Alien Universe Read online

  FIGURE P.1. Aliens are among us and have been for a long time. The iconic Aliens depicted here are familiar to anyone with even a modest knowledge of popular culture. See if you recognize them; their identities are given on the last page of the book.

  FIGURE P.2. While adults have had many years to have learned what Aliens “should” look like, children are cleaner slates. Yet, as these images drawn by children show, some have already learned the “right” answer.

  Through the rest of this book, we will explore mankind’s collective picture of Aliens. Chapter 1 will look at the concept of Aliens before 1900. This was the era where speculation about Aliens was generally the special province of scientists and theologians. Mars, being our nearest planetary neighbor, is a natural location to imagine where Aliens might exist, so I spend extra time in describing the rise and fall of the claims of intelligent Martian life.

  In chapter 2, I describe “true” stories of Aliens: UFOs, contacts, and abductions. It is nearly irrelevant whether these tales are actually true. While some might object that this question is totally relevant, we must distinguish the question of alien life actually existing from the social phenomenon of Aliens as something embedded deeply in human culture. Aliens as pictured by mankind have their origins in stories in the media and entertainment industries, as well as tales told by a handful of people. Whether those tales are entirely true, a complete hoax, a misunderstanding of a natural phenomenon, or a manifestation of insanity doesn’t matter at all. The stories and how they have moved through culture are what matters, and these stories have significantly shaped public opinion on the nature of Aliens.

  Chapters 3 and 4 chronicle the evolution of Aliens in fiction in written literature, radio, television, and film. It is in fiction where authors can use Aliens in situations that are metaphors for the concerns of the society of the day. This is an especially interesting tale.

  In chapter 5, we change gears. Rather than describing the historical opinion of Aliens, we use the rest of the book to explore modern efforts to understand what an Alien might look like. The first step in that process is to investigate what life on Earth can tell us. Chapter 5 surveys the various kingdoms of life on Earth, while chapter 6 ranges more broadly. Modern biochemistry and astrobiology has a lot to say about what kinds of life might exist “out there,” including possible life-forms based on atoms other than carbon.

  Chapter 7 completes our saga. In it, we move away from fiction and speculative science, instead focusing on the simple question: If you look for Aliens around nearby stars, what do you find? So far, despite half a century of looking and speculations that began even earlier, we have found nothing.

  Until we find Aliens, we will continue to dream them. What we think they look like will tell us more about us than them. I don’t know if we’ll ever encounter extraterrestrial life. But, until we do, please join me and stare at the clear midnight sky and wonder.

  ONE

  BEGINNINGS

  That the present inhabitants of Mars are a race superior to ours is very probable.

  Camille Flammarion

  A floating silver saucer, perhaps punctuated with colorful lights. A diminutive gray being, with large, black, soul-less, almond-shaped eyes. Ghostly, telepathic voices. A hard, frigid slab. Silver medical instruments. Pokes and prods, especially around the groin. Then a return to where you were, with an unease and a period of time unaccounted for.

  These are the elements of many a modern Alien tale.

  For more than 70 years, humanity has slowly built a mythos around Aliens. Even those of us who have no personal experience with UFOs, flying saucers, or anything of the sort know the story. In this book, you’ll learn from where those elements have arisen. As we will see, that particular narrative is a recent one, built from a handful of progenitor tales and buttressed from being told again and again both person to person and in the media. But, while the general public’s fascination with the question of extraterrestrial life has grown tremendously in the past century or so, the interest isn’t a new one. In this chapter, you’ll encounter scholars of the Renaissance who asked the question (and some who died for their temerity). You’ll learn about ideas put forth in the nineteenth century, some in good faith and some just hoaxes to generate publicity. You’ll learn about what our ancestors thought about our celestial neighbors: the moon and Mars.

  And so we begin.

  To discuss the existence of extraterrestrial life means, we must first answer a different question, specifically that of whether other planets exist. After all, if there are no other planets, it’s hard to even ask the question of whether life exists on places other than the Earth.

  The story starts, as it often does, with the early Greeks. Aristotle’s writings had the longest impact on the question, and his argument was rooted in his physics and cosmology. For instance, Aristotle postulated a geocentric universe, in which the Earth was at the center, surrounded by a sphere of stars in fixed positions. Between the two were other spheres, each carrying the sun, the moon, and the wandering planets. These wandering planets were not imagined to be similar to Earth. Aristotle’s physical theories postulated four elements: air, fire, earth, and water. He claimed that each of them had a natural affinity. Earth sank downward toward the planet, fire fled the planet, while water and air had intermediate affinities. According to his logic, this implied that there could be but one planet. Otherwise, earth wouldn’t know where to fall … toward our planet or toward some other one. The logic was simple and the conclusion compelling. (It’s also a scathing indictment of the role of pure logic in scientific discourse without empirical guidance.) While there were competitor ideas at the time, Aristotle’s position dominated scholarly thinking for about 2,000 years.

  If the question of extraterrestrial life hinged first on there being non-Terran planets, the first chink in the armor of Aristotelian logic can be traced to Nicolaus Copernicus. Just before his death in 1543, his book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres was published. In it, he postulated a very different cosmology. In his heliocentric theory, the sun was at the center of the universe and all planets, including our own, revolved around it. And, of course, if the Earth is not central to the universe, then it is likely that neither is mankind. Copernicus did not write of the implications of his theory on the question of extraterrestrial life, but they were clear for others to pursue. Dominican friar Giordano Bruno, born just five years after Copernicus’s death, was a bit of a Catholic bad boy. Eventually burned at the stake for religious heresies, he questioned many of the ideas accepted at the time. Relevant to our interests here, he postulated that if our sun was a star surrounded by planets, then all stars were suns surrounded by planets. If our planet held life, then others did too.

  Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger, published in 1610, further reduced the idea of Terran exceptionalism. He saw the moons of Jupiter and described the surface of the Earth’s moon as having mountains and topography similar to the Earth. His contemporary Johannes Kepler was even more adventurous, suggesting that the moon was inhabited, with people living in caves on the side of craters. The Alien genie was out of the bottle.

  The ensuing years involved discussions typical of the period between theologians, philosophers, and nascent scientists. In a period where the scientific instrumentation was not sufficient to settle the debate (a state of affairs that persists today), it is unsurprising that you would see the smart people of the era try to reason it out and many proposed hypotheses. There was no compelling winner in the debate over the question of whether other worlds carried life. We knew that there were other planets in our solar system and that other stars would most likely host their own planets. But, in a period in history in which learned people believed life came from a Creator, as opposed to natural processes, it is hard to imagine substantial progress being made on the question on the basis of reason alone.

  Two important advances in scientific knowledge in the 1850s and 1860s put the discussion on more solid ground. First,
Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution in 1859, which had as obvious an implication for extraterrestrial life as it did for the earthly variant. Secondly, the 1860s was the decade in which physicists started using spectroscopy in a serious way. Early spectroscopy used prisms to separate light into its constituent colors. For instance, studying the light absorbed or emitted by a gas allows scientists to determine its composition. In 1868, spectroscopic investigations of light emitted by the sun revealed a bright yellow line that couldn’t be ascribed to the known elements, leading Sir Norman Lockyear to postulate that the sun contained an unknown element he called helium (after the Greek sun god Helios). Essentially, spectroscopy allowed scientists to do a chemical analysis without ever touching the object being studied.

  In a similar way, scientists could turn their spectroscopes to light coming from planets in the solar system. By studying the spectrum, it is possible to ascertain the substances in the planetary atmosphere. Observation of oxygen, nitrogen, and water would indicate that the planet’s atmosphere was like ours, where we know life exists. Combined with the knowledge we gain from evolution, it seems likely that life could form anywhere there was a favorable environment. It’s not an airtight argument, but it certainly is a plausible one and one we will return to toward the end of the book. The mid- to late-1800s marks the point where answers to the question of extraterrestrial life became accessible through the mastery of scientific instruments.

  By this period, telescopes were good enough to be able to study the moon’s surface in detail. It was clear to all but a few eccentrics that it was a lifeless ball, or at least so it appeared. No water, no atmosphere, nothing but rocks and craters. With the moon out of the picture, the scientist’s attention turned to Mars and Venus, as they were our planetary neighbors. In a later chapter, we’ll again see this fascination with the neighbors in our study of Aliens in science fiction.

  1835 Moon Hoax

  Before we continue our story of mankind’s search for Alien life among nearby planets, we must recall that this book is not just about what scientists think and thought, but also about what the public thinks. Prior to the ability of science to totally debunk the idea, the possibility of lunar life was seen as plausible. A set of stories in the New York Sun in August 1835 brought Aliens to their readers in a dramatic and splashy way.

  To better understand the tale requires going back in time about five years before it begins and taking a look at early nineteenth-century journalism. In 1830, newspapers were different from the ones we have now. There were typically only two types of newspapers in that era: political ones and business ones. The political ones were published by political parties to advance their specific agenda, while the business ones were written for the business community to inform the affluent about what was going on in the economic sphere. Modern-day equivalents of the latter might be the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times. Newspapers were sold by subscription and cost six cents a day or about twenty dollars a year. That was a fair bit of money at that time, and, consequently, newspapers tended to be read by the well to do and might have a circulation of one or two hundred readers. The newspapers were conservative, in that they tended to stand behind the material in their pages. (Although their politics might be not be conservative, indeed they could be rather radical.) In a way, carrying an advertisement was an endorsement.

  The world changed on September 3, 1833, when Benjamin Day began publishing the New York Sun. Perhaps the most famous story written in the Sun was the 1897 editorial “Is There a Santa Claus?” (most commonly called “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus”). However, in 1833, the Sun was a game changer, as it was sold for a penny per copy. It was the first of the newspapers in New York City that became what was known as the “penny press.” Because the cost was lower, the only way newspapers like it could stay in business was through volume sales. The phrase “Extra, extra, read all about it” stemmed from this time. In the months prior to the story I’m about to tell, the daily circulation of the New York Sun had reached about 20,000 copies. The penny presses were closer to what we currently call tabloids, filled with hearsay and stories from the police blotter, full of salacious details. If they carried an advertisement, it certainly didn’t imply an endorsement. The readers expected to be entertained as well as informed. And, as we shall see, it is from such a periodical that one of the first media frenzies came to be. On Friday, August 21, 1835, the Sun published a small teaser notice on the second page of the paper: “We have just learnt from an eminent publisher in this city that Sir John Herschel at the Cape of Good Hope has made some astronomical discoveries of the most wonderful description, by means of an immense telescope of an entirely new principle.”

  Sir John Herschel was an excellent scientist and mathematician. Son of Sir William Herschel (discoverer of the planet Uranus), he built a telescope with a diameter of 18 inches and a 20-foot focal length that allowed him to explore the heavens in great detail. For his scientific work, he was made a Knight of the Royal Guelphic Order in 1831. He left England for South Africa in the fall of 1834, bringing his telescope with him. The goal was to study the southern sky.

  Given Hershel’s reputation, it is perhaps unsurprising to see an announcement of his work if he had made an advancement in astronomical instrumentation. The public of 1835 was just as fascinated by the heavens as we are today. Other papers in New York made no mention of the announcement.

  On Tuesday, August 25, the Sun began publishing a series of columns over six days describing observation of life on the surface of the moon. And not just ordinary forms of life were observed, but rather intelligent life with an advanced civilization. However, the first day was a little more ordinary. It described a new telescope. The series of columns was entitled Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel and was supposed to be a reprint from a supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science. In essence, this was as if the newspaper was reprinting a special issue of a Scottish scientific journal, although the editor told the readership that some technical and mathematical details had been omitted. The newspaper article was accompanied by an editorial note that said, “We this morning commence the publication of a series of extracts from the new Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science, which have been very politely furnished us by a medical gentleman immediately from Scotland, in consequence of a paragraph which appeared on Friday last from the Edinburgh Courant. The portion which we publish today is introductory to celestial discoveries of higher and more universal interest than any, in any science yet known to the human race.” As it happened, the Edinburgh Journal of Science had suspended publication two years earlier, but that was not widely known.

  The first day described a new telescope, with a lens of 24 feet in diameter, made of excellent glass. The weight of the lens was a little over seven tons. Mind you, the biggest telescope ever built using a lens (rather than a mirror) had a diameter of 49 inches. But the telescope became even more outlandish. Because of its great size, it was capable of even studying “the entomology of the moon, in case she contained insects upon her surface.” That’s a pretty impressive claim. In addition to the large telescope, the superb performance was made possible by the use of a “hydro-oxygen microscope” to brighten the image. Essentially, the claim was that the telescope fed into a microscope and thus the ability to closely study the surface of the moon was achieved.

  If you read the original article, you are struck by the presence of many details that make it sound more authentic, like the manufacturer of the lens, the name of Herschel’s assistant, and the assistant’s relationship with Herschel’s famous father. Nowadays, this attention to detail sounds like the output of a gifted and diligent investigative reporter. However, as we will see, it was instead a delightful tall tale, told with enough detail to convince many a reader.

  Day two of the saga began with a discussion of why the telescope needed to be placed in the southern hemisphere, but it finally got down to brass tacks and described what
Herschel saw as he peered at the surface of the moon or, as the article stated, “no longer withholding from our readers the more generally and highly interesting discoveries which were made in the lunar world.” What did he see?

  Well, the first thing observed was basaltic rock, but as the Earth turned, what moved into his field of vision was a rock shelf “profusely covered with a dark red flower,” similar to rose poppies seen on earthly cornfields. Further inspection revealed trees, but only one kind, large and reminiscent of yew trees on Earth. Alien life had been observed but only of the plant variety.

  Further searching revealed beautiful crystals, huge and colored vibrant purple and vermillion. Landscapes beyond imagining and a vast forest, this time with trees “of every imaginable kind,” the author reported continuous herds of brown quadrupeds that looked very much like bison. The bison were followed by gregarious, “bluish-lead” unicorn-goats. Pelicans, cranes, a strange, spherical, amphibious creature that rolled along the beaches—animal life had been observed.

  The article on day three spoke of more geology and the first observation of intelligent, although primitive, lunar life. This life took the form of a bipedal, tailless, beaver that carried its young in its arms and lived in small huts. Smoke in the vicinity of the huts revealed that the beavers had conquered fire. According to the article, the question of intelligent extraterrestrial life had been definitively answered, although the best was still to come.