Dr Jack Cohen is an evolutionary biologist, whose interests include speculating on what alien life would look like. Dr Cohen thinks that SETI should be broadening its horizons and looking for more than just 'other astrophysicists' i.e. beings with intelligence similar to our own - intelligence can take on many different, often unexpected, forms.

What are the limits of the SETI approach?
SETI is a very interesting project. What it’s done which is very, very positive is created a community of people who are thinking of Earth as being just a tiny speck in space and the great galaxy around, and it’s wonderful. But what it has not done is to imagine a larger technology than we have. Essentially what it’s doing is using, well, radio waves are really like smoke signals, they’re such an ancient technology even for us – we’ve only been technological for, what a hundred years? And as far as we’re concerned radio waves are the great thing. But even radio waves are very difficult to pick up if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

One of the problems about thinking about life on other planets is that by and large it’s physicists or astrophysicists who’ve done it, and what they look for is a way of producing astrophysicists, human astrophysicists – they’re very small-minded about the whole thing, I think. Now, when they look, therefore, at other solar systems – or this solar system – they do silly things like talking about a ‘sphere of possibility’ for life, which ranges from about Venus to about Mars. They say, you know, where water is liquid that’s where you’ll find it. But actually it’s not like that at all, it’s very very disjunct: Venus is no good because it’s gone over the top in heat, Mars is no good because it’s too small, but Europa, which is well outside the so-called ‘habitable’ zone is fine. So they’re just completely wrong in doing the ‘let us have a neat sphere of habitable zone and see if it will work’.

Can you explain the difference between intelligence and what you call 'extelligence'?
It seems to me that there are 2 ways of arguing about what alien life, life on another planet – or on this planet run again – would be like. And the first argument I have is this, that if something has happened many times on this planet, like photosynthesis, like flight, like fur – some plants have got fur, bumblebees have got fur, mammals have got fur, it’s a good trick for temp regulation – if you have several occasions when it’s happened, in several different evolutionary lines, then if we ran the Earth again, or if we found another aqueous planet, the default is that we would find those things. And I call them ‘universals’.

The alternative is the little contingent things we have - like airway crossing foodway and all the other bad bits of design mixing up our sexual system with our excretory system, so that we talk about dirty books – that is just a contingent thing, and we won’t find that elsewhere. So parochials and universals, and the interesting thing about intelligence is that the evolutionary story on Earth tells us that intelligence is a universal. We have squids and cuttlefish, octopuses, they’re a little group of intelligent creatures, they’re relatives of the clams and the snails, who are not intelligent at all. And then of course we have the mammals, a lot of mammals are intelligent, and birds are intelligent.

Now, none of those is going to be doing radio waves from SETI. What’s happened is that one mammal has picked up in addition to intelligence, extelligence. What we do is to build culture around ourselves, we have libraries, that know much more than any individual person; we have a ‘make a human being kit’, that makes each of us a very knowledgeable fraction of our culture. And that is what leads to technology, and possibly – or at least it does in human beings, and we mustn’t argue from the prejudices of astrophysicists out into the universe as a whole – but in us it leads to a wish to communicate with other creatures.

But perhaps the other creatures we’re talking about, the aliens, may have grown up as cave dwellers or altogether shyer creatures than us, maybe they’re much more herbivorous than we were, maybe there was a really nasty carnivore, or a nasty parasite that got you if you stuck your head up out of the burrow. And they have a mindset which is different from our, and it says find a hole and pull it in after you.

They will have many have stealth techniques, and we just simply wouldn’t know they were here if they didn’t want us to know. I have a very nice cartoon which I show on this occasion to my school lectures, which has a rather silly looking woman standing on a weighing machine and she’s got a card out of the weighing machine, and the caption is ‘I am not a weighing machine, I am a Martian, you are standing on my testicles’. And that always causes a laugh, it’s a nice joke. We wouldn’t know they were here if they didn’t want us to know. On the other hand, we ought to be able to see them, we ought to see the evidence of energy waves as spaceships go all over the galaxy, what the hell’s going on?

Well, for a start the galaxy is a lot emptier. But, I like to think that we’re looking in the wrong places and we don’t know how to look. I met actually an astrophysicist, friend of mine in England, in the Everglades. And he was sitting there in little glade, in the Everglades, and he was saying ‘where are all the animals?’. And there was a big alligator not 20 feet from him, there was a snake not 3ft from his foot, there were little lizards all over the trees and he was just blind to all of them, he couldn’t see them, it took a biologist’s eye. And I think that it might be that we’re not looking in the right places or in the right way – you need a search image, we don’t have a search image of what these aliens are like.

What do you think it'd be like if we came face to face with aliens? A few people will care ever such a lot, and most people won’t care at all because they think it’s already happened. It is said one survey showed that one third of middle American people had had some alien experience, and it dropped as low as one in ten in San Francisco and New York. But those aliens have been ever so busy if you really think that one in ten people has had an experience which they interpret as being something to do with aliens. Now, many of these experiences have certainly happened, I just doubt they’ve been anything to do with aliens. But because we are so ready, because we’ve been softened up – who knows, this may be a trick by aliens, to soften us up so when they really appear we won’t be surprised at all.

  < previous   next > Page 4 of 6