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!

On Tuesday, January 18, 2011, physicist, cosmologist, writer, and science celebrity Stephen Hawking spoke in Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium on the subject of “My Brief History,” an autobiographical journey through the life of one of the most famous scientists in history.

Tickets were in such high demand that I had to go as a member of the press, writing for Scientific American, Skeptic, eSkeptic, and Skeptic.com, and even then it wasn’t clear I was getting in to actually hear the lecture until after the press junket that afforded us a photo opportunity to pose with The Great One (see below).

Despite his handicap that prevents him from moving anything but a tiny cheek muscle, Hawking is fiercely independent and insists on writing his own speeches and delivering them sentence by sentence through a computer cursor command that he controls through twitching that one muscle, the movement of which is picked up by a small camera attached to his eye glasses (see close up photo below).

Propped up in his chair with his computer screen in front of him, Hawking delivers the lines of his speech sentence by sentence, which you can hear being commanded by a barely perceptible short buzzing sound that advances the already-written text line by line.

click image to enlarge

Hawking’s talk was a mix of anecdotes about his parents and upbringing, his schooling and early education, and his science—all of which have been outlined in countless articles, books, films, and biographies—but it was refreshing to hear it directly from the man himself, who rarely addresses the public about personal matters. Hawking was obviously gifted from early childhood, plus had the support of well-educated parents and opportunities for an excellent education. What he lacked, by his own admission, was motivation to achieve. In fact, Hawking noted that the whole point of going through higher education was to show how little effort was needed to succeed, and he took every advantage his genetics gave him for cognitive superiority to cruise through his courses while hardly lifting a finger.

All that changed when he was diagnosed with ALS, which jump-started his ambitions to roll up his sleeves and get to work on something significant to complete his Ph.D. and provide for his new family before…well, before his inevitable demise that is the prognosis of this disease. Four decades on Hawking remains paralyzed but very much alive, living life to the fullest that he can (Caltech cosmologist Kip Thorne, who hosted the event, recounted a trip to Antarctica that Hawking organized, as well as his well-publicized zero-gravity excursion in the “vomit comet” jet that flies through parabolic arcs that enable brief snippets of weightlessness. Apparently Hawking plans to be one of the first tourists into space aboard one of the developing private space flight companies.

Hawking also has a keen sense of humor, although it isn’t clear that if any of his lines were delivered by anyone else that they would be found funny. His situation is so unique, and his mind so interesting, that audiences seem eager to respond to anything he says that isn’t straight reportage about his life or science.

In previous talks that I have attended by Stephen the Q & A inevitably includes a god question, but in those days Hawking took questions from the floor, which took too long to answer so now he fields questions before the talk from Caltech students, who read them aloud to the audience, followed by Hawking’s prepared answer. Here are the three questions and Hawking’s answers:

Student question #1 from Marc Favata, a Caltech postdoc in physics: “As you well know, one of the major research efforts at Caltech concerns the detection of gravitational-radiation with LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory). When the upgrades to LIGO are complete in the next 5 years or so, we expect to detect multiple gravitational-wave events from merging neutron stars or black holes. Considering the uncertainties in our understanding of the rates at which these mergers happen, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the prospects for LIGO to detect something? More importantly, could you speculate on what might be some of the ‘big surprises’ that could come from gravitational-wave observations?

Hawking: “There is uncertainty in the rate of black hole or neutron star mergers. But after the upgrade, LIGO should be able to detect gravitational waves from neutron star binaries, and we know they exist. The most exciting result would be to find something we don’t expect. I can’t say what that might be, because then it wouldn’t be a surprise.”

Student question #2 from Shiri (Teresa) Liu, a Caltech physics sophomore: “In one of your TV series, you proved that time travel from the future to the past is impossible by holding a party for time travelers from the future. In your experiment, you planned to hold a party for the time travelers at noon on a specific day. You printed many copies of the invitations and counted on some of them to survive for thousands of years, so that time travelers living in the future will read the letter and use a time machine to come back to your party. However, nobody showed up at noon that day, so you concluded that time travel from the future to the past is impossible. Here is a paradox that I have encountered by changing your party plans: Suppose that time travel from the future to the past is, in fact, possible, and suppose that you have made a firm decision, before the party starts, to print and preserve the invitations forever. Suppose, you hold your party and time travelers do show up; but soon after your party you suddenly change your mind and destroy all the letters. What will happen? Will the time travelers who showed up at your party suddenly disappear into the future when you destroy the letters? If so, haven’t you just changed the future in the past? And, by the way, I’m just curious; do you still have all the invitation letters?

Hawking: “Even if I destroyed all the invitations, the television program is on YouTube, so time travelers from the future, would know about the party. Of course, they would also know that nobody came. Maybe that’s why they didn’t turn up.”

Student question #3, from Sirio Belli, a first-year grad student at Caltech in astrophysics: “The great Russian physicist Lev Landau, in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, ranked physicists on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 5 according to their productivity. He assigned the best score of 0 to Newton, 0.5 to Einstein, 1 to Paul Dirac and 2 to himself. What do you think would be your place on this scale? Many journalists have called you ‘the new Einstein,’ but I would like to know your opinion about the importance of your contributions to physics.”

Hawking: “Landau was good, but not that good. People who rank themselves are losers.”

A good time was had by all, and by all I mean the 1,100 people inside Beckman Auditorium, the additional 400 people in Remo Hall watching a video feed, and hundreds more on the lawn outside Beckman watching and listening on big screens and speakers. It is both rare and refreshing to see a scientist so popular that people were lined up to nab the handful of seats set aside for the general public as early as noon that day. Such is the nature of celebrity, even science celebrity.

In 1998 God appeared at Caltech.

More precisely, the scientific equivalent of the deity, in the form of Stephen W. Hawking, delivered a public lecture via his now familiar voice synthesizer. The 1,100-seat auditorium was filled; an additional 400 viewed a video feed in another hall, and hundreds more squatted on the lawn and listened to theater speakers broadcasting this scientific saint’s epistle to the apostles. The lecture was slated for 8 P.M. By three o’clock a line began to snake around the grassy quad adjoining the hall. By five, hundreds of scientists flipped Frisbees and chatted with students from Caltech and other universities.

When Hawking rolled into the auditorium and down the aisle in his motorized wheelchair, everyone rose in applause — a “standing O” just for showing up! The sermon was his customary one on the big bang, black holes, time and the universe, with the theology coming in the question-and-answer period. Here was an opportunity to inquire of a transcendent mind the biggest question of all: “Is there a God?”

Asked this ultimately unanswerable question, Hawking sat rigidly in his chair, stone quiet, his eyes darting back and forth across the computer screen. A minute, maybe two, went by. Finally, a wry smile formed and the Delphic oracle spoke: “I do not answer God questions.”

What is it about Hawking that draws us to him as a scientific saint? He is, I believe, the embodiment of a larger social phenomenon known as scientism. Scientism is a scientific worldview that encompasses natural explanations for all phenomena, eschews supernatural and paranormal speculations, and embraces empiricism and reason as the twin pillars of a philosophy of life appropriate for an Age of Science.

Scientism’s voice can best be heard through a literary genre for both lay readers and professionals that includes the works of such scientists as Carl Sagan, E. O. Wilson, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins and Jared Diamond. Scientism is a bridge spanning the abyss between what physicist C. P. Snow famously called the “two cultures” of science and the arts/humanities (neither encampment being able to communicate with the other). Scientism has generated a new literati and intelligentsia passionately concerned with the profound philosophical, ideological and theological implications of scientific discoveries.

Although the origins of the scientism genre can be traced to the writings of Galileo and Thomas Huxley in centuries past, its modern incarnation began in the early 1970s with mathematician Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, took off in the 1980s with Sagan’s Cosmos and hit pay dirt in the 1990s with Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which spent a record 200 weeks on the Sunday Times of London’s hardcover best-seller list and sold more than 10 million copies in 30-plus languages worldwide. Hawking’s latest work, The Universe in a Nutshell, is already riding high on the best-seller list.

Hawking’s towering fame is a result of a concatenation of variables that include the power of the scientism culture in which he writes, his creative insights into the ultimate nature of the cosmos, in which he dares to answer ersatz theological questions, and, perhaps most notably, his unmitigated heroism in the face of near-insurmountable physical obstacles that would have felled a lesser being. But his individual success in particular, and the rise of scientism in general, reveals something deeper still.

First, cosmology and evolutionary theory ask the ultimate origin questions that have traditionally been the province of religion and theology. Scientism is courageously proffering naturalistic answers that supplant supernaturalistic ones and in the process is providing spiritual sustenance for those whose needs are not being met by these ancient cultural traditions. Second, we are, at base, a socially hierarchical primate species. We show deference to our leaders, pay respect to our elders and follow the dictates of our shamans; this being the Age of Science, it is scientism’s
shamans who command our veneration. Third, because of language we are also storytelling, mythmaking primates, with scientism as the foundational stratum of our story and scientists as the premier mythmakers of our time.