Communication and Development

Communication and Development

On another planet, with a different sequence of random processes to make hereditary diversity and a different environment to select particular combinations of genes, the chances of finding beings who are physically very similar to us is, I believe, near zero. The chances of finding another form of intelligence is not.

Their brains may have been evolved from the inside out They may have switching elements analogous to our neurons. But the neurons may be very different; perhaps superconductors that work at very low temperatures rather than organic devices that work at room temperature, in which case their speed of thought will be 10(7) times faster than ours. Or perhaps the equivalent of neurons elsewhere would not be in direct physical contact but in radio communication so that a single intelligent being could be distributed among many different organisms, or even many different planets, each with a part of the intelligence of the whole, each contributing by radio to an intelligence much greater than itself.

In some sense such a radio integration of separate individuals is already beginning to happen on the planet Earth. There may be planets where the intelligent beings have about 19 (14) neural connections, as we do. But there may be places where the number is 10(24) or 10(34). I wonder what they would know. Because we inhabit the same universe as they, we and they must share some substantial information in common. If we could make contact, there is much in their brains that would be of great interest to ours. But the opposite is also true. I think extraterrestrial intelligence – even beings substantially further evolved than we – will be interested in us, in what we know, how we think, what our brains are like, the course of our evolution, the prospects for our future.

If there are intelligent beings on the planets of fairly nearby stars, could they know about us? Image : Elena

If there are intelligent beings on the planets of fairly nearby stars, could they know about us? Might they somehow have an inkling of the long evolutionary progression from genes to brains to libraries that has occurred on the obscure planet Earth? If the extraterrestrials stay at home, there are at least two ways in which they might find out about us.

One way would be to listen with large radio telescopes. For billions of years they would have heard only weak and intermittent radio static caused by lighting and the trapped electrons and protons whistling within the Earth’s magnetic field. Then, less than a century ago, the radio waves leaving the Earth would become stronger, louder, less like noise and more like signals. The inhabitants of Earth had finally stumbled upon radio communication. Today there is a bast international radio, television, radar communications traffic. At some radio frequencies the Earth has become the brightest objet, the most powerful radio source, in the solar system – brighter than Jupiter, brighter than the Sun.

An extraterrestrial civilization monitoring the radio emission from Earth and receiving such signals could not fail to conclude that something interesting had been happening here lately.