Signs of Intelligent Life

Signs of Intelligent Life

Intelligent Beings on the Earth and in the Universe.

Like organisms, machines also have their evolutions. The rocket began, like the gunpowder that first powered it, in China, where it was used for ceremonial and aesthetic purposes. Imported to Europe around the fourteenth century, it was applied to warfare, discussed in the late nineteenth century as a means of transportation to the planet by the Russian schoolteacher Konstantin Tsiolkosky , and first developed seriously for high altitude flight by the American scientist Robert Goddard. The German V-2 military rocket of World War II employed virtually all of Goddard’s innovations and culminated in 1948 in the two-stage launching of the V-2/WAC Corporal combination to the then-unprecedented altitude of 400 kilometers. In the 1950’s, engineering advances organized by Sergei Korolov in the Soviet Union and Wernher von Braun in the United States, funded as delivery systems for weapons of mass destruction, led to the first artificial satellites. The pace of progress has continued to be brisk: manned orbital flight; human orbiting; then landing on the moon; and unmanned spacecraft outward bound throughout the solar system. Many other nations have now launched spacecraft, including Britain, France, Canada, Japan, China, the society that invented the rocket in the first place.

Among the early applications of the space rocket, as Tsiolkovsky and Goddard (who as a young man had read Wells and had been stimulated by the lectures of Percival Lowell) delighted in imagining, were an orbiting scientific station to monitor the Earth from a great height and a probe to search for life on Mars. Both these dreams have now been fulfilled.

Intelligence reveals itself through the geometric regularity of its constructions. Image : © Elena

Imagine yourself a visitor from some other and quite alien planet, approaching Earth with no preconception. You view of the planet improves as you come closer, and more and more fine detail stand out. Is the planet inhabited? At what point can you decide? If there are intelligent beings, perhaps they have created engineering structures that have high-contrast components on a scale of a few kilometers, structures detectable when our optical systems and distance from the Earth provide kilometer resolution. Yet at this level of detail the Earth seems utterly barren. There is no sign of life, intelligent or otherwise, in places we call Washington, New York, Moscow, Boston, London, Tokyo, Paris, Beiging, Berlin. If there are intelligent beings on Earth, they have not much modified the landscape into regular geometrical patterns at kilometer resolution.

But when we improve the resolution tenfold, when we begin to see detail as small as a hundred meters across, the situation changes. And intelligent life on Earth first reveals itself through the geometric regularity of its constructions.

An intelligent being: a cat. An average cat is much more intelligent than any human, but cats are deep plunged or immersed inside their inner contemplation to object the Human domination. Image: © Megan Jorgensen.