Project Cyclops, A Design... - Department of Earth and Planetary ...

3. SOME REASONS FOR THE SEARCH
It is clear that establishing contact with intelligent
life on another world is a major undertaking involving
expenditures comparable to those of the Apollo program.
There are many reasons for mounting an effort
on this scale, but most if not all of them are based
upon the assumption that the human race will survive
as a socially and scientifically evolving species for a
very long time. If this is not true, if our society is
going to exhaust our mineral and fuel reserves, or overpopulate
our planet, or extinguish itself through atomic
war in the next few decades, or centuries, or even
millennia, then there is very little reason other than
curiosity to carry out the quest. Indeed, there is very
little reason to carry out, on any large-scale, socially
supported programs such as our present space program
or research into biochemistry, medicine, cosmology,
particle physics, or the mysteries of the brain, if today's
world-the product of four and one half billion
years of evolution on Earth-is the end of the road.
Rather, like so many of our youth are doing to our
distress, we should drink our nepenthe, turn inward to
lives of sensuality and subjectivity, and only occasionally
weep for glory unattained.
Underlying the quest for other intelligent life is the
assumption that man is not at the peak of his evolutionary
development, that in fact he may be very far
from it, and that he can survive long enough to inherit
a future as far beyond our comprehension as the present
world would have been to Cro-Magnon man. To do
this, man must, of course, solve the ecological problems
that face him. These are of immediate and compelling
importance and their solution must not be delayed,
nor effort to solve them be diminished, by overexpenditures
in other areas. But if the cost of the
quest is, in one sense, competitive with the cost of
solving ecological problems, we can nevertheless do
both; and, in a larger sense, the quest gives more significance
to survival and therefore places more, not less,
emphasis on ecology. The two are intimately related,
for if we can survive (and evolve) for another aeon the
chances are that many other races have also, and this
reduces the problem of making contact.
CONTINUING
ADVENTURE
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought an
excitement and stimulation that we are prone to forget
today. The discovery of the New World, the circumnavigation
of the Earth, and the development of trade
routes to the East brought cultures into contact that
had long been isolated. There followed a period of
trade and cultural enrichment in which change and
growth were much more rapid than in the centuries
before. With the explorations of the last three centuries,
and particularly with the advent of modern
technology, there are no longer any significant frontiers
on earth for geographic or cultural discovery. But
the tradition of cultural expansion is still strong, still
exciting.
To a considerable extent the possibility of exploring
other planets, of possibly finding them habitable, or of
finding other life there led to the enthusiastic support
of the space program. When the surface temperature of
Venus was found to be too hot for life and when the
Mariner photos showed the surface of Mars to be too
similar to that of the airless Moon to cause one to
expect advanced life there, the conviction grew that
except for Earth itself the solar system is probably
barren. Our planet seen from space was so beautiful to
behold, so in contrast to the scarred faces of the Moon
or Mars that the importance of saving our own world
before exploring others grew larger in the popular
mind. Support for the space program dwindled, and
the clamor for ecology grew.
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