Alien Universe: Extraterrestrial Life in Our Minds and in the Cosmos

207 Pages·2013·2.88 MB·English

by  Don Lincoln

ALIEN UNIVERSE
ALIEN UNIVERSE
Extraterrestrial Life in our Minds
and in the Cosmos
DON LINCOLN
© 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2013
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lincoln, Don.
Alien universe : extraterrestrial life in our minds and in the cosmos / Don
Lincoln.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-42141072-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-
1073-9 (electronic) ISBN-10: 1-4214-1072-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10:
1-4214-1073-7 (electronic) 1. Life on other planets. 2. Exobiology. 3.
Extraterrestrial beings—Social aspects. 4. Extraterrestrial beings in popular
culture. I. Title.
QB54.L487 2013
576.89’39—dc23 2012051094
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more
information, please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or
[email protected].
The Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book
materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent
post-consumer waste, whenever possible.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE THE QUESTION
ONE BEGINNINGS
TWO ENCOUNTERS
THREE FICTIONS
FOUR BLOCKBUSTERS
Interlude
FIVE LIFE-FORMS
SIX ELEMENTS
SEVEN NEIGHBORS
EPILOGUE THE VISITORS
Suggested Reading
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Books are never a solo effort. To convert an idea to a finished product takes the
contributions of many.
Even the first idea can incorporate contributions from many people. This
book wouldn’t exist in its current form, were it not for my wife, who listened to
my initial sketchy ideas and helped me weave them together into a coherent
whole. The idea to interleave our evolving idea of Aliens with the concerns of
the public at the time is entirely hers, and she also greatly clarified the
presentation of several of the scientific topics I covered. Any residual rough
spots in the execution are from when I stubbornly didn’t listen to her.
Drs. Hassan Al-Ali, Albert Harrison, Judi Scheppler, Jill Tarter, and Erica
Zahnle all provided expert advice on the text, correcting the misconceptions and
errors. I am very grateful for their efforts and to Alvaro Amat for making helpful
connections.
I would like to thank Patty Hedrick, Dr. Julie Dye, and Meredith Carlson for
their assistance in procuring the drawings of Aliens, as imagined by children. I
also thank both the Fermilab library and the Geneva Public Library staff for their
invaluable assistance in finding original sources. The UFO literature is replete
with fakes and manufactured “facts.” To cut through various writers’ agendas, it
is imperative to confirm everything with original documents.
I am grateful to Linda Allewalt, Meredith Carlson, Sue Dumford, Vida
Goldstein, Lori Haseltine, Dee Huie, Nancy Krasinski, Diane Lincoln, Toni
Mueller, Robert Shaw, and Felicia Svoboda for being test readers. In addition to
a myriad of typos, they helped identify weaknesses in the original manuscript
that I hope I have removed. Michele Callaghan should get special mention for
her deft copyediting. Finally, I would like to thank my publicist Kathy Alexander
for her tireless efforts.
While these people all contributed directly to this book, it goes without saying
that the information and tales recounted here wouldn’t have been possible
without generations of historians and scientists. Human knowledge is a
cumulative endeavor, and what I’ve gathered here is really the work of hundreds
of people.
It is traditional in my books to assign blame to a specific childhood friend of
mine for any unnoticed residual errors. However it would be inappropriate to
mention his name in a book that talks about Aliens, whom some think already
walk among us. It wouldn’t be right to blow his cover.
ALIEN UNIVERSE
PROLOGUE
THE QUESTION
The beginning is the most important part of any work.
Plato
One of the Biggest Questions of All
Of all the things that could change mankind’s outlook, one of the biggest would
be contact with intelligent life originating from another world. There have been
similar paradigm-shifting episodes before in the history of humanity. When
Galileo first saw the moons of Jupiter in about January of 1610, it marked the
beginning of the end of the idea that Earth held a unique location in the cosmos.
The publication of his manuscript Starry Messenger in Venice just two months
later began the spread of the knowledge that someone had incontrovertible
evidence that our planet could no longer be viewed as exceptional. The genie
was out of the bottle.
Another paradigm-shifting event was the death of human exceptionalism,
developed by Charles Darwin and his contemporaries. The idea that humans are
but a twig on the vast tree of life forever changed our vision of ourselves as a
unique species that had been given the Earth as our birthright. We became
animals, like countless others, undoubtedly one with tremendous power to shape
the globe, but still just a cousin species among many; one who had been shaped
by the same forces that created the bear, the shark, and the kangaroo. Humanity’s
exceptionalism was reduced to our ongoing pride of our intellect and technical
achievement.
While we know of other species on Earth who use tools and have a degree of
intelligence, the discovery of no other species comparable to us has allowed
some to continue to believe humanity to be exceptional and that it has been
given, as the Bible says, dominion over all living things. Even the non-religious
might point to our spread from Africa across the globe, exploiting all
environments and all niches, as a kind of Manifest Destiny of species. Taken to
an extreme, some dream of a future in which mankind has left the Earth and
spread across the cosmos, in a triumphant march of galactic conquest.
But what kind of galaxy will we encounter? Setting aside the very real
practical difficulties associated with interstellar travel, is the galaxy a lifeless and
sterile place, with the Earth being a unique and precious cradle of intelligent
life? Or is the universe instead a cosmopolitan neighborhood, with many planets
inhabited by species intellectually and technologically similar to our own? In
short, we must ask a single important question.
“Are we alone?”
My purpose in writing this book is to explore that question. While imaginative
thinkers have long speculated on the possibility and nature of life on other
worlds, it was in the twentieth century that the idea has become common
throughout Western culture. Unlike in early centuries, where discussions of alien
life was the purview of the intellectual or academic, the idea of aliens has
penetrated the literature, newspapers, movies, and other sources of information
enjoyed by the public. The idea of Aliens, UFOs, alien contacts, abduction,
interspecies reproduction, and so on, all exist to various degrees in the literature
available to everyone.
This leads us to the fundamental question of the book. If Aliens exist, what do
they look like? Or, even more specific still, what have members of the ordinary
public thought Aliens look like over time? If you walked into a coffee shop in
Greenwich Village in New York and asked the guy behind the counter what
Aliens looked like, what would he say? What sort of answer would you get if
you stopped instead for coffee in a diner in Ottumwa, Iowa? Or asked the same
question 50 years ago?
Note the capital “A” in the word “Aliens.” This choice is made to explicitly
identify intelligent aliens, with which humanity could hypothetically one day
compete for galactic domination. I am carefully distinguishing Aliens from alien
life in general, which might be much more common in the universe. Aliens
might one day appear in our skies and say “Take me to your leader,” or they may
attack the Earth for some of its resources. An alien duck flapping happily in the
skies of a world circling Betelgeuse is not what I mean by an Alien. An Alien
would be a sentient creature on that same world who has written a poem about
that duck. An Alien must be intelligent, although not necessarily have extensive
technology. An alien caveman counts as an Alien. An alien monkey does not.
Of course, the idea of alien life and Aliens go hand in hand, in the same way
that life on Earth and humanity are inextricably linked. So, in parts of the book,
we will occasionally expand the conversation to include a more generic
discussion of alien life. But the focus will be on Aliens and how mankind’s
image of them has evolved and why.