by Carl Sagan
If such experiments were repeated many times and it were found that the learning curves for Dolphin B were in a statistically significant sense always steeper than those of Dolphin A, communication of moderately interesting information between two dolphins would have been established. It might be a verbal description of the difference between Bach and the Beatles – to my mind, a difficult but not impossible task – or it might simply be the distinction between left and right in each trial, until Dolphin B catches on. This is not the best experimental design to test dolphin-to-dolphin communication, but it is typical of a large category of experiments that could be performed. To my knowledge and regret, no such experiments have been performed with dolphins to date.
Questions of dolphin intelligence have taken on a special poignancy for me in the past few years as the case of the humpback whale unfolded. In a remarkable set of experiments, Roger Payne, of Rockefeller University, has trailed hydrophones to a depth of tens of meters in the Caribbean, seeking and recording the songs of the humpback whale. Another member, along with the dolphins, of the taxonomic class of Cetacea, the humpback whale has extraordinarily complex and beautiful articulations, which carry over considerable distances beneath the ocean surface, and which have an apparent social utility within and between schools of whales, which are very gregarious social animals.
The brain size of whales is much larger than that of humans. Their cerebral cortexes are as convoluted. They are at least as social as humans. Anthropologists believe that the development of human intelligence has been critically dependent upon these three factors: Brain volume, brain convolutions, and social interactions among individuals. Here we find a class of animals where the three conditions leading to human intelligence may be exceeded, and in some cases greatly exceeded.
But because whales and dolphins have no hands, tentacles, or other manipulative organs, their intelligence cannot be worked out in technology. What is left? Payne has recorded examples of very long songs sung by the humpback whale; some of the songs were as long as half an hour or more. A few of them appear to be repeatable, virtually phoneme by phoneme; somewhat later the entire cycle of sounds comes out virtually identically once again. Some of the songs have been commercially recorded and are available on CRM Records (SWR-II). I calculate that the approximate number of bits (see Chapter 34) of information (individual yes/no questions necessary to characterize the song) in a whale song of half an hour's length is between a million and a hundred million bits. Because of the very large frequency variation in these songs, I have assumed that the frequency is important in the content of the song – or, put another way, that whale language is tonal. If it is not as tonal as I guess, the number of bits in such a song may go down by a factor of ten. Now, a million bits is approximately the number of bits in The Odyssey or the Icelandic Eddas. (It is also unlikely that in the few hydrophone forays into Cetacean vocalizations that have been made to date, the longest of such songs has been recorded.)
Is it possible that the intelligence of Cetaceans is channeled into the equivalent of epic poetry, history, and elaborate codes of social interaction? Are whales and dolphins like human Homers before the invention of writing, telling of great deeds done in years gone by in the depths and far reaches of the sea? Is there a kind of Moby Dick in reverse – a tragedy, from the point of view of a whale, of a compulsive and implacable enemy, of unprovoked attacks by strange wooden and metal beasts plying the seas and laden with humans?
The Cetacea hold an important lesson for us. The lesson is not about whales and dolphins, but about ourselves. There is at least moderately convincing evidence that there is another class of intelligent beings on Earth besides ourselves. They have behaved benignly and in many cases affectionately toward us. We have systematically slaughtered them. There is a monstrous and barbaric traffic in the carcasses and vital fluids of whales. Oil is extracted for lipstick, industrial lubricants and other purposes, even though this makes, at best, marginal economic sense – there are effective substitute lubricants. But why, until recently, has there been so little outcry against this slaughter, so little compassion for the whale?
Little reverence for life is evident in the whaling industry – underscoring a deep human failing that is, however, not restricted to whales. In warfare, man against man, it is common for each side to dehumanize the other so that there will be none of the natural misgivings that a human being has at slaughtering another. The Nazis achieved this goal comprehensively by declaring whole peoples untermenschen, subhumans. It was then permissible, after such reclassification, to deprive these peoples of civil liberties, enslave them, and murder them. The Nazis are the most monstrous, but not the most recent, example. Many other cases could be quoted. For Americans, covert reclassifications of other peoples as untermenschen has been the lubricant of military and economic machinery, from the early wars against the American Indians to our most recent military involvements, where other human beings, military adversaries but inheritors of an ancient culture, are decried as gooks, slopeheads, slanteyes, and so on – a litany of dehumanization – until our soldiers and airmen could feel comfortable at slaughtering them.
Automated warfare and aerial destruction of unseen targets make such dehumanization all the easier. It increases the "efficiency" of warfare because it undercuts our sympathies with our fellow creatures. If we do not see whom we kill, we feel not nearly so bad about murder. And if we can so easily rationalize the slaughter of others of our own species, how much more difficult will it be to have a reverence for intelligent individuals of different species?
It is at this point that the ultimate significance of dolphins in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence emerges. It is not a question of whether we are emotionally prepared in the long run to confront a message from the stars. It is whether we can develop a sense that beings with quite different evolutionary histories, beings who may look far different from us, even "monstrous," may, nevertheless, be worthy of friendship and reverence, brotherhood and trust. We have far to go; while there is every sign that the human community is moving in this direction, the question is, are we moving fast enough? The most likely contact with extraterrestrial intelligence is with a society far more advanced than we (Chapter 31). But we will not at any time in the foreseeable future be in the position of the American Indians or the Vietnamese – colonial barbarity practiced on us by a technologically more advanced civilization – because of the great spaces between the stars and what I believe is the neutrality or benignness of any civilization that has survived long enough for us to make contact with it. Nor will the situation be the other way around, terrestrial predation on extraterrestrial civilizations – they are too far away from us and we are relatively powerless. Contact with another intelligent species on a planet of some other star – a species biologically far more different from us than dolphins or whales – may help us to cast off our baggage of accumulated jingoisms, from nationalism to human chauvinism. Though the search for extraterrestrial intelligence may take a very long time, we could not do better than to start with a program of rehumanization by making friends with the whales and the dolphins.
25. "Hello, Central Casting? Send Me Twenty Extraterrestrials"
My friend Arthur C. Clarke had a problem. He was writing a major motion picture with Stanley Kubrick of Dr. Strangelove fame. It was to be called Journey Beyond the Stars, and a small crisis in the story development had arisen. Could I have dinner with them at Kubrick's New York penthouse and help adjudicate the dispute? (The film's title, by the way, seemed a little strange to me. As far as I knew, there is no place beyond the stars. A film about such a place would have to be two hours of blank screen – a possible plot only for Andy Warhol. I was sure that was not what Kubrick and Clarke had in mind.)
After a pleasant dinner, the crisis emerged as follows: About midway through the movie, a manned space vehicle is making a close approach to either Jupiter 5, the innermost satellite of Jupiter, or to Iapetus, one of the middle-sized sat
ellites of Saturn. As the spacecraft approaches and the curvature of the satellite is visible on the screen, we become aware that the satellite is not a natural moon. It is an artifact of some immensely powerful, advanced civilization. Suddenly, an aperture appears in the side of the satellite; through it we see – stars. But they are not the stars on the other side of the satellite. They are a portion of the sky from elsewhere. Small drone rockets are fired into the aperture, but contact with them is lost as soon as they pass through. The aperture is a space gate, a way to get from one part of the universe to another without the awkwardness of traversing the intervening distance. The spacecraft plunges through the gate and emerges in the vicinity of another stellar system, with a red giant star blazing in the sky. Orbiting the red giant is a planet, obviously the site of an advanced technological civilization. The spacecraft approaches the planet, makes landfall, and then – what?
Although the human elements were nearing studio production in England, this fairly important plot line – the ending! – had not yet been worked out by the two authors. The spacecraft's crew, or some fraction of it, was to make contact with extraterrestrials. Yes, but how to portray the extraterrestrials? Kubrick favored extraterrestrials not profoundly different from human beings. Kubrick's preference had one distinct advantage, an economic one: He could call up Central Casting and ask for twenty extraterrestrials. With a little makeup, he would have his problem solved. The alternative portrayal of extraterrestrials, whatever it was, was bound to be expensive.
I argued that the number of individually unlikely events in the evolutionary history of Man was so great that nothing like us is ever likely to evolve again anywhere else in the universe. I suggested that any explicit representation of an advanced extraterrestrial being was bound to have at least an element of falseness about it, and that the best solution would be to suggest, rather than explicitly to display, the extraterrestrials.
The film, subsequently titled 2001: A Space Odyssey, opened three years later. At the premiere, I was pleased to see that I had been of some help. As we learn from Jerome Agel's book The Making of Kubrick's "2001" (Signet, 1970), Kubrick experimented during production with many representations of extraterrestrial life, including a pirouetting dancer in black tights with white polka dots. Photographed against a black background, this would have been visually very effective. He finally decided on a surrealistic representation of extraterrestrial intelligence. The movie has played a significant role in expanding the average person's awareness of the cosmic perspective. Many Soviet scientists consider 2001 to be the best American movie they have seen. The extraterrestrial ambiguities did not bother them at all.
During the filming of 2001, Kubrick, who obviously has a grasp for detail, became concerned that extraterrestrial intelligence might be discovered before the $10.5 million film was released, rendering the plot line obsolete, if not erroneous. Lloyd's of London was approached to underwrite an insurance policy protecting against losses should extraterrestrial intelligence be discovered. Lloyd's of London, which insures against the most implausible contingencies, declined to write such a policy. In the mid-1960s there was no search being performed for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the chance of accidentally stumbling on extraterrestrial intelligence in a few years' period was extremely small. Lloyd's of London missed a good bet.
26. The Cosmic Connection
From earliest times, human beings have pondered their place in the universe. They have wondered whether they are in some sense connected with the awesome and immense cosmos in which the Earth is imbedded.
Many thousands of years ago a pseudoscience called astrology was invented. The positions of the planets at the birth of a child were supposed to play a major role in determining his or her future. The planets, moving points of light, were thought, in some mysterious sense, to be gods. In his vanity, Man imagined the universe designed for his benefit and organized for his use.
Perhaps the planets were identified with gods because their motions seemed irregular. The word "planet" is Greek for wanderer. The unpredictable behavior of the gods in many legends may have corresponded well with the apparently unpredictable motions of the planets. The argument may have been: Gods don't follow rules; planets don't follow rules; planets are gods.
When the ancient priestly astrological caste discovered that the motions of the planets were not irregular but predictable, they seem to have kept this information to themselves. No use unnecessarily worrying the populace, undermining religious belief, and eroding the supports of political power. Moreover, the Sun was the source of life. The Moon, through the tides, dominated agriculture – especially in river basins like the Indus, the Nile, the Yangtze, and the Tigris-Euphrates. How reasonable that these lesser lights, the planets, should have a subtler but no less definite influence on human life!
The search for a connection, a hooking-up between people and the universe, has not diminished since the dawn of astrology. The same human needs exist despite the advances of science.
We now know that the planets are worlds more or less like our own. We know that their light and gravity have negligible influence on a newborn babe. We know that there are enormous numbers of other objects – asteroids, comets, pulsars, quasars, exploding galaxies, black holes, and the rest – objects not known to the ancient speculators who invented astrology. The universe is immensely grander than they could have imagined.
Astrology has not attempted to keep pace with the times. Even the calculations of planetary motions and positions performed by most astrologers are usually inaccurate.
No study shows a statistically significant success rate in predicting through their horoscopes the futures or the personality traits of newborn children. There is no field of radio-astrology or X-ray astrology or gamma-ray astrology, taking account of the energetic new astronomical sources discovered in recent years.
Nevertheless, astrology remains immensely popular everywhere. There are at least ten times more astrologers than astronomers. A large number, perhaps a majority, of newspapers in the United States have daily columns on astrology.
Many bright and socially committed young people have more than a passing interest in astrology. It satisfies an almost unspoken need to feel a significance for human beings in a vast and awesome cosmos, to believe that we are in some way hooked up with the universe – an ideal of many drug and religious experiences, the samadhi of some Eastern religions.
The great insights of modern astronomy have shown that, in some senses quite different from those imagined by the earlier astrologers, we are connected up with the universe.
The first scientists and philosophers – Aristotle, for example – imagined that the heavens were made of a different sort of material than the Earth, a special kind of celestial stuff, pure and undefiled. We now know that this is not the case. Pieces of the asteroid belt called meteorites; samples of the Moon returned by Apollo astronauts and Soviet unmanned spacecraft; the solar wind, which expands outward past our planet from the Sun; and the cosmic rays, which are probably generated from exploding stars and their remnants – all show the presence of the same atoms we know here on Earth. Astronomical spectroscopy is able to determine the chemical composition of collections of stars billions of light-years away. The entire universe is made of familiar stuff. The same atoms and molecules occur at enormous distances from Earth as occur here within our Solar System.
These studies have yielded a remarkable conclusion. Not only is the universe made everywhere of the same atoms, but the atoms, roughly speaking, are present everywhere in approximately the same proportions.
Almost all the stuff of the stars and the interstellar matter between the stars is hydrogen and helium, the two simplest atoms. All other atoms are impurities, trace constituents. This is also true for the massive outer planets of our Solar System, like Jupiter. But it is not true for the comparatively tiny hunks of rock and metal in the inner part of the Solar System, like our planet Earth. This is because the small terrestrial p
lanets have gravities too weak to hold their original hydrogen and helium atmospheres, which have slowly leaked away to space.
The next most abundant atoms in the universe turn out to be oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and neon. These are atoms everyone has heard of. Why are the cosmically most abundant elements those that are reasonably common on Earth – rather than, say, yttrium or praseodymium?
The theory of the evolution of stars is sufficiently advanced that astronomers are able to understand the various kinds of stars and their relations – how a star is born from the interstellar gas and dust, how it shines and evolves by thermonuclear reactions in its hot interior, and how it dies. These thermonuclear reactions are of the same sort as the reactions that underlie thermonuclear weapons (hydrogen bombs): The conversion of four atoms of hydrogen into one of helium.
But in the later stages of stellar evolution, higher temperatures are reached in the insides of stars, and elements heavier than helium are generated by thermonuclear processes. Nuclear astrophysics indicates that the most abundant atoms produced in such hot red giant stars are precisely the most abundant atoms on Earth and elsewhere in the universe. The heavy atoms generated in the insides of red giants are spewed out into the interstellar medium, by slow leakage from the star's atmosphere like our own solar wind, or by mighty stellar explosions, some of which can make a star a billion times brighter than our Sun.
