Flying Saucers Again: Do You Believe in Them?

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

# Approved For Release 2001/04/02 : CIA-RDP81R00560R000100010009-2

PLANETS, From Page E1 direct its skills to cosmic exploration. Interstellar communication, let alone interstellar travel, sounds a desperately laborious business.

Suppose that Epsilon Eridani boasts a civilized planet interested in communicating with us. Assume, too, that the technical difficulties (which are formidable) are overcome. It would take over ten years for a message to travel to earth, another ten for us to answer back. To get some sense into the exchange would presuppose a mutually comprehensible code.

An American radio astronomer, Frank Drake, recently fabricated an "interstellar message" of 550 dots and dashes and asked distinguished scientists to decode it. They had very moderate success, although they knew the decoded result would be pictorial and that the code derived from a human mind (i.e. Drake's).

But even the "cautious optimism" of Sagan and Shklovskil recognizes that there is only a slight chance that the nearest likely stars actually have planets with technical civilizations endeavoring to contact others on the 21-centimeter radio band. Some rough statistics suggest that the nearest advanced technical civilization in the galaxy would be likely to lie from a hundred to a thousand light years away. Thus the minimum time for an exchange of messages would be two centuries. One of the first qualities necessary for cosmic communication will be remarkable patience.

This applies still more to interstellar travel despite the bonus of

"time-contraction," a consequence of relativity. The time effect presupposes a spacecraft which can travel near the speed of light; a crew could then make a round trip to the center of the galaxy in 42 years. But on arrival back home, they would find that tens of thousands of years had elapsed. There would be no guarantee that anyone would be there to welcome them.

## Millennial Visits

DESPITE THESE discouraging prospects, the optimism of Sagan and Shklovskil seems to increase as their book proceeds. Suppose, says Sagan, a million civilizations, mostly well in advance of our own, are currently engaged in plying the galaxy at relativistic speeds. Suppose, too, that each dispatches one starship per year and that these concentrate on likely planets; any particular planet similar to ours might be visited once every thousand years. ("In my opinion," Shklovskil writes in parenthesis, "these estimates of Sagan are slightly too optimistic.")

Have we been or are we being visited? A Russian ethnologist, M. M. Agrest, has conjectured that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by a nuclear explosion (presumably engineered by extraterrestrials). A fresco in a Saharan cliff was held by some to represent a Martian in a space suit, although it is more conventionally regarded as a human in a ritual mask and costume.

Sagan is more impressed by a legend about the origin of Sumerian civilization, which, according to the account

of Alexander Polyhistor, derived from "an animal endowed with reason who was called Oannes . . . This Being in the daytime used to converse with men, but took no food at that season; and he gave them an insight into letters, and sciences, and every kind of art. He taught them to construct houses, to found temples, to compile laws, and explained to them the principles of geometric knowledge. . . ."

The gods of the Sumerians, says Sagan, were each associated with a different star, and there survive seals depicting sunlike objects surrounded by various numbers of planets. "Such a picture," writes Sagan, "is not altogether different from what we might expect if a network of confederated civilizations interlaced the galaxy."

## Audible Heartbeats

SAGAN AND Shklovskii are both aware of the vague borderline that separates bold scientific speculation from fantasy or wishful thinking. They quote an old Chinese proverb: "The man who eagerly awaits the arrival of a friend should not mistake the beating of his own heart for the thumping hooves of the approaching horse." Nevertheless, the beating of both their hearts, it seems to me, is distinctly audible in their arguments—and why not?

Not long ago, it was rather fashionable to proclaim man's "insignificance" and "loneliness" in a vast empty universe. Perhaps this loneliness is becoming oppressive, or the possibility of self-destruction too menacing.