Name: Life Beyond Earth and the Mind of Man - 1975
Uploaded: 2014-05-14T21:35:39.000Z
Duration: 26 min 56 s
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Adverbs of manner

Ashley Montagu:  When we speak of life beyond Earth, what we generally mean is of course intelligent life,

Adverbs of degree

something resembling our noble selves.  It is highly probable that there are such intelligent forms of life in other galaxies

in the universe.  And it is even more probable that many of these forms are vastly more intelligent than we.

Philip Morrison:  It is conceivable that a spherical ship will land in front of the Washington Monument and a figure with four antennas

and otherwise looking like a professional football player will walk out and demand to see our leader.  But I hope very much that the universe of

circumstance is wider than the rather shoddy imaginations of science fiction writers for 30 or 40 years.  And I’m pretty convinced it is.

We’ve not found their guidance so great in any but the most modest activities, like going to the Moon, which is not very much.

You see, this is a beautiful exposition of the myths we live with.

Narrator:  Life Beyond Earth and the Mind of Man, a symposium on extraterrestrial life and some of its implications for us all.

Sponsored jointly by NASA and Boston University and chaired by Professor Richard Berendzen.

Richard Berendzen:  Let me briefly introduce the panel.  On the far side is Dr. Ashley Montagu who’s a world-renowned anthropologist and social biologist.

Next to him is Dr. Krister Stendahl, who’s an outstanding church man and theologian who is now the dean of the prestigious School of Divinity at Harvard University.

In theological circles Dr. Stendahl is considered one of the nation’s most scholarly theologians.  Next to me is Dr. Carl Sagan who is a astronomer

at Cornell University and probably one of the five or six leading researchers in this question of extraterrestrial life.

He’s the coauthor with Shklovskii with of the Soviet Union of the very famous book Intelligent Life in the Universe.

To my right is Philip Morrison, who’s professor of physics at MIT, and 13 years ago he was a coauthor of what is perhaps the first scientifically

valid or reasonable paper ever published on what might well be a possible mode of communication with extraterrestrial life.

Dr. Morrison is considered among scholarly circles as being perhaps one of the most broadly knowledgeable scientists in the country.

And on the far side is Dr. George Wald, who’s professor of biology at Harvard and a recipient of the

Nobel Prize.  So now I would like to turn to the symposium proper and give the floor to Carl Sagan.

Carl Sagan:  Thank you Dick.  I, in trying to prepare a few brief remarks on this, I came upon a comment by Thomas Carlyle, a somewhat crusty old fellow who,

on thinking about the stars, said: “A sad spectacle.  If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly.  If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.”

There was little more than a year ago in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, in fact at the foot of Mount Ararat on which Noah’s Ark is said

to be beached, a symposium sponsored jointly by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and the Soviet Academy of Sciences

on the question of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.  This was a six-day meeting which ran from morning to late at night and involved a

large group of people, around 40 or 50 people – mostly from USA, USSR, but a few other nations.  It involved, in addition to physicists and

astronomers, biologists, chemists, anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, people concerned with coding messages and decoding them, and

was a turning point I think in the study of the subject not because some striking new opinions or results were expressed but because I think it

marks the turning point in the increasing respectability of the subject.  It is now okay to talk about life elsewhere, or intelligent life elsewhere,

whereas a decade or two ago it wasn’t okay.  It was considered too speculative to be worth any investment of time.

Richard Berendzen:  As an example of the modern scientific attitude I’d like to quote a short passage from a recent report of the Astronomy Survey

Committee of the prestigious and august National Academy of Sciences of the United States, probably the nation’s most distinguished scientific body.

This was printed in May of this year.  Quote: “Each passing year has seen our estimate of the probability of life in space increase along with

our capabilities of detecting it.  More and more scientists feel that contact with other civilizations is no longer something beyond our dreams but

is a natural event in the history of mankind that will perhaps occur within the lifetime of many of us.  The promise is now too great either

to turn away from it or to wait much longer before devoting major resources to a search for other intelligent beings.  In the long run,

this may be one of science’s most important and most profound contributions to mankind and to our civilization.”  End quote.

The basic point is, very simply put, is that the number of stars in our galaxy alone is so staggeringly large (on the order of 10^11 or more),

the probability of stars having planetary systems is so high (we think perhaps half), the probability that those planetary systems

might be comparable with our own and that the stars have some kind of an ecosphere, a sphere in which

the radiation is suitable for life (that it’s not too hot, not too cold, meeting the other criteria), seems so reasonable.

These bits of information come from astronomy primarily.  Then we join with the biochemists who tell us about the probable evolution of

life here on Earth, the kinds of elements that are necessary for it – DNA molecules, amino acids, and the like – amino acids which have now been

found in meteorites, that we have now found interstellar molecules floating out in the space between stars.  So that you know the materials

for carbon-based life exist, we know that many of the building blocks of life in our own solar system exist off of our planet.  If you put these

kinds of probabilities together, it begins to lead to the sorts of conclusions that we started with as an initial premise, and which apparently

no one on the panel has disagreed, and that is that life must exist in the universe and it must exist quite abundantly.

Carl Sagan:  It’s therefore an extraordinary fact that we have listened to possible signals being sent our way from a mere handful of stars.

The first such effort was more than 10 years ago, Project Ozma organized by Frank Drake at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

It looked for a couple of weeks at two stars at one frequency; the results were negative.  In the meeting in Armenia, a group at Gorky University

under V. S. Troitsky announced that they had been doing similar studies looking at a dozen stars, at two frequencies, slightly longer periods of time;

no one was broadcasting from there.  And Dr. Verschuur at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory has given me permission to make

known at this meeting that he has performed recently a similar such search at 21-centimeter wavelength with the 140-foot—

300-foot telescopes at Green Bank.  He has looked at another handful of stars and they weren’t sending anything either.

The most optimistic estimates, in the view of many, about the number of civilizations that there might be in the galaxy is of the

order of a million, which means that only one in a few hundred thousand stars has such civilizations.

Therefore any such search requires not a brief look but some substantial long-term commitment of radio telescope time.

George Wald:  I think there’s no question but that we live in an inhabited universe that has life all over it.  I was sort of interested in Carl Sagan’s

saying there were 250 billion stars like our sun and our galaxy.  I’ve been using the number 100 billion, but this is an inflationary period.

I rather like Eddington’s old paradigm for the situation: 10^11 stars make a galaxy, 10^11 galaxies make a universe.

Those are good numbers still.  And as for our own galaxy, it’s estimated that perhaps one to five percent of the stars in it would provide,

on their planets, some of their planets, an […] for life.  That would mean a billion such places just in our own galaxy that might contain life.

And as for what life would mean in those places, I think it would mean something very like the life we know.  Not the same creatures.

We didn’t have the same creatures on the Earth during its past as live here now.  But life anywhere in the universe, I’ve been convinced

for years, must be made of the same elements that principally constitute it here: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen.

Those four elements constitute about 99 percent of living material on the Earth, and I think are likely to come out that way wherever life exists.

And may I say so that we can have a somewhat warmer and livelier conversation as this meeting goes on, I can conceive of no nightmare

as terrifying as establishing such communication with a so-called superior or, if you wish, advanced technology in outer space.

Philip Morrison:  What do you worry about George?  What’s going to happen when one of these books are printed?

George Wald:  Oh, I think a degree of degradation of the human enterprise.  One of the greatest of human enterprises is our understanding,

something that men have sweated out, to the greater dignity and worth of man.  And you see the thought that we might attach as by an

umbilical cord to some more advanced civilization, science, and technology in outer space doesn’t thrill me but just the opposite.

Carl Sagan:  I try to imagine back when I was working hard as a student.  Okay, there were a lot of textbooks.  I would open up those textbooks

and in there would be what other guys had found out.  Now I didn’t approach each way saying “Oh my God, they know that also.”

George Wald:  I do not, as I’ve said, look upon the possibility of some continuous transmission that will completely supersede all further human efforts in this direction.

Krister Stendahl:  When I think as a theologian on the possibilities of life beyond Earth and even communication with such life, my first reaction is:

That’s great.  Because it seems always great, to me, when God’s world gets a little bigger and when I get a somewhat more true view of my place

and my smallness in that universe.  And to achieve this by a growing awareness, which I do not find at all threatening as George Wald, a growing awareness

that really sinks in that whatever the question of communication is, it is highly, highly probable that we are only one possible such civilization.

Ashley Montagu:  I don’t think we should wait until the encounter occurs, but that we should do all in our power to prepare ourselves for it.

The manner in which we first meet may determine the character of all our subsequent relations.  Let us never forget the fatal impact we’ve had

upon innumerable peoples on this Earth, peoples of our own species, who’ve trusted us, befriended us, and who we destroyed by our

thoughtlessness and insensitivity to their needs and their vulnerabilities.  The simple truth is that before we can communicate with others successfully,

with must first learn to communicate with ourselves successfully, and we’re a long way from having achieved that.  Perhaps that is where

we ought to begin, with ourselves, learning to communicate with ourselves, with all the different peoples and nations of the Earth.

Philip Morrison:  I suppose if you were to ask what instrument would be the image of the announced topic, you surely would say, people are going

to talk about what they see through a telescope.  But in fact, at least most of the speakers have really spoken on the topic what they see in the mirror.

Now that’s not in any way wrong.  Perhaps the most valuable part of this extraordinary enterprise is going to be the mirror with which we confront

ourselves obliquely and in all sorts of ways as we try to ask the question what the future is like, in the dim future of how we’re going to get over ourselves,

to reach that future, and so on.  So I’m not prepared to say that this is wrong, but as a somewhat matter-of-fact discussant in the affair,

I feel that I’m somewhat inclined to direct some attention to what I think it really will be like and not to these mirror-like discussions, which are undoubtedly

more important in our present state of mind, which somehow I think will be perhaps supported by taking a calmer look at what the real situation is.

Professor Wald, for example, defending magnificently the creativity of which he is one of the great pillars of our time, feels that if somebody

were to tell him the answer it would be kind of cheating.  And Dr. Montagu on the other hand is quite concerned lest this contact bring physical

and mental harm to those persons whom we– those beings whom we might hypothetically contact.  It’s probable, I think, I would say if I

were a debater I would argue these two really somewhat cancel each other out, it can hardly be both ways.  I think on the contrary that an

enormous distance separates us from the nearest existing, or even rec–, you know, memorable, group of a similar kind.  An enormous distance.

Not the distance to the Moon, not the distance to the planets, not the distance to the nearest stars, but tens or even hundreds or perhaps a