The vested interests in favor of the divine right of kings, or slavery, were very large. Kings had a vested interest in the divine right of kings. Slaveholders had a vested interest in the continuation of the institution of slavery. Who has a vested interest in the prospects of nuclear war? It's a very different situation. Everyone is vulnerable today. And therefore I think it's important to remember that we have dealt with and solved much more difficult problems than this.
The only problem is that the threat of nuclear war has to be dealt with swiftly, because the stakes are too high. The clock is ticking. We cannot permit a leisurely pace.
Suppose you are a linguist. You are interested in the nature and evolution of language. But unfortunately you know only one language. No matter how clever you are, no matter how complete your dictionary of whatever the language is-say, Nahuatl-you will be fundamentally limited in your ability to generate a broad, interdisciplinary, predictive theory of language. How could you be expected to do very well if you knew only one language? If Newton were restricted, in working through the theory of gravitation, to apples and forbidden to look at the motion of the Moon or the Earth, it is clear he would not have made much progress. It is precisely being able to look at the effects down here, look at the effects up there, comparing the two, which permits, encourages, the development of a broad and general theory. If we are stuck on one planet, if we know only this planet, then we are extremely limited in our understanding even of this planet. If we know only one kind of life, we are extremely limited in our understanding even of that kind of life. If we know only one kind of intelligence, we are extremely limited in knowing even that kind of intelligence. But seeking out our counterparts elsewhere, broadening our perspective, even if we do not find what we are looking for, gives us a framework in which to understand ourselves far better.
I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed. I think this search does not lead to a complacent satisfaction that we know the answer, not an arrogant sense that the answer is before us and we need do only one more experiment to find it out. It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us.
SELECTED Q &A
After each lecture there was a lively question-and-answer period. Unfortunately, the transcripts report that in some cases the audience was not provided with working microphones. These are the fragments of the sessions that survive.
CHAPTER ONE
Questioner; When will we be likely to make contact with another intelligence?
CS: Prophecy is a lost art. But what I would say is that it's clear that if we don't try to seek such intelligence, it will be more difficult to find it. And it is remarkable that we live in a time when the technology permits us, at least in a halting way, to seek such intelligences, mainly by constructing large radio telescopes to listen for signals being sent to us-radio signals- by civilizations on planets of other stars.
Questioner: Considering the accomplishments of scientists like Newton and Kepler, is it likely that science will one day come upon a demonstration of the existence of God?
CS: The answer depends very much on what we mean by God. The word "god" is used to cover a vast multitude of mutually exclusive ideas. And the distinctions are, I believe in some cases, intentionally fuzzed so that no one will be offended that people are not talking about their god.
But let me give a sense of two poles of the definition of God. One is the view of, say, Spinoza or Einstein, which is more or less God as the sum total of the laws of physics. Now, it would be foolish to deny that there are laws of physics. If that's what we mean by God, then surely God exists. All we have to do is watch the apples drop.
Newtonian gravitation works throughout the entire universe. We could have imagined a universe in which the laws of nature were restricted to only a small portion of space or time. That does not seem to be the case. And Newtonian gravitation is one example, but quantum mechanics is another. We can look at the spectra of distant galaxies and see that the same laws of quantum mechanics apply there as here. So that is itself a deep and extraordinary fact: that the laws of nature exist and that they are the same everywhere. So if that is what you mean by God, then I would say that we already have excellent evidence that God exists.
But now take the opposite pole: the concept of God as an outsize male with a long white beard, sitting in a throne in the sky and tallying the fall of every sparrow. Now, for that kind of god I maintain there is no evidence. And while I'm open to suggestions of evidence for that kind of god, I personally am dubious that there will be powerful evidence for such a god not only in the near future but even in the distant future. And the two examples I've given you are hardly the full range of ideas that people mean when they use the word "god."
CS: The questioner asked whether I was familiar with Democritus, bearing in mind my suggestion that we now know things that were not known in the past. Democritus is one of my heroes. I think I know more than Democritus. Now, I don't claim to be smarter than Democritus, but I have the advantage that Democritus did not of having twenty-five hundred years of scientists between him and me. So, for example, I'll give you a few things that I know and that Democritus did not know. Democritus proposed that the Milky Way Galaxy was composed of stars. Far ahead of his time. He did not know that there were other galaxies. We know that.
We know of the existence of many more planets than he did. We have examined them close up. We know what their physical natures are. He did not, although he speculated that they were at least made of matter. We have an idea of how many stars there are in the Milky Way Galaxy.
Democritus was an atomist. You will not exceed me in your admiration for Democritus. And were the vision of Democritus to have been adopted by Western civilization, instead of being cast aside for the pale views of Plato and Aristotle, we would be vastly further ahead today, in my personal view.
CS: The questioner asks have I not perhaps been looking through the wrong end of the telescope; that is, is not the proper province of religion the human heart and mind and ethical questions and so on, and not the universe?
Well, I couldn't agree with you more, except that it is striking how many religions have felt that astronomy is their province and have made confident statements about matters astronomical. It is possible to design religions that are incapable of disproof. All they have to do is to make statements that cannot be validated or falsified. And some religions have very neatly positioned themselves in that respect. Now, that means that you cannot make any statements on how old the world is; you cannot make any statements about evolution; you cannot make any statements about the shape of the Earth (the Bible is quite clear about the Earth being flat, for example), and so on. And then you have religions that are making statements on human behavior, where religions have, in my view, made significant contributions. But it is a very rare religion that avoids the temptation to make pronouncements on matters astronomical and physical and biological.
Questioner: Do you think humans at this time could cope with us finding extraterrestrial intelligence?