Cosmic Connection (21 page)

There is also the vexing question of the latency period. If we expose terrestrial organisms to Martian pathogens, how long must we wait before we can be convinced that the pathogen-host relationship is understood? For example, the latency period for leprosy is more than a decade. Because of the danger of backcontamination of Earth, I firmly believe that manned landings on Mars should be postponed until the beginning of the next century, after a vigorous program of unmanned Martian exobiology and terrestrial epidemiology.

I reach this conclusion reluctantly. I, myself, would love to be involved in the first manned expedition to Mars. But an exhaustive program of unmanned biological exploration of Mars is necessary first. The likelihood that such pathogens exist is probably small, but we cannot take even a small risk with a billion lives. Nevertheless, I believe that people will be treading the Martian surface near the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Beyond that, it is just possible to glimpse the outline of further exploration and colonization. The large moons of Jupiter, and Titan, the biggest moon of Saturn, are major worlds in their own right. Titan is known to have an atmosphere much thicker than that of Mars. These five moons all have large quantities of ices on their surfaces. To make these worlds more habitable, their ices can be tapped for fuel, for the production of food and for the generation of atmospheres. Schemes for similarly terraforming Mars and Venus have been suggested and will very likely be refined and implemented (see Chapter 22). More exotic possibilities, requiring much more advanced technologies, are not at all beyond the likely capabilities of mankind in the next century or two. These include the establishment of bases on and in the asteroids and the short-period comets.

In another century or so, novel forms of propulsion within the Solar System will be developed. One of the most charming of these is solar sailing, the use of the pressure of sunlight and of the protons and electrons in the solar wind for tripping through the Solar System. Enormous sails will be required for such an enterprise, but they can be extremely thin. We can imagine a spacecraft surrounded with tens of miles of golden gossamer-thin sails, delicately and exquisitely furled to catch the solar wind. Remote scientific stations will be on the lookout for the gusts produced by solar flares. Going outward from the Sun will be easy; tacking inward will be more difficult. Spacecraft using solar electric power and nuclear fusion will very likely also be developed in the next century.

In something like two or three centuries, assuming even a modest growth in our technological capability, I would imagine the entire Solar System will have been explored thoroughly–at least to the extent that the Earth has been explored at the present time, some two or three centuries after the first large-scale exploration and colonization activities were begun by European sailing vessels. After that, it is not out of the question that a more wholesale rearrangement of our Solar System will begin, first slowly and then at a more rapid rate–astroengineering projects to move the planets about, to rearrange their masses for the convenience of mankind, his descendants, and his inventions.

By then–perhaps long before then–we may have made contact with other advanced civilizations in the Galaxy. Or perhaps not. In any case, we will be ready in a few centuries for the next step. At just the point the Solar System begins to be filled in–again psychologically, rather than physically–we will be ready for interstellar voyages. That is a limitless prospect, one that can occupy the best exploratory instincts of mankind forever.

Pioneer 10
is the first interstellar spacecraft launched by mankind. It was also the fastest spacecraft launched, to the date of its departure. But it will take eighty thousand years for
Pioneer 10
to reach the distance of the nearest star. Because space is so empty, it will never enter another Solar System. The little golden message aboard
Pioneer 10
will be read, but only if there are interstellar voyagers able to detect and intercept
Pioneer 10
.

I believe that such an interception may occur, but by interstellar voyagers from the planet Earth, overtaking and heaving to this ancient space derelict–as if the
Nina
, with its crew jabbering in Castilian about falling off the edge of the world, were to be intercepted, somewhere off Tristan da Cunha, by the aircraft carrier
John F
.
Kennedy
.

To dance beneath the diamond sky

With one hand wavin’ free …

– Bob Dylan,
Mr
.
Tambourine Man

T
he first scientific conference on the subject of communication with extraterrestrial intelligence was a small affair sponsored by the U. S. National Academy of Sciences in Green Bank, West Virginia. It was held in 1961, a year after Project Ozma, the first (unsuccessful) attempt to listen to possible radio signals from civilizations on planets of other stars. Subsequently, there were two such meetings held in the Soviet Union sponsored by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Then, in September 1971, a joint Soviet-American conference on Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence was held near Byurakan, in Soviet Armenia (see Chapter 27). The possibility of communication with extraterrestrial intelligence is now at least semirespectable, but in 1961 it took a great deal of courage to organize such a meeting. Considerable credit should go to Dr. Otto Struve, then director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, who organized and hosted the Green Bank meeting.

Among the invitees to the meeting was Dr. John Lilly, then of the Communication Research Institute, in Coral Gables, Florida. Lilly was there because of his work on dolphin intelligence and, in particular, his efforts to communicate with dolphins. There was a feeling that this effort to communicate with dolphins–the dolphin is probably another intelligent species on our own planet–was in some sense comparable to the task that will face us in communicating with an intelligent species on another planet, should interstellar radio communication be established. I think it will be much easier to understand interstellar messages, if we ever pick them up, than dolphin messages (see Chapter 29), if there are any.

The conjectured connection between dolphins and space was dramatized for me much later, at the lagoon outside the Vertical Assembly Building at Cape Kennedy, as I awaited the
Apollo 17
liftoff. A dolphin quietly swam about, breaking water now and again, surveying the illuminated Saturn booster poised for its journey into space. Just checking us all out, perhaps?

Many of the participants at the Green Bank meeting already knew one another. But Lilly was, for many of us, a new quantity. His dolphins were fascinating, and the prospect of possible communication with them was enchanting. (The meeting was made further memorable by the announcement in Stockholm during its progress that one of our participants, Melvin Calvin, had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. )

For many reasons, we wished to commemorate the meeting and maintain some loose coherence as a group. Captured as we were by Lilly’s tales of the dolphins, we christened ourselves “The Order of the Dolphins.” Calvin had a tie pin struck as an emblem of membership; it was a reproduction from the Boston Museum of an old Greek coin showing a boy on a dolphin. I served as a kind of informal coordinator of correspondence the few times that there was any “Dolphin” business, all of it the election of new members. In the following year or two, we elected a few others to membership–among them I. S. Shklovskii, Freeman Dyson, and J. B. S. Haldane. Haldane wrote me that membership in an organization that had no dues, no meetings, and no responsibilities was the sort of organization he appreciated; he promised to try hard to live up to the duties of membership.

The Order of the Dolphins is now moribund. It has been replaced by a number of activities on an international scale. But for me the Order of the Dolphins had a special significance–it provided an opportunity to meet with, talk with, and, to some extent, befriend dolphins.

It was my practice to spend a week or two each winter in the Caribbean, mostly snorkeling and scuba diving–examining the non-mammalian inhabitants of the Caribbean waters. Because of my acquaintance and later friendship with John Lilly, I was also able to spend some days with Lilly’s dolphins in Coral Gables and in his research station at St. Thomas in the U. S. Virgin Islands.

His institute, now defunct, unquestionably did some good work on the dolphin, including the production of an important atlas of the dolphin brain. While I will be critical here about some of the scientific aspects of Lilly’s work, I want to express my admiration for any serious attempt to investigate dolphins and for Lilly’s pioneering efforts in particular. Lilly has since moved on to investigations of the human mind from the inside–consciousness expansion, both pharmacologically and non-pharmacologically induced.

I first met Elvar in the winter of 1963. Laboratory research on dolphins had been limited by these mammals’ sensitive skin; it was only the development of plastic polymer tanks that permitted long-term residence of dolphins in the laboratory. I was surprised to find that the Communication Research Institute resided in what used to be a bank, and I had visions of a polystyrene tank in each teller’s cage, with dolphins counting the money. Before introducing me to Elvar, Lilly insisted that I don a plastic raincoat, despite my assurances that this was entirely unnecessary. We entered a medium-sized room at the far corner of which was a large polyethylene tank. I could immediately see Elvar with his head thrown back out of the water so that the visual fields of each eye overlapped, giving him binocular vision. He swam slowly to the near side of the tank. John, the perfect host, said, “Carl, this is Elvar; Elvar, this is Carl.” Elvar promptly slapped his head forward, down onto the water, producing a needle-beam spray of water that hit me directly on the forehead. I had needed a raincoat after all. John said, “Well, I see you two are getting to know each other”–and promptly left.

I was ignorant of the amenities in dolphin/human social interactions. I approached the tank as casually as I could manage and murmured something like “Hi, Elvar.” Elvar promptly turned on his back, exposing his abraded, gun-metalgray belly. It was so much like a dog wanting to be scratched that, rather gingerly, I massaged his underside. He liked it–or at least I thought he liked it. Bottle-nose dolphins have a sort of permanent smile set into their heads.

After a little while, Elvar swam to the opposite side of the tank and then returned, again presenting himself supine–but this time about six inches subsurface. He obviously wanted his belly scratched some more. This was slightly awkward for me because I was outfitted under my raincoat with a full armory of shirt, tie, and jacket. Not wishing to be impolite, I took off my raincoat, removed my jacket, slid my sleeves up onto my wrists without unbuttoning my shirt cuffs, and put my raincoat on again, all the while assuring Elvar I would return momentarily–which I did, finally scratching him six inches below the water. Again he seemed to like it; again, after a few moments, he retreated to the far side of the tank, and then returned. This time he was about a foot subsurface.

My mood of cordiality was eroding rapidly, but it seemed to me that Elvar and I were at least engaged in communication of a kind. So I once again removed my raincoat, rolled up my sleeves, put my raincoat on again, and attended to Elvar. The next sequence found Elvar three or four feet subsurface, awaiting my massage. I could just have reached him were I prepared to discard raincoat and shirt altogether. This, I decided, was going too far. So we gazed at each other for a while in something of a standoff–man and dolphin, with a meter of water between us. Suddenly, Elvar came booming out of the water head first, until only his tail flukes were in contact with the water. He towered over me, doing a kind of slow backpedaling, then uttered a noise. It was a single “syllable,” high-pitched and squeaky. It had, well, a sort of Donald Duck timbre. It sounded to me that Elvar had said “More!”