The Mind’s Sky — Tim Ferris on SETI and Human Intelligence

The Mind’s Sky — Timothy Ferris on SETI, human intelligence, and hourglass trees

The Fermi paradox

Where is everybody? A deep question that Enrico Fermi posed in 1950 about our seemingly lonely position among the stars. While the universe is nearly 14 billion years old, Homo sapiens are about 300 thousand years young. If some intelligent species somewhere out there got a million years head start on us, surely that’d be signs of them somewhere. Yet, when our machines listen to what might be, we are greeted only with static and silence. As science writer Timothy Ferris writes in his wonderful book The Mind’s Sky, “perhaps they are not anywhere, and we are alone in the galaxy.”

But as the former U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld says, the “absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence”—a reminder that applies nonetheless to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). So even if we search for a thousand more years to no avail, we cannot say for certain that we are all alone in space. We might simply be looking in the wrong place or in the wrong way.

Listeners and virtual worlds

Another possibility, Ferris writes, is that “everybody in the galaxy is listening”, but “nobody [is] broadcasting.” Would you tell a stranger from a distant stellar region where you live? We only need to look inward at our own history to see that things don’t go very well when inhabitants from different continents collide for the first time. If intelligent life is risk averse, it seems prudent to listen and hide at the same time.

Moreover, space faring is an expensive affair. Unless your planet is dying, or your star is about to explode, the economic case for intergalactic colonization might not seem so wise. (Then again, it was not long ago when two superpower nations believed it utterly imperative that they be the first to land on the moon. Perhaps something of that sort will compel our alien neighbors into the cosmos.)

Also, it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where intelligent life chooses instead to rely more on virtual reality than on action in the physical world. Why might life want to travel into the far reaches when it can simulate its needs? We can find parallels here on Earth already. As Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk race to Mars, Mark Zuckerberg and others are turning inside to the Metaverse.

The reality, I think, is probably more general than that. True, I’d rather read about ants in a book than to squat in my backyard to marvel at them myself. But not everyone is like me. For every hundredth sofa spud like me is a pioneer. The same may apply to intelligent extraterrestrial species as well. If we do encounter intelligent life elsewhere, they are more likely to be of the expansionary kind. After all, the things that are easier to see in nature are usually the things that grow and expand.

A darker picture

What would happen anyway if we ran into intelligent life? In Life Beyond Earth & the Mind of Man, astronomer Carl Sagan says that “knowing this seems to me to be a useful and character-building experience for mankind.” Perhaps we’d share in science, technology, commerce, culture, and philosophy with our alien neighbors?

While we ought to leave such speculation to fiction writers, Sagan’s conclusion might be just a tad too rosy. While the 21st century is relatively peaceful by historical standards, our own track record for violence is pretty abysmal. If we go further back, archaeological records suggest that our ancestors might have even engaged in tribal warfare with the now extinct Neanderthals.

True, we cannot assume that human tendencies ought to apply to extraterrestrial intelligence. But the possibilities are immense. Would they treat us like dogs or ants or kin or something else altogether? As Ferris laments, “I fear not that aliens will be different from us, but that they will resemble us in the ways of which we are least proud.” Is it wise then to toy with Pandora’s box?

Spasms, extinctions, and intelligence

The problem with our discussions and the prospects of SETI, however, is in our treatment of intelligence. As Ferris wonders, “if there has been life on Earth for four billion years, and ‘intelligent’ life for but sixty years, then how can we say that intelligence has been selected for in the course of biological evolution?”

The rebuttal, of course, is that intelligence is hard to come by. It is a complex and contingent culmination of many building blocks over evolutionary time. But maybe once intelligence is finally underway, it becomes hard to stop. It grows resilient and adaptive. This seems consistent at least with the upward trajectory in animal brain sizes and with Darwinian gradualism.

Fossil studies and the theory of punctuated equilibrium suggests that evolution is marked also by “unpredictable tumult and change”—that “evolution proceeded not gradually, but in fits and starts, with long periods of stasis interrupted by explosions of new life forms”, Ferris writes.

When dinosaurs walked the earth, mammals lived a “marginal, furtive” existence. “No mammal grew larger than a house cat”. Then around 66 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period, whether by asteroid impact or volcanic eruption, the dinosaurs simply died out. With the throne now vacant, the mammals that survived began to fill out.

But had modern humans not come about, might intelligence emerge anyway? Obviously, it’s near-impossible to reimagine the counterfactual in detail. But if I had to guess, I would say yes. Like the evolution of eyes or wings, intelligence appears generally useful. Even today, from ants to dolphins to octopuses, many animals seem to be on the cusp of something remarkable. Who’s to say what another million or billion years might yield had we not been around?

Anthropocentrism and sensory cripples

In The Eerie Silence, physicist Paul Davies says we ought to abandon “the shackles of anthropocentrism” if we want to approach SETI in the right way. Unless there are self-organizing principles that we do not yet know about, thinking about alien life in a human sort of way seems fraught with error. Indeed, as J.B.S Haldane reminds in Possible Worlds, “the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

Even by Earthian standards, Homo sapiens are “sensory cripples”, writes E.O Wilson in The Meaning of Human Existence. We pride ourselves in many things, from appreciating fine wine to navigating the seas. Yet each of these talents pale in comparison to the abilities of other marvelous creatures in the wild. Our definition of intelligence needs work.

The point is curiously reflected in the fields of artificial intelligence as well. While most children learn to run and play before they learn about chess or arithmetic, the opposite has been true with the development of AI. Computers excel at computing but struggle with the basic necessities of life. What then does this imply about the utility of intelligence? They say you shouldn’t praise a horse that only knows how to count to three. But who’s to say who’s the horse? Thinking humans or immobile robots?

As Ferris explains:

“I wonder whether our traditional conceptions of intelligence have been too limited. We academics tend to stress the importance of abstract reasoning, and logic is certainly one of the glories of the human mind, but it’s hardly the whole story… There are many sorts of intelligence, each representing excellence in one or more of the programs… If those of us who contemplate the prospect of extraterrestrial life were to spend more time trying to grasp the diversity of intelligence here on Earth, we might be less quick to fix on one-dimensional paradigms that rank pan-stellar brainpower in terms of smart and dumb, and in doing so become a little less dumb ourselves.”
Tim Ferris. (1992). The Mind’s Sky.

The Drake equation

This brings us then to astronomer Frank Drake’s famous Drake equation, which seeks to estimate N, the number of civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy with advanced communicative potential:

N = R* f_p n_e f_l f_i f_c L

Borrowing Paul Davies’ definitions, the equation depends on seven variables:

R* is the “rate of formation of sun-like stars in the galaxy”.
f_pis the “fraction of those stars with planets”.
n_e is the “average number of Earth-like planets in each planetary system”.
f_l is the “fraction of those planets on which life emerges”.
f_i is the “fraction of planets with life on which intelligence evolves”.
f_c is the “fraction of those planets on which technological civilization and the ability to communicate emerges”.
L is the “average lifetime of a communicating civilization.”

While astronomers have decent estimates for R*, f_p, and n_e, we don’t have much to go on for the remaining four variables. From biogenesis to interstellar communications, all we have is a measly sample size of one that is mother Earth. As Davies notes, the Drake equation is probably a better measure of our ignorance than anything else.

Cosmic necropolis

But assumptions about the last variable (L), the average lifetime of communicating civilization, is particularly important. Because not only does it say something about intelligent life elsewhere, it says a lot about our own prospects too.

While it is a truism that nothing lasts forever, forever leaves plenty of room for possibility. Are we destined for an arms race towards self-destruction, or is there enough resilience, renewal, and adaptability in the system for intelligent life to proceed once underway?

We do not really know. But unless we are among the first intelligent lifeforms in the Milky Way, the eerie silence may not bode well for our chances. Ferris wonders whether the universe, when “viewed on a cosmic time scale, is mainly a necropolis.” Given what we know so far, it wouldn’t surprise me one way or the other.

Extraterrestrial mirrors

As Davies writes, “SETI is the quintessentially long-term project”. The nearest exoplanet, Proxima b, is more than 4 light years away. Communications with any alien satellite, if discovered, would surely be a protracted affair.

But the real value of SETI for non-astronomists like myself is in introspection. To understand what might exist out there, we must first confront ourselves. And as it stands, Homo sapiens are very much a violent, dysfunctional, unequal, and ignorant lot.

Indeed, the human condition is tragically ironic. Some busy themselves at remote observatories looking for life and signals near distant stars, while others wage wars, pollute our planet, and run the rat race. How can we conceive of the great beyond when we’re barely functional ourselves?

The hourglass tree

Ferris himself likens our relationship with the universe to an hourglass or a tree. The branches reflect what we know of the observable universe, while the system of roots represents the perceiving mind. “Neither we nor any other thinking beings can comprehend any more of the universe than what we can make of it in our minds”, Ferris writes. “In that sense, roots and branches—mind and cosmos—are mutually dependent.”

Science and progress is still in its infancy, of course. The Scientific Revolution began less than five hundred years ago with Nicolaus Copernicus and his writings on the revolutions of heavenly spheres. There remains much about the universe and the mind that we do not yet understand. What we do know is that from time to time, people like Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein, come along to upend our sense of cosmic order. What lies ahead we cannot say. But you can bet that it’ll be interesting.

As Ferris writes:

“We look through a peephole at nature… and interpret the whole in terms of what little we have been able to see. But we, too, are part of the whole—and we, like the universe, are more than the sum of the observations made of us. All swim in an ocean of enigma… We are confronted, then, not with the universe, which remains an eternal riddle, but with whatever model of the universe we can build within the mind.”
Tim Ferris. (1992). The Mind’s Sky.

Sources and further reading

Ferris, Timothy. (1992). The Mind’s Sky: Human Intelligence in a Cosmic Context.
Wilson, E.O. (2014). The Meaning of Human Existence.
Davies, Paul. (2010). The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence.

The Mind’s Sky — Tim Ferris on SETI, Human Intelligence, and Hourglass Trees