One Human Minute

percentage of the stars in our Galaxy had planets. The obvious conclusion was that life arose frequently in the course of ordinary cosmic changes, that its evolution should be a natural phenomenon in the Universe, and that the crowning of the evolutionary tree with the emergence of intelligent beings likewise belonged to the normal order of things. But, over the decades, the repeated failure to receive extraterrestrial signals, despite the increasing number of observatories that joined the search, contradicted this image of a populated cosmos.

According to the science of the astronomers, biochemists, and biologists, the Universe was full of stars like the Sun and planets like the Earth; by the law of large numbers, therefore, life should be developing on innumerable globes, but radio monitoring indicated, everywhere, a dead void.

The scientists who belonged to CETI and then SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) created various ad hoc hypotheses to reconcile the universal presence of life with its universal silence. At first they said that the average distance between civilizations equaled fifty to a hundred light-years. Later they had to increase the distance to six hundred and then to a thousand light-years. And there were hypotheses about the self-destructiveness of intelligence — such as von Horner’s, which connected the psychozoic “density” of the Universe with its barrenness, claiming that suicide threatened every civilization, as nuclear war was now threatening humanity. The organic evolution of life took billions of years, but its final, technological phase lasted barely a few dozen centuries. Other hypotheses pointed to the dangers that the twentieth century encountered even in the peaceful expansion of technology, whose side effects devastated the reproductive capacities of the biosphere.

Someone said, paraphrasing the famous words of Wittgenstein, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must make poetry.” Perhaps Olaf Stapledon, in his fantasy Last and First Men, was the first to express our destiny, in this sentence: “The stars create man, and the stars kill him.” At the time, however, in the 1930s, these words contained more poetry than truth; they were a metaphor, not a hypothesis qualifying for citizenship in the realm of science.

But any text can hold more meaning than its author gave it. Four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon contended that flying machines were possible, as well as machines that would speed across the Earth and travel on the sea bottom. He certainly did not conceive such devices in any concrete way; but we, reading his words today, not only know that they have come true but also expand their meaning with a multitude of details familiar to us, which only adds weight to his statements.

Something similar happened with the idea that I expressed at the American-Soviet conference of CETI in Burakan in the year 1971. (My text can be found in the book Problems of CETI, published by Mir in Moscow in 1975.) I wrote then:

If the distribution of civilizations in the universe is not a matter of chance but is determined by astrophysical conditions of which we are ignorant, though they may be observable phenomena, then there will be less chance of contact the stronger the connection is between the location of the civilization and the nature of its stellar environment — that is, the more unlike a random distribution is the distribution of civilizations in space. One cannot, a priori, rule out the possibility that there exist astronomically observable indicators of the presence of civilization… Consequently, the CETI program should also make allowance for the passing nature of our astrophysical knowledge, since new discoveries will influence and alter CETI’s most fundamental assumptions.

And that is exactly what happened — or, rather, what is slowly happening. As from the scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, a new picture is emerging from new discoveries in galactic astronomy, from new models for the genesis of the planets and the stars, from the composition of radioisotopes recently found in meteors of the solar system. The history of the solar system is being reconstructed, and the origin of life on Earth, with an import as exciting as it is contrary to all we have accepted until now.

To put the matter most concisely: the hypotheses that reconstruct the past ten billion years of the Milky Way’s existence tell us that man emerged because the Universe is a place of catastrophe; that Earth, together with life, owes its existence to a peculiar sequence of catastrophes. It was as a result of violent cataclysms that the Sun gave birth to its family of planets. The solar system emerged from a series of catastrophic disturbances, and only after that could life arise, develop, and eventually establish dominion over the Earth. In the next billion-year period, during which man had no chance to emerge because there was no room on the evolutionary tree, another catastrophe opened the way for anthropogenesis by killing hundreds of millions of Earth’s creatures.

Creation through destruction (and consequent release of tensions) occupies the central place in this new picture of the world. Or one could put it thus: Earth arose because the proto-Sun entered a region of destruction; life arose because Earth left that region; man arose because in the next billion years destruction once again descended on Earth.

Stubbornly opposing the indeterminism of quantum mechanics, Einstein said, “God does not play dice with the world.” By this he meant that chance cannot decide atomic phenomena. It turned out, however, that God plays dice not only on the atomic scale but with the galaxies, the stars, the planets, the birth of life, and the emergence of intelligence. We owe our existence as much to catastrophes that occurred at the right place and the right time as to those that did not take place in other epochs and places. We came into the world having passed — during the history of our star, then of the planet, then of biogenesis and evolution — through the eyes of many needles. The nine billion years separating the protosolar cloud of gases from Homo sapiens can therefore be compared to a gigantic slalom in which no gate was missed. We know now that there were many such “gates,” and that any veering from the slalom run would have precluded the rise of man. What we do not know is how “wide” was this track, with its curves and gates — or, in other words, the probability of this “perfect run” whose goal was anthropogenesis.

So the world that the science of the next century will recognize will be a group of random catastrophes, creative as well as destructive. Note that the group is random, whereas each of the catastrophes in it conforms to the laws of physics.

I

In roulette, losses are the rule for the vast majority of players. Otherwise, every Monte Carlo-type gambling casino would quickly go bankrupt. The player who leaves the gaming table with a profit is the exception to the rule. The one who wins often is a rare exception, and the one who makes a fortune because the ball lands on his number almost every time is an extraordinary exception; his incredible luck is written up in the papers.

A player can take no credit for a run of wins, because there is no betting strategy that will guarantee a win. The roulette wheel is an instrument of chance; that is, its end states cannot be predicted. Since the ball always stops at one of thirty-six numbers, the player has one chance out of thirty-six to win in every game. The player who places his bet on the same number twice has one chance in 1,296 to win twice, because the probabilities of chance events not interdependent (as on the roulette wheel) must be multiplied by one another. The probability of winning three in a row is 1:46,656. The chance is very small, but it is calculable, because the number of end states of every game is the same: thirty-six. If, however, in calculating the player’s chances, we wished to take into account incidental phenomena (earthquakes, bomb attacks, the player’s death from a heart attack, etc.), the task would become impossible. Similarly, when someone picks flowers in a meadow under artillery fire and returns home safe, bouquet in hand, his survival cannot be put into statistical form, either. It cannot be done, although the incalculability — and, therefore, the unpredictability — has nothing to do with the kind of unpredictability that characterizes quantum-atomic phenomena. The fate of the flower picker under fire could be made a statistic only if there were very many flower pickers, and if, in addition, the distribution of the flowers in the meadow were known, and the time of their picking, and the average number of shells per unit of shelled surface.

The determination of this statistic is complicated, moreover, by the fact that the shells that miss the picker destroy flowers, thereby changing their distribution in the meadow. The picker who is killed is dropped from the game of picking flowers under fire, just as the roulette player who was lucky at the start but then lost his shirt is dropped.

An observer watching the group of galaxies for billions of years could treat them like roulette wheels or meadows with flower pickers and discover the statistical laws to which the stars and planets are subject. From that, he would be able to establish how often life appears in the Universe and how often it evolves to the point