The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

A SERIOUS SEARCH FOR WEIRD WORLDS by Ray Bradbury

I do not know which was the most pleasantly startling: that this article was written by Ray Bradbury, genius of anti-science-fiction; that Life magazine devoted fourteen beautifully illustrated pages to it; or that the United States Government, in I960, should have provided the basis for it.

In the shadows of a West Virginia valley, a Giant wakes —and listens. Owls sweeping the Green Bank wilderness see the Giant turn sleeplessly hour on hour, its vast 85-foot Ear cupped to the showering radiation of the Milky Way. Jabberings, cacklings and maniacal chitterings of electromagnetic star-talk bombard the Ear. Calmly the Ear feeds this static to tape machines and memory systems humming in its metal Brain nearby. Afflicted by ghost voices of lightnings which prowl far-traveling suns, the Ear, nursed by men, sleeps at dawn.

Does this sound like science fiction? Ten seconds from now will the Martian spider-kings invade, capture the Ear, and disintegrate the mad scientists who built it?

No. The Ear is a competently machined, absolutely real radio telescope finished in March 1959 at Green Bank, W. Va. The scientists of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory moving in its vast shadow are not mad. Their daring but dead-serious work is called Project Ozma.

Named for the princess of the faraway Land of Oz, the project began work on April 8, 1960. Periodically since then it has been searching for life on other worlds. Some fine evening the scientists of Ozma hope to hear a faint echo of humanity calling back down the vast slope of space.

Simultaneously, in nearby Sugar Grove, W. Va., the Navy is rearing an even greater beast out of mythology via technology. The Navy’s electronic ear will stand half as high as the Empire State Building. Its dish will stretch 600 feet from rim to rim. Cradled in two titanic Ferris wheel structures, the Sugar Grove ear will gather cosmic signals from 60 light years deep in space.

How many stars are there in the universe for our radio-telescope ears to listen to? Write the number 10. Then add 19 zeros after it. Of this unthinkable number, how many stars have planets rushing about them? A conservative estimate, says Harlow Shapley, Harvard professor emeritus of astronomy, is one in a thousand.

How many such one-in-a-thousand worlds will lie just the right distance from their suns so that a moderate temperature will encourage life? One in a thousand.

How many of these far fewer worlds will be large enough to bind and keep an atmosphere? One in a thousand.

And finally, how many of this vastly reduced number will have a proper atmosphere, with carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen enough to stir up cellular life such as exists on Earth? Again, says Shapley, one in a thousand.

But with the number ruthlessly cut, we are still left with one hundred million planets in the universe on which some kind of life is not only possible but probable.

“It follows then,” say Professors Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison of Cornell, “that near some star rather like the sun, there are civilizations with scientific interests and with technical possibilities much greater than those available to us.

“To the beings of such a society,” they continue, writing in the British publication, Nature, “our sun must appear as a likely site for the evolution of a new society.... We shall assume that long ago they established a channel of communication that would one day become known to us, and that they look forward patiently to the answering signals from our sun which would make known to them that a new society has entered the community of intelligence.”

Cocconi and Morrison were delighted when they learned that Dr. Frank D. Drake, director of Project Ozma at Green Bank, convinced of the same views, was putting the matter to a test.

As to whether Ozma will succeed and how long it might take before we hear intelligent cosmic broadcasts, Professor Morrison says, “We are in the position of a man who has bought a lottery ticket, not knowing what kind of lottery it is. It may be a great international sweepstakes with odds of 10 million to one against anyone winning. Or it may be a neighborhood raffle where chances of winning are high. I hope that Dr. Drake’s experiment may succeed shortly, but it may go on for generations before success or abandonment.”

Intergalactic party lines may have been established ages ago, Dr. Drake believes. Professors Morrison and Cocconi agree. Civilizations in space may have contacted each other with strong, directed radio beams and formed a club talking back and forth. Consequently, the better the club, the more members are in it. So each member looks around for stars with worlds having indications of advanced technology. When they see a promising star, they cast their beam toward it. It is like waving a flashlight. They have been waving it for thousands of years.

The disquieting thought arises, however, that if politicians in other universes are like our own home-grown variety, little or no waving of flashlights would be done on such an unproductive basis. Unless assured of economic or technological gains, it is hard to imagine a government on Earth, Mars or one of Alpha Centauri’s planets handing over funds for what could be the most expensive wrong number ever dialed. For that matter, is there any reason to think that beings on far worlds would be able to invent and perfect such a thing as radio?

“In our view,” says Professor Morrison, “life on most planets would be maintained by light from its neighboring star, just as Earth life is maintained by light from our star, the sun. Therefore, any scientific civilization would certainly seek to understand the nature of light which is the basis of their life. Once you understand the nature of light, you are led to the whole electromagnetic spectrum of which radio is a necessary part.”

How do we tune in on other worlds? How do we know the right “station” to fix our attention on? After much study, Project Ozma has picked a listening frequency of 21 centimeters (1420 megacycles). This frequency was chosen to cut down on natural interference. The air surrounding planets like Earth cannot be penetrated successfully by signals above 10,000 megacycles. Below 1,000 megacycles, on the other hand, the static from galactic space is too loud. Faced with atmospheric noise on one hand and radio gibberish on the other, the Ozma scientists compromised on the 21-centimeter frequency. They chose it for another reason as well: it is the natural vibration most commonly heard on our radio telescopes, the vibration of neutral hydrogen that we get when we study giant hydrogen clouds in the sky.

Neutral hydrogen, we know then, is richly strewn throughout the universe. Other radio-advanced worlds cannot help but note this same truth. Guessing that we will have already tuned in on this natural intergalactic wave-length, intelligent beings on other worlds may be expected to do a most sensible thing: they will probably broadcast at a frequency close to that of the neutral hydrogen band, just as small U.S. radio stations sometimes sneak over and rub shoulders with big-brother radio-station bands in order to pick up stray listeners. So our Ozma scientists, listening to the moronic outbursts of neutral hydrogen, will test both sides of its narrow band, hoping for sounds more intelligent.

By spectroscopic study of starlight, we have decided that seven stars exist within 15 light years of us which have a luminosity and lifetime like that of our own sun. These seven stars are old enough to have given birth to planets from which radio broadcasts could be expected. The stars are: Tau Ceti, Omicron-Two Eridani, Epsilon Eridani, Epsilon Indi, Alpha Centauri, 70 Ophiuchi and 61 Cygni.

Ozma will record all the radio whispers it gets from these most promising star systems and look for some pattern hidden in the whispers. Any sounds repeated, in sequence, would draw our attention. If we heard, for instance, three dots, seven dots, three dots, seven dots, over and over, again and again, we would be alerted immediately.

“Naturally,” Professor Morrison points out, “there is no chance whatever of a common language existing between the broadcasters on separate worlds. But it is easy to see how a common language could be built up during a long period of communication. Starting with a simple arithmetical relations, using our radio pulses as numbers, we could communicate all the symbols for algebra to another world.”

With the algebraical relations established, Morrison believes, it would be a short step to drawing figures geometrically. At our end of the party line we might try translating the pulses we receive into a picture suggested by the mathematics. Once we find a way to make the diagram visible, we will know how to interpret any picture. Through these pictures, traded between worlds like do-it-yourself numbered painting kits, much information could be transferred and even compact languages taught by cross-galactic radio.

The entire process might last out the lives of generations of scientists. If, for example, we heard a recognizable code from Tau Ceti tonight and broadcast our own welcoming salute back at it, it would take our message 11 years, traveling 186,000 miles per second, the speed of light, to reach our possible friends. If they, in turn, heard our first broadcast and wired us congratulations at joining the network, another 11 years would pass before their good wishes hit our radio telescopes. So it would take until 1982 for us just to say “hello” to each other. It would be 2004 before we asked after each other’s health. By 2026, only a few groping, exploratory words or sentences might have been traded.

We would have to wait until the middle of the 21st Century before anything resembling a page of the simplest pictures might change hands. Meantime, death will have harvested and life reseeded both scientific ends of the fantastic long-distance call.

Not that we will wait that long for our first grunts and stutters to clarify themselves. Once we are sure that a specific star system contains intelligent life, we will probably shoot out vast quantities of information about ourselves on various frequencies, utilizing various codes. This information, though unrecognizable, might be recorded by the scientists on another world, to be translated after they solved our code. They might use the same bombardment of information on us, thus saving vast quantities of time once the new interplanetary language is learned.

Once a language is finally established, what will we talk about? Most important, of course, may be the bartering of scientific fact. Technological know-how radioed from Omicron-Two may help us swarm our rockets up in great locust flights across the universe, thousands of years earlier than now expected.

Nostrums for the common cold may be prescribed for us by doctors who may themselves be long dead before their cure reaches Earth. Psychological information, culled by creatures beyond imagining, may be signaled to us. Much of it may be dross, but some of it might contribute to our own fast-growing self-awareness. And ultimately, who can say? A cure may be offered for that most ancient and terrible of our sicknesses: war.

But surprisingly, the first intelligent sounds we hear from far Epsilon Indi may not be code or pulsing signal at all, but rather some Epsilon Indi music that was broadcast, as is ours, to the heedless winds of space. We would not know it as music at first, just as when we hear the Oriental tone-scale it falls strangely on the ear. Yet, with persistent listenings, our first brush with alien minds across the darkness may be the filtering in of a symphony composed by a Beethoven raised in the starshine of 61 Cygni.

But, man being what he is, electronic ears and signals and symphonies will not suffice. We will want to go and see for ourselves. We will not, however, send our first unmanned rockets to one of the seven promising star systems. Instead, the rockets will fire out through our own solar system, among those very planets which we have half neglected with our radio telescopes, simply because they do not appear to offer hope for our kind of life.

Our first robot machines will probably set down on the red planet Mars. From within this knowledgeable rocket, valves and snouts will thrust to suck ore samples into bins deep in the ship. Other airlocks will feed endless rolling tapes of that gelatinous standby of the biologists, the sticky nutrient agar, through the Martian air and back into a laboratory. There, under automatic TV and camera equipment, a historical event will occur: mankind, by remote control, will meet his first Martian—a bacterium jittering under a microscope.

Dr. Joshua Lederberg, at the Stanford University School of Medicine, who suggested the agar-tape equipment, has warned that we must build devices to decontaminate our rockets coming home from Mars. Science fiction is filled with tales of Martians invading Earth. It would be a terrible irony if some alien bacteria, carried back in a robot ship, conquered Earth through our lungs and blood stream.

Having met and been disappointed by our first Martian, the bacterium, what other life forms can we look for? Vegetation, says Clyde W. Tombaugh, one of the nation’s leading astronomers, now working in Las Cruces, N. M. Tombaugh believes the seasonal darkening of Mars’s so-called canals is probably caused by lichens which survive extreme heat, cold and lack of water. The canals themselves are “deep fissures of fractured land caused by asteroid impacts.”

Varieties of vegetable life and the higher levels of animal life would be missing, says Tombaugh, because there is so little water. He adds: “Certain favored places on Mars, in the summer months, would have temperatures as high as 70°F., but the temperature drops to 30 or 40 below zero every night of the year at the Martian equator. In the antarctic night, the temperature must go some 200 below zero.”

So much for Mars, tomorrow morning.

But a half million years ago, when Earth’s half-apes gamboled in an eternal nightmare spring, did civilizations rear temples, forums and ocean cities across Mars? Have those peoples gone to dust, or perhaps burrowed underground to escape the bitter weather?

Krafft Ehricke, a top space researcher at Convair Astronautics in San Diego, very much doubts it. He believes that any planet originally able to clothe itself in oxygen and to rain down turbulent oceans of water would almost certainly be able to keep those elements in vast supply over geological leaps of time.

Nevertheless, Mars may well shock us from our provincial views. We must remember that here on Earth some germs thrive in purest sulphur, microbes generate in boiling Yellowstone springs. At Los Alamos our water-immersed nuclear reactors are often clouded by the micro-organism called Pseudomonas which survives radiation dosages 10,000 times stronger than those needed to kill a man. Similarly Mars, in its harsh natural laboratory, may have evolved fantastic chemical cycles that produce life forms heretofore unguessed.

All facts considered, however, our scientists may well tum to a more mysterious greenhouse world nearby. The surface of Venus, shrouded in mist, has never been seen. Some authorities still believe that this shroud results from titanic hurricanes of dust roaring over a bleak desert world. But recent Naval balloon-ascension observations have found the first traces of water vapor in Venus’ atmosphere, reviving the old theory that Venus is covered with water. The problem of landing on Venus then may be complicated by the discovery of an ocean that runs forever with no shore.

Given this single vast medium, the same elemental seas that we Earthmen carry as remembrances in our saline blood, it is reasonable to believe that with generation bringing forth generation for three billion years, fish kingdoms not unlike the societies of ant and bee might have developed in the Venusian depths. Unfortunately, the 50-foot radio telescope at the Naval Research Laboratory has found that radiation from Venus indicates a surface temperature of about 540°F. From this we can imagine millions of tons of water boiling up in oceanic storms to condense and fall in scalding rain.

“If this is true,” says Clyde Tombaugh, “Venus is not only a hidden planet. It may be a forbidden planet for manned exploration.”

Drownings and scaldings on one world, freezings and asphyxiations on another. Has our family of planets nothing better to offer us? Mercury, nearest the sun, has her noon side melting in 725°F. blast-furnaceings, her midnight side struck dead by utter cold. Jupiter, ten times larger than Earth and 317 times heavier, lies stunned beneath a hydrogen atmosphere 6,000 miles deep, an ice layer 13,000 miles thick. This dismal world would crush our rocket like tinfoil with an atmospheric pressure one million times greater than our own. Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Pluto: the farther out the colder, darker, more desolate, as the story of life grinds to a halt.

Spurned by Mars, dusted off Venus, mashed by the gravities of Jupiter and Saturn, we will set our course for the stars.

Actually, no one man can live long enough to survive the journey from Earth to even the nearest star. Traveling far more slowly than the speed of light, even our fastest rockets may take hundreds of years to reach a single target. Yet once the journey becomes feasible, man will not be able to resist it. The nearest star being a lifetime or more away, we will have to prepare for a trip in which families will bridge the billion-mile gap with leaps of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The abyss will know the burials of astronauts dead and jettisoned while their sons’ sons move on.

Unless we have a radio response to guide us, where will we go? By the time our star-ships are ready, we will have established great telescopes on our moon and on Mars. There, with atmospheric interference cut to zero and with visual clarity at its finest, we may be able for the first time to see families of planets obedient to distant suns. We will look for a planet revolving about a sun that looks old enough to have given its worlds time to rouse up life. We will try to detect a world like ours, whose atmosphere in the beginning was largely methane, ammonia, water vapor and hydrogen. That primitive world would have been needled with prehistoric lightnings and bombarded by a younger, more violent life-provoking sunlight.

We will look for a world which did the following for itself: 1) collected a thin sheath of water over at least a part of its surface; 2) for a billion or more years stirred this water into a broth of chemicals; 3) after untold trillions of fruitless combinations brought forth exactly the right complex of compounds, rich in proteins, needed to make up protoplasm; 4) somehow, in a way still not understood, built into this protoplasm the characteristic of self-reproduction that made it a living cell.

We will have to judge from a great distance whether a planet is too far out or too near its sun. A planet as close to the sun as we are should revolve at a good pace on its axis in a time corresponding to our 24-hour day. A planet turning more slowly would have higher temperatures dangerous to budding life forms. Also the cosmic rays that penetrate its atmospheric shell should not be too strong or too weak. If too strong, annihilation of life would follow. If too weak, the chemistry of the world would not be encouraged to put forth those remembrance-molecules we call life.

But let us say we calculate correctly, cross the galaxy and step from our rocket onto a sunlit world the incredible duplicate of Earth. Who, or what, will be there to greet us? Will it look human? Or will we be confronted by science-fictional creatures with multi-faceted housefly eyes and snakelike arms? Let us start with mankind and work down.

The alien creature at our rocket door might have eyes, ears, nose and mouth, might even have a skeleton on top of which would sit that appendage called “head” in which it would locate, through successive biological experiments, its main sensing organs.

How can we dare, imagine life like ourselves on another world, when even on Earth we find millions of creatures totally different?

“The problem is,” says Krafft Ehricke, “we do not even know what caused man’s differentiation from the primates. One thing is sure, however: we are constructed intelligently. If your eyes were on your knees or elbows and your brain remained where it is now, it would take 20 or 30 times as long for the brain to learn that a rock, say, was flying toward you. By the time the message traveled the long way from eye to mind, you’d be dead. You’d never know what hit you. It is therefore very functional for the eyes to be near the brain. The same goes for the ears and practically all our senses, as far as preliminary warning is concerned. One would assume that any higher intelligence on another world would need its sight, sound and smell located near its brain.

“Secondly,” Ehricke continues, “assuming a gravitation similar to ours, you must assume the need for a basic frame, a bone structure. It would not necessarily look like ours, but it has to be there. If this life form operates on oxygen or some other chemical system which uses gaseous intake, there would have to be certain conversion systems in the body such as our lungs and heart. For protection, these organs must be placed where the bone structure would serve them best—within the frame or otherwise shielded by bones. If our vital organs were located without protection in any of our limbs, accident might lop them off entirely.”

The history of other worlds then is roughly the same as that of our own world: a competition between life forms, some able to win through, some unable to do so through bad placement of organs. The extinct billions of experiments that failed are not around for us to examine. Life, structuring itself for more efficient survival, remains.

To further illustrate his point, Ehricke cites airplane design in-the early 1900s: “Fantastic varieties emerged from many countries, all experimental, all different. But today by natural selection, there is only one optimum type of aircraft for certain speeds. So if conditions on other worlds are similar to ours, their creatures could show some physical resemblance to us.”

This allowed, we have no way of guessing what variations in mankind itself could make a more efficient creature with greater survival characteristics. A third eye in the back of our heads, for instance, would be a lifesaver in this age of the galloping pedestrian. On a world where the air is thick, the beings would need extremely small mouths and nostrils to cut down on intake. If the air is thin, they would need mouths and nose vents like barn doors.

To the lonely space man, an alien woman with the above features would hardly be attractive. Right here, the entire field of esthetics looms before us. Astronautical history may depend on those concepts of beauty and utility our men take along as unacknowledged cargo to the stars. Countless books will have to be written under the general title: Esthetics and Etiquette for Other Worlds. Otherwise we are in danger of mistaking a rough skin for a rough mind, a third eye for an evil eye, a cold hand for a cold and hostile heart.

We have our own history of Indian-white relations to look back on with dismay. But these were, though savages, men. Confronted with beings resembling cockroaches, will we pause to consider whether their I.Q. is 50 or 250? Or will we simply build the grandest shoe in history and step on them?

Our first astronauts then must be the wisest and most temperate men, slow to revulsion, quick to sympathy, capable even of having their concepts of male-female sexuality shaken. On the planets of Tau Ceti sexes may be combined in one body or, worse from our lusty view, may be lacking altogether because more efficient if less invigorating ways have been found by nature to keep a race going.

Thus far we have dealt with planets enjoying climates as bright and fine as ours. But even on such worlds, spendthrift creation is almost certain never to repeat an accident in the same way. Man, ape on the way to being angel, is but one of a trillion happenstances, neither better nor worse than trillions of others thrown up for grabs in island universes we will never see.

So while we may find cities on other worlds, they will not look like cities, the houses not quite houses, and the furniture and art all a little wrong to our jaundiced eyes. We will watch games that seem hardly games, hear songs just barely songs, all on worlds exactly like ours in natural environment.

But what of planets swinging about redder or whiter suns than ours, covered with lethal atmospheres where we will move like deep-sea divers in our space suits?

Earth life is based on carbon and oxygen. Does it have to be, on other worlds? No. Here are some other possibilities:

A world where the air is a hydrogen-peroxide vapor. This vapor, breathed in by animals, could be broken down into oxygen and water for use by their bodies.

A world where fluorine might be inhaled as a gas by living creatures. The skin of flourine-breathers, however, would be leathery and unpleasant and the world itself so nightmarish that our space men probably would not stay more than an hour.

But in the creation of life the atmosphere of planets is less important than the kind of warm-broth seas that covered them in their formative years. We men are built largely of carbon which, billions of years ago, formed the basis of increasingly complicated chemical compounds that changed and changed again until at last they came alive.

We carbon creatures are prejudiced in our own favor because, in all truth, carbon life can survive environmental dangers that other noncarbon forms could not possibly stand. So versatile is it, in fact, that if ever carbon life and silicon life came into existence simultaneously, carbon life would wipe out the silicon life. So versatile is carbon that out scientists long ago divided their studies into organic (carbon) chemistry and inorganic chemistry. Carbon, a virtuoso performer, can do more tricks than the whole theater of all the other known chemical elements. Silicon is the only other element that approaches it. Can we then expect to find silicon life in the universe?

There is one serious flaw in imagining silicon creatures. We breathe out carbon dioxide, which is a gas. “Silicon creatures,” says Dr. Tombaugh, “would breath out silicon dioxide, which is quartz.”

It is hard to imagine an animal exhaling crystals of quartz as it moves through its world. Silicon life would need to breathe something like flourine. This would cause it to exhale silicon-tetra-fluoride, after using the liberated energy. This, too, would result in a creature far removed, if even faintly resembling, ourselves.

What we have guessed so far is unpromising, unsettling, sometimes terrifying. How nice it would be to step off our rocket on some far world and find just home folks like us.

It could happen.

Thomas Gold of Cornell’s space research group believes Earth may have been visited by cosmic neighbors a billion years ago. Finding the climate not to their taste, they dumped their picnic trash and left. From this discarded lot, bacterial life in its own good billion-year time evolved up to present-day man. We, too, some year, may seed other worlds with Coke bottles, paper napkins and orange peels from which our germs, invisibly stamped with our images, might rise up and walk on legs a billion years hence. So the creatures of the universe, through an intergalactic untidiness, might summon forth twins a thousand million sunrises apart.

Improbable. But improbable, too, is the thought that spores, drifting down the star winds, may have carried life from other nebulae to ours. Or the thought that perhaps huge meteoroids, shot across the abyss, carried out the work. Yet there is evidence that this may have happened. Dr. Melvin Calvin of the University of California at Berkeley has discovered recently, in examining meteor bodies, molecules resembling the basic stuff of genetic material here on Earth. In these blazing gifts from space he found prebiological forms that have not been on Earth for millions of years. These chemical combinations were the very ones that had to occur before life could stir.

In the scientific laboratories experts are experimenting with the creation of life in a test tube. In an artificial recreation of our raw and nightmarish environment when lightnings prowled our world like unchained beasts, Scientist Stanley L. Miller subjected a mixture of methane, or marsh gas, hydrogen, ammonia and water to electrical discharge. The result was the production of amino acids: Biochemist Sidney W. Fox, of Florida State University, has carried the process one significant step further: from the amino acids he has produced substances resembling proteins which then form tiny spheres which look like—and in some ways act like—bacteria.

Life in a test tube: a mystery.

Life on Earth: a mystery.

Life on other worlds: a mystery.

The mysteries move closer together through the immense shuttling of our thoughts, our laboratory devices, our far-traveling rockets.

The dust which once flew in the voids, the stuff of the sun, the mineral trash of Earth, has reared itself up in our time to become man—to speak in tongues, to put forth hands and, with one of its billion-year-developed senses, to see those beckoning stars. That dust which came down through cycles of destruction and rebirth now desires to seek other dusts, to know what further shapes strange suns and gravities may have given them.

In our time this search will eventually change our laws, our religions, our philosophies, our arts, our recreations, as well as our sciences. Space, the mirror, waits for life to come look for itself there.