Morgan Cable, the JPL planetary scientist who wrote an extraordinarily uplifting and fascinating op-ed about the Lab’s just-launched Europa Clipper probe in search of life in our solar system in these pages a couple of Sundays ago, was giving us a personally guided tour of her La Canada Flintridge campus the other day. What a joy it was! What a brilliant job to have.
While the spectrometer on the Clipper that Morgan helped design is only in search of evidence of very primitive life forms in the oceans of the Jovian moon, I would hazard a guess that most of us these days believe that the mathematics of the universe skew toward the likelihood of other advanced life forms out there. Somewhere. Far, far away — but nonetheless, life forms.
After all, there are on the order of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way.
But wait, there’s more: There are over a hundred billion other galaxies in the universe, too.
Those are big numbers.
As we strolled around looking at satellites under construction in clean rooms and at the tech-geek fabulousness that is the Charles Elachi Mission Control Center, Pierre Smith, both of whose parents were professors at Caltech, recalled their old family friend, the French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Bibring, who used to come stay in Pasadena to do work at the Lab.
“He always maintained that, numbers or no numbers, we are alone — no ETs, no UFOs, no … nobody,” Pierre said. In fact, he wrote a book: “Seuls dans L’Univers.”
“Yeah, that’s the Lou Friedman theory, too,” Morgan said. “He wrote a book called ‘Alone But Not Lonely.’ He says we’re all the universe has got. Well, a few examples of primitive life, certainly. But not advanced civilizations.”
Really?
I was truly dumbfounded to hear this. As would many of us in the science-fiction generation who grew up reading Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Sentinel” — the basis for “2001: A Space Odyssey” — and then watching “Star Trek,” “Star Wars,” “Close Encounters.” Not close encounters with microbes — with clearly sentient beings.
Plus, I’d seen a UFO myself. Well, two. In France, as it happens. When I was 21. Buy me a beer and I’ll tell you all about it. Them.
Plus, as a reporter and editor, I’d known Louis Friedman, both when he was also a planetary scientist at JPL, and then when he co-founded the Pasadena-based Planetary Society with astronomer Carl Sagan and the Lab’s Bruce Murray. The organization is all about funding SETI — the search for extraterrestrial life — right?
Lou worked with my stepfather Al Hibbs at the Lab, and used to bring Sagan over to our house. I mean, we’re talking the guys who put a gold record featuring Chuck Berry and Beethoven on the Voyager probe that has now left the solar system for interstellar space, along with a map back to the third planet from the sun. They weren’t trying to impress the single-celled critters, what?
So I bought a copy of “Alone But Not Lonely,” in which Lou does the math, and concludes, that while his late friend Carl was indeed right about the “billions and billions” of stars and star systems out there, a formula based on the famous Drake equation indicates that there are at best 1.08 civilizations in the Milky Way — and since we are one of them, maybe we are all she wrote.
And this, from a guy who has spent his entire career looking for evidence of other life in the universe.
Lou acknowledges that especially in our science-fiction age most people do believe the math would show that there are other civilizations out there. A CBS News poll from 2020 showed that two-thirds of Americans think there is intelligent life on other planets, and the numbers have gone up in the last decade — in 2010, only 47% thought there were ETs.
But wishing does not make it so.
And part of his fascinating book deals with his worry that if life on our planet is any example, it may be that there are or were other advanced civilizations, with the irony that becoming advanced leads to those civilizations being short-lived: Industry leads to climate change, or nuclear war, leading to the end of those civilizations.
Lou’s successor at The Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy, writes: “Dr. Friedman argues that we are alone, absolutely alone in the cosmos, and that this is a feature, not a bug. He acknowledges and celebrates the idea that there are almost certainly a great many bugs out there, that primitive life must be extant all over the cosmic place … Is it heartbreaking or a wonderful insight? It’s certainly something for intelligent beings to ponder.”
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