What Happens If China
Makes First Contact?
As America has turned away from searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, China has built the world’s largest radio dish for precisely that purpose.
Story by Ross
Andersen The Atlantic
Last january, the Chinese
Academy of Sciences invited Liu Cixin, China’s preeminent science-fiction
writer, to visit its new state-of-the-art radio dish in the country’s
southwest. Almost twice as wide as the dish at America’s Arecibo Observatory,
in the Puerto Rican jungle, the new Chinese dish is the largest in the world,
if not the universe. Though it is sensitive enough to detect spy satellites
even when they’re not broadcasting, its main uses will be scientific, including
an unusual one: The dish is Earth’s first flagship observatory custom-built to
listen for a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence. If such a sign
comes down from the heavens during the next decade, China may well hear it
first.
In some ways, it’s no surprise that Liu
was invited to see the dish. He has an outsize voice on cosmic affairs in
China, and the government’s aerospace agency sometimes asks him to consult on
science missions. Liu is the patriarch of the country’s science-fiction scene.
Other Chinese writers I met attached the honorific Da, meaning “Big,” to
his surname. In years past, the academy’s engineers sent Liu illustrated
updates on the dish’s construction, along with notes saying how he’d inspired
their work.
But in other ways Liu is a strange choice
to visit the dish. He has written a great deal about the risks of first
contact. He has warned that the “appearance of this Other” might be imminent,
and that it might result in our extinction. “Perhaps in ten thousand years, the
starry sky that humankind gazes upon will remain empty and silent,” he writes
in the postscript to one of his books. “But perhaps tomorrow we’ll wake up and
find an alien spaceship the size of the Moon parked in orbit.”
In recent years, Liu has joined the ranks
of the global literati. In 2015, his novel The Three-Body Problem became
the first work in translation to win the Hugo Award, science fiction’s most
prestigious prize. Barack Obama told The New York Times that the
book—the first in a trilogy—gave
him cosmic perspective during the frenzy of his presidency. Liu told
me that Obama’s staff asked him for an advance copy of the third volume.
At the end of the second volume, one of
the main characters lays out the trilogy’s animating philosophy. No
civilization should ever announce its presence to the cosmos, he says. Any
other civilization that learns of its existence will perceive it as a threat to
expand—as all civilizations do, eliminating their competitors until they
encounter one with superior technology and are themselves eliminated. This grim
cosmic outlook is called “dark-forest theory,” because it conceives of every
civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland,
listening for the first rustlings of a rival.
Liu’s trilogy begins in the late 1960s,
during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when a young Chinese woman sends a message to
a nearby star system. The civilization that receives it embarks on a
centuries-long mission to invade Earth, but she doesn’t care; the Red Guard’s
grisly excesses have convinced her that humans no longer deserve to survive. En
route to our planet, the extraterrestrial civilization disrupts our particle
accelerators to prevent us from making advancements in the physics of warfare,
such as the one that brought the atomic bomb into being less than a century
after the invention of the repeating rifle.
Science fiction is sometimes
described as a literature of the future, but historical allegory is one of its
dominant modes. Isaac Asimov based his Foundation series on classical
Rome, and Frank Herbert’s Dune borrows plot points from the past of
the Bedouin Arabs. Liu is reluctant to make connections between his books and
the real world, but he did tell me that his work is influenced by the history
of Earth’s civilizations, “especially the encounters between more
technologically advanced civilizations and the original settlers of a place.”
One such encounter occurred during the 19th century, when the “Middle Kingdom”
of China, around which all of Asia had once revolved, looked out to sea and saw
the ships of Europe’s seafaring empires, whose ensuing invasion triggered a
loss in status for China comparable to the fall of Rome.
“It looks like something out of science
fiction,” Liu said.
This past summer, I traveled to China to
visit its new observatory, but first I met up with Liu in Beijing. By way of
small talk, I asked him about the film adaptation of The Three-Body
Problem. “People here want it to be China’s Star Wars,” he said, looking
pained. The pricey shoot ended in mid-2015, but the film is still in
postproduction. At one point, the entire special-effects team was replaced.
“When it comes to making science-fiction movies, our system is not mature,” Liu
said.
I had come to interview Liu in his
capacity as China’s foremost philosopher of first contact, but I also wanted to
know what to expect when I visited the new dish. After a translator relayed my
question, Liu stopped smoking and smiled.
“It looks like something out of science
fiction,” he said.
A week later, i rode a bullet train
out of Shanghai, leaving behind its purple Blade Runner glow, its hip
cafés and craft-beer bars. Rocketing along an elevated track, I watched
high-rises blur by, each a tiny honeycomb piece of the rail-linked urban
megastructure that has recently erupted out of China’s landscape. China poured
more concrete from 2011 to 2013 than America did during the entire 20th
century. The country has already built rail lines in Africa, and it hopes to
fire bullet trains into Europe and North America, the latter by way of a tunnel
under the Bering Sea.
The skyscrapers and cranes dwindled as the
train moved farther inland. Out in the emerald rice fields, among the
low-hanging mists, it was easy to imagine ancient China—the China whose written
language was adopted across much of Asia; the China that introduced metal
coins, paper money, and gunpowder into human life; the China that built the
river-taming system that still irrigates the country’s terraced hills. Those
hills grew steeper as we went west, stair-stepping higher and higher, until I
had to lean up against the window to see their peaks. Every so often, a Hans
Zimmer bass note would sound, and the glass pane would fill up with the smooth,
spaceship-white side of another train, whooshing by in the opposite direction
at almost 200 miles an hour.
Liu Cixin, China’s preeminent
science-fiction writer, has written a great deal about the risks of first
contact.
It was mid-afternoon when we glided into a
sparkling, cavernous terminal in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou, one of
China’s poorest, most remote provinces. A government-imposed social
transformation appeared to be under way. Signs implored people not to spit
indoors. Loudspeakers nagged passengers to “keep an atmosphere of good
manners.” When an older man cut in the cab line, a security guard dressed him
down in front of a crowd of hundreds.
The next morning, I went down to my hotel
lobby to meet the driver I’d hired to take me to the observatory. Two hours
into what was supposed to be a four-hour drive, he pulled over in the rain and
waded 30 yards into a field where an older woman was harvesting rice, to ask
for directions to a radio observatory more than 100 miles away. After much
frustrated gesturing by both parties, she pointed the way with her scythe.
We set off again, making our way through a
string of small villages, beep-beeping motorbike riders and pedestrians
out of our way. Some of the buildings along the road were centuries old, with
upturned eaves; others were freshly built, their residents having been
relocated by the state to clear ground for the new observatory. A group of the
displaced villagers had complained about their new housing, attracting bad
press—a rarity for a government project in China. Western reporters took
notice. “China
Telescope to Displace 9,000 Villagers in Hunt for Extraterrestrials,” read
a headline in The New York Times.
The search for extraterrestrial
intelligence (seti) is often derided as a kind of religious mysticism,
even within the scientific community. Nearly a quarter century ago, the United
States Congress defunded
America’s seti program with a budget amendment proposed by
Senator Richard Bryan of Nevada, who said he hoped it would “be the end of
Martian-hunting season at the taxpayer’s expense.” That’s one reason it is
China, and not the United States, that has built the first world-class radio
observatory with seti as a core scientific goal.
seti does share some traits with
religion. It is motivated by deep human desires for connection and
transcendence. It concerns itself with questions about human origins, about the
raw creative power of nature, and about our future in this universe—and it does
all this at a time when traditional religions have become unpersuasive to many.
Why these aspects of seti should count against it is unclear. Nor is
it clear why Congress should find seti unworthy of funding, given
that the government has previously been happy to spend hundreds of millions of
taxpayer dollars on ambitious searches for phenomena whose existence was still
in question. The expensive, decades-long missions that found black holes and
gravitational waves both commenced when their targets were mere speculative
possibilities. That intelligent life can evolve on a planet is not a
speculative possibility, as Darwin demonstrated. Indeed, seti might
be the most intriguing scientific project suggested by Darwinism.
Even without federal funding in the United
States, seti is now in the midst of a global renaissance. Today’s
telescopes have brought the distant stars nearer, and in their orbits we can
see planets. The next generation of observatories is now clicking on, and with
them we will zoom into these planets’ atmospheres. seti researchers
have been preparing for this moment. In their exile, they have become
philosophers of the future. They have tried to imagine what technologies an
advanced civilization might use, and what imprints those technologies would
make on the observable universe. They have figured out how to spot the chemical
traces of artificial pollutants from afar. They know how to scan dense star
fields for giant structures designed to shield planets from a supernova’s shock
waves.
In 2015, the Russian billionaire Yuri
Milner poured $100 million of his own cash into a new seti program
led by scientists at UC Berkeley. The team performs more seti observations
in a single day than took place during entire years just a decade ago. In 2016,
Milner sank another $100 million into an
interstellar-probe mission. A beam from a giant laser array, to be built in
the Chilean high desert, will wallop dozens of wafer-thin probes more than four
light-years to the Alpha Centauri system, to get a closer look at its planets.
Milner told me the probes’ cameras might be able to make out individual
continents. The Alpha Centauri team modeled the radiation that such a beam
would send out into space, and noticed striking similarities to the mysterious
“fast radio bursts” that Earth’s astronomers keep detecting, which suggests the
possibility that they are caused by similar giant beams, powering similar
probes elsewhere in the cosmos.
Andrew Siemion, the leader of
Milner’s seti team, is actively looking into this possibility. He
visited the Chinese dish while it was still under construction, to lay the
groundwork for joint observations and to help welcome the Chinese team into a
growing network of radio observatories that will cooperate on seti research,
including new facilities in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. When I
joined Siemion for overnight seti observations at a radio observatory
in West Virginia last fall, he gushed about the Chinese dish. He said it was
the world’s most sensitive telescope in the part of the radio spectrum that is
“classically considered to be the most probable place for an extraterrestrial
transmitter.”
Before I left for China, Siemion warned me
that the roads around the observatory were difficult to navigate, but he said
I’d know I was close when my phone reception went wobbly. Radio transmissions
are forbidden near the dish, lest scientists there mistake stray
electromagnetic radiation for a signal from the deep. Supercomputers are still
sifting through billions of false positives collected during previous seti observations,
most caused by human technological interference.
My driver was on the verge of turning back
when my phone reception finally began to wane. The sky had darkened in the five
hours since we’d left sunny Guiyang. High winds were whipping between the Avatar-style
mountains, making the long bamboo stalks sway like giant green feathers. A
downpour of fat droplets began splattering the windshield just as I lost
service for good.
Jon Juarez
The week before, Liu and I had
visited a stargazing site of a much older vintage. In 1442, after the Ming
dynasty moved China’s capital to Beijing, the emperor broke ground on a new
observatory near the Forbidden City. More than 40 feet high, the elegant,
castlelike structure came to house China’s most precious astronomical instruments.
No civilization on Earth has a longer
continuous tradition of astronomy than China, whose earliest emperors drew
their political legitimacy from the sky, in the form of a “mandate of heaven.”
More than 3,500 years ago, China’s court astronomers pressed pictograms of
cosmic events into tortoiseshells and ox bones. One of these “oracle bones”
bears the earliest known record of a solar eclipse. It was likely interpreted
as an omen of catastrophe, perhaps an ensuing invasion.
Liu and I sat at a black-marble table in
the old observatory’s stone courtyard. Centuries-old pines towered overhead,
blocking the hazy sunlight that poured down through Beijing’s yellow, polluted
sky. Through a round, red portal at the courtyard’s edge, a staircase led up to
a turretlike observation platform, where a line of ancient astronomical devices
stood, including a giant celestial globe supported by slithering bronze
dragons. The starry globe was stolen in 1900, after an eight-country alliance
stormed Beijing to put down the Boxer Rebellion. Troops from Germany and France
flooded into the courtyard where Liu and I were sitting and made off with 10 of
the observatory’s prized instruments.
The instruments were eventually returned,
but the sting of the incident lingered. Chinese schoolchildren are still taught
to think of this general period as the “century of humiliation,” the nadir of
China’s long fall from its Ming-dynasty peak. Back when the ancient observatory
was built, China could rightly regard itself as the lone survivor of the great
Bronze Age civilizations, a class that included the Babylonians, the
Mycenaeans, and even the ancient Egyptians. Western poets came to regard the
latter’s ruins as Ozymandian proof that nothing lasted. But China had lasted.
Its emperors presided over the planet’s largest complex social organization.
They commanded tribute payments from China’s neighbors, whose rulers sent envoys
to Beijing to perform a baroque face-to-the-ground bowing ceremony for the
emperors’ pleasure.
In the first volume of his landmark series, Science
and Civilisation in China, published in 1954, the British Sinologist Joseph
Needham asked why the scientific revolution hadn’t happened in China, given its
sophisticated intellectual meritocracy, based on exams that measured citizens’
mastery of classical texts. This inquiry has since become known as the “Needham
Question,” though Voltaire too had wondered why Chinese mathematics stalled out
at geometry, and why it was the Jesuits who brought the gospel of Copernicus
into China, and not the other way around. He blamed the Confucian emphasis on
tradition. Other historians blamed China’s remarkably stable politics. A large
landmass ruled by long dynasties may have encouraged less technical dynamism
than did Europe, where more than 10 polities were crammed into a small area,
triggering constant conflict. As we know from the Manhattan Project, the stakes
of war have a way of sharpening the scientific mind.
Still others have accused premodern China
of insufficient curiosity about life beyond its borders. (Notably, there seems
to have been very little speculation in China about extraterrestrial life
before the modern era.) This lack of curiosity is said to explain why China
pressed pause on naval innovation during the late Middle Ages, right at the
dawn of Europe’s age of exploration, when the Western imperial powers were
looking fondly back through the medieval fog to seafaring Athens.
Whatever the reason, China paid a dear
price for slipping behind the West in science and technology. In 1793, King
George III stocked a ship with the British empire’s most dazzling inventions
and sent it to China, only to be rebuffed by its emperor, who said he had “no
use” for England’s trinkets. Nearly half a century later, Britain returned to
China, seeking buyers for India’s opium harvest. China’s emperor again
declined, and instead cracked down on the local sale of the drug, culminating
in the seizure and flamboyant seaside destruction of 2 million pounds of
British-owned opium. Her Majesty’s Navy responded with the full force of its
futuristic technology, running ironclad steamships straight up the Yangtze,
sinking Chinese junk boats, until the emperor had no choice but to sign the
first of the “unequal treaties” that ceded Hong Kong, along with five other
ports, to British jurisdiction. After the French made a colony of Vietnam, they
joined in this “slicing of the Chinese melon,” as it came to be called, along
with the Germans, who occupied a significant portion of Shandong province.
Meanwhile Japan, a “little brother” as far
as China was concerned, responded to Western aggression by quickly modernizing
its navy, such that in 1894, it was able to sink most of China’s fleet in a
single battle, taking Taiwan as the spoils. And this was just a prelude to
Japan’s brutal mid-20th-century invasion of China, part of a larger campaign of
civilizational expansion that aimed to spread Japanese power to the entire
Pacific, a campaign that was largely successful, until it encountered the
United States and its city-leveling nukes.
China’s humiliations multiplied with
America’s rise. After sending 200,000 laborers to the Western Front in support
of the Allied war effort during World War I, Chinese diplomats arrived at
Versailles expecting something of a restoration, or at least relief from the
unequal treaties. Instead, China was seated at the kids’ table with Greece and
Siam, while the Western powers carved up the globe.
China has learned the hard way that spectacular
scientific achievements confer prestige upon nations.
Only recently has China regained its
geopolitical might, after opening to the world during Deng Xiaoping’s 1980s
reign. Deng evinced a near-religious reverence for science and technology, a sentiment
that is undimmed in Chinese culture today. The country is on pace to outspend
the United States on R&D this decade, but the quality of its research
varies a great deal. According to one
study, even at China’s most prestigious academic institutions, a third of
scientific papers are faked or plagiarized. Knowing how poorly the country’s
journals are regarded, Chinese universities are reportedly offering bonuses of
up to six figures to researchers who publish in Western journals.
It remains an open question whether
Chinese science will ever catch up with that of the West without a bedrock
political commitment to the free exchange of ideas. China’s persecution of
dissident scientists began under Mao, whose ideologues branded Einstein’s
theories “counterrevolutionary.” But it did not end with him. Even in the
absence of overt persecution, the country’s “great firewall” handicaps
Chinese scientists, who have difficulty accessing data published abroad.
China has learned the hard way that
spectacular scientific achievements confer prestige upon nations. The
“Celestial Kingdom” looked on from the sidelines as Russia flung the first
satellite and human being into space, and then again when American astronauts
spiked the Stars and Stripes into the lunar crust.
China has largely focused on the applied
sciences. It built the world’s fastest supercomputer, spent heavily on medical
research, and planted a “great green wall” of forests in its northwest as a
last-ditch effort to halt the Gobi Desert’s spread. Now China is bringing its
immense resources to bear on the fundamental sciences. The country plans to
build an atom smasher that will conjure thousands of “god particles” out of the
ether, in the same time it took cern’s Large Hadron Collider to strain out
a handful. It is also eyeing Mars. In the techno poetic idiom of the 21st
century, nothing would symbolize China’s rise like a high definition shot of a
Chinese astronaut setting foot on the red planet. Nothing except, perhaps,
first contact.
At a security station 10 miles from
the dish, I handed my cellphone to a guard. He locked it away in a secure
compartment and escorted me to a pair of metal detectors so I could demonstrate
that I wasn’t carrying any other electronics. A different guard drove me on a
narrow access road to a switchback-laden stairway that climbed 800 steps up a
mountainside, through buzzing clouds of blue dragonflies, to a platform
overlooking the observatory.
Until a few months before his death this
past September, the radio astronomer Nan Rendong was the observatory’s scientific
leader, and its soul. It was Nan who had made sure the new dish was customized
to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He’d been with the project since
its inception, in the early 1990s, when he used satellite imagery to pick out
hundreds of candidate sites among the deep depressions in China’s Karst
mountain region.
Apart from microwaves, such as those that
make up the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, radio waves are the weakest form
of electromagnetic radiation. The collective energy of all the radio waves
caught by Earth’s observatories in a year is less than the kinetic energy
released when a single snowflake comes softly to rest on bare soil. Collecting
these ethereal signals requires technological silence. That’s why China plans
to one day put a radio observatory on
the dark side of the moon, a place more technologically silent than
anywhere on Earth. It’s why, over the course of the past century, radio
observatories have sprouted, like cool white mushrooms, in the blank spots
between this planet’s glittering cities. And it’s why Nan went looking for a
dish site in the remote Karst mountains. Tall, jagged, and covered in
subtropical vegetation, these limestone mountains rise up abruptly from the
planet’s crust, forming barriers that can protect an observatory’s sensitive
ear from wind and radio noise.
The receiver will train its sensitive
algorithms across billions of stars, looking for a beacon.
After making a shortlist of candidate
locations, Nan set out to inspect them on foot. Hiking into the center of the
Dawodang depression, he found himself at the bottom of a roughly symmetrical
bowl, guarded by a nearly perfect ring of green mountains, all formed by the
blind processes of upheaval and erosion. More than 20 years and $180 million
later, Nan positioned the dish for its inaugural observation—its “first light,”
in the parlance of astronomy. He pointed it at the fading radio glow of a
supernova, or “guest star,” as Chinese astronomers had called it when they
recorded the unusual brightness of its initial explosion almost 1,000 years
earlier.
After the dish is calibrated, it will
start scanning large sections of the sky. Andrew Siemion’s seti team
is working with the Chinese to develop an instrument to piggyback on these wide
sweeps, which by themselves will constitute a radical expansion of the human
search for the cosmic other.
Siemion told me he’s especially excited to
survey dense star fields at the center of the galaxy. “It’s a very interesting
place for an advanced civilization to situate itself,” he said. The sheer
number of stars and the presence of a supermassive black hole make for ideal
conditions “if you want to slingshot a bunch of probes around the galaxy.”
Siemion’s receiver will train its sensitive algorithms on billions of
wavelengths, across billions of stars, looking for a beacon.
Jon Juarez
Liu Cixin told me he doubts the dish will
find one. In a dark-forest cosmos like the one he imagines, no civilization
would ever send a beacon unless it were a “death monument,” a powerful
broadcast announcing the sender’s impending extinction. If a civilization were
about to be invaded by another, or incinerated by a gamma-ray burst, or killed
off by some other natural cause, it might use the last of its energy reserves
to beam out a dying cry to the most life-friendly planets in its vicinity.
Even if Liu is right, and the Chinese dish
has no hope of detecting a beacon, it is still sensitive enough to hear a
civilization’s fainter radio whispers, the ones that aren’t meant to be
overheard, like the aircraft-radar waves that constantly waft off Earth’s surface.
If civilizations are indeed silent hunters, we might be wise to hone in on this
“leakage” radiation. Many of the night sky’s stars might be surrounded by faint
halos of leakage, each a fading artifact of a civilization’s first blush with
radio technology, before it recognized the risk and turned off its detectable
transmitters. Previous observatories could search only a handful of stars for
this radiation. China’s dish has the sensitivity to search tens of thousands.
In Beijing, I told Liu that I was holding
out hope for a beacon. I told him I thought dark-forest theory was based on too
narrow a reading of history. It may infer too much about the general behavior
of civilizations from specific encounters between China and the West. Liu
replied, convincingly, that China’s experience with the West is representative
of larger patterns. Across history, it is easy to find examples of expansive
civilizations that used advanced technologies to bully others. “In China’s
imperial history, too,” he said, referring to the country’s long-standing
domination of its neighbors.
But even if these patterns extend back
across all of recorded history, and even if they extend back to the murky
epochs of prehistory, to when the Neanderthals vanished sometime
after first contact with modern humans, that still might not tell us
much about galactic civilizations. For a civilization that has learned to
survive across cosmic timescales, humanity’s entire existence would be but a
single moment in a long, bright dawn. And no civilization could last tens of
millions of years without learning to live in peace internally. Human beings
have already created weapons that put our entire species at risk; an advanced
civilization’s weapons would likely far outstrip ours.
I told Liu that our civilization’s
relative youth would suggest we’re an outlier on the spectrum of civilizational
behavior, not a Platonic case to generalize from. The Milky Way has been
habitable for billions of years. Anyone we make contact with will almost
certainly be older, and perhaps wiser.
Jon Juarez
Moreover, the night sky contains
no evidence that older civilizations treat expansion as a first
principle. seti researchers have looked for civilizations that shoot
outward in all directions from a single origin point, becoming an ever-growing
sphere of technology, until they colonize entire galaxies. If they were consuming
lots of energy, as expected, these civilizations would give off a telltale
infrared glow, and yet we
don’t see any in our all-sky scans. Maybe the self-replicating machinery
required to spread rapidly across 100 billion stars would be doomed by runaway
coding errors. Or maybe civilizations spread unevenly throughout a galaxy, just
as humans have spread unevenly across the Earth. But even a civilization that
captured a tenth of a galaxy’s stars would be easy to find, and we haven’t
found a single one, despite having searched the nearest 100,000 galaxies.
Some seti researchers have
wondered about stealthier modes of expansion. They have looked into the
feasibility of “Genesis
probes,” spacecraft that can seed a planet with microbes, or accelerate
evolution on its surface, by sparking a Cambrian explosion, like the one that
juiced biological creativity on Earth. Some have even searched for evidence
that such spacecraft might have visited this planet, by looking for encoded
messages in our DNA—which is, after all, the most robust informational storage
medium known to science. They too have come up empty. The idea that
civilizations expand ever outward might be woefully anthropocentric.
Liu did not concede this point. To him,
the absence of these signals is just further evidence that hunters are good at
hiding. He told me that we are limited in how we think about other
civilizations. “Especially those that may last millions or billions of years,”
he said. “When we wonder why they don’t use certain technologies to spread
across a galaxy, we might be like spiders wondering why humans don’t use webs
to catch insects.” And anyway, an older civilization that has achieved internal
peace may still behave like a hunter, Liu said, in part because it would grasp
the difficulty of “understanding one another across cosmic distances.” And it
would know that the stakes of a misunderstanding could be existential.
First contact would be trickier still if we
encountered a post biological artificial intelligence that had taken control of
its planet. Its worldview might be doubly alien. It might not feel empathy,
which is not an essential feature of intelligence but instead an emotion
installed by a particular evolutionary history and culture. The logic behind
its actions could be beyond the powers of the human imagination. It might have
transformed its entire planet into a supercomputer, and, according to a trio of Oxford researchers,
it might find the current cosmos too warm for truly long-term, energy-efficient
computing. It might cloak itself from observation, and power down into a
dreamless sleep lasting hundreds of millions of years, until such time when the
universe has expanded and cooled to a temperature that allows for many more
epochs of computing.
As i came up the last flight of steps
to the observation platform, the Earth itself seemed to hum like a
supercomputer, thanks to the loud, whirring chirps of the mountains’ insects,
all amplified by the dish’s acoustics. The first thing I noticed at the top was
not the observatory, but the Karst mountains. They were all individuals, lumpen
and oddly shaped. It was as though the Mayans had built giant pyramids across
hundreds of square miles, and they’d all grown distinctive deformities as they
were taken over by vegetation. They stretched in every direction, all the way
to the horizon, the nearer ones dark green, and the distant ones looking like
blue ridges.
Amid this landscape of chaotic shapes was
the spectacular structure of the dish. Five football fields wide, and deep
enough to hold two bowls of rice for every human being on the planet, it was a
genuine instance of the technological sublime. Its vastness reminded me of
Utah’s Bingham copper mine, but without the air of hasty, industrial violence.
Cool and concave, the dish looked at one with the Earth. It was as though God
had pressed a perfect round fingertip into the planet’s outer crust and left
behind a smooth, silver print.
I sat up there for an hour in the rain, as
dark clouds drifted across the sky, throwing warbly light on the observatory.
Its thousands of aluminum-triangle panels took on a mosaic effect: Some tiles
turned bright silver, others pale bronze. It was strange to think that if a
signal from a distant intelligence were to reach us anytime soon, it would
probably pour down into this metallic dimple in the planet. The radio waves
would ping off the dish and into the receiver. They’d be pored over and
verified. International protocols require the disclosure of first contact,
but they are nonbinding. Maybe China would go public with the signal but
withhold its star of origin, lest a fringe group send Earth’s first response.
Maybe China would make the signal a state secret. Even then, one of its
international partners could go rogue. Or maybe one of China’s own scientists
would convert the signal into light pulses and send it out beyond the great
firewall, to fly freely around the messy snarl of fiber-optic cables that spans
our planet.
In Beijing, I had asked Liu to set aside
dark-forest theory for a moment. I asked him to imagine the Chinese Academy of
Sciences calling to tell him it had found a signal.
How would he reply to a message from a
cosmic civilization? He said that he would avoid giving a too-detailed account
of human history. “It’s very dark,” he said. “It might make us appear more
threatening.” In Blindsight, Peter Watts’s novel of first contact, mere
reference to the individual self is enough to get us profiled as an existential
threat. I reminded Liu that distant civilizations might be able to
detect atomic-bomb flashes in the atmospheres of distant planets,
provided they engage in long-term monitoring of life-friendly habitats, as any
advanced civilization surely would. The decision about whether to reveal our
history might not be ours to make.
Liu told me that first contact would lead
to a human conflict, if not a world war. This is a popular trope in science
fiction. In last year’s Oscar-nominated film Arrival, the sudden
appearance of an extraterrestrial intelligence inspires the formation of
apocalyptic cults and nearly triggers a war between world powers anxious to
gain an edge in the race to understand the alien’s messages. There is also
real-world evidence for Liu’s pessimism: When Orson Welles’s “War of the
Worlds” radio broadcast simulating an alien invasion was replayed in Ecuador in
1949, a riot broke out, resulting in the deaths of six people. “We have fallen
into conflicts over things that are much easier to solve,” Liu told me.
Even if no geopolitical strife ensued,
humans would certainly experience a radical cultural transformation, as every
belief system on Earth grappled with the bare fact of first contact. Buddhists
would get off easy: Their faith already assumes an infinite universe of untold
antiquity, its every corner alive with the vibrating energies of living beings.
The Hindu cosmos is similarly grand and teeming. The Koran references Allah’s
“creation of the heavens and the earth, and the living creatures that He has
scattered through them.” Jews believe that God’s power has no limits, certainly
none that would restrain his creative powers to this planet’s cosmically small
surface.
We may be humbled to one day find
ourselves joined, across the distance of stars, to a more ancient web of minds.
Christianity might have it tougher. There
is a debate in contemporary Christian theology as to whether Christ’s salvation
extends to every soul that exists in the wider universe, or whether the
sin-tainted inhabitants of distant planets require their own divine
interventions. The Vatican is especially keen to massage extraterrestrial life
into its doctrine, perhaps sensing that another scientific revolution may be
imminent. The shameful persecution of Galileo is still fresh in its long
institutional memory.
Secular humanists won’t be spared a
sobering intellectual reckoning with first contact. Copernicus removed Earth
from the center of the universe, and Darwin yanked humans down into the muck
with the rest of the animal kingdom. But even within this framework, human
beings have continued to regard ourselves as nature’s pinnacle. We have
continued treating “lower” creatures with great cruelty. We have marveled that
existence itself was authored in such a way as to generate, from the simplest
materials and axioms, beings like us. We have flattered ourselves that we are,
in the words of Carl Sagan, “the universe’s way of knowing itself.” These are
secular ways of saying we are made in the image of God.
We may be humbled to one day find
ourselves joined, across the distance of stars, to a more ancient web of minds,
fellow travelers in the long journey of time. We may receive from them an
education in the real history of civilizations, young, old, and extinct. We may
be introduced to galactic-scale artworks, borne of million-year traditions. We
may be asked to participate in scientific observations that can be carried out
only by multiple civilizations, separated by hundreds of light-years.
Observations of this scope may disclose aspects of nature that we cannot now fathom.
We may come to know a new metaphysics. If we’re lucky, we will come to know a
new ethics. We’ll emerge from our existential shock feeling newly alive to our
shared humanity. The first light to reach us in this dark forest may illuminate
our home world too.
