SETI and the drive to contact intelligent life

I've been reading lots of papers in space ethics. One of the early texts is Beyond Spaceship Earth: Environmental Ethics and the Solar System, a collection of conference proceedings edited by Eugene Hargrove and published in 1986. It includes a wide-ranging paper by J. Baird Callicott. Among Callicott's criticisms of space fans in general is this comment on SETI in particular:

In the face of this sort of giddy enthusiasm for communicating with "intelligent life" on other planets, it is both sobering and irritating to observe that those involved in SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, have not first established—as a kind of preliminary benchmark or data base, so that they would have some idea of what communicating with an exotic intelligence would be like—communication with nonhuman forms of intelligent life on Earth. Cetaceans carry the biggest brains on this planet, with richly fissured cerebral cortexes and a brain-to-body weight ratio comparable to that of humans. Like us they are social mammals. But they live in an environment, relatively speaking, very different from ours. Hence, theirs is a world apart from ours, a terrestrial analog of an extraterrestrial environment. And they engage, apparently, in complex vocal communication, of which we to date understand not one word—or rather click, grunt, or whistle. What this omission reveals is not only an arrogant disregard for nonhuman terrestrial intelligence; it also clearly shows that by "extraterrestrial intelligence" those involved in SETI mean something very like, if not identical to, human intelligence.

--Callicott, “Moral Considerability and Extraterrestrial Life”

 Exactly so. This point was later taken up in a characteristically excellent short story by Ted Chiang, "The Great Silence" (2015). Callicott tends toward anger; Chiang tends toward heartbreak. Both are appropriate responses to human refusal to value the Earth's animals.

A gripping story, avoided

Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands" appears in SFWA's Science Fiction Hall of Fame, marking it as one of the most widely respected SF novellas of the 1940s.  For me it mostly illustrates a pet peeve I associate more closely with science fiction than with mainstream literary fiction.

The basic idea of the story: it's the future, but not the far future.  The main character is a salesman in the robotic domestic assistants game.  These robots barely clear the threshold of usefulness; they are big, clumsy, and dumb.  The main character's-- and everyone else's-- world is disrupted by the introduction, from a distant planet, of sophisticated humanoid robots capable of out-performing people along just about any dimension of evaluation.  They are programmed "to serve and obey and guard men from harm," and they rapidly take over all the difficult, dangerous, tedious, or otherwise unpleasant aspects of the industrial and service economies.  Almost overnight, there is nothing left for most people to do but enjoy their free time and the excellent products of free robot labor.

That setup is super interesting.  What would it be like to live in a world in which nothing I did was connected to the comfort, let alone the success, let alone the survival, of anyone?  What would it be like to have every possible use of my time boil down to leisure?  I think I want that.  But might there be downsides for me, or for other people in a similar position?  Would there be social downsides when everyone found themselves in that position?

Instead of developing the story to engage these questions, Williamson ducks them.  The humanoid super robots interpret their prime directive with a maximalist zeal.  They don't just protect people from serious harm, they prevent people from taking the kinds of risks that could lead to slightest harm.  They protect people from unpleasant states of mind. If a person is persistently stressed, frustrated, or unhappy, the robots intervene to remove surgically the unhappy portions of the brain.

So, duh.  No one would want to live in that world.  There isn't any question worth exploring.  Nothing about the difference between work and leisure, or their respective products.  Nothing about values at all.  We're left with half an unhelpful lesson story ("Boys and girls, you don't really want guaranteed safety and happiness!") and half a standard adventure story about escaping from confused benevolent oppressors.  (Our last hope for escape? A form a faster-than-light radiation that maybe possibly can scramble the circuits of the mothership from across the gulf of space.  Snore.)

I think:  did Williamson not see what an interesting issue he'd raised?  Why did he turn it into another adventure-story-slash-cautionary-tale when it could have been deep?  I think:  is there something wrong with me that so many people-- readers and writers alike-- hold this up as an example of the best SF has to offer?  Can it really be that a simple cautionary tale about technology was mind-expanding in 1947, two years after the atom bombs?

We can do such much better than lessons gussied up as fiction.  Science fiction is especially able to light up ambiguities that go overlooked in the real world and explore in new ways issues that are way too complicated to write essays about.  It's frustrating when writers pass up obvious opportunities to use the power the genre gives them, as Williamson does here.  And it's puzzling when readers react so enthusiastically to missed opportunities.

Cosmopolis and two kinds of surprise

I recently read Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis. I pretty much hated it, and it's easy to identify why: there are no rules structuring the narrative. In Cosmopolis, everything happens with the sullen randomness of the third act of a JJ Abrams twist-fest. (This happened, and then this other thing happened, and you won't believe what happened next!)

I tried to stay on board. I tried to focus on DeLillo's sentences, which are always rewarding, and to ignore the stupidity of the narrative. But when the main character, in his limousine in the year 2000, and for no real reason, used his wrist-watch to hack into his trophy wife's Swiss bank account, I gave up. There is no way I was not going to hate this book.

Reading such an extreme example of rule-free fiction helped give some structure to some previously inchoate attitudes, so in that sense I'm glad I read it. The lesson lesson I took away from Cosmopolis:

Being surprised by a story is one of the main pleasures of fiction. "Predictable" is, in the context of fiction, everywhere pejorative. But there are different kinds of surprises. One kind of surprise invites a reaction like "that is what would happen-- why didn't I see that coming?" Another kind of surprise invites a reaction like "wow. I had no idea that could happen." I love the first kind of surprise, and I hate the second. There is no pleasure, for me, in discovering that the author has been withholding important rules, characters, or information from me. There is nothing better known rules, characters, and information snapping together in an unexpected way.

(A bit of introspection. The distinction between these two kinds of surprises is, effectively, the criterion I use for distinguishing science fiction from fantasy. I say I like science fiction, because it is characteristic of the kind of science fiction I like that it takes the world as given and changes no more than a few of the familiar rules. I say I don't like fantasy because it is characteristic of the fantasy I don't like that any rules are open to emendation at any time.

This obviously isn't going to work as a genuine criterion of distinction. Far-future science fiction, which I can't tolerate, has effectively no rules. And when fantasy authors talk about world-building, one of the things they're talking about is setting up a set of rules. But having realized that this is how I divide the genres in my own mind, I should be able to talk more temperately about fantasy.)