Extraterrestrial Civilizations - Isaac Asimov [1]
Let us start with that establishment of aloneness before we can go on to a new view of a new kind of other-intelligence.
SPIRITS
To go back to the beginning, we will have to recognize that the phrase extraterrestrial intelligence is already sophisticated. It refers, after all, to intelligence found on worlds other than Earth and for it to have meaning there must be some recognition that worlds other than Earth exist.
To the vast majority of human beings, however, through almost all of history, there were no worlds other than Earth. Earth was the world, the home of living things. The sky, to early observers, was exactly what it appeared to be: a canopy overhanging the world, blue by day and punctuated by the round glare of the Sun; black by night and pin-pricked with the brightness of the stars.
Under those conditions, the phrase extraterrestrial intelligence has no significance. Let us talk, instead, of nonhuman intelligence.
As soon as we do that, we can see at once that human beings of the prescientific age always assumed that humanity was not alone; that the one world they thought of as filling the universe contained a variety of nonhuman intelligences. Not only was human intelligence one of very many, but it was very likely to be the weakest and least advanced of all.
To the prescientific mind, after all, events in the world seemed whimsical and willful. Nothing followed natural and inexorable “law” because law was not recognized as part of the Universe. If something happened unpredictably, it was not because not enough was known to predict it, but because every part of the Universe was behaving with free will and doing things through some uncomprehended motivation—through even, perhaps, an incomprehensible motivation.
Free will is inevitably associated with intelligence. To do something willful, after all, you have to understand the existence of alternatives and choose among them, and these are attributes of intelligence. It seemed to make sense, therefore, to consider intelligence a universal aspect of nature.
To the early Greeks (whose myths we know best), every aspect of nature had its spirits. Every mountain, every rock, every stream, every pool, every tree, had its nymph, marked not only by intelligence but even by a more or less human shape.
The ocean had its deity, as did the sky and the underworld; they were given human attributes such as childbirth and sleep, and various levels of abstraction such as art, beauty, and chance.
As time went on, Greek thinkers grew sophisticated enough to view all these spirits and deities as symbols, and to strive to withdraw them from human associations.
Thus, Zeus and his fellow gods were thought to live on Mount Olympus in northern Greece to begin with, but were later transferred to a vague “Heaven” in the sky.* The same transfer took place in the case of the God of the Israelites, who originally lived on Mt. Sinai or in the Ark of the Covenant, but who was eventually relocated to Heaven.
In the same way, the world of the spirits of the dead could be thought of at first as sharing the one world with the living. Thus, in the Odyssey, Odysseus visits Hades in some vague spot in the far West, and it is somewhere in the West that the Elysian Fields, the Greek Paradise, may also have existed. The spirits of the dead were eventually transferred to a semimystical underground Hell.
Nevertheless, this process of sophisticated abstraction is a purely intellectual phenomenon intended to save the thinker the embarrassment of unsophisticated opinions. They rarely affected the common person.
Thus, whatever the Greek philosopher may have thought as to the cause of rain, the common uneducated farmer may have thought of rain (as Aristophanes jokingly says in one of his plays) as “Zeus pissing through a sieve.”
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