More Thoughts On Fermi's Paradox

This is a third in a series of posts on Fermi's Paradox, which started here. My thinking in recent years is driven by a remark from the then-vocation director of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, who posed this question to a discussion group of seminarians: If aliens arrive from outer space, should we offer them baptism?

I don't think he had a single right or wrong answer in mind, but I find the overall direction of his thinking compelling. It's actually in full conformity with the views of pop cosmologist Carl Sagan, the author of the Voyager Disk illustrated above, as well as the late 20th century science fiction universe exemplified by the Star Trek-Star Wars franchises -- except that I think it subverts them via a reductio ad absurdum.

Let's start with the assumption behind the Voyager Disk, which is clearly that it's intended to be found someday, even eons and light years distant, by an alien civilization that has the rational resources to decrypt it. It would pose no challenge for Hollywood to develop a script based on the idea that an alien civilization does in fact come upon the disk and then makes contact with the earthlings who produced it, via some combination of warp drive and time travel.

But the basic assumption behind the disk is that the aliens have the rational capacity to understand that the images are of a species with sexual dimorphism, situated on a planet with a particular location in the universe, with a particular rationalistic understanding of physics and chemistry. Heck, I could write a subplot in that Hollywood script that would involve Dr Asdf Qwerty, a young assistant professor in the Cosmology Department at the University of Glubdwtfug, who comes upon the disk in a discarded pile of cosmic trash, and his subsequent struggle to prove its authenticity. Key to his eventual triumph would be his ability to reverse engineer the LP phonograph technology that plays the sounds on it.

The utter complacency of Sagan's idea is in effect that the mere power of random evolutionary forces will produce alien species elsewhere in the universe with rationalistic cultures that are near-duplicates of our own Ivy League dominated human establishment, such that, once the Sagan disk is discovered, it will be a relatively trivial task to translate a rationalistic message on a piece of metal and act on it in some consequential way -- if in no other way than to place it in the Glubdwtfug Institute of Cosmology's museum. (It would not, however, be consistent with this theory to have an alien microbe species come upon the disk and simply eat it.)

This is puzzling. Before the Star Trek-Star Wars model of the universe, there was the HG Wells model in War of the Worlds, whereby the space aliens are not benign and do not have the interests of earthlings in mind. In fact, even among the earthling cosmological establishment, there have been objections to the Sagan Voyager Disk-SETI model, suggesting we may not be doing ourselves a favor by broadcasting to the universe that we're around.

But looking at Sagan's biography and list of awards on Wikipedia -- which include Ivy League advanced degrees, as well as the Klumpke-Roberts Award; NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal; Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction; Oersted Medal; Carl Sagan Award for Public Understanding of Science; and the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal -- it's plain that the Sagan view of alien beings has formed the contemporary popular understanding of how the universe is populated.

Thus, space aliens, even if there are superficial differences with earthlings, are able to undersand each other via a mutually translatable set of languages, and indeed, can communicate and persuade via classical rhetoric. It's implied that they are able to understand and manipulate the universe's elements and properties via mutually recognized rationalistic techniques. I think this is in fact an understanding of how we view space aliens that underlies Fr Sam's question to the seminarians.

If or when we encounter space aliens, it's clearly understood in this view that the aliens will not simply want to eat us. Nor will they simply want to exterminate us to steal the planet's water. The basic assumption is that the universe is benign. In fact, it's complacent enough to encompass the idea that there are probably Ivy Leaguers on other planets who are fully simpatico with those on this one.

So there are two basic assumptions here. The first is the Judeo-Christian view, expressed in the Genesis creation story, that the universe is benign. "He saw that it was good." The second is that rationalistic creatures are in effect created in God's image. Thus if there are intelligent space aliens, which of course is a big if, they are created in God's image.

In that case, I have a hard time getting around Fr Sam's question: should we offer them baptism? Carl Sagan must be spinning in his grave.