Civilized Life in the Universe: Scientists on Intelligent Extraterrestrials , George Basalla , Oxford U. Press, New York, 2006. $29.95 (233 pp.). ISBN 0-19-517181-0
George Basalla’s Civilized Life in the Universe: Scientists on Intelligent Extraterrestrials is a curious book. It appears to be a history of the extraterrestrial (ET) life debate, yet Basalla offers much less detail than other histories on the subject written over the last two decades—for example, Michael Crowe’s The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750–1900: The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lowell (Cambridge U. Press, 1986) and The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (Cambridge U. Press, 1996), which I wrote. Basalla adds little new historical information, but his book has other purposes, which become increasingly apparent as one proceeds through it. First, the author attempts to show that belief in extraterrestrials and the search for them are irretrievably contaminated by anthropocentrism. Second, he tries to demonstrate that such belief is a secular religion. The first argument is hardly surprising; the second, highly questionable.
Throughout history, proponents of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) have projected terrestrial culture onto extraterrestrials. Basalla cites examples from Johannes Kepler, Christiaan Huygens, Percival Lowell, and others. Undoubtedly some, including two of the 20th century’s leading advocates, Frank Drake and the late Carl Sagan, have projected onto ETs godlike qualities such as immortality and omnipotence. However, those facts do not constitute proof, as Basalla implies, that the entire search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is doomed to failure a priori. At no point does he allow that the search for life in the universe, with all its anthropocentric shortcomings and purported motivations, might be a scientific enterprise of considerable importance in which researchers are attempting to answer one of the greatest riddles of the day in light of what they now know about the cosmos and its evolution. Even the US National Academy of Sciences has proclaimed several times that the endeavor is worthwhile.
Rather than taking the subject seriously, Basalla uses dubious inferences to build a case against SETI. He harshly criticizes the Drake equation, which is sometimes used for estimating the number of technological civilizations in the galaxy, yet he fails to point out that almost all SETI scientists, including Drake himself, stated long ago that the equation is nothing more than a heuristic device, a way of organizing our ignorance. It is not at the center of empirical SETI searches. Basalla also excoriates Sagan for some of his more imaginative ideas and takes NASA to task for indulging them. He accuses Sagan of hyping the possibilities of extraterrestrial life to gain public support and government funding (page 101) and believes that NASA tried to second-guess the Viking results (page 97) in 1976 and hyped the claims of fossil life in the ALH84001 Mars rock in 1996 for budgetary reasons.
In scientists’ attempts to study the possibilities of life in the universe, Basalla seems to see conspiracy everywhere. SETI and astrobiology in general stir great interest among the public; that Sagan and NASA have used that interest to their advantage is apparent. But isn’t such excitement understandable, when the subject remains one of the great questions of science?
Basalla’s claim that extraterrestrials constitute deities for those who reject traditional religions is dubious. In the 18th century, many natural philosophers filled the heavens with extraterrestrials at a time when Newtonian mechanics precluded the need for God’s action in the heavens. But their extraterrestrials were certainly not a replacement for God or traditional religion. For the modern era, Basalla cites only the backgrounds of Drake and Sagan to make his point (page 12), and if that isn’t small-number statistics, I don’t know what is. I would be more impressed if a scientific sample of thousands of people around the world showed some correlation between atheism and SETI supporters.
There is certainly room for skepticism in the ETI debate, as demonstrated, for example, in the type of scientific arguments advanced in Peter Ward and Don Brownlee’s Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe (Copernicus, 2000) (see the review in Physics Today, September 2000, page 62). Such arguments must be and, in my experience, have been taken seriously by SETI proponents in the same way the Fermi paradox (the contradiction between the high probability of the existence of ETs and the lack of evidence of their existence) was taken seriously when it was debated in Physics Today 26 years ago. The discussion was incited by Frank J. Tipler’s article, “Extraterrestrial Intelligent Beings Do Not Exist,” ( Physics Today, April 1981, page 9), which prompted a series of letters to the editor (see Physics Today, March 1982, page 26) and an article by Drake, “Will the Real SETI Please Stand Up?” (see Physics Today, June 1982, page 9). If the SETI community did not engage in such debate, it would indeed be practicing a secular religion. The point of SETI proponents is that evidence must exist one way or another—and they continue to look for it, although no longer with government funding. But by invoking anthropocentrism and claims of secular religion, Basalla aims to undermine the enterprise. His arguments take on a polemical and, one might say, almost religious tone. I am not convinced and prefer to await the evidence.
Some of Basalla’s points are well taken. His penultimate chapter, “Mirror Worlds,” is worth reading because of the questions he raises about the universality of science, alien morphology, communication, and technology. In the realm of epistemology, asking whether science is universal when extended to alien minds is legitimate. A few philosophers have taken up the problem, and some have concluded that science would not be universal.
In the realm of alien morphology, most evolutionists have concluded that extraterrestrials would not resemble us. Moreover, it is highly unlikely that any alien message would be easily decipherable, if recognizable. As the late Philip Morrison and others have argued, decoding such a message would likely occupy many scholars for generations, if the message could be deciphered at all. And Basalla, himself a distinguished historian of technology, speaks from his own strength and knowledge about the history of our species when he points out that technology may develop in many directions on other planets and may not include radio telescopes.
Nevertheless, if everyone followed Basalla’s logic that philosophical and cultural predispositions must be excised before we begin to do science, the scientific enterprise would never have gotten off the ground. Although the author argues the obvious, that we cannot escape our own minds and thus our conceptions of other worlds mirror our own, that fact does not preclude a search of the skies in the hope that we may someday come to an objective conclusion about life and intelligence in the universe.
