National Science Foundation Proposal: 

 Where Is Everybody? Inter-Species Communication and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: An Anthropological Approach

(Including: Autopsy of a Proposal: Peer Review, the Ethnographer’s Eye, and a Fundamental Problem)

 By: Lee Drummond, Center for Peripheral Studies

www.peripheralstudies.org )  Submitted December 2001, rejected April 2002

The Stars Like DustWhere is everybody? The theoretical physicist Enrico Fermi posed this question

over fifty years ago, at a time when the scientific community was still reeling from the discoveries of Edwin Hubble and his two hundred-inch telescope. Through that instrument it appeared that the Milky Way galaxy, home to our sun and its planets, contained tens of billions, not tens of thousands, of stars like our sun. More daunting still, many of the “gaseous nebulae” described by earlier astronomers as dense clouds of interstellar gas and dust within the Milky Way revealed themselves through Hubble’s telescope as separate galaxies, impossibly remote and each teeming with an uncountable number of stars. Hence Fermi’s question: With all those stars and, presumably, planets out there, why were the skies, and especially the airways, of Earth not filled with alien craft and alien radio messages? Why, in the saucer frenzy of the immediate postwar years, did the public have to clutch at straws — a smudged photograph here, a Roswell New Mexico incident there — to bolster its new-found paranoia of the alien menace? They should be everywhere. But they aren’t. So where is everybody?

Over the ensuing decades this mystery has only deepened, until it now presents itself as an enigma for scientific and social thought as we enter the new millennium. Up to now the possible existence of extraterrestrial intelligence(s) has been a matter of professional concern only for a small group of physicists and cosmologists (excluding the

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legion of mostly non-professional saucer buffs). Except for episodic interest among a few anthropologists (perhaps launched by the intriguing collection by Magoroh Maruyama and Arthur Harkins eds., Cultures beyond the Earth, 1975), social thinkers (when they were not consciously attempting science fiction) have mostly skirted the issue. The result has been a peculiarly schizoid literature dominated by physical scientists on one hand and novelists on the other, with the “true believers” making up a third, raucous contingent.

In this research proposal I want to suggest that anthropology’s slighting the issue has been a mistake, and that the time to address it systematically and in depth is now. The questions raised in a thorough consideration of the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence are not merely an interesting adjunct to anthropology’s principal theoretical concerns; they are at the heart of our discipline. As we proceed here, I hope to establish that anthropologists do not have to wait on the sidelines for physical scientists to let us know the outcome of the debate; it is rather we who offer an excellent hope of resolving the enigma of extraterrestrial intelligence.  The Procreant Urge of the World

Until quite recently the existence of planets around our sun was thought to be a rare occurrence, caused by an extraordinary event such as the sun’s near-collision with a passing star. It now appears, however, that planets are routine products of stellar evolution, coalescing along with the embryonic star from a collapsing accretion disk of gas and debris. The billions of stars in our galaxy probably have billions of planets circling them — a few of which have recently been identified by the telescope that bears Hubble’s name.

On a considerable number of those billions of planets, conditions may be favorable to the emergence of carbon-and-water based life forms. In the half-century since Fermi posed his question, biologists and paleontologists have been as active as cosmologists in populating the universe, and in the process demonstrating that the old anti-Copernican, anti-Darwinian prejudices are untenable. If the cosmos teems with stars and their planets, it also teems with the building blocks of life and, the conclusion seems inescapable, with life itself. Complex organic molecules, including chlorophyll and even amino acids, have been identified in interstellar gas clouds and in asteroids and planetary debris that land on Earth as meteorites. Those meteorites may even be responsible for the appearance of life on our planet some three-plus billion years ago, when Earth’s fiery crust was just beginning to cool. Without some form of interstellar “seeding” process, biologists seem at a loss to account for the fact that DNA-based organisms, with their elaborate retinue of amino acids and proteins, were present at the earliest possible moment: as soon as the planet began to be habitable, life immediately established itself. We, or our earliest ancestors, may indeed be hitchhikers in the galaxy.

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Rather than a novelty, a unique product of divine creation, it now appears that life may be commonplace in our galaxy, that it is irrepressible and inevitable wherever there is the slightest chance for it to gain a foothold. And yet the heavens are silent. The skies of Earth are not filled with saucers: the radio telescopes, despite thousands of hours of observation, have not identified a clear interstellar message. So, “Where is everybody?”, we must ask again, as what has come to be known as The Great Silence becomes deafening. Their absence makes it all too easy to take the next treacherous step: the easy refuge of our prideful human egos is to assert that there is something very special about our species, something that accounts for the fact that, try as we might with our newfound technology, we cannot detect a ghost of a clue of an extraterrestrial intelligence. Earth may not be the center of the universe, nor the solitary cradle of life in a barren cosmos, but, we like to tell ourselves, humanity does possess a unique quality that sets us apart from other life forms. Call it consciousness, mind, spirit, or even soul — it is that spark of self-awareness and self-determination that distinguishes us from all other animal species on earth and, supposedly, throughout the galaxy. How Things Stand Now, and Where Anthropology Enters the Picture

Faced with that silent sky and the ingrained xenophobia of the American public, the few renegade astronomers and physicists (Carl Sagan, Frank Drake, Philip Morrison) who inspired and organized SETI have made remarkable advances. From the first radio telescope search for an extraterrestrial signal — Drake’s 1960 Project Ozma — until today, researchers have begged, borrowed, and variously cobbled together enough telescope time to carry out both full sky and individual star searches of significant portions of the galaxy (a useful recent summary is found in Scientific American July 2000). While extremely modest in relation to what would be possible with substantial regular funding, SETI research to date has progressed to the point that its lack of results are worrisome even to scientists dedicated to the endeavor. One suspects Fermi’s question has begun to haunt them.

Still, it is hard to argue with their rationale for continuing: Even though the chances of detecting an alien signal seem to be diminishing, the importance of a single authenticated result would be so enormous that the work must continue. If we stop listening, we’ll never know. If we find something, humanity will be forever transformed.

True enough, but recent work in several fields adds to the mounting doubts. Astronomers have now got passable data on enough extrasolar planets (about seventy to date) to know that planetary systems come in an unexpected variety. Huge gas giants, much larger than Jupiter, circle close in to their suns or, alternatively, describe highly elliptical orbits. In other systems which include a companion star planets are regularly fried and irradiated by one or other of the binary pair.

Another looming problem for the SETI camp is that the field of candidate stars has been greatly reduced. Main sequence stars anywhere in the galaxy cannot be

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considered equally as potential life-sustaining planetary systems. Stars appreciably nearer the galactic center than the solar system contain such a high proportion of heavy elements (because they are older and made of more recycled stellar material) that formation of Earth-like planets is improbable. Conversely, stars more distant from the center contain too few heavy elements to permit any but gaseous planets to form. The solar system happens to lie within quite a narrow “galactic habitable zone,” a torus-shaped region roughly mid-way out from the center that includes only a fraction (about twenty per cent) of the total population of stars (See G. Gonzalez et al, “Refuges for Life in a Hostile Univese,” in Scientific American October 2001; and Virginia Trimble, “Galactic Chemical Evolution: Implications for the Existence of Habitable Planets,” in Extraterrestrials: Where Are They?, 1995). Within the solar system itself a comparable “circumstellar habitable zone” (or “Goldilocks zone”) includes only Earth and Mars; planets nearer or further away lack the bare essentials for organic molecules to produce life. This restriction presumably applies to extrasolar planetary systems, further reducing the odds for life-sustaining planets.

If recent work describes a less hospitable galaxy and solar system, it also documents a less hospitable Earth. Paleontologists have now identified several extinction events that have interrupted and threatened biological evolution. Multicellular life forms, among them sapient species, have a limited time to evolve, develop civilizations, and broadcast their existence to the heavens before the next cometary impact or tectonic shift wipes them out. On Earth, even with some three-plus billion years of a sustained biological presence, civilization arose only six or seven thousand years ago — and the Sumerians’ clay tablets did not broadcast a strong signal to Tau Ceti and beyond. For that, radio, television and radar were required — all developments of the past century and less. A cometary impact at the end of the 19th century would have silenced Earth’s radio space for another eon. Surely planets in extrasolar systems face these same odds, and doubtlessly some or even most are not as fortunate as Earth in nourishing life through the worst cataclysms. Only in the past couple of decades have we come to the sobering realization that the heavens may bring an instant Armageddon as well as a welcoming beacon from a galactic civilization. As we now find ourselves casting an anxious eye to those heavens, their silence begins to seem less surprising, and more ominous.

Despite the generally negative cast of recent work, SETI advocates are by no means ready to give up their search. Acknowledging that a significant portion of the sky has been searched, with negative results, they counter that effective interstellar communication requires tremendously high transmission power, huge receiving antennae, and narrowly focused beams. Our planet is obviously not being blasted with such a directional signal (if anybody is out there, they’re not much interested in talking to us), and so our SETI search is necessarily a needle-in-a-haystack quest that has barely scratched the surface. We have to keep trying until we stumble across one wayward signal among perhaps hundreds of thousands of others that are directed elsewhere.

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The SETI research effort, in short, has become a stand-off in the physical sciences community; advocates and critics could go on and on without much being accomplished (short of that literal bolt from the blue in the form of an authenticated message). I suggest this is an opportune time to introduce a fresh perspective to the debate, and from an unexpected quarter: anthropology. With astronomers and physicists in profound disagreement, it is crucial to re-examine the assumptions both sides bring to the SETI debate. When we begin to do that, I believe it is immediately clear that both advocates and skeptics of the program share a number of assumptions that prejudice their discussions. An uncritical acceptance of those assumptions can derail the entire research effort, and before a clear answer to Fermi’s question is obtained.

Anthropology’s potential contribution consists in recognizing from the outset that the problem before us is not exclusively or even primarily one that physical scientists are equipped to answer. In the search for a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence, we have attached far too much importance to its “extraterrestrial” aspect while virtually ignoring the complexities involved in an “intelligence” sending a “message.” Astronomers and physicists are the people to ask about stellar evolution and intragalactic radio transmission, but nothing in their training or job description prepares them to address the problems raised in communicating with another sapient species — the “intelligence” and “message” parts of the puzzle. That has much more to do with anthropology, conceptual ethology, and linguistics; and yet no one to my knowledge has previously suggested those fields be made a central part of the SETI project (rather than the occasional window dressing or tokenism). The research proposed here is intended to begin correcting our up-to-now lopsided approach to Fermi’s question, which, again, is of fundamental importance to humanity.

To date the SETI project has addressed exclusively astronomical and technological issues: How many stars in the galaxy might have planetary systems? How many of those might contain earth-like planets? What sort of signal, in terms of its strength, frequency, and directionality, might we listen for, or even send? While necessary, all these issues side-step the critical problem: they deal with the means of receiving and sending messages, and leave unexamined the nature of messages themselves and of the sociocultural context for generating and interpreting messages. The emphasis is on the how, rather than the what and why of communication. While the how-emphasis is quite sufficient when it comes to, say, reading the spectral emission bands of a star, it does not carry over into the what- and why-emphases necessarily at work when one sapient species attempts to communicate with another. On that score there is a pressing need for an anthropological and ethological orientation. That orientation really should have preceded and guided the technological and astronomical concerns. Now that SETI has reached an impasse, we need belatedly to turn to it, and frame the search in terms of one overarching question: What does it take to communicate with another species?

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Let me interject here that I quite probably would not be making this proposal had I found some willingness among physical scientists involved in SETI to consider the anthropological aspects of their search. As I delved into their literature, however, I was struck by the narrow anthropocentrism these pioneers displayed regarding the very object of their study. Without a deep-seated anthropological appreciation for the tremendous cultural diversity of our own species, the founders of SETI blithely assume that there are beings pretty much like us out there, with technological civilizations so similar to ours that they, too, are utilizing a (radio telescope) technology we’ve had for less than fifty years to broadcast messages that are much like our binary code or mathematical formulae. My suggestion — call it an hypothesis if you like — is that the heavens’ silence owes more to the selective listening (or, frankly, deafness) of the SETI project than it does to their inherent lifelessness.

Consider, for example, a remarkable comment made by Frank Drake during an interview with David Swift, whose 1990 book, SETI Pioneers: Scientists Talk about Their Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, chronicles the project’s beginnings. Swift asks, “What might ETI [an extraterrestrial intelligence] be like?” And Drake responds, “They won’t be too much different from us. What I usually say, when people ask me that question, is that a large fraction will have such an anatomy that if you saw them from a distance of a hundred yards in the twilight you might think they were human.” I was struck dumb when I encountered this passage, revealing that the individual responsible for launching SETI as a research enterprise fully expected to hear from beings who were dead-ringers for the spacemen plastered over the covers of the National Enquirer. We may not be alone in the universe, but, don’t worry, even way out there on Tau Ceti and beyond they’re pretty much like folks.

Carl Sagan, more cerebral and more of a public figure than Drake, betrays much the same anthropocentrism. The “calling card” assembled for Voyager — images of humans, star maps, musical selections — would be unintelligible and simply inaccessible (without precisely the right technology for decoding) had the space probe landed in an African or Asian village, never mind journeying to the stars. And in Sagan’s visionary work, Pale Blue Dot: The Human Future in Space, he envisions a distant future of galactic exploration and settlement in which the actors remain “human” while transforming (“terraforming”) extrasolar planets and whole star systems. He does not stop to consider that “we” would continue to evolve at a pace at least matching the relatively short time scale that has seen “us” develop from earlier hominid species. Forty thousand years from now, in a star system far, far away, won’t our formerly human descendants differ fundamentally from us? And won’t they possess a technology that makes our hope of communicating with radio telescopes analogous to 19th century proposals to send smoke signals to Martians who were out boating on their canals?

Given the serious defects in the principles (or assumptions) of the SETI project, it is necessary to put the horse back before the cart. And then try to communicate with it!

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Our attempts to communicate with an extraterrestrial intelligence need to be framed within the more general project of communicating with other terrestrial species endowed with considerable intelligences themselves. There is such a diversity of communicative facilities within even mammals and birds that producing reliable observations for those cases should materially advance the vastly more general question of extraterrestrial communicative systems.

Our problems to date have arisen at least in part because we have grandly assayed the SETI project without stopping to ponder that our knowledge of other terrestrial species’ communicative systems has been only recently and tentatively acquired. Our track record of research there has not been one to encourage us to reach for the stars. Take elephants, for example. Hard to miss, the subject of traveler’s fascinated study for more than a century, the subject of professional zoological study for decades. Yet it is only in the past fifteen years that elephants’ infrasonic signals have been detected and analyzed by field ethologists — an entire communicative system functioning all around previous trained researchers, without their recognizing it (See, for example, Cynthia Moss’s Elephant Memories: 13 Years in the Life of an Elephant Family, 2000). Imagine how much more difficult it would have been to identify elephants’ infrasonic communication if researchers hadn’t been right there with them, and if those researchers hadn’t resembled their long-lived, large-brained mammalian subjects. Suppose we possessed radio technology but hadn’t yet explored the African continent. We might have wanted to survey the continent for the presence of intelligent life, and employed our technology to search for a signal. How would we have proceeded? Even assuming we had extended our survey to sound waves, maybe with “microphone in the sky” survey equipment, and thus succeeded in receiving elephant infrasonic transmissions, whatever would we have made of those signals? Would we have identified them as “signals” at all? As “intelligent”? Outline of the Research Project

Goals. The proposed research is a comparative ethnographic study of diverse on-going efforts to communicate with other, terrestrial species. The findings of that ethnographic study will then feed into a cultural analysis of efforts to communicate with extraterrestrial species, including the general background of images of the Alien in American culture. This two-part endeavor brings what I believe to be the correct perspective to discussions of inter-species communication, of which the SETI project is part (although its practitioners do not acknowledge that fact). The question posed earlier informs the entire research project, from ethnographic study to cultural analytic theorizing: What does it take to communicate with another species? I claim that this question is of supreme importance to the development of several branches of the humanities and the sciences: anthropology and ethology, to be sure, but also linguistics, philosophy, and those aspects of astronomy and physics concerned with SETI. My claim

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is based on a strong hunch, which the proposed research may or may not prove true, that a searching inquiry into SETI and inter-species communication leads directly into fundamental questions regarding the nature of communication itself.

The integrative phase of the project, in which the ethnographic studies will be applied to a cultural analysis of images of aliens and alien civilization in American society, should begin to answer those fundamental questions. The general argument here is that “communication” and the composition and interpretation of a “signal” that comprises communication are highly complex processes. Understanding those processes involves a great deal more than keeping our eyes peeled to the printout of radio telescopes; it requires delving into questions of identity: species, cultural, and even ethnic. The Alien is a fixture of American/global culture that asserts itself far beyond the tiny community of SETI and animal-language researchers; it is a springboard and index into Americans’ deeply-held beliefs about themselves and their place in the world, about how persons differ from culture to culture, about how humans differ from animals and machines. Broadening the discussion in this integrative phase of the project will be both theoretically necessary and socially productive: the oft-heard lament is that anthropology does not contribute much to public intellectual forums; the results of the proposed project should do just that.

Ethnographic Studies. It is important to note at the outset that the proposed research lays absolutely no claim to contributing to ethological studies of animal communication. Apart from quite extensive general reading, I have no professional competence in ethology, and particularly in the field work regimen required by that science. I will add nothing to our growing knowledge of how bats, elephants, dolphins, whales, ravens, and chimpanzees communicate. What I propose to do is study the studiers, that is, to conduct ethnographic interviews and observations with persons deeply involved in animal communications studies. From those interviews and observations I hope to develop a broad, fairly comprehensive account of how creative scientists and others (1) identify the existence of communicative activity — signal transmission — within an animal species; (2) reach some conclusions regarding the organization and level of complexity of that communicative activity; (3) identify instances (if such exist) in which signal transmission occurs across, rather than within, a species boundary separating two animal species; (4) identify instances (if such exist) in which signal transmission occurs between the researcher’s animal subjects and the researcher or other humans; and (5) summarize their investigations in general terms that bear on the nature and possibility of inter-species communication. I am particularly intrigued by the prospect of exploring with ethnographic subjects their thoughts on SETI — in my view, these are the people we should be hearing from at least as often as we hear from the astronomers and physicists.

The general format for the ethnographic studies, therefore, is to develop an account or narrative of particular individuals whose life’s work involves them in the

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phenomenon of animal communication. The species named above, from bat through chimpanzee, are a sufficiently representative sample. Even more important, each of those species has attracted a great deal of attention from several prominent researchers and from lay students. While my interviews will focus mainly on professional researchers, I do intend to explore inter-species relationships that lie well outside the discipline of ethology.

Let me provide two examples here. For some time I have been fascinated by the whale handlers or wranglers at San Diego’s Sea World, particularly by those daring souls who hitch a ride on Shamu’s back, plummet with him to the bottom of his tank, then erupt from the water twenty feet in the air, perched on the whale’s snout. That is some feat, and while the surfer dudes who accomplish it don’t go on about sygtagmatic chains in Orca infrasonic transmissions, they certainly know a thing or two about communicating with those large, and truly dangerous beasts. Their stories need telling and, more than that, interpreting in the context of a general discussion of inter-species communication. A second example is that assortment of persons (far outnumbering professional ethologists) who undertake interactions/communications with dolphins and whales. I don’t intend to look closely at the cult-like aspects of this phenomenon (the whale-huggers), only to concentrate on individuals (such as Jim Nollman, whose The Charged Border is a highly intelligent account of non-traditional inter-species communicative strategies) who meld ethology and artistic creativity in a novel fashion.

Individual ethnographic studies will each take four to eight weeks, generally with a briefer follow-up visit during the final phase of the project. The research protocol will be for me to attach myself to an on-going project on animal communication, to do in-depth interviews with project staff, and to record my observations on the interactions among staff and their animal subjects. The interviews will be structured around the five-part series of questions identified above. Those inquiries will often assume a chronological form: What were your earliest results that indicated the existence of a communicative system for species X? How did you proceed to build early observations into generalizable findings, to go from events to regularities or rules? Can you relate experiences or anecdotes that demonstrate specific cases of inter-species communication? What implications are you prepared to draw at this stage of your research for the general study of animal communication systems? Finally, what are your thoughts about SETI, having yourself been engaged in inter-species communication for much of your career?

Although candidates for the set of ethnographic studies may change with circumstances, my initial aim is to contact the following persons/projects.

(1) Cynthia Moss, who has done pioneering and highly detailed work on both elephant and bat communication (See, in addition to earlier citation, Moss and Shettleworth, eds., Neuroethological Studies of Cognitive and Perceptual Processes, 1996). Having worked with such diverse species, I believe Moss should possess valuable insights into the general topic of inter-species communication.

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(2) Bernd Heinrich, whose years of study on raven communication and intelligence (see in particular Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds, 1999) make him an ideal ethnographic source. His work should be particularly appropriate, because it makes explicit points regarding a communicative system between ravens and predators, including humans, and relates his findings to the raven’s characterization in Amerindian myth and European folklore.

(3) Roger Fouts and the Washoe (or Washoe colony) project (see Next of Kin: My Conversations with Chimpanzees, 1998). Of the several well-known studies of primate communication, the Washoe project stands out as the longest sustained effort. Human researchers and chimpanzee subjects have had decades to evolve inter-species relationships, in the course of which a rich body of narrative-anecdotal material has been generated that beckons the ethnographer.

(4) Jim Nollman and Paul Gilman and whale-dolphin communication. Nollman’s work referenced above is well-known; he has combined a zoologist’s knowledge of cetaceans with an unusual quest to communicate with them through music. The composer Paul Gilman is newer to the field, but as an established professional musician with much experience in cross-cultural musical genres, his recent work with cetaceans is promising. Both Nollman and Gilman provide a useful balance to the more traditional academic projects on animal communication, such as Moss’s.

(5) Whale wranglers at Sea World. Mentioned above, these individuals should furnish a much-needed new perspective on inter-species communication, one based less on formal signals at a distance and more on intimate contact and interaction.

(6) Vincent Janik, marine biologist whose dolphin communication research (see, for example, “Whistle Matching in Wild Bottlenose Dolphins,” Science 289: 1355-1357) argues for dolphin’s superior capacity for vocal learning over other species, including primates. Janik’s rigorous approach to the subject will also provide a needed counterweight to the whale wranglers and serenaders mentioned above.

(7) Shirley Strum, whose extensive field studies of baboons (see, for example, Almost Human: A Journey into the World of Baboons) complements the captivity-based Washoe project. Strum’s argument that the structure of baboon social life on the open savanna allies them with early hominids despite their evolutionary distance is intriguing, particularly because she supports that argument with accounts of pronounced ambivalence in baboon sociality.

My aim is first to produce reasonably coherent individual accounts of these several projects, accounts that pull together the ethnographic materials generated during my research. I then hope to use the diverse perspectives on the subject in a general survey of the nature and possibilities of inter-species communication. As part of that general survey, I intend to situate SETI as an extreme instance of the other, accessible projects.

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Cultural Analysis. My strong suit, such as it is, is the cultural analysis of diverse cultural productions: myth, ritual, sporting events, movies, concepts of “family”, “ethnicity,” and “race”, emblematic machines (cars, guns, spaceships). Throughout my various works on these topics, I have sought to sketch an outline of a theory of culture, a theory that situates a shifting and rather evanescent “humanity” within a semiotic space or manifold. (See Chapter 3, “A Theory of Culture as Semiospace,” in American Dreamtime, and the long theoretical essay, “Culture, Mind, and Physical Reality: An Anthropological Essay). I visualize SETI and the encompassing topic of inter-species communication as aspects of a cultural system in which people are forever defining and redefining themselves in relation to what they are not: animals, machines, deities, and, here, a little of all three: extraterrestrials. I believe the ethnographic studies and their synopsis are interesting and worthwhile in themselves. Their true value, however, is their potential to contribute to an anthropological theory of culture, to a science of humanity. That is the final part of the project. I hope to bring the ethnographic studies to bear on inquiries into explicitly fictional treatments of aliens, such as movies. We’re fascinated by aliens, by the animate, intelligent not-us, whether those are found in movies, in all those Discovery Channel wildlife documentaries, on in our daily doings with the animals in our lives.

The ethnographic accounts and the cultural analysis are then meant to inform each other: how we perceive and communicate with animals is intimately bound up with our speculations about how we might communicate with extra-terrestrial species. Interestingly, and perhaps as a vindication of the proposed research, that cross-fertilization is much in evidence in American culture’s most important monument to SETI: Steven Spielberg’s classic, E. T. That movie incorporated, often in highly synthesized versions, the calls and cries of a number of animal species — it is something of an acoustic bestiary. E. T.’s vibrant personality, which captured the imagination of the nation, owes much to its voice, and that voice derives its cathectic power from its animal sources. In emoting over E. T., we are returning to our primal concern with our relations with animals.

Schedule of Research. The project is planned to extend over twenty-four months. Individual ethnographic studies will be conducted during the first eighteen months, including necessary follow-up studies. As outlined above, each ethnographic study, consisting of sets of interviews and observations, will occupy four to eight weeks. The final six months of the project will be occupied in pulling together the materials into written conclusions. The four to eight week field studies will be interspersed with comparable periods away from the field spent processing field notes, transcribing tapes, and refining the research protocol. 

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 Principal Investigator’s Selected Publications Culture, Mind, and Physical Reality: An Anthropological Essay.  Last Undiscovered Tribe Exposed. Anthropology News. The Human Race. Anthropology News. Where Is Everybody? Anthropology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Anthropology News. American Dreamtime: A Cultural Analysis of Popular Movies, and Their Implications for a Science of Humanity.  The Logic of Things That Just Happen. Anthropology News. Are There Cultures to Communicate Across? An Appraisal of the “Culture” Concept from the Perspective of Anthropological Semiotics. In Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1986. Simon P. X. Battestini, ed. Pp. 214-225. Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press.  

Autopsy of a Proposal:Peer Review, the Ethnographer’s Eye, and a Fundamental Problem

It has become fashionable, if not rather passé, for cultural anthropologists to subject themselves and their discipline to a thorough critique of how they go about cultural analysis, of the implicit assumptions they bring to a situation, of their analytical procedure or methodology, and of theoretical bias that colors their conclusions. While this sort of navel-gazing and self-abuse has become something of an obsession, it is curious that, in my experience, much less attention is given to the actual practices by which anthropological research and writing are evaluated within the discipline. Cultural anthropologists are keen to tout the virtues of ethnography, but reluctant to place under the ethnographic lens the concrete details of just how they go about sanctioning their colleagues’ work, of how they go about constructing a little authoritative discourse of their own. The practices of conducting research and publishing its results, as we all know, are tethered to the sacrosanct institution of peer review: access to research funds and to scholarly publications is controlled by a process in which established workers –

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authorities – in one’s particular subfield or area of inquiry pass anonymous judgment on their fellows’ (their “peers”) proposals and manuscripts.

We should look at the immediate intellectual history or context of this practice in the United States. I would suggest that prior to World War II there existed a vibrant tradition of social thought : figures such as Emerson, Thoreau and Veblen produced masterful works on the nature of our society and culture, and did so without any particular disciplinary or institutional affiliation. Following that golden era has come a rather tarnished period in which a considerable number of individuals, few of whom possessed anything like the acuity or lucidity of our classical thinkers, banded together to stake out specific areas of research which they vaingloriously called the social sciences. In appropriating the term “science,” of course, they hoped to secure something of the legitimacy (and government funding!) enjoyed by the natural sciences (whose usefulness to the powers-that-be had been amply demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki). And so university departments in psychology, sociology, and anthropology were created. To maintain this charade members of those newly minted groups of scholars sought to do what actual living, breathing scientists do: to conduct research that has been sanctioned by other members of the group and to publish their findings in official “refereed” journals.

To some extent subfields of psychology and sociology with a strong quantitative orientation have managed this imposture, although they remain open to the scathing criticism Richard Feynman leveled at them long ago in calling their activities “cargo cult science,” ( the “social scientists” wishing something would make it so). Cultural anthropology, however, because it is inherently an analytical, qualitative practice, has never got very far with a pretense to scientific rigor (although some cultural anthropologists have tried, hoping, indeed, that their wishes — and introductory textbooks — would make it so). This situation has set the stage for a most curious bit of recent intellectual history. Although clearly unsuited for the regime of the physical and so-called social sciences, cultural anthropologists have allowed themselves and their subdiscipline to be subject to a pantomime of what actual scientists do: they acquiesce to (or, all to often, embrace) the institution of peer review of research and publication. It is both cowardly and stupid of them, for that institution presupposes that there exist clear standards or yardsticks by which to evaluate the work of cultural anthropologists, to weed out the bad and nourish the good. But what might those standards be? How might one distinguish, as mathematicians and physicists are generally competent to do, worthwhile from worthless problems and ideas? The pretense is insupportable because cultural anthropology possesses no coherent body of theory and no established research procedure (apart from vague exhortations to “do ethnography”). Even the concept of “culture” itself, which should be the field’s organizing principle, is now held in deep suspicion by many cultural anthropologists. It is high irony that the concept of culture has become an embarrassment for cultural anthropologists. I have presented this argument in more

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detail in my essay, “Culture, Mind, and Physical Reality: An Anthropological Essay,” available at www.peripheralstudies.org , and in other work.

My own research proposal to the National Science Foundation provides a little case study, an ethnographic vignette if you will, of the practice of peer review in cultural anthropology. The proposal, unsurprisingly, was declined. It did not bristle with “hypotheses,” and, the kiss of death, it proposed to tie more-or-less (okay, less) traditional ethnographic research into a wider analytical program focusing on the cultural identity of “Alien” in American society. Way too airy-fairy for the NSF, notwithstanding the proposal’s other flaws. So, with the independent peer reviewers presented with an obviously peripheral proposal from a decidedly peripheral guy, and with them following the canons of an established, scientific discipline, one would expect them to return uniformly unfavorable evaluations. Isn’t that the very spirit and purpose of peer review? To assemble a council of elders who will insure that things proceed in an orderly and constructive fashion? To continue to build, brick-by-brick, the solid edifice of the discipline of, in this case, cultural anthropology? In my case and, I’m confident, in a great many other cases the results were rather perplexing. When the four reviews reached me via email I found – my ethnographer’s eye discerned – that they were all over the board. Two reviewers, obviously appalled by my lack of scientific rigor, rated the proposal “poor.” One reviewer, giving it the benefit of the doubt, rated it “fair.” But then the fourth reviewer, obviously some old softie known as an easy grader, rated the proposal “good.” To translate into terms I’m sure most of you will understand, it’s as though a course assignment was submitted to four different instructors who returned grades of two Ds, one C, and one B (maybe even, to indulge in a little self-flattery, a B+).

What does this little anecdote say to the cultural anthropologist engaged in turning his ethnographer’s eye on his own field? I am afraid it demonstrates that the subfield is altogether lacking in coherence or focus. The shabby pretense of peer review in the absence of any real standards demonstrates, not the validity of particular “well-crafted” research proposals and essays, but the invalidity of the subdiscipline of cultural anthropology itself. Lacking standards and, far worse, genuine imagination and vision, cultural anthropology may very well have drifted into an intellectual backwater while the main current, the turbulent flow of important ideas and concepts, passes it by.

A Fundamental Problem. In my obviously biased view, cultural anthropology is probably headed for the scrap heap of intellectual history. It may survive, and barely survive, as something of an antiquarian curiosity, in much the way that the field of philology, once the vanguard of social thought (when Burckhardt flourished and before his University of Basel colleague, Nietzsche, abandoned the field as a lost cause), withered on the vine. If so, we shouldn’t mourn its passing (though those with professorships will doubtlessly find the process rather unsettling). Let it go gently into that good night.

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But whether cultural anthropology vanishes altogether (like alchemy) or lingers on in a diminished capacity (like philology), cultural anthropologists will largely have dealt themselves out of one of the most profound topics to engage 21 st century thinkers. That topic is the ongoing search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the subject of my rejected NSF proposal. As I suggested in the body of the proposal, a penetrating analysis of that topic involves far more than tweaking the dials on SETI instruments; it involves an inquiry into the very nature of sapience and communication, and into humanity’s present and possibly future place in a sapient universe.

I made the same suggestion some years prior to drafting my ill-fated proposal. In late-1995 the American Anthropological Association’s publication, Anthropology News, announced its 1996-1997 Annual Theme: “The Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable in Anthropology.” That call inspired me to draft a brief essay with the same title given my NSF proposal: “Where Is Everybody? Anthropology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” (available at www.peripheralstudies.org ). That essay was published (it didn’t have to survive a rigorous, months-long period of “peer review”), but seemed to have no discernible impact in the subdiscipline of cultural anthropology (though I did hear from a few self-styled and rather incoherent “futurists”). A few years down the road and considerably longer in the tooth, I thought I’d give it another shot, with the 2001 NSF proposal. We know what happened to that attempt. Now, in early 2011, some fifteen years after the appearance of my Anthropology News essay, cultural anthropology’s involvement in the problem of extraterrestrial intelligence seems even more peripheral than my own decidedly peripheral status in the field.

It is somewhat encouraging that a few anthropologists do find the problem engaging. At the 2005 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association a panel was convened on the topic of “The History of Anthropological Contributions to SETI,” and in 2009 Anthropology News published another of its brief essays, “Encountering the Future: Anthropology and Outer Space,” by D. Valentine, D. Battaglia, and V. A. Olson. The same authors have collaborated with others in a forthcoming journal publication with the intriguing title, “Extreme: Limits and Horizons of the Once and Future Cosmos” (and the cosmos should be as exciting and dramatic as T. H. White’s Camelot). There may well be other scattered efforts along these lines; I am not much of a scholar and my “review of the literature” is never very thorough. But my Internet searches haven’t turned up much (one prominent exception, by a non-anthropologist, is www.sentientdevelopments.com , which contains insightful pieces on transhumanism and SETI). Still, cultural anthropologists have produced nothing comparable in stature or distribution to the works of the late Carl Sagan, John Gribbin, Michio Kaku, Arthur Clarke, and the rash of Discovery and Nature Channel pieces on flying saucers and extraterrestrial intelligence.

The passage of time has only made the topic of extraterrestrial intelligence more pressing, and more oppressive. Within just the past year the newly-launched Kepler

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Space Telescope, having surveyed only a tiny region of the sky, has identified over 1,200 exoplanets (planets orbiting stars other than the sun). Of these over 250 are in the habitable zone of their respective stars, in which liquid water on a planet’s surface would be possible. A number of these exoplanets are Earth or Super-Earth size (up to twice the diameter of Earth). When these preliminary and very partial findings are extrapolated to the entire Milky Way Galaxy and beyond, the numbers are staggering.

Roughly one out of every 37 to one out of every 70 sunlike stars in the sky might harbor an alien Earth, a new study reveals. These findings hint that billions of Earthlike planets might exist in our galaxy, researchers added. These new calculations are based on data from the Kepler space telescope, which in February [2011] wowed the globe by revealing more than 1,200 possible alien worlds, including 68 potentially Earth-size planets. The spacecraft does so by looking for the dimming that occurs when a world transits or moves in front of a star. Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., focused on roughly Earth-size planets within the habitable zones of their stars — that is, orbits where liquid water can exist on the surfaces of those worlds. After the researchers analyzed the four months of data in this initial batch of readings from Kepler, they determined that 1.4 percent to 2.7 percent of all sunlike stars are expected to have Earthlike planets — ones that are between 0.8 and two times Earth's diameter and within the habitable zones of their stars. "This means there are a lot of Earth analogs out there — 2 billion in the Milky Way galaxy," researcher Joseph Catanzarite, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Space.com. "With that large a number, there's a good chance life and maybe even intelligent life might exist on some of those planets. And that's just our galaxy alone — there are 50 billion other galaxies." (www.msnbc.com /Space/ March 22, 2011)

One should consider Fermi’s famous question, “Where is everybody?” in light of these research findings. Fermi posed his question nearly sixty years ago, when there was absolutely no conclusive scientific evidence for the existence of planets beyond our solar system. At the time the prevailing attitude even among astronomers was that the sun and its planets were an unusual if not extraordinary phenomenon in the galaxy, the possible result of a star passing close to the sun and tearing out solar material which could collapse into planets. Even in modern science, Ptolomey’s ghost is hard to exorcise: We are special, an incredible exception to physical processes which govern the rest of the universe. Were Fermi to ask his question anew today, it would be deafening.

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Deafening. And yet during that same period our searching out, our listening for an extraterrestrial intelligence has advanced in pace with our increasing knowledge of the physical universe. In addition to the thousands of hours of radio telescope time and analysis logged by the SETI Institute and its supporters prior to 2007, in that year the Institute was handed a godsend (well, not God exactly, but close enough: Paul Allan, one of the founders of Microsoft). The new Allan Telescope Array, with its capacity to search large swaths of the galaxy while simultaneously listening closely to the emissions of selected stars, has expanded exponentially the earlier SETI searches. And the results to date: nothing conclusive, or even strongly suggestive (otherwise we would hear the finding trumpeted on all the cable news channels). The silence of space has been deafening, oppressive, crushing. It is what has prompted George Dvorsky and other critics of SETI to label The Great Silence.

In our search, our wonderment at what may be out there, we are faced with an ever more critical impasse. While astronomers discover more and more Earth-like planets in our galaxy, SETI researchers amass higher and higher mountains of radio telescope data, to no avail. I suggest that this impasse represents a fundamental problem, perhaps the fundamental problem for contemporary thinkers pursuing the age-old question of “man’s place in the universe.” It is certainly a matter which cultural anthropologists should have focused on long before now and made a central part of their research programs, their (oh, to be sure) “refereed” publications and, perhaps most of all, their departmental curricula (lets have hundreds of “Anthro and ET” courses at all levels of instruction at our fine institutions of higher learning).

The source or inspiration behind my NSF proposal was the thought that we can best approach the problem of extraterrestrial intelligence by investigating inter-species communication on planet Earth. How can we possibly look for signals from other worlds and hope to interpret them if we know very little of the nature or extent of inter-species communication among creatures which share our DNA and our planetary environment? In surveying the ethological literature it is clear that such communication is extremely difficult both to identify and to facilitate. Right here on Earth, faced with fellow mammals not so far removed from us on the evolutionary timescale, the infrasonic signals of elephants and giraffes, the ultrasonic signals of bats, and the whistles, clicks, squeaks, and burst-pulses of dolphins went on all around us for centuries before a few brilliant ethologists identified them as elements of a communications system (or even before the signals were known to exist). I noted that this track record does not inspire confidence when we turn our eyes, and radio telescopes, to the skies in hopes of receiving and deciphering an extraterrestrial message. I suggested that a constructive step to ameliorate this unhappy situation would be to conduct a comparative ethnographic study of the work of several prominent animal researchers, searching in their diverse research programs and results for common threads that might lead to a deeper understanding of the

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general phenomenon of inter-species communication. The NSF reviewers, my “peers,” thought otherwise.

Although unable to do the actual field research, in the years following the rejection of my 2001 proposal I have done quite a bit of reading and considerable thinking about the issue. I must admit at this point that the ET question has become something of an obsession with me. I cannot spend a day or restless night without at some point turning the question over in my mind. And whenever I happen to glance up at the stars twinkling in the clear night sky of my California desert home, the five Big Questions almost always come at me unbidden: Who? What? Where? When? How? I should also confess that the ET question has been with me for most of a lifetime, in more or less acute form, from the tender age of six when my uncle, a science-fiction author, took me to see the movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still (the original, not the special effects remake).

With that background and continuing penchant to find ET (not unlike the scientist character Keys in the movie ET) I would like to report here that my involvement with the subject has led me to identify some encouraging possibilities for future contact. Unhappily, that is not the case. I am afraid I have come to be one who finds The Great Silence deafening, and not only deafening but, considering my deep interest in the subject, rather agonizing. In this regard I have identified four problem areas or sources of puzzlement, really bafflement. The four problems are highly diverse, originating from very different lines of reasoning, and I will merely sketch these here. As I have come to think of (or nickname) them, they are: (1) Wittgenstein’s lion; (2) the semiotic sinkhole; (3) if they are out there the little green guys must be really, really green; or, where is Asimov’s Galactic Foundation?; and (4) perhaps the most sobering of all: Nietzsche’s abyss.

Wittgenstein’s Lion. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s bizarre and brilliant intellectual odyssey took him from an “ideal language” concept of meaning rooted in the work of Russell and Whitehead to a “meaning as use” concept in which utterances are devoid of propositional form (the “atomic propositions” of Principia Mathematica) and derive their “meaning,” such as it is, entirely from their continuously shifting context. To take or gauge the meaning of an individual’s expression (whether linguistic or gestural) it would be necessary to participate in the same context as that individual, to share a set of common experiences and expectations, to be playing the same “language game.” If two individuals lacked a common framework in which to communicate, Wittgenstein argued, in a phrase now as famous as it is infamous, that they experienced different “forms of life” between which any meaningful exchange was extremely limited or, more likely, impossible. Toward the end of Philosophical Investigations he presented this idea in its starkest form: “If a lion could speak, we wouldn’t understand him.” [The German, “Wenn ein Löwe sprechen könnte, wir könnten ihn nicht verstehen.” is translated by Anscombe

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as “couldn’t understand him,” which seems to ignore the future conditional aspect of the expression requiring “wouldn’t”.]

While modern ethological studies may take some of the sting of finality from Wittgenstein’s assertion, it is crucial to note that they manage to document instances of animal communication, to understand something of what the lion (or dolphin or bonobo) is saying only by meticulous, fine-grained analysis of animal utterances / gestures / movements in specific, very well defined contexts. Popular productions which encourage us to embrace the idea of animal language, such as “the song of the humpback whale” and the host of Orca recordings, really tell us nothing about those species’ lives or communication, for we hear them in the absence of any closely described behavioral context. Dolphin ethologists such as Kathleen Dudzinski, Jim Nollman, and Karen Pryor have managed to identify communication among their subjects only through sophisticated observations below the surface in the immediate vicinity of interacting dolphins, employing stereoscopic video cameras, hydrophones, and lots of computer analysis of reams of data. Those studies are so far removed from the situation of the SETI researcher, eyes glued to the oscilloscope screen or computer printout of signal blips, that there is very little overlap between the two enterprises.

In addition to this considerable obstacle is the overarching problem that contemporary ethologists are not primarily engaged in what would be an even more daunting goal: to identify what, if anything, dolphins and bonobos are saying to us. It is so daunting because it appears unlikely that wild populations of these species have taken time to devise a means of inter-species communication with the pesky humans around them. As a couple of the dolphin researchers phrase it, they are engaged in “eavesdropping” on their subjects, of trying to find out what they are saying to one another. When a dolphin stops what it is doing, turns toward the hovering scuba diver and addresses her with an actual communicative signal besides a standard gesture of (understandable) annoyance or curiosity, that will really get our attention. Only then will we find ourselves in the position of beginning to understand Wittgenstein’s lion.

It is certainly true, however, that a great deal of highly publicized research has been done on how individual animals may in fact communicate with individual researchers in strictly controlled, artificial settings. This complex and controversial topic should indeed be addressed in a systematic study of inter-species communication as that might bear on the topic at hand, extraterrestrial intelligence. But I think it’s a reach. The experimental subjects in animal-human communication studies are often raised and conditioned from birth or infancy to interact with their human keepers through artificial protocols of human design: sign language and computer-like keyboards being the most common. Unless X-File scenarios have some basis in fact, and a deeply covert operation in now underway in some underground laboratory at Area 51 in the Nevada desert, an operation which involves strapping a few of our captive aliens to Hannibal Lecter-like gurneys and attempting to teach them Earthling communication skills, we really should

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not claim that the (contested) results of captive animal studies can be applied to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Simply put, Washoe and Koko are not going to get us very far in conversing with our little friend, E. T.

The Semiotic Sinkhole. In my 1996 Anthropology News essay, “Where Is Everybody? . . .) I suggested that there are two diametrically opposed ways to view the relationship between organisms’ complexity (in terms of neural organization) and their sapient ability, particularly including their ability to comprehend what other organisms are doing and to communicate with them. One way, the traditional and prevalent view, is to see large-brained humans with their linguistic and cultural achievements as supremely fitted to take in what other less well-endowed species are up to. As the most complex organisms on Earth, humans stand at the pinnacle of a scale of relative complexity. I termed this outlook the Ozymandias model of cerebral development and communicative ability, after Shelley’s powerful poem. Standing on that pinnacle, we are masters of all we survey. Contrasted to this view is that of the semiotic sinkhole. If we simply invert the scale of relative complexity (see figure) we find that our big brain, our language, and our cultural systems place us at the bottom of a steep declivity. In short, our remarkable specialization makes us less able to communicate with other species, which rely on relatively simple, and very different, signals involving gestures and rudimentary vocalizations.

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The crucial point here is that in a sapient universe, one in which other highly evolved intelligences exist, they will be similarly specialized in their symbolic and communicative abilities – quite likely to a far greater degree than ourselves. I proposed a rather godawful term, semiospace, to describe the wide, possibly boundless, domain in which our species and other sapient species function. And those species, rather than being perched on pinnacles of complexity, are, like ourselves, resting at the bottoms of their respective semiotic sinkholes. Faced with these hugely formidable obstacles, our hope of establishing communication with them is nearly, well, hopeless. It is a curious fact that a bacterium, with an elementary system of chemical signatures, can identify and interact with other species of bacteria (see, for example, http://www.jci.org/articles/view/20195 , whereas we will quite likely find the semiotic / symbolic system of an extraterrestrial intelligence impossible to decipher. I also made the rather blasphemous proposal that this universe of semiospace would be a good candidate to replace our frayed and contested concept of “culture,” so that cultural anthropologists might well take down their weather-beaten disciplinary shingle and replace it with a new, shiny one: “anthropological semiotics.” That proposal will probably come to pass about the time we begin to have cozy chats with the Tau Setians. At any rate, the argument is presented in detail in Chapter 3, “A Theory of Culture as Semiospace” of American Dreamtime ( www.peripheralstudies.org ).

A problem closely tied to that of the semiotic sinkhole is that of scale, or degree of relative complexity. Our sun is a fairly late bloomer in the galaxy; there are hundreds of millions of main sequence stars billions of years older than the solar system. If some form of sapient evolution (let’s not even call it biological) has been occurring on many exoplanets circling those ancient stars, it boggles the mind to think what those beings might be like. This problem is especially acute because it appears, at least from our solitary example, that the pace of evolution increases dramatically with increases in the complexity of the evolved product. Although living organisms appeared on Earth over three billion years ago, anything resembling the human species was not present until some three million years ago. Then, of course, things took off, first very slowly and then faster and faster. True Homo sapiens sapiens, who possessed a fully functional language, complex social organization, an elaborate toolkit, and cultural productions such as art, dance, and, probably, music, have a history of no more than forty thousand years or so – mere seconds, as is often pointed out, on the evolutionary time clock. Even those developments seem agonizingly slow in comparison with what has come later. Human civilization itself has a history of no more than ten thousand years, and as for societies capable of producing spaceships and radio telescopes. . . Our legions of self-styled “futurists” are now straining at their tethers (some rather short) to imagine what even the next hundred years will bring. What should be clear, however, is that whatever the future

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holds it will quite likely resemble our present far less than our lives resemble those of Neolithic farmers ten thousand years ago.

If our future a century from now is mostly veiled in mystery, what might a sapient life form millions of years older than humanity and with an utterly different evolutionary past be like? Here the “visionaries” of the SETI Project have shown themselves to be remarkably short-sighted. In the body of my rejected proposal I have quoted Frank Drake, the originator of SETI, reflecting on the aliens who are the object of his pioneering quest. It is worth doing so again:

They won’t be too much different from us. What I usually say, when people ask me that question, is that a large fraction will have such an anatomy that if you saw them from a distance of a hundred yards in the twilight you might think they were human.”

Ridiculous. One could obtain the same answer from any dim-witted reader of the National Enquirer. The anthropocentrism of Drake’s remark is staggering: In this vast galaxy presumably teeming with intelligent life any beings possessing sapience “won’t be too much different from us.” For how could they be, since we stand at the pinnacle of creation, the masters of all we survey?

The implications of the problem of scale are daunting. If, and it is a very big “if,” other sapient beings have undergone the sort of technological evolution the human species has experienced, we are unlikely to be able to exchange messages with any of them unless they occupy our own extremely narrow technological niche. Had an alien civilization bombarded Earth with radio transmissions even 150 years ago they would have gone unheard. And 150 years from now, who is to say that radio will hold much interest for us, unless, that is, SETI grant meisters are still able to secure funding. It is an impossibly tall order to expect that an exoplanet with Earth-like sapient life would possess just the right technology to enable our communication with them. A sapient species even modestly more advanced than us may well have forsaken radio in favor of something like powerful laser transmissions aimed at specific locations, other exoplanets, where life forms comparable to themselves exist. Such pin-point bursts of optical energy could be going on all around us but would entirely bypass our primitive little planet. Not being on the guest list, we wouldn’t be invited in on the conversation.

This picture of the extraterrestrial sapient landscape, however, is very likely far too conservative. Rather than being separated by a few centuries in technological complexity, it is far more probable that we stand in relation to another sapient life form as, say, microbes or insects stand with respect to us. Even if those beings could adjust their communicative facility to accommodate our hopelessly primitive devices of radio telescopes and satellites, the looming question is, Why would they want to? Unless the huge populations of bacteria in your lower intestine begin to act up, you don’t make

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much of an effort to communicate with them. For the most part their existence, if recognized at all, is completely inconsequential to you; your concerns are elsewhere and you could care less about them. Why, then, should we expect that a sapient life form millions of years more advanced than humans would be interested in communicating with us? As the desert sands continue to drift in around the derelict monument to Ozymandias, we must seriously question whether we are worth a call.

If They Are Out There, the Little Green Guys Must Be Really, Really Green. If The Great Silence poses an increasingly difficult problem for SETI researchers and others hoping to discover E. T., there is an even more formidable issue. It arises from the big “if” question I noted above: Is it the case that sapient evolution elsewhere in the galaxy has generally involved the sort of technological development we have come to regard as the sine qua non of change? If the answer to this crucial question turns out to be “yes,” then we may expect that highly evolved sapient life forms, which have been around millions of years longer than ourselves, possess correspondingly evolved technologies. That is certainly the assumption built into the famous Drake Equation, which Frank Drake proposed to the very first conference of SETI thinkers in 1961:

N = R fp ne fl fi fc L

where fc represents the fraction of intelligent life-bearing planets whose inhabitants have developed the ability to communicate beyond their own world. We won’t worry that the Drake Equation is not an equation at all, but a mere list of factors several of which are sheer speculation; there is no solution to an “equation” with so many unknowns (and, possibly, unknowables).

Drake assumes, as apparently do all SETI researchers, that an ability for interstellar communication goes hand-in-hand with a highly developed technology. Here the problem of scale of relative complexity is again paramount. If we stand in relation to other, ancient sapient life forms as bacteria or insects stand to us, what must their technologies be like? We tend to take it as given that the more advanced the technology, the greater the energy consumption of a civilization: all of evolution, biological and sapient, seems to be about increasingly effective utilization of available energy. If we have gone from the cooking fire to the fires of nuclear reactors in a quarter million years or so, civilizations far more advanced than ours must have made even more dramatic changes in their exploitation of their environments. They must, in actual fact, have reached for the stars.

Three years after Drake put his equation on the chalkboard at the first SETI conference, the Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev proposed what has become known as the Kardashev Scale. Kardashev argued that technological civilizations throughout the galaxy could be grouped into three categories based on their ability to exploit, and thereby control, energy resources. He called these Type I, Type II, and Type III civilizations. Type I civilizations could use the energy resources of an entire planet to

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function, including controlling the environment. Type II civilizations would have escaped the confines of their planet and proceeded to extract the energy they required directly from their home star. They might employ a technology presciently described by Freeman Dyson, often called the “Dyson sphere”: a vast number of stellar energy-collecting satellites in close orbit around the home star. Type III civilizations would have colonized significant tracts of the galaxy and would extract energy from many star systems and, possibly, from the accretion discs of black holes. An advanced Type III civilization might even tap into the ultimate energy source: the super-massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

And where on this scale does the human species reside? Nowhere, unless we include a “Type 0” possibility. We haven’t made it to Type I yet, being unable to control such forces of nature as wildfires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, and possibly even earthquakes and tsunamis. Michio Kaku has a lively, entertaining, and terribly humbling account of our place in the scheme of things :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA1_BsxOwzU

Recent calculations suggest that human civilization may now be at about 0.7 on the modified Kardashev Scale, perhaps a century or two away from achieving control of our planetary environment (but don’t hold your breath; you know what horrors may befall us long before that happy day comes to pass).

But even though we may be the galactic equivalent of inconsequential bugs, there is one all-important difference between us and the actual bugs we squash underfoot every day. We happen to be bugs with large radio telescope arrays and powerful space-based interferometers. The bacteria in our gut don’t have much of a sense of the organism they inhabit, but with our observational capability, relatively primitive as it may be on a galactic scale, we can identify planets hundreds of light years away and obtain precise spectral emission patterns from stars over much of the galaxy. And there’s the problem. Advanced civilizations may well not care to communicate with us, may employ communications systems far beyond our ability to recognize, but their advanced technologies should be impossible to keep secret. If we accept the premise that energy demand and consumption increase in step with the evolution of civilizations, then we must grant the general validity of Kardashev’s theory that a galaxy populated by diverse sapient life forms would include some which consume energy on a colossal scale. Type II civilizations, which significantly alter the energy emissions of their home stars, could be readily identified by virtue of their unnatural spectral readings. And if our galaxy is home to any Type III civilizations which have colonized major portions of the galaxy and altered the emissions of a multitude of stars, these would stand out like blazing marquee lights on a dark night. The heavens would sparkle with stellar beacons impossible for our astronomers to miss. They would closely resemble a galaxy which I and millions of my generation experienced vicariously through Isaac Asimov’s thrilling Foundation Trilogy.

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Probably more than any other mid-century cultural production, Asimov’s novels predisposed Americans to accept, and even yearn for, a galaxy teeming with sapient life.

The Foundation, however, has not turned up. Fermi’s famous question now becomes, not only deafening, but blinding. Try as our astronomers might, including the legion of SETI researchers poised to leap at the slightest flicker of a signal, they have seen nothing. The heavens are not lit with any unnatural starlight. Where is everybody?

Given the problems outlined above, I think there are now only two possible answers to Fermi’s question. The most simple, stark answer is that nobody is out there. Some people, including myself, find that answer terribly depressing. Apart from the overwhelming feeling of loneliness that comes with the acceptance of a cosmic isolation, it seems such an incredible, improbable waste that billions and billions of planets are out there, but not a single other sapient life form. Other people, of a fundamentalist turn of mind or simply unjustifiably proud of our species’ miserable accomplishments, would likely rejoice at confirming what they already believe: that the human species is superior to whatever lesser life forms may be out there; we are The Chosen Ones. It is the Ozymandias refrain, played in the key of species.

The other answer is perhaps even more disturbing than the first, given our deeply rooted assumptions about the nature of biological and cultural evolution: Sapient species millions of years older than us may not have experienced anything resembling our technological history. Contrary to everything we have come to believe as a result of several centuries of incredibly rapid technological development, highly advanced sapient life forms may not (or no longer) feel the need to consume energy at an ever more voracious rate. They may have devised patterns of existence – “societies” if you like – which have minimally intrusive effects on their environments. The little green guys may be really, really green.

Since we have no extrasolar data at our disposal in evaluating this possibility, we are left, once again, to examine our own circumstances. When we do that, I think the possibility of low-tech sapience “out there” begins to seem somewhat less improbable. To begin, it is important to acknowledge that our search for “Other Earths” narrows the range of possibilities by injecting yet another anthropocentric bias: They must be something like Us (rather than just, well, Something). And so astronomers tune their instruments to accomplish the extremely difficult task of identifying small, rocky planets orbiting distant stars, planets that might support, in the classic phrase, “life as we know it.” But there are other possibilities. Gas giant planets, such as Jupiter, seem a fixture of the extrasolar world; some of these could host complex chemical processes based on methane rather than carbon and water, processes that could be self-replicating, self-modifying, and therefore “alive.” Another possibility, an intriguing and extreme speculation put forward by the eminent astrophysicist Fred Hoyle (who first described the nucleosynthesis process which makes stars shine) is that interstellar gaseous nebulae, many of which contain complex organic molecules, have the capacity to evolve into

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living beings. Hoyle wove this idea, which he called “panspermia,” into a gripping science-fiction novel, The Black Cloud. Hoyle’s Cloud character, however, did engage in activities which would tip off astronomers surveying the spectral emissions of stars: the Cloud was headed for the solar system to devour the sun’s energy, an action which may have proven an inconvenience to the creatures inhabiting the system’s third planet.

Methane or silicon-based life forms, sapient interstellar gas clouds – these are indeed highly speculative, but perhaps not so extreme when viewed in the context of biological evolution right here on Earth. Where and how did life originate on our planet, at a time when global volcanism had barely subsided and the planet was clothed in toxic gases? The best evidence is that it did not appear, as Charles Darwin proposed, in “some warm little pond,” a pond much like Darwin, the country gentleman, might have picnicked by with his brood on a balmy day in the English spring. No, life, in the form of archaen organisms or extremophiles, probably first appeared in the deepest oceans, clustered around hydrothermal vents belching hydrogen sulfide and boiling water. It has only recently been determined that the Archaea form a new and separate Domain of life, alongside Bacteria and Eukaryotes (the latter which includes all macrocellular organisms such as plants and animals). Quite literally, life is borne of fire and brimstone. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaea . Limited as it is, our own biological history reveals the great range of possibilities for the appearance and evolution of life. We should therefore try to keep our preconceptions in check when we turn our eyes from our birthplace, the deep-sea Hades of hydrothermal vents, to the stars.

One preconception we have not let go of in our search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that most of our thinking strongly emphasizes the terrestrial aspect of that topic. Our telescopes and interferometers are busily searching out “Earth-like” planets within a star’s “habitable zone,” that is, small, rocky planets which can support liquid water on their surface. Water, rather than methane or molecules in interstellar gas clouds, is essential for the evolution of carbon-based organisms such as ourselves. Yet water-based life itself is pretty much left out of the research protocols of SETI researchers, and quite understandably. It is conceivable that highly evolved, sapient species exist in the aquatic environments of Earth-like exoplanets, but they haven’t quite got around to constructing radio transmitters and radio telescopes. I believe this possibility represents a severe, possibly crippling limitation to the SETI Project. A defining characteristic of humanity is what I have called an artifactual intelligence (see, again, Chapter 3 of American Dreamtime). We are what we are only because, long, long before Homo sapiens sapiens appeared on the scene, our hominid ancestors were fashioning finely-worked stone tools and using fire. Our innermost nature, our identity as a sapient species, is bound up with our artifactual facility; tools are not an external accessory but basic components of our neural and cerebral functions.

Inhabiting land rather than water would seem to be a requirement for developing anything remotely resembling our own technology. No matter how smart you (or they)

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are, it’s pretty hard to get a cooking fire going at fifty fathoms, and forget about smelting metal for implements (f’gitaboutit as our old friends the Sopranos would say). And yet we tend to ignore just how transitory and precarious a land-based existence is. Again, we have only our own situation to examine, but it is a telling one. We know that life originated in the oceans, which now cover about three-quarters of the earth’s surface, over three billion years ago. A great deal of evolution went on there before, around 550 million years ago, the first small, worm-like organisms began to burrow in the muddy shorelines of a land mass utterly devoid of life. The history of life on land is but a small fraction of that of life in the water. And halfway through its history, the End-Permian mass extinction, more widely known as The Great Dying, obliterated some seventy per cent of all terrestrial vertebrate species. An aquatic environment is a far more stable setting for long-term biological evolution than a terrestrial habitat, but, as is obvious, that imposes severe limitations on the course such evolution can take. Employing that gold standard of (pop) science, the “law of averages,” we would reasonably expect that sapient life forms are much more likely to evolve and survive in a watery world, cut off from the inquiries of terrestrial aliens such as ourselves.

Even among land-based species here on Earth, it is sobering to reflect on how very few possess what I have called an artifactual intelligence. And those few, intriguingly, are spread haphazardly among the Animalian kingdom – it is simply not the case that the ability to construct implements and environments is an attribute of what we like to think of as the most highly evolved, i.e., human-like, species. Apart from ourselves and, of all things, the beaver, mammalian artifactuality (forgive the pedantic coinage) is extremely limited. A number of species dig burrows, elephants use their trunks to manipulate various objects (including the bones of elephant skeletons), a few chimpanzee groups use stones to crack open palm nuts, otters employ the same means to open shells, and that’s about it. Birds, those descendants of dinosaurs, are much more adept than mammals, for almost all construct some form of nest. In a few species, such as orioles, weaver birds, and, most impressively, bower birds, these constructions are very elaborate and well beyond the ability of any mammal to reproduce. But the true architects of the non-human world are not the usual suspects introduced in any discussion of animal intelligence; they are the numerous species of spiders, ants, termites, and bees, which construct elaborate edifices for themselves that, in proportion to body size, dwarf almost anything humans have put together. If on Earth so few species have the ability to construct their environment, and those species comprise such a haphazard assortment, it would seem unreasonable to expect that extraterrestrials would exhibit a different pattern of accomplishment.

Among aquatic species, as noted above, artifactual production is even more limited. Some species, such as the octopus, fashion burrows, and the octopus is additionally endowed and capable since it has tentacles with which to manipulate objects. Curiously, though, the most strikingly intelligent sea creatures, cetaceans, produce

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nothing. Lacking grasping limbs and living in the open ocean, they provide the sharpest contrast to humans in terms of what one might call the radiation of sapience. Dolphin ethologists, such as Karen Pryor and Kenneth Norris, speak with scientific authority (they are not the general run of whale huggers) of dolphin societies and dolphin language, but how very different these intelligent beings are from us. Even if we don’t endorse John Lilly’s proposal to create a Cetacean seat (tank?) at the United Nations or a Cabinet-level position, alongside the State Department, for a Department of Cetacean Affairs, we must acknowledge that the more we learn of dolphins the greater is our appreciation for the staggering diversity of sapient beings. And if this is the situation right here on planet Earth, how does one begin to sketch the range of possibilities for exoplanets?

There is yet another potential obstacle standing in the way of SETI researchers as well as that of astronomers surveying the stellar emissions of distant stars. Even were we to grant the common argument that advanced sapient beings would possess advanced technologies, we really have no grounds for believing that those technologies would feed on enormous amounts of energy and would therefore light up the skies. Again, take our own technological civilization as a starting place and sounding board. Within just a few decades the fields of electronics, computer science, and biotechnology have fashioned a world that would be incomprehensible even to my grandparents’ generation. And as an individual of a certain age, I (and millions like me) find things pretty incomprehensible already. A broad-brush characterization of those decades might be that humans increasingly have moved from a technology based on making things to one which concentrates on having experiences. In the United States, I would wager than anyone over the age of twelve (a conservative guesstimate, it’s probably more like six or seven!) spends far more time staring into and manipulating a television, cellular phone, or computer monitor (the difference among these is evaporating) than gazing into another human face. The individual no longer operates a machine; he communicates with it, and it with him. The dark satanic mills of our industrial world still churn out untold millions of tons of traditional consumer goods, but those now compete with, and are often eclipsed by, small, personal devices with which one may interact,. The adjective, “interactive,” has already become the dominant concept of a post-tech world; our ardent desire is to communicate, relate to, do things with the little gizmo in our pocket or tucked under our arm. We don’t just want to own a thing; we want to have experiences with it.

Note that this process, already well underway, involves a not-so-subtle blurring of the classical opposition, man vs. machine (a struggle, as discussed in American Dreamtime, enshrined in the story/myth of John Henry, that steel-drivin’ man who died with a hammer in his hand battling the Company’s machine). The few decades I mentioned above have taken us from the crudest form of video games, such as Pong and Pac-Man, through games with increasingly sophisticated and realistic graphics, and now on to devices such as X-Box 360, WII, and Kinect, in which the individual player is replicated within the device. The individual quite literally is translated or transformed

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into a dynamic, responding video image which inhabits and experiences only the electronic domain generated by the mega-Gigahertz processor at the core of the device.

It is not unfounded speculation to suggest that this trend toward an increasing synthesis or symbiosis of human biology and machine electronics will continue, and probably at a faster and faster rate. If more and more of human experience can be replicated through biotechnological devices, at some point (which we may have reached already) the desire and, later, actuality will be to cast aside the frail, mortal shell of the body and enter the immortal realm of circuitry. Heaven on a chip. Science fiction has provided the most gripping imagery of such a world. In the first of the endless Star Trek movies, Arthur Clarke describes an immense interstellar being, not unlike Hoyle’s Black Cloud, which approaches Earth with apparent malevolent intent. Captain Kirk and the weaponry aboard the Enterprise are powerless against the Object until Spock and a couple of bright young scientists in the crew hit on a strategy: they make it possible for the Object to replicate, in exact holographic form, the two young scientists, who then proceed to act as liaisons between the electronics-based Object and the human “carbon units” which the Object believes have infested the starship. It regards the human crew as a parasitic infestation of a being something like itself, the Enterprise, and proposes to do its new friend (romantic? machine sex, anyone?) a favor by ridding it of that plague. Even closer to the subject at hand is a sci-fi movie not quite in the league of Arthur Clarke and Steven Spielberg productions: the 1952 oldie-but-goodie classic, Forbidden Planet. If one ignores the inane script and characters, the provocative theme of the movie is that a vanished civilization has abandoned biological existence in favor of assimilation / synthesis with immense underground computers which possess enormous energy to simulate or re-create all of physical experience.

Machines with the power to produce simulations or re-creations of human experience are really no longer what we conventionally call “machines” (nor are they what we conventionally call “human”). I would describe them using a term I find evocative: they are Something Else, some form of alien sapience either yet to come or already “out there.” The question then becomes, would beings inhabiting such immortal virtual worlds have the need, desire, or even ability to communicate with other entities (organic like ourselves or biotechnological like themselves) scattered around the galaxy? There may be a communications window which imposes rather severe restrictions on sapient beings, which acts to create what, again following Wittgenstein, we might call “forms of life.”

In concluding this section, consider a little thought experiment:………………………………….

In the not-too-distant future the SETI Project secures truly windfall funding. Imitating the object of their attentions, Project administrators decide that they should construct a starship for themselves. They produce one capable of indefinitely sustaining crew members through cryogenic suspension, just as in Signourney Weaver’s Aliens

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movies, and launch the starship in the direction of the nearest Earth-like planet. Now, with no Star Trek-like warp drive and with interstellar distances being what they are, it takes a long, long time for the starship to arrive at its destination, let’s say around 10,000 years. Those ages pass, the crew is awakened by the ship’s computer and, after limbering up, set about their task to survey the planets of the new star system. But first they need to check in with their SETI Project leaders back on Earth. And fortunately, although their starship does not have warp drive, humans have mastered greater-than-light speed radio transmission. They send off their report and wait the half-hour required to receive an answer. For a time, silence; nothing but the interstellar hiss of hydrogen atoms. Then an image appears on the ship’s communications monitor: a woman dressed in a peculiar tunic/uniform. She proceeds to address them:

“The SETI telescope array has received your transmission. We congratulate you on the completion of your long voyage, and hope that you are well. I come to you by means of a message-disc recorded some 4,000 years after your ship’s departure. The SETI monitoring system has been deactivated since that time, except that it has been programmed to receive and respond to any transmission received on your ship’s frequency. The news I bring you is of great importance and, I am sure, will come as a severe shock to you. Some 4,000 years after you left Earth, remarkable advances in computer science and biotechnology presented us with a momentous opportunity: the human population of the planet could be wholly assimilated by the global network of supercomputers, synthesized as virtual beings capable of an indefinitely long existence and of all conceivable experiences. Since the social and environmental problems you had known became immeasurably worse in the centuries following your departure, all the world’s people elected to become part of this new electro-organic Community. Upon entering that Community, we arranged for our physical beings to be . . . extinguished. Since the supercomputers that serve as our host are located deep underground and are impervious to natural disasters, our only concern is that a space-going sapient life form might reach Earth and interfere with the biotechnological system which sustains us. Therefore, we have created automated devices, in the form of extremely powerful laser transmitters, to identify and destroy any such invasive forms. The one exception we have made to this policy is that, in the event you re-program your ship to return to Earth, you would be allowed to land at a designated Synthesis Station and be transformed into full members of our Community. Otherwise, regrettably, you must be destroyed to avoid any possible disruption to our system. Alternatively, should your exploratory voyage discover another habitable planet, you might wish to colonize it. I’m sure you will understand our

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reasoning on this matter, difficult as that may be for you. And please know that the seeming harshness of our policy is not intended to detract from your magnificent accomplishment. Unless you do return to Earth and enter Earth orbit, your ship will receive no further transmission from us. We wish you well.”The ship’s crew, consisting of three men and three women, turn away from the

communications monitor with mixed expressions of alarm and despair. As they reflect on the sobering news, they happen to glance at the display bank of the planetary survey they had initiated before receiving the broadcast. One monitor shows a small planet, blue tinged with swatches of brown and green. The spectroscopic data array for the planet indicates a breathable concentration of oxygen and nitrogen. The crew members gaze deeply into each others’ eyes . . .

………………………………….Nietzsche’s Abyss.

And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Of all the eminently quotable passages from Nietzsche’s remarkable oeuvre, his haunting admonition about the abyss is perhaps cited only a bit less frequently than his notorious “God is dead.” remark. But while his anti-Christian position is clearly laid out in most of his writings and provides a context for his “God” remark, there is not a comparable background within which to situate his provocative warning about the abyss. Apart from sending a cerebral chill through the perceptive reader, what exactly did Nietzsche intend by his statement?

The quotation invites a variety of interpretations, but here I would like to emphasize its relevance for our inquiry into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In pursuing this line of thought, I do not claim to identify the meaning of the remark, if any such definitive meaning exists.

For our purposes here, I believe the remark illuminates, in the most glaring light, Nietzsche’s paramount vision of humanity as inherently inadequate, as a miserable failure, as a mere transitory phenomenon in a transforming world which might eventually usher in the only truly moral being, the übermensch. To my knowledge, Nietzsche was the first philosopher to ground his thinking in a concept of humanity as an evolving entity with only a limited lifespan. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra he summed up this idea in a phrase as chilling as his remark about the abyss: “Man is a thing that will pass.” And in Human, All too Human he proceeded to situate that concept within a philosophical tradition which lacked it:

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Family failing of philosophers – All philosophers have the common failing of starting out from man as he is now and thinking they can reach their goal through an analysis of him. They involuntarily think of ‘man’ as an aeterna veritas, as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure measure of things. Everything the philosopher has declared about man is, however, at bottom no more than a testimony as to the man of a very limited period of time. Lack of historical sense is the family failing of all philosophers.

From what has gone before, it is clear that this belief in the constancy of humanity is not only a family failing of philosophers, but of SETI researchers as a group. From Frank Drake through Carl Sagan and on to the present generation, these scientists, with their gaze fixed on the heavens, have not subjected their own species and other intelligent animal species to close inspection. Had they done so, they would have identified problems of the sort I have discussed in this essay, problems that may have given them pause, perhaps even shaken their rather doctrinaire resolve.

It may be that the gravest problem of all is the one alluded to in our little thought experiment. It is the problem of the relation between language and artifact or, phrased differently, between a linguistic facility and an artifactual intelligence. We should not be too hard on the SETI researchers here, for they have merely inherited another “family failing” of Western thinkers, one intimately tied to that Nietzsche criticized. That is the failing to place language and artifact production on at least an equal footing, if not to assign primary importance to the latter. I have critiqued this failing in previous works, and will merely summarize it here. For quite a number of years now it has struck me as highly ironic, and deeply regrettable, that we typically emphasize the importance of language and language acquisition in shaping the human mind, in making humanity what it is today, while skirting the role that two and a half million years of artifact production played in that process.

I believe the reason for this damaging oversight is rather obvious, and acutely shameful: it is because those individuals who publicly ponder the nature of the human mind and human culture are almost without exception “word people.” They are linguists, philosophers, cultural anthropologists, English professors, professors of comparative literature – in short, an academic community fiercely self-selected (tenure, anyone?) for people good with words. They took third and fourth-year literature classes in high school rather than shop, auto mechanics, and mechanical drawing. Nor did they play much varsity ball or get on the varsity cheerleader squad. And in college, of course, these nerds never looked back, never considered that the low-brow kids down in the basement shop class or out on the football field might be onto something, might be instantiations, however off-putting their personal appearance and behavior, of something fundamentally

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human, perhaps more fundamentally human than the language our budding young scholars esteemed so highly.

We inhabit, as Ernest Gellner intimated in the title of the first of his brilliant books, a world composed of words and things. That world in turn has shaped us, has made us a bizarre, composite creature born from biology but not of biology. Our bilateral (cognatic) inheritance, however, has been obscured by several centuries of Western-style “learning” – the monkish, insular fussing with words to the exclusion of a vast surrounding world of human action and experience.

There is nothing wrong in itself with the scholarly pursuit of a topic, but it is utterly wrong to project the nature of one’s calling onto the subject at hand, particularly when that subject happens to be the fundamental nature of the human species. Thus we have Philip Lieberman, an eminent professor of linguistics, publishing a book entitled Uniquely Human, whose astonishing conclusion is that it is language which makes us “uniquely human.” Lieberman does not devote a page to the tremendous range of facilities, of distinct intelligences, our species uniquely possesses. He does not discuss, and certainly does not engage in any sort of basic ethnography of, such individuals as auto mechanics, test pilots, major league baseball sluggers and pitchers, concert pianists, race car drivers, artists, chess prodigies, or even mathematicians. He does not consult them at all, and those individuals, being who they are, have not dedicated themselves to writing books about the uniquely human abilities they possess. We do not learn that Ted Williams, of a long-ago Boston Red Sox team, rose to preeminence in his sport because he combined superb muscular strength and coordination with a remarkable visual acuity which enabled him to see the stitches on a fastball hurdling at him. We do not hear about Chuck Yeager, test pilot and hero of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, who broke the sound barrier in the X-1 when everyone said it was an impossibility. When he wasn’t piloting experimental aircraft, Yeager displayed an incidental trait which set him apart, his “signature,” “written” in the “language” of raw nerve and mechanical aptitude. Approaching the landing field, he liked to do a fly-by of the control tower, an action strictly against regulations. Yeager would bring his jet in at over two hundred miles an hour, some fifty feet above the runway, rattling the windows of the tower and the nerves of its occupants with the hellish roar of his engines, and, passing the tower, would give it a wave. If there were any question about the identity of the infractious pilot, that was dispelled because, you see, Yeager’s plane was flying upside-down. In exploring the boundaries of the “uniquely human,” it would be interesting, as Yeager’s plane began its shrieking dive toward the airfield a thousand feet below, somehow to replace the daring pilot with the good Professor Lieberman. Failing that little experiment, ask a duck-billed platypus to draw the tree of evolution.

Comparable examples could be added indefinitely. Consider Joe Montana, future Super Bowl-winning quarterback for the San Francisco Forty-Niners, as a high school student. He and his father would take a football and go out in a field by their home,

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where his father would hold up a wire coat hanger, stretched to form a crude rectangle. From thirty yards away, Joe would put the football through the hanger. Or consider Bobby Fischer at thirteen, playing a game that has become known in the chess literature as “the game of the century.” While it is Fischer’s dazzling Queen sacrifice that is usually mentioned in discussions of the game, a grandmaster commentator has suggested that a rather puzzling, apparently unassuming Knight move preceding the Queen sacrifice may have been “the most brilliant move ever played on a chessboard.” Thirteen years old, and Bobby much too young and too poor a student to asses the profundities found in Uniquely Human. In a somewhat more orthodox intellectual vein, one might try, in vain, to relate Lieberman’s theory to the phenomenon of Srinivasa Ramanujan, a mathematical prodigy so brilliant that historians of mathematics place him in the select company of Leonhard Euler and Carl Friedrich Gauss. Ramanujan’s story is all the more remarkable because he was born to a poor family in south India at the turn of the century and lacked both teachers and mathematical textbooks during early childhood. Upon being exposed to formal mathematics at the age of ten, he began to produce original theorems in trigonometry. Over his tragically short lifetime, he proceeded to fill up his famous Notebooks with equations and theorems which contemporary mathematicians still mine for insights. Desperately poor, he was awarded a scholarship to a post-secondary school, which he lost after his first year because he was unable to do the work in his other, liberal arts classes. Evidently Ramanujan didn’t possess that uniquely human intelligence esteemed by his teachers in British India.

Of these and many other extraordinary individuals, perhaps the one that contrasts most starkly with Lieberman’s view is the card-playing sensation, Stuey Ungar. Born and reared on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Ungar’s father was a loan shark who operated a bar at which illegal gambling was routine. Stuey thus grew up among gamblers and hoods, one of whom befriended and became a sort of mentor to him. By his early teens, having dropped out of school, Ungar was a master of gin rummy and a fixture of the New York gambling scene. Barely literate, speaking mostly in uniquely human curses and obscenities, eating his meals, as acquaintances said, “like an animal,” mortally addicted to cocaine, mocking and taunting his victims, Ungar experienced a meteoric rise to the summits of the gambling world. In his brief lifetime he won the World Series of Poker three times, an unmatched record, defeating in heads-up battles legendary figures of the poker world like Doyle Brunson. A master of blackjack as well, a casino owner once bet Stuey $100,000 that he could not identify the last card in a six-deck blackjack shoe, that is, the 312th card to be dealt. As Stuey watched, the dealer whipped out and flashed the cards in rapid-fire sequence, letting them scatter face-down on the blackjack table. At the final card the dealer stopped and Stuey called out the three of spades. The dealer turned over the card. It was the three of spades.

In my view the only way to begin to make sense of this astounding diversity in human aptitude is to abandon a monolithic theory of intelligence in favor of one that

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gives due credit to that diversity. The scholarly oxen, as Nietzsche called his former academic colleagues, in psychology departments who design IQ tests and conduct experiments designed to yield results already foreseen would do well to broaden their horizons. As would cultural anthropologists, whose stock in trade, the diversity of cultures, of multiple systems of meaning, should sensitize them to the enormous range of human thought and action. In Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences and subsequent works the psychologist Howard Gardner eloquently makes this proposal. Language ability, as determined by sitting down at a desk, reading and answering questions, represents only a fraction of a human cognitive repertoire that includes kinetic, musical, mathematical, interpersonal, and other distinct orders or faculties of intelligence. It is an indication of our shortsightedness, rather than our analytical acuity, that we persist in stacking the deck, to return to Ungar’s world, in favor of individuals who are able to perform as we would like them to, as good little students, seated at their desks arranged in tidy rows, parsing sentences and quoting acceptable authors. It is perhaps understandable though regrettable that psychologists, linguists, and, of course, English professors, should adopt this outlook, but it is a major intellectual scandal that cultural anthropologists have acquiesced in it as well. While, mercifully, I am not a diligent scholar, I have searched the anthropological literature for any significant use of Gardner’s theory, to no avail.

Crunch Time (X 2). This essay has left things in a state of ruin; hopefully even that result will prove edifying. More edifying, I would argue, than the deeply flawed SETI Project or the nattering squabble the once-promising field of cultural anthropology has become. It is a bitterly ironic pill to swallow that both these areas of inquiry, the one focusing on the vast panorama of the stars and the other on the broad sweep of all the world’s cultures, should reveal themselves to be essentially myopic, narrow-minded, provincial, in a word, inadequate to the tasks they set themselves. They founder on two major issues: the relationship between language and sapience; and the integrality and persistence of the human species. SETI researchers sift through mountains of data searching for a message, while cultural anthropologists collect myths and record conversations searching for the meaning, the interconnectedness, in the words of their ethnographic subjects. Therein lies the problem. Here is the first zinger, the first crunch: Suppose that language, far from being the definitive trait, not only of humanity, but of sapience generally, is just a kind of hiccup, a speed bump, in the continuing (d)evolution of a particular sapient species (ourselves) and, just perhaps, of a limited number of other sapient species scattered around the galaxy? We have seen that our intellectual myopia, really, our bigotry, has led us to ignore both the brief involvement our species has had with a fully-developed language (fifty thousand or so years out of some three million years of hominid evolution) and the tremendous range of contemporary human performance which is quite independent of language use. And there is every indication that language, in any presently recognizable form, is on its way out. We’ve experienced

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the Lost Generation, the Me Generation, the X-Generation, and are now well into the e-generation. Language is “uniquely human”? Say goodnight, Phil!

Here is the second zinger, the second crunch (danke to Fritz): Humanity itself, considered as a coherent entity, has already disappeared. The “human species” is a fiction. In fact, as Nietzsche remarked long ago, there has never been a being you could point to and call “Man.” Humanity is and has always been a transitory phenomenon, a couple of seconds in the life of the galaxy, an entity that came from Something Else and is now barreling headlong into an utterly unknown and probably unknowable Something Else. “We” are already so diverse, so discrepant in our sapient abilities that it is a meaningless exercise to attempt to draw a neat line separating the human from the non-human. “We” are simply too fragmented, too smeared (as quantum physicists say) across the vast manifold of sentience for that to be possible. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men . . . The earnest folks at SETI need only to wait around a couple of thousand years (if that), pretty much the turnaround time for a signal beamed to and from a distant extrasolar system, and they will discover their aliens. Those beings, or that entity, will be wholly alien, wholly unrecognizable, and may well not “communicate” in anything resembling “messages.” But they will be there, nonetheless. For “they” will be what has become of the human species. E. T. won’t have to phone home; he’ll already be home. Only “he” will probably lack bilateral symmetry and perhaps even the DNA discovered in Spielberg’s movie version. E. T. will most likely be an “it,” a Something Else.

In conclusion, this is the perspective I would bring to the interpretation of Nietzsche’s abyss. Before I began to think long and hard about the question of extraterrestrial intelligence, I took Nietzsche to mean that a penetrating examination of the essential ugliness of humanity – its meanness, its hypocrisy, its claustrophobic smallness – inevitably rebounded to oneself. As a perceptive, deeply thoughtful being, Nietzsche, and those few independent thinkers somewhat like him, could not but sense the vestigial taint, the stench, of those human-all-too-human qualities within themselves. I continue to think this is a valid interpretation, perhaps even what Nietzsche actually intended. But there is something more. There is Something Else. If language itself is to be rejected as an instrument or standard for understanding, and if one, like Nietzsche, relies on his mastery of language to formulate his thoughts, what then is the status, the worth, the possible validity of those thoughts? Don’t they have to be discarded, thrown under the wheels of an essentially non-linguistic cosmos barreling along helter-skelter? There are passages in Zarathustra, which I have cited elsewhere, that indicate Nietzsche himself came to this conclusion. Finally, a discredited language is left to deal with an impossibly variegated subject: a writhing, amoeba-like humanity which lacks any coherence or permanence. In reflecting on this, the deeply thoughtful individual cannot help but realize that the incredible diversity of his species is contained, imprisoned, struggling for release, within himself. The individual’s “identity,” his “personality,” is a turbulent mix of utterly incompatible experiences: child, adolescent, student, teacher,

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lover, spouse, parent, businessman, soldier, religious believer or, just possibly, doubter. All these and other discrepant identities are not mere “social roles” as preached by a pathetically inadequate American sociology; they are incompatible, deeply confused, and often warring beings locked inside a crammed darkness (as Merleau-Ponty described the human body). Or, as Walt Whitman wrote in a loftier turn of mind in Leaves of Grass, “each of us contains multitudes.” In subjecting the transient jumble of humanity to a penetrating analysis, the undeniable truth looms up that just such a transient jumble is contained within oneself, is what passes for one’s self. And when you gaze long into an abyss . . .

But it was fun while it lasted. We really got blasted!

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