Nature of Our Civilization

Nature of Our Civilization

We would discover the nature of other civilizations. There would be many of them, each composed of organisms astonishingly different from anything on this planet. They would view the universe somewhat differently. They would have different arts and social functions. They would be interested in things we never thought of. By comparing our knowledge with theirs, we would grow immeasurably. And with our newly acquired information sorted into a computer memory, we would be able to see which sort of civilization lived where in the Galaxy.

Imagine a huge galactic computer, a repository, more or less up-to-date, of information on the nature and activities of all the civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy, a great library of life in the Cosmos. Perhamps among the contents of the Encyclopaedoa Galactica will be a set of summaries of such civilizations, the information enigmatic, tantalizing, evocative – even after we succeed in translating it.

Eventually, taking as much time as we wished, we would decide to reply. We would transmit some information about ourselves – just the basic at first – as the start of a long interstellar dialogue which we would begin but which, because of the vast distances of interstellar space and the finite velocity of light, would be continued by our remote descendants. And someday, on a planet of some far distant star, a being very different from any of us would request a printout from the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Galactica and acquire a little information about the newest society to join the community of galactic civilizations.

Nature of our Civilization. Photograph by Elena

Hypotetical computer summaries of two advanced civilizations from the Encyclopaedia Galactica (By Jon Lomberg and Carl Sagan):

Civilization Type: 1,8 L

Society Code 2A11 “We Who Survived”. Star F0V, specturm variable r = 9,717 kpc,

Planet : Sixth, a = 2,4 x 10(13)cm Extraplanetary colonies: None

Source civilization neutrino channel

Local Group polylogue

Biology metal-chelated organic semiconductors, types various

Cryogenic superconducting electrovores with neutron crystal dense packing and modular starminers; polytaxic various Genomes nonredunant bits/mean genome probability of survival 99%.

Polytaxic, monochromatic, no genetic prosthesis technology exponentiating, approaching asymptotic limit. Culture: global, nongregarious, polyspecific (2 genera, 41 species), atithmetic poetry. Received first galactic nestled code.

DNS Only Knows

DNS Only Knows

Eating a pumpkin is an immensely complicated process. In fact, if I had to synthesize my own enzymes, if I consciously had to remember and direct all the chemical steps required to get energy out of food, I would probably starve. But even bacteria do anaerobic glycolysis, which is why pumpkin rot: lunchtime for the microbes. They and we and all creatures in between possess many similar genetic instructions. Our separate gene libraries have many pages in common, another reminder of our common evolutionary heritage. Our technology can duplicate only a tiny fraction of the intricate biochemistry that our bodies effortlessly perform: we have only just begun to study these processes. Evolution, however, has had billions of years of practice. DNA knows.

But suppose what you had to do was so complicated that even several millions bits was insufficient. Suppose the environment was changing so fast that the precoded genetic encyclopaedia, which served perfectly well before, was no longer entirely adequate. Then even a gene library of one thousand volumes would not be enough. This is why we have brains.

The language of the brain is not the DNA language of the genes. Rather, what we know is encoded in cells called neurons – microscopic electrochemical switching elements, typically a few hundredths of a millimeter across. Each of us has perhaps a hundred billion neurons, comparable to the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. Many neurons have thousands of connections with their neighbors. There are something like a hundred trillion (10(14), such connections in the human cerebral cortex.

An Old Martian Castle. We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. (Quotations from Meg Jorgensen). Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

A thought is made of hundreds of electrochemical impulses. If we were shrunk to the level of the neurons, we might witness elaborate, intricate, evanescent patterns. One might be the spark of a memory of the smell of lilacs on a country road in childhood. Another might be part of an anxious all-points bulletin: “Where did I leave the keys?”

There are many valleys in the mountains of the mind, convolutions that greatly increase the surface area available in the cerebral cortex for information storage in a skull of limited size. The neurochemistry of the brain is astonishingly busy, the circuitry of a machine more wonderful than any devised by humans. But there is no evidence that its functioning is due to anything more than the 19(14) neural connections that build an elegant architecture of consciousness.

Day and Night of Brahma

Day and Night of Brahma

There is the deep and appealing notion that the universe is but the dream of the god who, after a hundred Brahma years, dissolves himself into a dreamless sleep. The universe dissolves with him – until, after another Brahma century, he stirs, recomposes himself and begins again to dream the great cosmic dream. Meanwhile, elsewhere, there are an infinite number of other universes, each with its own god dreaming the cosmic dream.

But what are Brahma years?

Every human culture rejoices in the fact that there are cycles in nature. But how, it was thought, could such cycles come about unless the gods willed them? And if there are cycles in the years of humans, might there not be cycles in the aeons of the gods?

The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicates to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales off.

Do we live in a universe in which there is an infinite set of cycles? (Quotations from Megan Jorgensen). Image: Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

The dates on Mayan inscriptions also range deep into the past and occasionally far into the future. One inscription refers to a time more than a million years ago and another perhaps refers to events of 400 million years ago, although this is in some dispute among Mayan scholars. The events memorialized may be mythical, but the time scales are prodigious. A millennium before Europeans were willing to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the world was a few thousand years old, the Mayans were thinking of millions, and the Indians of billions years.

In fact, it is very likely, the universe has been expanding since the Big Bang, but it is by no means clear that it will continue to expand forever. The expansion may gradually slow, stop and reverse itself. If there is less than a certain critical amount of matter in the universe, the gravitation of the receding galaxies will be insufficient to stop the expansion, and the universe will run away forever. But if there is more matter than we can see – hidden away in black holes, say, or in hot but invisible gas between the galaxies – then the universe will hold together gravitationally and partake of an Indian succession of cycles, expansion followed by contraction, universe upon universe, Cosmos without end. If we live in such an oscillating universe, then the Big Bang is not the creation of the Cosmos but merely the end of the previous cycle, the destruction of the last incarnation of the Cosmos.

An Old Civilization

An Old Civilization

What does it mean for a civilization to be a million years old?

We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilization is a few hundred years old, scientific ideas of a modern cast a few thousand, civilization in general a few tens of thousands of years; human beings evolved on this planet only a few million years ago. At anything like our present rate of technical progress, an advanced civilization millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bush baby a macaque.Would we even recognize its presence? Would a society a million years in advance of us be interested in colonization or interstellar spaceflight? People have a finite lifespan for a reason. Enormous progress in the biological and medical sciences might uncover that reason and lead to suitable remedies. Could it be that we are so interested in spaceflight because it is a way of perpetuating ourselves beyond our own lifetimes? Might a civilization composed of essentially immortal beings consider interstellar exploration fundamentally childish? It may be that we have not been visited because the stars are strewn abundantly in the expanse of space, so that before a nearby civilization arrives, it has altered its exploratory motivations or evolved into forms indetectable to us.

A standard motif in science fiction an UFO literature assumes extraterrestrials roughly as capable as we. Perhaps they have a different sort of spaceship or ray gun, but in battle – and science fiction loves to portray battles between civilizations – they and we are rather evenly matched. In fact, there is almost no chance that tow galactic civilizations will interact at the same level.

We will know what else is possible, when they show up high in the skies… Image: © Elena

In any confrontation, one will always utterly dominate the other. A million years is a great many. If an advanced civilization were to arrive in our solar system, there would be nothing whatever we could do about it. Their science and technology would be far beyond ours. It is pointless to worry about the possible malevolent intentions of an advanced civilization with whom we might make contact. It is more likely that the mere fact they have survived so long means they have learned to live with themselves and others. Perhaps our fears about extraterrestrial contact are merely a projection of our own backwardness, an expression of our guilty conscience about our past history: the ravages that have been visited on civilizations only slightly more backward than we. We remember Columbus and the Arawaks, Cortés and the Aztecs, even the fate of the Tlingit in the generations after La Pérouse. We remember and we worry.

But if an interstellar armada appears in our skies, I predict we will be very accommodating: A very different kind of contact is much more likely – the case we have already discussed in which we receive a rich, complex message, probably by radio, from another civilization space, but do not make, at least for a while, physical contact with them. In this case there is no way for the transmitting civilization to know whether we have received the message. If we find the contents offensive or frightening, we are not obliged to reply. But if the message contains valuable information, the consequences for our own civilization will be stunning – insights on alien science and technology, art, music, politics, ethics, philosophy and religion, and most of all, a profound deprovincialization of the human condition.

Looking Back Into Time

Looking Back Into Time

Do we live in a universe that expands forever or in one in which there is an infinite set of cycles? There are ways to find out: by making an accurate census of the total amount of matter in the universe, or by seeing to the edge of the Cosmos.

Radiotelescopes can detect very faint, very distant objects. As we look deep into space we also look far back into time. The nearest quasar is perhaps half a billion light-years away. The farthest known to us may be ten or twelve or more billions. But if we see an object twelve billion light-years away, we are seeing it as it was twelve billion years ago in time. By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang.

The Very Large Array (VLA) is a collection of twenty-seven separate radio telescopes in a remote region of New Mexico. It is a phased array, the individual telescopes electronically connected, as if it were a single telescope of the same size as its remotest elements, as if it were a radio telescope tens of kilometres across. The VLA is able to resolve or discriminate fine detail in the radio regions of the spectrum comparable to what the largest ground-based telescopes can do in the optical region of the spectrum.

Some matter, particularly the matter in the stars, glows in visible light and is easy to see. Some hearts never glow. (Quotations from Meg Jorgenson). Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Sometimes such radio telescopes are connected with telescopes on the other side of the Earth, forming a baseline comparable to the Earth’s diameter – in a certain sense, a telescope as large as the planet. In the future we may have telescopes in the Earth’s orbit, around toward the other side of the Sun, in effect a radio telescope as large as the inner solar system. Such telescopes may reveal the internal structure and nature of quasars.

Perhaps a quasar standard candle will be found, and the distances to the quasars determined independent of their red shifts. By understanding the structure and the red shift of the most distant quasars it may be possible to see whether the expansion of the universe was faster billions of years ago, whether the expansion is slowing don, whether the universe will one day collapse.

Modern radio telescopes are exquisitely sensitive; a distant quasar is so faint that its detected radiation amounts perhaps to a quadrillionth of a watt. The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground. In detecting the cosmic background radiation, in counting quasars, in searching for intelligent signals from space, radio astronomers are dealing with amounts of energy that are barely there at all.