Broca's Brain (25 page)

Another great value of modern science fiction is some of the art forms it elicits. A fuzzy imagining in the mind’s eye of what the surface of another planet might look like is one thing, but examining a meticulous painting of the same scene by Chesley Bonestell in his prime is quite another. The sense of astronomical wonder is splendidly conveyed by the best of such contemporary artists—Don Davis, Jon Lomberg, Rick Sternbach, Robert McCall. And in the verse of Diane Ackerman can be glimpsed the prospect of a mature astronomical poetry, fully conversant with standard science-fiction themes.

Science-fiction ideas are widespread today in somewhat different guises. We have science-fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke providing cogent and brilliant summaries in nonfictional form of many aspects of science and society. Some contemporary scientists are introduced to a vaster public by science fiction. For example, in the thoughtful novel
The Listeners
, by James Gunn, we find the following comment made fifty years from now about my colleague, the astronomer
Frank Drake: “Drake! What did he know?” A great deal, it turns out. We also find straight science fiction disguised as fact in a vast proliferation of pseudoscientific writings, belief systems and organizations.

One science-fiction writer, L. Ron Hubbard, has founded a successful cult called Scientology—invented, according to one account, overnight on a bet that he could do as well as Freud, invent a religion and make money from it. Classic science-fiction ideas are now institutionalized in unidentified flying objects and ancient-astronaut belief systems—although I have difficulty not concluding that Stanley Weinbaum (in
The Valley of Dreams
) did it better, as well as earlier, than Erich von Däniken. R. De Witt Miller in
Within the Pyramid
manages to anticipate both von Däniken and Velikovsky, and to provide a more coherent hypothesis on the supposed extraterrestrial origin of pyramids than can be found in all the writings on ancient astronauts and pyramidology. In
Wine of the Dreamers
, by John D. MacDonald (a science-fiction author now transmogrified into one of the most interesting contemporary writers of detective fiction), we find the sentence “and there are traces, in Earth mythology … of great ships and chariots that crossed the sky.” The story
Farewell to the Master
, by Harry Bates, was converted into a motion picture,
The Day the Earth Stood Still
(which abandoned the essential plot element, that on the extraterrestrial spacecraft it was the robot and not the human who was in command). The movie, with its depiction of a flying saucer buzzing Washington, is thought by some sober investigators to have played a role in the 1952 Washington, D.C., UFO “flap” which followed closely the release of the motion picture. Many popular novels today of the espionage variety, in the shallowness of their characterizations and the gimmickry of their plots, are virtually indistinguishable from pulp science fiction of the ’30s and ’40s.

THE INTERWEAVING
of science and science fiction sometimes produces curious results. It is not always clear whether life imitates art or vice versa. For example,
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., has written a superb epistemological novel,
The Sirens of Titan
, in which a not altogether inclement environment is postulated on Saturn’s largest moon. When in the last few years some planetary scientists, myself among them, presented evidence that Titan has a dense atmosphere and perhaps higher temperatures than expected, many people commented to me on the prescience of Kurt Vonnegut. But Vonnegut was a physics major at Cornell University and naturally knowledgeable about the latest findings in astronomy. (Many of the best science-fiction writers have science or engineering backgrounds; for example, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Hal Clement and Robert Heinlein.) In 1944, an atmosphere of methane was discovered on Titan, the first satellite in the solar system known to have an atmosphere. In this, as in many similar cases, art imitates life.

The trouble has been that our understanding of the other planets has been changing faster than the science-fiction representations of them. A clement twilight zone on a synchronously rotating Mercury, a swamp-and-jungle Venus and a canal-infested Mars, while all classic science-fiction devices, are all based upon earlier misapprehensions by planetary astronomers. The erroneous ideas were faithfully transcribed into science-fiction stories, which were then read by many of the youngsters who were to become the next generation of planetary astronomers—thereby simultaneously capturing the interest of the youngsters and making it more difficult to correct the misapprehensions of the oldsters. But as our knowledge of the planets has changed, the environments in the corresponding science-fiction stories have also changed. It is quite rare to find a science-fiction story written today that involves algae farms on the surface of Venus. (Incidentally, the UFO-contact mythologizers are slower to change, and we can still find accounts of flying saucers from a Venus populated by beautiful human beings in long white robes inhabiting a kind of Cytherean Garden of Eden. The 900° Fahrenheit temperatures of Venus give us one way of checking such stories.) Likewise, the idea of a “space
warp” is a hoary science-fiction standby but it did not arise in science fiction. It arose from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

The connection between science-fiction depictions of Mars and the actual exploration of Mars is so close that, subsequent to the Mariner 9 mission to Mars, we were able to name a few Martian craters after deceased science-fiction personalities. (See
Chapter 11
.) Thus there are on Mars craters named after H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Stanley Weinbaum and John W. Campbell, Jr. These names have been officially approved by the International Astronomical Union. No doubt other science-fiction personalities will be added soon after they die.

THE GREAT INTEREST
of youngsters in science fiction is reflected in films, television programs, comic books and a demand for science-fiction courses in high schools and colleges. My experience is that such courses can be fine educational experiences or disasters, depending on how they are done. Courses in which the readings are selected by the students provide no opportunity for the students to read what they have not already read. Courses in which there is no attempt to extend the science-fiction plot line to encompass the appropriate science miss a great educational opportunity. But properly planned science-fiction courses, in which science or politics is an integral component, would seem to me to have a long and useful life in school curricula.

The greatest human significance of science fiction may be as experiments on the future, as explorations of alternative destinies, as attempts to minimize future shock. This is part of the reason that science fiction has so wide an appeal among young people: it is
they
who will live in the future. It is my firm view that no society on Earth today is well adapted to the Earth of one or two hundred years from now (if we are wise enough or lucky enough to survive that long). We desperately need an exploration of alternative futures, both experimental and conceptual. The novels and
stories of Eric Frank Russell were very much to this point. In them, we were able to see conceivable alternative economic systems or the great efficiency of a unified passive resistance to an occupying power. In modern science fiction, useful suggestions can also be found for making a revolution in a computerized technological society, as in Heinlein’s
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.

Such ideas, when encountered young, can influence adult behavior. Many scientists deeply involved in the exploration of the solar system (myself among them) were first turned in that direction by science fiction. And the fact that some of that science fiction was not of the highest quality is irrelevant. Ten-year-olds do not read the scientific literature.

I do not know if time travel into the past is possible. The causality problems it would imply make me very skeptical. But there are those who are thinking about it. What are called closed time-like lines—routes in space-time permitting unrestricted time travel—appear in some solutions to the general relativistic field equations. A recent claim, perhaps mistaken, is that closed timelike lines appear in the vicinity of a large, rapidly rotating cylinder. I wonder to what extent general-relativists working on such problems have been influenced by science fiction. Likewise, science-fiction encounters with alternative cultural features may play an important role in actualizing fundamental social change.

In all the history of the world there has never before been a time in which so many significant changes have occurred. Accommodation to change, the thoughtful pursuit of alternative futures are keys to the survival of civilization and perhaps of the human species. Ours is the first generation that has grown up with science-fiction ideas. I know many young people who will of course be interested but in no way astounded if we receive a message from an extraterrestrial civilization. They have already accommodated to that future. I think it is no exaggeration to say that if we survive, science fiction will have made a vital contribution to the continuation and evolution of our civilization.

IMAGINE THE EARTH
scrutinized by some very careful and extremely patient extraterrestrial observer: 4.6 billion years ago the planet is observed to complete its condensation out of interstellar gas and dust, the final planetesimals falling in to make the Earth produce enormous impact craters; the planet heats internally from the gravitational potential energy of accretion and from radioactive decay, differentiating the liquid iron core from the silicate mantle and crust; hydrogen-rich gases and condensible water are released from the interior of the planet to the surface; a rather humdrum cosmic organic chemistry yields complex molecules, which
lead to extremely simple self-replicating molecular systems—the first terrestrial organisms; as the supply of impacting interplanetary boulders dwindles, running water, mountain building and other geological processes wipe out the scars attendant to the Earth’s origin; a vast planetary convection engine is established which carries mantle material up at the ocean floors and subducts it down at the continental margins, the collision of the moving plates producing the great folded mountain chains and the general configuration of land and ocean, glaciated and tropical terrain varies continuously. Meanwhile, natural selection extracts out from a wide range of alternatives those varieties of self-replicating molecular systems best suited to the changing environments; plants evolve that use visible light to break down water into hydrogen and oxygen, and the hydrogen escapes to space, changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere from reducing to oxidizing; organisms of fair complexity and middling intelligence eventually arise.

Yet in all the 4.6 billion years our hypothetical observer is struck by the isolation of the Earth. It receives sunlight and cosmic rays—both important for biology—and occasional impact of interplanetary debris. But nothing in all those eons of time leaves the planet. And then the planet suddenly begins to fire tiny dispersules throughout the inner solar system, first in orbit around the Earth, then to the planet’s blasted and lifeless natural satellite, the Moon. Six capsules—small, but larger than the rest—set down on the Moon, and from each, two tiny bipeds can be discerned, briefly exploring their surroundings and then hotfooting it back to the Earth, having extended tentatively a toe into the cosmic ocean. Eleven little spacecraft enter the atmosphere of Venus, a searing hellhole of a world, and six of them survive some tens of minutes on the surface before being fried. Eight spacecraft are sent to Mars. Three successfully orbit the planet for years; another flies past Venus to encounter Mercury, on a trajectory obviously chosen intentionally to pass by the innermost planet many times. Four others successfully traverse the asteroid
belt, fly close to Jupiter and are there ejected by the gravity of the largest planet into interstellar space. It is clear that something interesting is happening lately on the planet Earth.

If the 4.6 billion years of the Earth history were compressed into a single year, this flurry of space exploration would have occupied the last tenth of a second, and the fundamental changes in attitude and knowledge responsible for this remarkable transformation would fill only the last few seconds. The seventeenth century saw the first widespread application of simple lenses and mirrors for astronomical purposes. With the first astronomical telescope Galileo was astounded and delighted to see Venus as a crescent, and the mountains and the craters of the Moon. Johannes Kepler thought that the craters were constructions of intelligent beings inhabiting that world. But the seventeenth-century Dutch physicist Christianus Huygens disagreed. He suggested that the effort involved in constructing the lunar craters would be unreasonably great, and also thought that he could see alternative explanations for these circular depressions.