WITH THE ALLEN TELESCOPE ARRAY run by the SETI Institute in northern California, the time is coming when we will encounter an extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). Contact will probably come sooner rather than later because of Moore’s Law (proposed by Intel’s co-founder Gordon E. Moore), which posits a doubling of computing power every one to two years. It turns out that this exponential growth curve applies to most technologies, including the search for ETI (SETI): according to astronomer and SETI founder Frank Drake, our searches today are 100 trillion times more powerful than 50 years ago, with no end to the improvements in sight. If E.T. is out there, we will make contact. What will happen when we do, and how should we respond?

Such questions, once the province of science fiction, are now being seriously considered in the oldest and one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world—Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A—which devoted 17 scholarly articles to “The Detection of Extra-Terrestrial Life and the Consequences for Science and Society” in its February issue. The myth, for example, that society will collapse into fear or break out in pandemonium—or that scientists and politicians will engage in a conspiratorial cover-up—is belied by numerous responses. Two such examples were witnessed in December 2010, when NASA held a very public press conference to announce a possible new life-form based on arsenic, and in 1996, when scientists proclaimed that a Martian rock contained fossil evidence of ancient life on the Red Planet and President Bill Clinton made a statement on the topic. Budget-hungry space agencies such as NASA and private fund-raising organizations such as the SETI Institute will shout to the high heavens about anything extraterrestrial they find, from microbes to Martians. But should we shout back to the aliens?

According to Stephen Hawking, we should keep our mouths shut. “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet,” he noted in his 2010 Discovery Channel documentary series. “I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.” Given the history of encounters between earthly civilizations in which the more advanced enslave or destroy the less developed, Hawking concluded: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

I am skeptical. Although we can only represent the subject of an N of 1 trial, and our species does have an unenviable track record of first contact between civilizations, the data trends for the past half millennium are encouraging: colonialism is dead, slavery is dying, the percentage of populations that perish in wars has decreased, crime and violence are down, civil liberties are up, and, as we are witnessing in Egypt and other Arab countries, the desire for representative democracies is spreading, along with education, science and technology. These trends have made our civilization more inclusive and less exploitative. If we extrapolate that 500-year trend out for 5,000 or 500,000 years, we get a sense of what an ETI might be like.

In fact, any civilization capable of extensive space travel will have moved far beyond exploitative colonialism and unsustainable energy sources. Enslaving the natives and harvesting their resources may be profitable in the short term for terrestrial civilizations, but such a strategy would be unsustainable for the tens of thousands of years needed for interstellar space travel. In this sense, thinking about extraterrestrial civilizations forces us to consider the nature and progress of our terrestrial civilization and offers hope that, when we do make contact, it will mean that at least one other intelligence managed to reach the level where harnessing new technologies displaces controlling fellow beings and where exploring space trumps conquering land. Ad astra!

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On Saturday, February 5, 2011, my audio book producer John Wagner and I took a break from endless hours of my reading aloud (with John editing out my countless mistakes) my next book, The Believing Brain, which ironically includes chapters on UFOs, aliens, and conspiracy theories. Ironic because for this break John and I took what we thought would be an uneventful tour of the beautiful new National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

This is definitely a museum well worth visiting for a comprehensive tour of all things atomic. It was originally opened in 1969 as the Sandia Atomic Museum, but then changed in 1973 to the National Atomic Museum to include a broader history of the peaceful use of nuclear energy, and finally morphed into the new building that now houses the collection, which includes replicas of the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs (see photograph), along with a B-29, a B-52, an F-105, an A-7, an Atomic Cannon, a Titan II Rocket, a Minuteman Missile, a Jupiter Missile, a Thor Missile, and hundreds more smaller items inside the museum building itself, including these two amusing early uses of atomic energy for “health” purposes:

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1. The Spectro-Chrome Device, “invented around 1911, was used in the practice of Spectro-Chrome therapy. The inventors believed that every element exhibits a certain color. Ninety-seven percent of a human body is made up of four main elements: oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon. The color waves of these elements were thought to be blue, red, green, and yellow respectively. Illness was thought to occur when one or more of these colors became out of balance, either too dim or too brilliant. The Spectro-Chrome Device treated the afflicted part of the body with the proper amount of color and light to restore balance in the body. Once balance occurred, the patient should recover.” The operative word here is “should”.

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2. The Revigator: “This large pottery crock was lined with Radium ore. Instructions on the jar suggest that you fill it every night with water and drink an average of six or more glasses daily. After its discovery by Pierre and Marie Curie in 1898, Radium was considered a ‘cure-all’ until the early 1920s.” The operative word here is “crock”.

We were also quite impressed with the array of nuclear-tipped missiles, including these two (see below), one of which had been in space and survived the reentry. Can you tell which one?

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Then something really weird happened. As John and I were strolling along the exhibits talking about this and that, I wondered out loud if they had any examples of the sand that was turned into glass in the Trinity atomic bomb test explosion on July 16, 1945 at White Sands, New Mexico. Just then the museum docent who had kindly joined us to offer more detailed narratives to accompany the printed plaques, explained that they did, indeed, have a display of said sand-to-glass fusion, and there it was, beautiful in its horrific creation. We chatted it up with the docent for a time, at which point I asked if it is possible to go to White Sands and see the glass in situ. She said, “no, it has all been taken away.” I said, “who took it away, and where is it?” She responded rhetorically: “Right, who took it, where, and why?” I repeated the question and she repeated the rhetorical answer.

“Uh, what are you saying? Someone secreted it away?” “Yes, right, it’s gone and no one knows where,” she explained unhelpfully. “But someone must know,” I pleaded.

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At this point she hinted that there are many government secrets still surrounding nuclear weapons. Of this I am quite certain, since governments do keep secrets in the interests of national security, but she seemed to be speaking of a different sort of secret. I probed for more examples of such secrets. “When you go outside,” she offered, “you will see a B-29 bomber, like the one that dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Look at the serial number on the tail. It says 451748. But if you go inside the cockpit and look behind the pilot seat you will find another serial number for that plane: 451749.”

“Okay, so someone messed up,” I suggested. “After all, the people who spray paint numbers on planes are probably not the engineers who design and build planes for Boeing. So what?”

“Well, I looked into that matter myself when I was restoring the plane,” she continued breathlessly, “and it turns out that plane number 451749 disappeared over the South China Sea in a mysterious explosion in the early 1950s. Supposedly one of the bombs armed itself inside the B-29 and then detonated itself.”

“Is that possible?” I queried, wondering just where this story was going but suspecting it was about to take a dramatic turn into conspiratorial waters.

“Have you ever heard of a bomb arming itself and then detonating itself?” she queried. I had to admit that I hadn’t, but I also signaled to her that I didn’t know much at all about bombs and what they are capable of doing, but then suggested that I could certainly imagine how the same people who spray paint the wrong serial number on the tail of a plane could easily screw up while arming a bomb and cause it to explode. Human error happens not infrequently in operating complex machinery.

“Well, I’ll tell you—that doesn’t happen,” she countered my feeble objections. “That plane was shot down or intentionally destroyed.” Okay, shot down. Intentionally destroyed. By whom, enemy fighter planes or an anti-aircraft missile over enemy territory? “No, it was destroyed by our own government.” Why? “Because the crew saw something.” What? What did they see? “Remember, this was not long after Roswell….”

Okay, here we go, we’re on my turf now! Aliens, UFOs, Roswell, New Mexico. The alien encounter in 1947. The crew, she said, probably had a UFO encounter of some sort, and they were silenced. “Wow, that’s incredible,” I enthused. “How can I look into this further?” At this point my erstwhile conspiratorialist grew quiet, warning me in a voice too fervent by half: “You can try but I wouldn’t get my hopes up. I made some calls myself and finally got a hold of a two-star general, who told me ‘I don’t know what happened and you don’t either.’”

“What did you take that to mean?,” I pushed. “He was telling me that if I didn’t drop my investigation of what really happened to plane number 451749, that Men-In-Black would come pay me a visit,” she explained unhesitatingly and with enough dramatis that I would get the message myself.

So…there it is. That’s all I know from my brief visit and having conducted no further investigations. If anyone reading this knows, or knows someone who knows…or who has a Friend-of-a-Friend who knows someone who knows what happened to B-29 plane number 451749, I would really like to know myself. And if there are any M.I.B. out there planning to come visit me, bring an extra pair of those cool black sunglasses for me.

What are the odds that intelligent, technically advanced aliens would look anything like the ones in films, with an emaciated torso and limbs, spindly fingers and a bulbous, bald head with large, almond-shaped eyes? What are the odds that they would even be humanoid? In this YouTube video, produced by Josh Timonen of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, I argue that the chances are close to zero. Richard Dawkins himself made this interesting observation in a private communication after viewing it:

I would agree with [Shermer] in betting against aliens being bipedal primates, and I think the point is worth making, but I think he greatly overestimates the odds against. [University of Cambridge paleontologist] Simon Conway Morris, whose authority is not to be dismissed, thinks it positively likely that aliens would be, in effect, bipedal primates. [Harvard University biologist] Ed Wilson gave at least some time to the speculation that, if it had not been for the end-Cretaceous catastrophe, dinosaurs might have produced something like the attached [referring to paleontologist Dale A. Russell’s illustrated evolutionary projection of how a bipedal dinosaur might have evolved into a reptilian humanoid].

I replied to Dawkins that if something like a smart, technological, bipedal humanoid has a certain level of inevitability because of how evolution unfolds, then it would have happened more than once here. In his 2001 book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Robert Wright argues that our existence precludes other terrestrial intelligences of our level from arising. But Neandertals were as close as one can get to a counterfactual experiment: they had hundreds of thousands of years to themselves in Europe without our interference and showed nothing like the technological and cultural progress of the modern humans who displaced them. Dawkins’s rejoinder to me is enlightening:

But you are leaping from one extreme to the other. In the film vignette, you implied a quite staggering rarity, so rare that you don’t expect two humanoid life-forms in the entire universe. Now you are … pointing out, correctly, that a certain inevitability would predict that humanoids should have evolved more than once on Earth! So, yes, we can say that humanoids are fairly improbable, but not necessarily all that improbable! Anything approaching “a certain inevitability” would mean millions or even billions of humanoid life-forms in the universe, simply because the number of available planets is so huge. Now, my guess is intermediate between your two extremes … I suspect that humanoids are not so very rare as to justify the statistical superlatives that you permitted yourself in the vignette.

Good point. But of the 60 to 80 phyla of animals, only one, the chordates, led to intelligence, and only the vertebrates actually developed it. Of all the vertebrates, only mammals evolved brains big enough for higher intelligence. And of the 24 orders of mammals only one — ours, the primates — has technological intelligence. As the late Harvard evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr concluded: “Nothing demonstrates the improbability of the origin of high intelligence better than the millions of phyletic lineages that failed to achieve it.” In fact, Mayr calculated that even though there have evolved perhaps as many as 50 billion species on Earth, “only one of these achieved the kind of intelligence needed to establish a civilization.”

The late astronomer Carl Sagan, in a Planetary Society debate with Mayr (Bioastronomy News, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1995), noted that technologically communicating species “may live on the land or in the sea or air. They may have unimaginable chemistries, shapes, sizes, colors, appendages and opinions. We are not requiring that they follow the particular route that led to the evolution of humans. There may be many different evolutionary pathways, each unlikely, but the sum of the number of pathways to intelligence may nevertheless be quite substantial.”

Thus, the probability of intelligent life evolving elsewhere in the cosmos may be very high even while the odds of it being humanoid may be very low. I strongly suspect that we are blinded by Protagoras’ bias (“Man is the measure of all things”) when we project ourselves into the alien Other.

I’m a big fan of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intellience) and I think their search program constitutes the best chance we have of making contact. In fact, on a recent Saturday I was rained out of my normal 4-hour bike ride, so I read SETI scientist Seth Shostak’s new book, Confessions of An Alien Hunter (published by National Geographic), a brilliant and fun read. Seth has a fantastic sense of humor and in his book he presents some of great one-liners to use when dealing with UFOlogists, alien abductees, and the saucerites. For example:

Regarding the time it would take to traverse the vast distances between the stars, which would be millions of years (it will take Voyager II 300,000 years to reach a nearby star), Shostak notes: “That’s a long time to be squirming in a coach seat.”

As for the lack of tangible evidence for UFOs: “Physical evidence — a taillight or knob from an alien craft — is in short supply.”

UFOlogists claim that they have tens of thousands of UFO sightings, as if this is a good thing, but Shostak notes that this actually argues against UFOs being ET, because to date not one of these tens of thousands of sightings has materialized into concrete evidence that UFOs = ETIs. It’s counterintuitive, but more sightings equals less certainty because with so many saucers zipping around we would have captured one by now, and we haven’t.

Shostak notes that crop circles are a very poor means of communication because they represent only a few hundred bits of information, 1,679 bits in the most complex crop circle to date, which is less than a paragraph of text! If ETIs are advanced enough for interstellar space travel, why resort to using wheat fields, which are only ripe a couple of months a year, and then the crop-circle communication is quickly mowed down by angry farmers!

As for alien abductees, Shostak points out that Whitley Strieber’s book, Communion, launched the modern alien abduction movement. And guess what Strieber does for a living? He is a SciFi/fantasy/horror writer! Actually, I knew this already because I met Strieber in the green room at Bill Maher’s ABC show, Politically Incorrect, and Whitley and I were chatting it up over coffee and granola bars in the green room before the show when I asked him what he did when he wasn’t writing about being abducted by aliens. He told me that he writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels. The show was over right there in the green room! What else is there to say to a guy who writes this stuff as fiction, then slaps a “nonfiction” label on the book jacket?

The Ten Questions

1. How reliable is the source of the claim?
2. Does the source make similar claims?
3. Have the claims been verified by somebody else?
4. Does this fit with the way the world works?
5. Has anyone tried to disprove the claim?
6. Where does the preponderance of evidence point?
7. Is the claimant playing by the rules of science?
8. Is the claimant providing positive evidence?
9. Does the new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory?
10. Are personal beliefs driving the claim?

Credits

This is the first video by RDFTV.
Presented by The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
Directed by Josh Timonen
Produced by Maureen Norton
Animation by Pew 36 Animation Studios
Music by Neal Acree
Post Production Sound by Sound Satisfaction
Supervising Sound Editor/Re-Recording Mixer: Gary J. Coppola, C.A.S.
Sound Editor: Ben Rauscher
Production Assistant: Graham Immel
Copyright © 2009 Upper Branch Productions, Inc.

A review of George Basalla’s Civilized Life in the Universe: Scientists on Intelligent Extraterrestrials.

On February 8, 2000, the New York Times science section featured a newly published book, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe¹ by the paleontologist Peter Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee, who were called radicals for daring to challenge the orthodox assumption that the cosmos is probably teaming with complex life. “Now, two prominent scientists say the conventional wisdom is wrong.”²

How did the belief in the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI) change from the heresy it was in the early 1960s when Frank Drake, Carl Sagan, and others took up the search, to “conventional wisdom” by the late 1990s? It certainly was not due to any new empirical data for the existence of ETIs, since this continues to be a science without a subject. A compelling answer may be found in George Basalla’s critically important new book, Civilized Life in the Universe, the best treatment on the history and science of the subject since Steven Dick’s magisterial two volumes, Plurality of Worlds and The Biological Universe.³

Basalla’s tightly-woven and highly readable narrative begins with an epigraph from the theoretical physicist Paul Davies: “What I am more concerned with is the extent to which the modern search for aliens is, at rock-bottom, part of an ancient religious quest” (p. 3). That is precisely what it is, says Basalla, who precedes to outline three assumptions underlying the thinking about extra-terrestrial intelligence from antiquity to the present:

1. the universe is very large or infinite,
2. there are other inhabited worlds,
3. these other complex and intelligent beings are vastly superior to us.

Modern cosmology has confirmed the first assumption. We live in an accelerating expanding universe some 13.7 billion years old, which contains several hundred billion galaxies each of which houses several hundred billion stars. And modern astronomy is in the process of confirming half of the second assumption: there are a great many worlds circling those hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy. Whether they are inhabited or not, of course, remains to be seen.

As for the third assumption, if we did make contact with an ETI, they would have to be vastly superior to us (since we just recently mastered radio and space-flight). On an evolutionary time scale, an ETI species only slightly ahead of us biologically could be millions of years ahead of us technologically. Pace Arthur C. Clarke, I have called this Shermer’s Last Law: “Any sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.”⁴

This is actually an ancient belief, says Basalla.

The idea of the superiority of celestial beings is neither new nor scientific. It is a widespread and old belief in religious thought. Aristotle divided his universe into two distinct regions, the superior celestial realm and the inferior terrestrial realm.

The incorporation of Aristotle into Christian theology carried this belief into the Middle Ages. “Christians populated the celestial regions with God, the saints, angelic beings of varying ranks, and the souls of the dead. These immortal celestial beings were superior to mortals, who inhabited the inferior terrestrial realm” (p. 10). Even though the Copernican revolution overturned Aristotelian cosmology, “the belief that creatures living on a distant planet were superior to the human species” hung on into the modern age, and that “religious elements continue to adhere to the perception of extraterrestrial life even as we study it in the twenty-first century” (p. 12).

As I demonstrated in an analysis I conducted on the SETI pioneers,⁵ most were once religious but became either atheists or agnostics as adults. Radio astronomer Frank Drake — creator of the canonical “Drake Equation” for estimating the number of ETIs inhabiting the galaxy — was raised Baptist, and later reflected: “A strong influence on me, and I think on a lot of SETI people, was the extensive exposure to fundamentalist religion.”⁶ In his book on the subject, Drake suggested that “immortality may be quite common among extraterrestrials.”⁷ Carl Sagan — who did more than anyone to conventionalize SETI — was raised Jewish and became agnostic, later writing of SETI’s importance: “It touches deeply into myth, folklore, religion, mythology; and every human culture in some way or another has wondered about that type of question.”⁸ ETIs are secular Gods. Deities for atheists.

Why should so many people — theists and atheists, theologians and scientists — believe in the existence of superior celestial beings, be they angels or aliens? Basalla’s answer is twofold:

1. the psychologist Robert Plank suggests that humans have an emotional need to believe in imaginary beings.⁹ “Despite all their scientific trappings,” Basalla writes, “the extraterrestrials discussed by scientists are as imaginary as the spirits and gods of religion or myth” (p. 14);
2. the historian of science Steven Dick thinks that when the Newtonian mechanical universe displaced the spiritual world of the Middle Ages it left a vast and lifeless void, which was filled by modern science with ETIs. Consider Sagan’s vision of alien intelligences, says Basalla. “Sagan was certain that these creatures were benevolent. They would help us solve current problems, like the spread of nuclear weapons and environmental pollution, by sharing their advanced knowledge with us” (p. 13).

Basalla is also highly critical of the anthropomorphism inherent in SETI science. Although Sagan identified a number of chauvinisms (oxygen, carbon, temperature, etc.) that cloud scientific thinking on this subject, Basalla thinks that he didn’t go far enough. The chauvinism that ETIs will communicate via radio signals, that their intelligence will take a form similar to ours, and especially that they are social beings who live in civilizations are anthropomorphisms that have no basis whatsoever in reality. We cannot even communicate with terrestrial intelligences such as apes and dolphins, Basalla notes, “how can we hope to decode complex messages sent by superior extraterrestrial ones?” (p. 200).

Nevertheless, if we do make contact with intelligent celestial beings, all of this speculation and conjecture will fall by the wayside in favor of real science. So in the spirit of scientific inquiry, the search must go on. Ad astra!

References & Notes

1. Ward, P. D. and D. Brownlee. 2000. Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe. New York: Copernicus Books.
2. Broad, W. J. 2000. “Maybe We Are Alone in the Universe, After All.” New York Times, February 8.
3. Dick, Steven J. 1982. Plurality of Worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1996. The Biological Universe. New York: Cambridge University press.
4. Shermer, Michael. 2002. “Shermer’s Last Law.” Scientific American, January, p. 33.
5. Shermer, Michael. 2001. The Borderlands of Science. New York: Oxford University Press.
6. Swift, D. 1990. SETI Pioneers: Scientists Talk About Their Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, p. 57.
7. Drake, Frank and Dava Sobel. 1992. Is Anyone Out There? New York: Delacorte, p. 160.
8. Swift, D. 1990, p. 219.
9. Plank, Robert. 1968. The Emotional Significance of Imaginary Beings. Springfield: Charles C. Thomas.

(Cambridge University Press, 2006, ISBN 0195171810)
This review was originally published in Science.

In the wee hours of the morning on August 8, 1983, while I was traveling along a lonely rural highway approaching Haigler, Neb., a large craft with bright lights overtook me and forced me to the side of the road. Alien beings exited the craft and abducted me for 90 minutes, after which time I found myself back on the road with no memory of what transpired inside the ship. I can prove that this happened because I recounted it to a film crew shortly afterward.

When alien abductees recount to me their stories, I do not deny that they had a real experience. But thanks to recent research by Harvard University psychologists Richard J. McNally and Susan A. Clancy, we now know that some fantasies are indistinguishable from reality, and they can be just as traumatic. In a 2004 paper in Psychological Science entitled “Psychophysiological Responding during Script-Driven Imagery in People Reporting Abduction by Space Aliens,” McNally, Clancy and their colleagues report the results of a study of claimed abductees. The researchers measured heart rate, skin conductance and electromyographic responses in a muscle that lifted the eyebrow—called the left lateral (outer) frontalis — of the study participants as they relived their experiences through script-driven imagery. “Relative to control participants,” the authors concluded, “abductees exhibited greater psychophysiological reactivity to abduction and stressful scripts than to positive and neutral scripts.” In fact, the abductees’ responses were comparable to those of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients who had listened to scripts of their actual traumatic experiences.

The abduction study was initiated as a control in a larger investigation of memories of sexual abuse. In his book Remembering Trauma (Harvard University Press, 2003), McNally tracks the history of the recovered memory movement of the 1990s, in which some people, while attempting to recover lost memories of childhood sexual molestation (usually through hypnosis and guided imagery), instead created false memories of abuse that never happened. “The fact that people who believe they have been abducted by space aliens respond like PTSD patients to audiotaped scripts describing their alleged abductions,” McNally explains, “underscores the power of belief to drive a physiology consistent with actual traumatic experience.” The vividness of a traumatic memory cannot be taken as evidence of its authenticity.

The most likely explanation for alien abductions is sleep paralysis and hypnopompic (on awakening) hallucinations. Temporary paralysis is often accompanied by visual and auditory hallucinations and sexual fantasies, all of which are interpreted within the context of pop culture’s fascination with UFOs and aliens. McNally found that abductees “were much more prone to exhibit false recall and false recognition in the lab than were control subjects,” and they scored significantly higher than normal on a questionnaire measuring “absorption,” a trait related to fantasy proneness that also predicts false recall.

My abduction experience was triggered by sleep deprivation and physical exhaustion. I had just ridden a bicycle 83 straight hours and 1,259 miles in the opening days of the 3,100-mile nonstop transcontinental Race Across America. I was sleepily weaving down the road when my support motor home flashed its high beams and pulled alongside, and my crew entreated me to take a sleep break. At that moment a distant memory of the 1960s television series The Invaders was inculcated into my waking dream. In the series, alien beings were taking over the earth by replicating actual people but, inexplicably, retained a stiff little finger. Suddenly the members of my support team were transmogrified into aliens. I stared intensely at their fingers and grilled them on both technical and personal matters.

After my 90-minute sleep break, the experience represented nothing more than a bizarre hallucination, which I recounted to ABC’s Wide World of Sports television crew filming the race. But at the time the experience was real, and that’s the point. The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering. Thanks to science we have learned to tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

The world lost the creators of two of its most celebrated biohoaxes recently: Douglas Herrick, father of the risibly ridiculous jackalope (half jackrabbit, half antelope), and Ray L. Wallace, paternal guardian of the less absurd Bigfoot.

The jackalope enjoins laughter in response to such peripheral hokum as hunting licenses sold only to those whose IQs range between 50 and 72, bottles of the rare but rich jackalope milk, and additional evolutionary hybrids such as the jackapanda. Bigfoot, on the other hand, while occasionally eliciting an acerbic snicker, enjoys greater plausibility for a simple evolutionary reason: large hirsute apes currently roam the forests of Africa, and at least one species of a giant ape — Gigantopithecus — flourished some hundreds of thousands of years ago alongside our ancestors.

Is it possible that a real Bigfoot lives despite the posthumous confession by the Wallace family that it was just a practical joke? Certainly. After all, although Bigfoot proponents do not dispute the Wallace hoax, they correctly note that tales of the giant Yeti living in the Himalayas and Native American lore about Sasquatch wandering around the Pacific Northwest emerged long before Wallace pulled his prank in 1958.

In point of fact, throughout much of the 20th century it was entirely reasonable to speculate about and search for Bigfoot, as it was for the creatures of Loch Ness, Lake Champlain and Lake Okanagan (Scotland’s Nessie, the northeastern U.S.’s Champ and British Columbia’s Ogopogo, respectively). Science traffics in the soluble, so for a time these other chimeras warranted our limited exploratory resources. Why don’t they now? The study of animals whose existence has yet to be proved is known as cryptozoology, a term coined in the late 1950s by Belgian zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans. Cryptids, or “hidden animals,” begin life as blurry photographs, grainy videos and countless stories about strange things that go bump in the night. Cryptids come in many forms, including the aforementioned giant pongid and lake monsters, as well as sea serpents, giant octopuses, snakes, birds and even living dinosaurs.

The reason cryptids merit our attention is that enough successful discoveries have been made by scientists based on local anecdotes and folklore that we cannot dismiss all claims a priori. The most famous examples include the gorilla in 1847 (andthe mountain gorilla in 1902), the giant panda in 1869, the okapi (a short-necked relative of the giraffe) in 1901, the Komodo dragon in 1912, the bonobo (or pygmy chimpanzee) in 1929, the megamouth shark in 1976 and the giant gecko in 1984. Cryptozoologists are especially proud of the catch in 1938 of a coelacanth, an archaic-looking species of fish that had been thought to have gone extinct in the Cretaceous. Although discoveries of previously unrecorded species of bugs and bacteria are routinely published in the annals of biology, these instances are startling because of their recency, size, and similarity to cryptid cousins Bigfoot, Nessie, et al. They also have in common — a body! In order to name a new species, one must have a type specimen — a holotype — from which a detailed description can be made, photographs taken, models cast and a professional scientific analysis prepared.

If such cryptids still survived in the hinterlands of North America and Asia, surely by now one would have turned up. So far all we have are the accounts. Anecdotes are a good place to begin an investigation — which by themselves cannot verify a new species. In fact, in the words of social scientist Frank J. Sulloway of the University of California at Berkeley—words that should be elevated to a maxim: “Anecdotes do not make a science. Ten anecdotes are no better than one, and a hundred anecdotes are no better than ten.”

I employ Sulloway’s maxim every time I encounter Bigfoot hunters and Nessie seekers. Their tales make for gripping narratives, but they do not make sound science. A century has been spent searching for these chimerical creatures. Until a body is produced, skepticism is the appropriate response.

As scientist extraordinaire and author of an empire of science-fiction books, Arthur C. Clarke is one of the farthest-seeing visionaries of our time. His pithy quotations tug harder than those of most futurists on our collective psyches for their insights into humanity and our unique place in the cosmos.
And none do so more than his famous Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

This observation stimulated me to think about the impact the discovery of an extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) would have on science and religion. To that end, I would like to immodestly propose Shermer’s Last Law (I don’t believe in naming laws after oneself, so as the good book says, the last shall be first and the first shall be last): “Any sufficiently advanced ETI is indistinguishable from God.”

God is typically described by Western religions as omniscient and omnipotent. Because we are far from possessing these traits, how can we possibly distinguish a God who has them absolutely from an ETI who merely has them copiously relative to us? We can’t. But if God were only relatively more knowing and powerful than we are, then by definition the deity would be an ETI!

Consider that biological evolution operates at a snail’s pace compared with technological evolution (the former is Darwinian and requires generations of differential reproductive success; the latter is Lamarckian and can be accomplished within a single generation). Then, too, the cosmos is very big and very empty. Voyager 1, our most distant spacecraft, hurtling along at more than 38,000 miles per hour, will not reach the distance of even our sun’s nearest neighbor, the Alpha Centauri system (which it is not headed toward), for more than 75,000 years. Ergo, the probability that an ETI only slightly more advanced than we are will make contact is virtually nil. If we ever do find an ETI, it will be as though a million-year-old Homo erectus were dropped into the 21st century, given a computer and cell phone and instructed to communicate with us. The ETI would be to us as we would be to this early hominid — godlike.

Because of science and technology, our world has changed more in the past century than in the previous 100 centuries. It took 10,000 years to get from the dawn of civilization to the airplane but just 66 years to get from powered flight to a lunar landing.

Moore’s Law of computer power doubling every 18 months or so is now approaching a year. Ray Kurzweil, in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, calculates that there have been 32 doublings since World War II and that the singularity point — the point at which total computational power will rise to levels so far beyond anything that we can imagine that it will appear nearly infinite and thus be indistinguishable from omniscience — may be upon us as early as 2050.

When that happens, the decade that follows will put the 100,000 years before it to shame. Extrapolate out about a million years (just a blink on an evolutionary timescale and therefore a realistic estimate of how far advanced ETIs will be), and we get a gut-wrenching, mind-warping feel for how godlike these creatures would seem. In Clarke’s 1953 novel, called Childhood’s End, humanity reaches something like a singularity and must then make the transition to a higher state of consciousness. One character early in the story opines that “science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.”

Although science has not even remotely destroyed religion, Shermer’s Last Law predicts that the relation between the two will be profoundly affected by contact with an ETI. To find out how, we must follow Clarke’s Second Law: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” Ad astra!