Lost in the Cosmos

far as we know, language, mind, self, and consciousness, and almost immediately thereafter a train of disasters and triumphs which seem to have very little to do with adapting to an environment—such as organized warfare against himself, composing Don Giovanni, Charlie Manson, John Keats, suicide, joy, madness, murder, heroism, modern medicine, child abuse, loving care for the genetically malformed—and in recent years the appearance of the demoniac spirit of the erotic and the violent expressing itself in every conceivable variety of florid sexual behavior which has nothing to do with reproduction or survival of the species, and that with the very rise of science there has occurred the spectacular rise in technological violence, so that more men have been killed in this century than in all others put together—and that finally there should have come to pass the present state of affairs which surpass all belief, not merely that this very “matter” you speak of, which Democritus and Darwin and even Dalton and Boyle saw as peaceable little miniballs of atoms colliding and joining, is in fact possessed of an energy of such an order that one-quarter teaspoon will destroy Greater New York, but that this very secret and this very matter—and here the mind reels—should find itself in the hands of this selfsame demoniac autonomous self, itself a creature of science?
    Scientist A opens his mouth to reply, but the elevator doors open at last and there enters a somber-looking Hasidic rabbi, The two scientists exchange glances and fall silent.
    Question: How do you think Scientist A would have answered Scientist B?

(19) The Self Marooned in the Cosmos:
    What would you say if you met a man Friday out there? What do you think he would say to you? Could you understand him?

    A STARSHIP FROM EARTH is traveling in the galaxy, its mission to establish communication with extraterrestrial intelligences and civilizations. *
    For years SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has explored the 200 billion stars of the galaxy, huge dish antennae searching for something, anything other than the random noise of the Cosmos. At last, the computer of the spectrum analyzer which reads the tapes of all the received transmissions picked up a pattern, that is, a repeated signal, which, however, could not be interpreted. Was it a signal from an intelligence or was it like the Coke bottle in the movie On the Beach, which was leaning on a telegraph key in deserted California and which a fitful breeze blowing a curtain caused to send out a random letter or two?
    The starship has a transmission-receiver capability for the entire electromagnetic spectrum, but especially in the range of radio signals, since it is known of course that the Cosmos is filled with emissions in this part of the spectrum, from pulsars, quasars, radiation belts, and so on.
    The objective of the starship is to exchange information with other civilizations comparable with or superior to our own. It has been calculated that the probability that such civilizations exist is overwhelming. What the designers of the project hoped to learn was the level of technology of other civilizations, the degree of evolution, biology, type of metabolism, etc.
    The time is the year 2050 C.E. (Common Era, so called because, though the era is post-Christian, it proved useful to retain the year of Christ’s birth). The acceleration of vehicles to speeds approaching the speed of light is possible, the aging process is accordingly reduced, and the problems of communication delays are minimized.
    The assumption was made that as organisms evolve in the Cosmos, a level of intelligence will be reached so that it will be possible to transmit information. Mathematics and science might be used as the basis of a common language. Mathematics is the same everywhere. The prime numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 … are prime everywhere. The physics of the Cosmos is the same. For example, since hydrogen is the most abundant atom in the Cosmos, one might use the proton and electron spin of the neutral hydrogen atom as the binary number 1. Using such a binary system, the project designers hoped that it might be possible to establish a vocabulary and transmit information about the earth and its star, for example, its position in relation to the fourteen major pulsars of the galaxy, and to put similar questions to other intelligences.
    Organisms transmitting signals were, in fact, encountered. The trouble was