I spent February on a nudist beach. I was meant to be writing a science book but I made the mistake of writing it in Ibiza, which, it turns out, is impossible. Impossible for me anyway. Because, as much as I love science, it turns out I love beaches and naked people more.
Not that anyone was naked, truly. It was February after all. An elderly Spanish woman had her hat blown off but that was as far as it went. But all of us who picnicked and played and fretted about the book they were meant to be writing on that beach had the right to be naked if we so chose, and, for me at least, that gave the place a very enticing frisson. Not that my time there was entirely wasted because, while paddling in those clear blue Balearic waters, I made a breakthrough that I believe resolves a central conundrum in physics: namely “where are all the aliens?”.
First posed by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, this question neatly detonates a logical landmine in cosmology. When we look up at the heavens we see a galaxy of a hundred billion stars glimmering in a Universe of a hundred billion galaxies. As our telescopes are now telling us, many stars have planetary systems. If only one star in 100 has an Earth-like planet, and only one Earth-like planet in 100 produces intelligent life, that’s still a billion billion aliens looking for someplace to go. So where the heck are they?
Since the Sixties the SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute has been vainly seeking an answer. Carl Sagan, no less, devised an ingenious message with pictures of the solar system, a double helix and an anatomically correct human form. Yet for the past 60 years we’ve been calling and so far not one single extraterrestrial has picked up. Not even on Gliese 581 c, our nearest supposedly Earth-like planet. And being tidally locked to a red dwarf star with its bright side hemisphere roiling hot while the dark side is blisteringly cold, you’d think they’d be desperate for a holiday.
One of the most common explanations for this sorry state of affairs is that advanced civilisations are extremely short-lived. Our own has blossomed in a mere 10,000 years, a blink of an eye in a Universe that’s been open for business for 13.7 billion years. Maybe, the argument goes, all intelligent life is as belligerent as we are and destroys itself or its environment in such short order that it never gets a proper chance to doorstep the neighbours.
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Well I for one think that’s ridiculously pessimistic. There’s a much more simple solution. The Glieseans aren’t warmongers, they are hippies. They took one look at Sagan’s picture of a bloke with his willy out and rejoiced: they had found some fellow nudists. As for the delay, they are just holding off until the Earth warms up a bit.
They may not have too long to wait. Pretty soon people are going to be sunbathing in Anchorage, let alone Ibiza. That’s if we don’t blow ourselves up first. After all, in the past 200 years scientists have migrated from being countercultural loners into tools of the state. That has advantages when you want to spend a billion quid on a particle accelerator, but drawbacks when you figure out how to split the atom and someone needs a bomb.
Scientists tell themselves that their work is outside politics; that their responsibility is only to truth; and the way that truth is exploited is the task of a policy-making elite. Even Albert Einstein, a humanitarian if ever there was one, was quick to urge President Roosevelt to exploit chain reactions in uranium and make a nuclear weapon.
One thing is for sure. Our current rate of growth is unsustainable and the “War on Climate Change” is going to require some pretty nifty footwork in the energy department. Hydrogen fusion, the Holy Grail, is maybe 50 years off but it’s going to take that, or something like it, to save the day. Imagine: limitless clean, safe, energy that is sufficient to sustain our species for generations. Then we could make a truly colossal death ray and blow those Gliesean slackers to kingdom come.