Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [98]
This latter jibe is a reference to the times when the pair worked together. Brin was part of an effort by the International Institute of Aeronautics to draft a protocol about whether to broadcast messages into space in an attempt to reach out to alien civilisations. He eventually resigned from the committee in 2006 when Shostak and some other members changed some of the agreed wording, lopping off the proviso that international agreement should be reached before any such messaging took place.
‘If they’re silent,’ Brin says (he means the aliens), ‘then maybe they know something we don’t know.’ He is not scared of bogeymen, he says, he is properly cautious. And he is offended by the way he and people who share his sensibilities have been ridiculed: ‘What we care about is the rudeness that’s been going on, the failure of wisdom.’
As Brin concludes, the chair opens up the debate. Shostak is happy to get into an argument. If you think it’s dangerous to broadcast, he says, you might as well shut down the search for alien signals too. The aliens, he says, ‘will have reached the same conclusion’. Brin is still exercised. Back in 1990, he says, ‘we were all one happy family here’, a stark contrast to the ‘mania of the last seven or eight years’. Shostak has had enough. ‘You have provoked me,’ he says, his voice rising in anger. ‘No one was tyrannised.’
A Hungarian professor in the audience stands up and makes a plea. ‘Can’t we get back to the science?’ he says. ‘This looks like a TV show!’ And he’s right. It’s like watching Jerry Springer host a science special. What’s interesting – and rather funny – is what it takes to clear the air. About twenty minutes into the quarrel, an anthropologist, Kathryn Denning of York University in Toronto, stands up and asks a question about what level of broadcast signal would be detectable. ‘I’ve been watching this debate for a number of years now,’ she says. ‘People with apparently equivalent credentials, and good brains with the ability to do math that I can’t do, don’t agree. Why not?’
There is a moment of stillness, as when a parent walks in on a fight between siblings. Then the astronomers close ranks. The agreement is pretty close, one says. No, says another, it’s closer than that. A general hubbub rises in the room. There is no disagreement, they say. They are all friends again. Brin starts to talk about how good Shostak is on this topic and says that he listens ‘very humbly and respectfully’ whenever Shostak talks about SETI; Shostak has a ‘wonderful paper’ coming out on exactly this subject. The volte face is truly remarkable.
Nothing takes the fight out of scientists like the scrutiny of outsiders. They are secret anarchists, you see; open anarchy goes against the grain. Nonetheless, their concerns do occasionally run too deep to be contained, and then their anarchy is unleashed on an astonished world.
On 5 February 1987, one of the world’s best-known scientists was arrested in Nevada. Carl Sagan had been trying to scale a fence and enter the area where the United States military puts its nuclear arsenal to the test.
The arrest was a direct consequence of Sagan’s scientific studies. Four years earlier, he had attempted to pull together everything that was known about the aftermath of nuclear explosions. He applied this understanding to the scenario of all-out nuclear war and summarised the arguments in an article entitled ‘The Nuclear Winter’. Any such conflict, he said, would most likely involve ‘the explosion of 5,000 to 10,000 megatons – the detonation of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that now sit quietly, inconspicuously, in missile silos, submarines and long-range bombers, faithful servants awaiting orders’. The result, Sagan concluded, would be the rapid death of around half the humans on the planet. Those who survived would have to live in near darkness for months as ash and dust filled and blackened the sky. Plants, unable to harvest enough light for