s speculations have already had fair play. The Dyson sphere concept helped inspire numerous novels, including Larry Nivens’s popular Ringworld. The sphere was featured on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.17 Dyson was pleased that Star Trek had made him “part of popular culture,” but recognized that the episode was otherwise filled with physics errors.18

  The Dyson sphere proposal might have struck a chord, but the favored mode for searching out meaningful extraterrestrial light has remained radio waves or microwaves, and not infrared radiation. Project Cyclops was an early proposed array of more than a thousand radio telescopes, each in the shape of a large dish, dedicated to the effort. A Cyclops design study reaffirmed radio waves as the preferred searchable wavelength and specifically questioned the viability of Dyson’s idea that advanced civilization could profitably harvest energy with an orbiting armada of Dyson spheres, which the study snidely referred to as “mobile homes.” “Dyson appears haunted by Malthusian principles,” the report said, “and apparently considers astro-engineering a simpler solution than birth control.”19

  One can’t declare from reading the 1960 Science article alone that Dyson was haunted by the prognostications of Thomas Malthus—that burgeoning populations tended to overrun their territory and outrun available food—but Dyson’s subsequent writings would reveal a growing interest in exactly this subject. He would indeed write frequently about voyages into space and how to marshal scarce resources in a cold vacuum environment. But in so doing Dyson would prove to be not a Malthusian but an anti-Malthusian. He would consistently argue that many demographic threats could be counteracted with technological innovations. He wasn’t sure what those innovations would be. No one could predict these things. “In the long run, qualitative changes outweigh quantitative ones.”20 But he was pretty sure that the solution to the problem of overcrowding on Earth was to venture out among the stars. This was the destiny of the race, he heartfully felt.

  The Morrison-Cocconi and the Dyson papers are two of the founding documents of SETI. For decades now astronomers have scrutinized the skies at both radio and infrared wavelengths and found no purposeful broadcasts from the abyss. In 1966, the young Carl Sagan wrote an article about why finding such “Dyson civilizations” would be difficult.21 What subsequent observers have found is plenty of heat, but not meaningful heat signifying technological busyness. Alien creatures, if they’re out there, aren’t talking. As far as we can tell, they’re not even perspiring.

  DEATH OF ORION

  Not long after Dyson left La Jolla in the fall of 1959 Orion had passed quietly into the custodianship of the air force, and new compromises and new levels of bureaucracy were imposed. The purpose of exploring planets was not forgotten, but by law an air force project must contribute to the national defense. A militarized version of Orion was cooked up, a thing called Deep Space Bombardment Force.22 Essentially a battleship floating in the ocean of space, this craft would be a doomsday weapon of the kind described in Stanley Kubrick’s movie Dr. Strangelove. Deep Space Force would consist of a fleet of Orion ships parked in distant orbits, out next to Neptune. Each ship would bristle with nuclear missiles to be hurled in a retaliatory strike if ever the United States were attacked. When the Orion project was brought to the attention of John Kennedy, the new president was intrigued by the planet-visiting version of Orion but appalled by the doomsday version.23

  Ted Taylor, like a traveling salesman, boosted the idea of Orion wherever he could. Seeking to surmount the blatant problem of fouling Earth’s atmosphere with nuclear fallout, Orion engineers reconfigured the whole thing so that the craft could be ferried by Saturn V rockets, the same that were due to carry Apollo into space, at least as far as the jumping-off point of Earth orbit.

  But even this didn’t solve the problem of Orion’s mission. In January 1965 the project was canceled. Shortly thereafter Dyson wrote an extension of his Space Traveler’s Manifesto. It appeared later that year in the pages of Science, in the form of a funeral oration. Like Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Dyson assumed the pose of dispassionate historian: “The purpose of this article is neither to bury Orion nor to praise it. It is only to tell the public for the first time the facts of Orion’s life and death, and to explain as fairly as possible the political and philosophical issues which are involved in its fate.”24

  “Who killed Orion, and why?” he asked. The Defense Department (Orion wasn’t militaristic enough), NASA (Orion was too nuclear and encumbered with security issues), the test ban treaty (prohibiting nuclear tests), and scientists in general (who found the topic of propulsion uninteresting). Like Antony declaring throughout his funeral speech for Caesar that the regicide Brutus was an honorable man, Dyson commended Orion’s killers: “each group of men who killed Orion acted from high and responsible motives. And yet their motives were strangely irrelevant to the real issues at stake in this highly individual case.”

  The chief function of the article was to argue that Orion represented a “major expansion of human technology,” insofar as it provided a radically new way of achieving high velocity, the kind of velocity you need to travel to other stars within a few human generations, and that this magnificent enterprise had been suppressed for political reasons. Then, like Antony working his audience into a final froth of indignation, Dyson concluded with a thundering expression of solidarity with his comrades from the days in La Jolla:

  They must continue to hope that they may see their work bear fruit in their own lifetimes. They cannot lose sight of the dream that fired their imaginations in 1958 and sustained them through the years of struggle afterward—the dream that the bombs which killed and maimed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki may one day open the skies to mankind.25

  Ted Taylor, had called Dyson the most intelligent man he’d ever met. What did Dyson think of Taylor?

  T
here is something tragic about his life. He was the Columbus who never got to go and discover America. I just felt that he—much more than von Braun or anyone else—was the real Columbus of our days. I think he is probably the greatest man I ever knew well. And he is completely unknown.26

  1966: A SPACE ODYSSEY

  The brash director of Lolita and Dr. Strangelove wanted to meet Freeman Dyson. Stanley Kubrick was making a movie about space travel and liked Dyson’s idea of nuclear propulsion. The look and function of Kubrick’s fictional rocketship, Discovery, was borrowed from Orion. More than that, Kubrick wanted Dyson to speak on camera about life in space.

  That’s why in 1966 Dyson had come to the MGM Studios outside London, where 2001: A Space Odyssey was being shot. Orion wouldn’t be getting to Saturn by 1970, but Discovery would be getting to Jupiter by 2001, at least fictionally, and Dyson was going to be part of it. On film he talked about humans colonizing comets. Others interviewed included science writer Isaac Asimov and anthropologist Margaret Mead.

  When Dyson arrived, a scene inside the ship was being filmed. The actor Keir Dullea, playing astronaut Dave Bowman, was called upon to look undemonstrably at some monitors and walk about the annular-shaped flight deck. An Orion crew compartment might have looked something like this. Instead of Dave Bowman and Frank Poole, the protagonists in the movie, it might have been Freeman Dyson and Ted Taylor striding about taking readings.

  The trouble in the movie version, as Mr. Dullea confided to Dyson when they fell into conversation, was that the director wasn’t allowing him to act. He wasn’t being called upon to exhibit emotion or to react heroically. He felt as if he were sleepwalking through the part of Bowman, a man asked to undertake a mission vital to the inhabitants back on Earth—or so the earlier part of the script would have us believe.27

  Space Odyssey is about the evolution of the human race on Earth and its encounter with alien intelligence. In Philip Morrison’s search for extraterrestrial thinking creatures the expected signature would have been radio signals. In Dyson’s search it would have been heat waves. In Kubrick’s film the signature consists of an upright black slab and the magnetic forces that pour forth from it now and then.

  The humans who see the slab or who measure its magnetism are impressed but don’t otherwise behave in the melodramatic way characteristic of many science fiction movies. Even Kubrick’s soundtrack was understated. When music does play, the humans on screen are mute; we hear the incomparable Blue Danube Waltz while the pilots toil wordlessly. When humans speak there is no music. On the ship the only sounds are those of Dave, Frank, and HAL (the master onboard computer) talking, or of the incessant, mechanical, reassuring hum of the ventilation system.

  Along with Dullea, Dyson was baffled by this straitened approach to space travel. Couldn’t or shouldn’t a journey to Jupiter be more exciting? Dyson had enjoyed Kubrick’s previous film, Dr. Strangelove, which was also about saving the human race, not from aliens but from human folly in the form of a stupidly triggered catastrophic exchange of nuclear weapons. Dr. Strangelove was filled with colorful characters and mordant wit. The sequence of events could easily be followed. Space Odyssey had none of this. What was Kubrick up to?

  It was time for Dyson himself to act or, to be more exact, to come across on camera as a serious scientist, which he was, and to speak in interview style about space. It was Dyson’s impression that Kubrick wanted him and a few other select scientists appearing at the beginning of the film to lend credibility to the fictional events that followed. To further this impression of scientific reliability and seriousness, the scientists were asked to appear in front of a computer. The only computer on the lot, not counting the infamous HAL, was a business machine churning out paychecks for MGM personnel. Since its clatter interfered with the movie’s own acoustics, the computer had to be turned off in order to provide a clear sound level.28

  While Dyson had the attention of the director, he asked about the seeming chilliness of the story. Even taking into account that Strangelove was a smirking parody of war pictures while Space Odyssey was a more or less serious presentation of explorers going into the vacuum of space, the latter seemed overly somber. Why was this? Kubrick’s clipped reply: see the film.

  When it finally came, the picture was a surprise. Discovery no longer had overt nuclear propulsion. Dyson’s and the other interviews had been cut. And the unfolding action was even slower than it seemed on the day of the shooting. But gradually, as he watched the film, Dyson was won over. Kubrick’s inexplicable, impersonal approach to the story now seemed appropriate.

  Space Odyssey was not like Strangelove. It was not even like the Arthur C. Clarke novel written in tandem with the screenplay. In the film human motivations are not explored. Alien intentions remain unexplained. Indeed except for the black slab we don’t encounter symptoms of any extraterrestrial intelligence at all, only their technology. So ultimately Kubrick’s movie and Dyson’s writings about space aren’t about them, the aliens, but about us, about the human journey into the solar system and beyond.

  10. Nuclear Manifesto

  Dyson as Diplomat

  (EARLY 1960s)

  Freeman Dyson wanted to fly to Saturn, but no seats were available on Orion. Instead of using nuclear bombs to whisk people into deep space, defense planners wanted to keep them all in reserve for blowing up Russian cities in the event of a war.

  In the early 1960s open-air testing of nuclear weapons was on the increase. This testing amounted to dropping bombs on your own country—Nevada in the case of the United States and Central Asia in the case of the USSR. Many objected to the radioactive debris from the tests and wanted them stopped. The two superpowers began talking about a treaty to this effect.

  Dyson decided to be against a ban on nuclear testing, even if this put him into opposition with good friends such as Hans Bethe. Dyson felt a debt of loyalty to his friend Ted Taylor, who was trying to get Orion, not yet canceled, into space. Without proper testing of its nuclear propulsion, Orion would never happen. Dyson also thought of Edward Teller and his associates, who labored away behind the barbed wire at Livermore designing new weapons.

  Dyson was one of the few who knew what went on behind that fence. With Teller he had tried to create a bomb that would produce more neutrons, one that could penetrate oncoming Soviet tanks and kill their drivers, but with less radioactive debris. Creating such a neutron bomb suited Dyson since it would make it easier for Orion to chug through the atmosphere, boosting itself upward on a series of detonations as it went, without leaving such a dirty trail.

  Caltech chemist Linus Pauling, risking the displeasure of some of his friends, wrote, testified, marched, and spoke out as often as he could to halt the testing and spread of nuclear weapons. On one occasion he walked a picket line outside the White House fence the day before he found himself inside the fence, where he and forty other Nobel laureates sat down to dinner with President John Kennedy.1

  Dyson was anything but a Cold War hardhead. But the Soviet threat was formidable and the United States had to be prepared. That meant having up-to-date weapons. As he so often did, Dyson put his thoughts into the form of a prominent manifesto. He liked explaining things, clarifying complicated problems, summing up. His thoughtful prose in Physical Review had helped lift the veil from the mysteries of quantum electrodynamics. His imaginative schemes for artificial habitats, set forth in the pages of Science, helped launch the search for extraterrestrial civilizations. He had penned eloquent arguments in favor of nuclear reactors and nuclear rockets. Now he wrote about the proposed treaty.

  In the April 1960 issue of Foreign Affairs, he told readers why a test ban was a mistake. We couldn’t stop testing, he argued, because the United States couldn’t stop designing. Versatile new weapons, like the compact neutron bomb, were waiting to be carried through. By halting testing we would be fostering a false sense of security. Leaving aside the USSR for the moment, other adversaries such as the Chinese and even friends like France
, neither one of which was party to the current round of test ban negotiations, might be tempted to design a new generation of bombs that would leave the U.S. behind. Dyson didn’t like nuclear bombs any more than did Linus Pauling. But we had to have them, the right kind, and the right number. What if an opponent were to undertake tests in secret, leaving us outfoxed?

  ON THERMONUCLEAR WAR

  Dyson often said that the key to smoothing out the relations between East and West was to understand the Russian point of view. If it was true that the Russians had enough bombs and missiles to destroy many of American’s cities in the space of thirty minutes, then it was important to know how the Russians thought.2

  As a boy Dyson had taught himself Russian in order to study certain textbooks. Later he used his Russian language skills to appreciate the work of Russian astronomers and physicists. He tried to visit Russia as a private citizen and scientist in 1955, when he and Richard Feynman were invited to lecture about electrodynamics. But U.S. authorities would not allow them to go. Just one year later conditions had changed sufficiently—a post-Stalin, post-McCarthy interglacial period had ensued—and Dyson was permitted to attend a physics meeting in Moscow. On a side trip to Leningrad he and a few of his colleagues wandered by accident into a forbidden zone, a coast guard compound near the shore. When a guard coming up to them to investigate discovered that they were the same scientists mentioned in the newspaper, he brought them into a nearby building to meet the other sailors. There they all had a friendly conversation. “Why do you not come to our country more often?” the guard asked. “Be sure to tell the people in your countries, and your wives and children, that we would like to see more of them.”3