Listening to the Universe and Guarding our Consciousness

It bothers me, and I have to restrain myself from judgment when I overhear someone saying that a penny found face up or a bird flashing a certain color or singing in a certain key is a departed loved one’s surprise greeting from beyond. Of course, an innocent reminder of a loved one’s absence can be heartwarming, and nobody but a misanthrope wants to stop warming hearts. I’m no misanthrope. But it’s the denial of science and embrace of ignorance that scares me. Pseudo-science celebrates magical encounters with the dead and terms them synchronicity. But really this is just superstition. An almost infinite number of events happen to the human race every day. Some are bound to resonate emotionally more than others. Discarding as unimportant those that don’t and focusing on the rare times when they do, believers in magic and hocus pocus in our world are abandoning belief in reason, or understanding of science, specifically probability theory, and what psychologists call cognitive or heuristic biases, specifically confirmation bias. Sorry, but the universe doesn’t whisper personal messages in your ear like that. 

But the universe does whisper. And maybe it even shouts. What it doesn’t do is care. But that’s no reason for us to stop listening. It’s an even better reason for us to listen—and listen we must. I argue that the universe merely being is why we are compelled to care. Being alone might be what happens if we don’t. And I mean really alone.

The question of whether or not we are alone in the universe is the second most profound question we ask ourselves. The most profound question that we have asked and attempted to answer from our humble and less evolved beginnings is this: what does it mean to be human? I am afraid that these two questions can collide, and too soon, and that the explosion can stop us listening, and that if this happens, it will compel us to be alone, cosmically, forever. 

No, I’m not talking only about listening for SETI purposes, to hear ET, at 1420 megahertz (the frequency of hydrogen and therefore the presumed channel of choice, or waterhole, of intelligent life in the universe), and to validate Drake and to prove Fermi wrong. And I’m not talking about nuclear annihilation, though of course that too remains a possibility. Instead, I fear a self-imposed gag order. I’m afraid that we will voluntarily stop talking and listening to each other. I am most terrified of technology gone awry in hastening the silence and this being mistaken as progress.

The (Frank) Drake equation is an intellectual attempt to gauge the range of possibilities when considering the number of extra-terrestrial civilizations that exist within the Milky Way galaxy. Though this is not truly an equation in the classical sense, it is an exercise where different factors are thoughtfully guessed at to find an upper band and lower band of the number of possible civilizations that exist and which leak radio frequencies that could be detected by SETI. The equation lists these parameters:

1.     New stars formed per earth year;

2.     Fraction of those stars with planets;

3.     The average number of those planets that can potentially support life;

4.     The fraction of those planets that could potentially support life that indeed do develop life at some point;

5.     The fraction of those planets with life that develop intelligent life;

6.  The fraction of those planets transmitting radio or other signs of life that can be detected; and

7. The length of time that such civilizations release detectable signs of life.

Multiplying the numerical values for these delimiting considerations provides the number of civilizations within the galaxy that are transmitting signals that can possibly be detected. The thinking is that the larger the resulting number, the easier it should be to actually detect ET. Initial computation of this equation with Drake’s estimates for each factor resulted in a range from a lower bound estimate of 20 such civilizations to a very optimistic higher bound estimate of fifty million. To date, of course, we’ve detected proof of not a single such extraterrestrial civilization.

The (Enrico) Fermi paradox is the artful employment of the lack of contact as a suggestion that maybe we are alone. If the universe is teeming with life, if it is as ubiquitous as we’d like to selflessly think, then where is everyone? It’s a sober, valid question. Different conjectures are advanced as to why that might be:

Maybe reality itself isn’t real; instead, perhaps our consciousness somehow invents a fiction—world-building like rendered space in a Roblox game. 

Maybe it somehow takes the energy of the entire universe to create one intelligent life form, and we’re it. 

Maybe all intelligent life enters an evolutionary phase where species-wide suicide or annihilation is not just a possibility but inevitable. 

Maybe physics that we don’t yet understand prevents contact. 

There are many theories to explain why we hear just the crickets. But I theorize that there is another possibility why we’ve not yet heard from ET yet, and this is one I’ve not seen expressed before in this way. Maybe the human condition, which we accept as self-evident and which has been gloriously mined by artists of all kinds for millennia, ends. Maybe the window of time from the development of the technology that can end the human condition to willingly electing this option is really short. Maybe we’re about to make that election, its promised delivery from the existential dread we all sometimes feel, too alluring. 

With the exponential rate at which technology develops, and the rise of AI, I fear that the end is near. No, not the end as in a nuclear obliteration of the species, On The Beach- or Planet of the Apes-like. I mean something perhaps more profound even than that. I fear that we may be just a mere few hundred years away—a proverbial blink or wink of the eye in astrological time—from human consciousness being dropped onto a digital format. Originally, I assumed it would be onto silicon where we’d be dropped and reside, on one large communal computer chip. But has even that idea become hopelessly anachronistic? Technology develops that exponentially fast. Cloud based storage has evolved, though certainly silicon, or some other physical element, would still be necessary for the actual storage of all of our consciousnesses. Or would it? And would it be a single shared consciousness existing as one, or would there be billions of us? The point is, if my nightmarish vision is correct, man could continue to live—and that’s probably not even the right word—without its enveloping body. Exist is probably a better word choice here: man could exist like this. And indefinitely. But once as a species we shed our bodies, either purposely (in this case this would happen quickly); or somehow evolutionarily (the slow-motion version of this nightmare), then the human condition as we know it will be over. The pure sciences would of course still operate around us (we now being in digital form), but many, if not all of the social sciences would no longer matter: economics, sociology, even psychology. Everything we think of as being human will fall away. Consciousness itself could be altered by us. Food, sex, art, fun: all physical, sensual, and intellectual delight could be replaced—I theorize—with a simulated ecstatic high into perpetuity which would define existence. In this nightmarish, dystopian world I foresee, even communications with others of our species and a care or desire to discover new, extraterrestrial ones, would cease. There’d be no point when an artificial, hedonistic, euphoric high without physical, cerebral, or emotional consequence could be the alternative, forever and ever. Can this be our ultimate end? I fear it can be. 

Imagining such a future, without our bodies and senses, with or without downloaded memories projected from much earlier humans who actually lived and experienced them, but without real personal and conscious experience is an existence that seems so sterile. So stifling. So simulated. 

When one thinks of SETI, one might conjure up an image of Carl Sagan and the Pioneer plaque; or Jodie Foster and the movie Contact, or the Wow! signal, which perhaps more than anything else hints at the excitement of maybe one day within our lifetimes, obtaining absolute proof that we are not alone. It’s folklore now, and it has entered into our cultural consciousness, but in 1977 at the radio telescope called Big Ear at Ohio State University, an anomalous narrowband radio signal was detected and lasted for 72 seconds and at an intensity that reached thirty standard deviations above background noise. Astronomer Jerry Ehman wrote “Wow!” on the computer printout providing a moniker for such a momentous occurrence. It’s never been heard again and no reliable theory has explained it away. The question lingers in the imagination of the world: Was it really ET?Contact,

A popular misunderstanding about the Wow! signal is that it is a code that can be interpreted, like a cypher to be cracked. While it is nothing of the sort, still we can imagine that if ever an actual message is intercepted from intelligent life out there, decoded from its binary, it would certainly be profound. At the risk of great presumption and also of being repetitive, I think the message would be something like this: the universe merely being is why we are compelled to care. The universe is shouting at us if only we can hear it. Communication is critical. For our sake, it’s what we need to do to never be alone.