We may begin to see reality differently simply because the computer … provides a different angle on reality.
—Heinz Pagels
Reality: What a concept!
—Robin Williams
I wonder what sort of data might be carried by mature interstellar communications channels like those I’ve been envisioning as comprising a galactic network. The content of an acquisition signal presumably would be relatively simple—a series of prime numbers, perhaps, or a set of pictures—to aid untutored beings like us in detecting and deciphering it. But this need not be the case with the broader-bandwidth, high-data-rate mainstream channels to which we would expect the acquisition signal to direct our subsequent attention. Those channels could, for instance, contain interactive computer programs of great power and flexibility. Exposure to such programs would be less like deciphering a Morse Code message or reading a book than like viewing a movie—or experiencing reality itself. Such a possibility is easy to imagine, without extrapolating terribly far from existing or near-future human technology, and has implications for our conception, not only of extraterrestrial intelligence, but of reality itself.
Although electronics technology here on Earth is still young, its history already demonstrates how communications can evolve from basic Q&A conversations to the exchange of computer programs that present each user with an environment that can be explored and altered at will. Personal computers have been in widespread use for only about a decade, but hundreds of computer “bulletin boards” already have been established to facilitate data exchanges. A bulletin board is nothing more than a computer attached to one or more phone lines that has been set up, usually by a home hobbiest, to encourage others with computers to call in. When accessing a bulletin board one customarily is presented with a menu of options. Some menu choices enable you to send and receive electronic (“e-mail”) messages; these are similar to ordinary faxes or phone calls. But you can also obtain (“download”) programs that have been contributed (“uploaded”) to the bulletin board by other users. These programs typically include video games, color photographs, and simulations of everything from waterfalls and satellite orbits to fractal geometry patterns. There are special-interest bulletin boards for vegetarians, libertarians, law enforcement officers, stockbrokers, paramedics, sailing enthusiasts, skiers, UFO enthusiasts, religious fundamentalists, and those of just about every sexual proclivity.
The technical limitations of personal computers and telephone line data-transfer rates have to date limited bulletin boards to fairly rudimentary programs, but communications history suggests that the situation will improve. In the decades since Marconi and Bell, the amount of data that can be transmitted and received has constantly increased, and this in turn has had a dramatic effect on the emotional quality of the message. The main reason television can have more emotional impact than radio is that it communicates more data. An AM radio signal, for example, requires only ten kilohertz (ten thousand cycles per second) of bandwidth, while a high-fidelity FM transmission takes two hundred kilohertz, and a color TV signal about six megahertz (six million cycles); color television therefore conveys six hundred times as much data per second as does AM radio. (Whether the data are better is another matter; we’re talking potential here, not the actual performance of the radio and TV industries.) The story of technical improvements in communications, from the first wax-cylinder phonographs to today’s elaborate home stereo systems and from drumbeats to live television broadcasts, can be summed up as consisting of relaying more data, with less distortion, in less time. Combine these advances with the interactive facility of computer programs, and you can glimpse an exciting, involving, open-ended world that already has teachers talking of a new era in education (while lamenting that their students spend too much time playing video games).
A computer program is fundamentally different from a telegram or a TV show. It is more involving—because it is interactive, one tends to enter into the world invoked by the program—and its outcome is inherently unpredictable. These characteristics can make it a lot like the world of experience. Indeed, once the technology for interfacing with the computer extends beyond sight and sound to involve the other senses as well, computer-generated “realities” may well, for better or worse, begin to compete for our attention with real life.
Modern flight simulators suggest something of the potential of computer games. They engage not only the eye and ear—one sees clouds and mountains in the cockpit windows, hears the whine of the engines—but also the body: Turn left and the cockpit, which is suspended on hydraulic lifts controlled by the computer, heels over; fly into a storm cloud and it rocks and pitches; land too hard and you feel the bounce. The experience can be quite persuasive. One veteran airline pilot, flying a refresher course that simulated icing conditions at night, got a flashlight out of his flight bag and tried to shine it out the window to see whether ice was gathering on the wings; but there were no wings, of course, and the “window” was a rear-projection video screen.
Virtual reality (VR), the latest development in computer-sensory interfacing, significantly deepens one’s immersion in the computer-generated simulation. To experience VR at its current state of development, you don a helmet equipped with a pair of viewing screens that replicate stereoscopic vision. A sensor in the helmet attached to a computer keeps track of your head movements; look up and you see the sky, look down and you see the ground (and, in some programs, a computer-generated depiction of your own feet). Computer-interfaced gloves enable you to manipulate objects in the virtual world. You can dress in a suit that senses your movements and transmits them to the computer, which in turn presents you—and others, via “VR for Two”—with an image of your body, which can take on any form you like: You may if you wish become a swan, a bull, or a fashion model.
To date, VR has been dominated by rudimentary environments of the sort that can be created on a medium-sized computer. Devotees play hide-and-seek in computer-generated landscapes of geometrical solids, try their hand at a racquetball game where the laws of physics can be altered at will, or ride a VR exercise bicycle that when pedaled hard enough takes off and flies like the bike in the movie ET. But VR also can be used to replicate reality: Surgeons could practice an operation repeatedly in VR before ever laying hands on a real patient, fighter pilots reconnoiter cities they have never seen, and naturalists explore the Great Barrier Reef without leaving their homes.
Not long ago I spent an hour and a half on Mars, courtesy of a VR simulator at the NASA Ames Research Center. The site was the western end of Mariner Valley, a huge and colorful canyon that stretches a quarter of the way around the planet. The digital imagery had been compiled from data transmitted to Earth by the Viking Mars orbiters years earlier and subsequently manipulated by computer programmers.
I put on the helmet and found myself standing on a rocky promontory, looking down across a jumble of cliffs and plateaus stained in unearthly shades of ocher, sand-yellow, and plum. Using the computer controls I could descend to the valley floor and wander for miles through the twists and turns of one of the solar system’s most imposing landscapes, or climb high into the pink sky and take in the wider view, studying inky bluffs that marched off toward distant peaks five hundred kilometers away. Another control altered the position of the sun; by turning this knob I could watch the canyon’s colors change from the hot reds of noon to a startlingly alien hue, somewhere between ash and gunmetal blue, at sunset.
The quality of the images was only fair; it was limited by available computer power, by programming parameters, and by the Viking orbiters themselves, which could resolve nothing much smaller than about one hundred meters in diameter. Also the data loaded into the computer covered only part of Mariner Valley, so that if I strayed too far I’d find, upon turning a bend in the canyon, that I was confronted not by Mars but by a skeleton of neon-green polygons, as if I’d strolled off to one side of a movie soundstage and glimpsed the raw carpentry behind the sets. But the quality and scope of the interfaces will improve. Holograms, for instance, might be used to create illusory surroundings with full color, three dimensions, and motion, without the necessity of the user’s wearing any apparatus at all.
And despite its limitations, the experience of walking on Mars was vivid and immediate, not at all like seeing a movie or a photograph. The way I remember it, I was there. Over the years I have studied hundreds of photographs of Mariner Valley, and if asked I might have said that I had “seen” Mariner Valley. This was only metaphorically true; it expressed the immediacy conveyed by good photographs; I had seen Mariner Valley in the sense that I had seen Abraham Lincoln. But now, after a single VR immersion, the most emotionally honest response would be to say of Mariner Valley, “I have been there.”
Once an environment has been digitized—encoded in a form a digital computer can manipulate—it can be recreated at will, through virtual reality, anywhere.* Computers thus have the potential to extend the senses across vast distances. As I write, the surface of Venus is being digitized by means of radar imaging by the Magellan spacecraft. By the time you read these words, Magellan will have transmitted to Earth a digitized, three-dimensional image of ninety percent of the surface of Venus, showing objects down to the size of a football stadium. Once that task has been completed, it will be possible for anyone with a computer, the appropriate Magellan data, and a VR program to “fly” wherever he or she likes over the surface of Venus, skirting mountaintops and diving down into canyons. Similarly, a roving lander craft dispatched to Mars to make its way down Mariner Valley could image everything in sight with a resolution a thousand times better than the Viking data; explorers who donned VR helmets could then “hike” down this magnificent valley, examining it in as much detail as tourists currently enjoy when rafting down the Grand Canyon. No two trips would be alike; a VR trip is more like taking a vacation than watching a film.
Even at its present and admittedly primitive stage of development, VR is proving to be enormously appealing. Experimenters working in the field are swamped with requests for demonstrations, and complain that they have trouble getting people to take the helmet off. Its popularity suggest that VR has considerable educational potential: Students studying ecology could immerse themselves in a rain forest, while down the hall history students wander the Athenian agora and sit in on a conversation between Plato and Socrates in Simon’s shoe repair shop. The commercial implications of VR, too, are evident, sometimes disturbingly so. Movies will take on a new dimension once one can enter into a film, alter the plot through one’s actions, even feel what is going on.* Saatchi and Saatchi, the world’s largest advertising agency, reports that research is under way to study the feasibility of using VR to “transport” high school students to “hypermall” environments where, without physically leaving their classrooms, they could freely wander, electronically purchasing products to be shipped to their homes. Like every other important development in the brave new world of technology, VR is a double-edged sword.
My concern here, however, has less to do with what VR may mean for our world than with its implications for interstellar communication by means of a galactic network.
Extraterrestrials in possession of VR technology could transmit not just encyclopedias of facts, but VR simulations (“sims”) of their world. A race of luminous squid that live in liquid methane seas would not have to limit themselves to explaining that they are squid, sending us photos and details of their genetic makeup and so forth; they could dispatch simulations that let us see, hear, and feel what it is to be a squid swimming in methane. Load such a program and don the helmet and you are a squid, perambulating down the avenues of a submarine squid city. A species of operatic singers need not content themselves with telling us about their songs or sending recordings of them; they can make us feel that we are one among them, reclining on a hillside in the waning light of their setting red and blue binary suns while the songs echo down the valley. The greatest cartographers of the Milky Way galaxy need not merely send maps; they can send sims that enable us to fly through the galaxy, stopping off to examine star systems wherever we like, limited only by the amount and level of detail encoded into the simulation.
The prospect of distributing realistic simulations of alien environments throughout the galaxy sheds light on “Fermi’s question,” named after the physicist Enrico Fermi, who is said to have inquired, of intelligent extraterrestrials, “Where are they?” The point of Fermi’s question, much elaborated by later thinkers, is that a technically advanced civilization could set up colonies on the planets of nearby stars, which in turn could colonize other star systems, until their race had populated the entire galaxy. Since they are not here, the argument concludes, perforce they are not anywhere, and we are alone in the galaxy.
Interstellar colonization, however, is arduous and expensive by just about any imaginable standard. It can hardly be justified in terms of population pressure or a need for raw materials: Our sun, for instance, has enough energy, and the solar system enough space, to accommodate the most vigorous foreseeable expansion of our species for many millions of years into the future, and money spent on development within the solar system would reap us many times more rewards than would money spent ferrying people to another star. Unless the sun were about to explode and we had to get out, the only evident rationale for interstellar colonization by us or anybody else would be curiosity—to give some members of a species the experience of standing on the soil of a nonsolar planet. But VR does much the same thing, and does it more democratically, An automated probe, dispatched by a living species or by an interstellar network to an uninhabited planet, could send back simulations that let everybody “be there.”
The reason aliens are not here, then, need not be because they do not exist. It may simply be that they are content with sims, and feel no more compulsion to travel to distant planets in person than a viewer watching a television documentary about Borneo feels compelled to pack a bag and fly to Borneo. A few might make the long trek to another star, just as a few New Englanders may elect to visit Borneo, but their occasional voyages need not add up to anything like a wave of colonists flooding the galaxy.
I suggest, then, that the traffic carried on an interstellar communications network will include simulations of alien worlds. Some might be as rudimentary as a trip down the Grand Canyon. Others might be quite sophisticated. There is no theoretical reason, for instance, why individual beings could not be programmed into a sim so that they behaved spontaneously, in character, in response to input from the viewer. (These hypothetical ghosts are called “beamers” in VR jargon.) One could then vacation on populated worlds and carry on conversations via translation with simulated versions of real aliens who once lived, long ago, on a planet far away. I can imagine anthropologists and adventurers spending days on end immersed in such societies, before being dragged away from the apparatus, however unwillingly, to get a meal and some sleep.
The downside of the sims scenario is the couch potato phenomenon. Some species may become so enthralled by sims that they lose interest in the actual universe, preferring to dwell in a kaleidoscope of computer-generated illusion, or to “visit” hundreds of worlds by means of simulations rather than venturing into space or bothering to peer at the hazy image of a real planet through a telescope. Our species may be one of them, if television is any example; the average TV set in the U.S. is on for seven hours a day, and the perceived danger of exposing people to a more beguiling medium is immediate enough that one already hears talk of outlawing virtual reality.
Yet I suspect that simulations based on fact ultimately will prove at least as popular as those based on fiction.
My reasoning is that reality is both richer and less parochial than fantasy.
Imagine that we here on Earth have made contact with an interstellar network and have downloaded thousands of simulations from its memory banks. All over the planet people are putting on VR helmets and immersing themselves in the art, culture, and science of alien worlds. We in turn have uplinked whole libraries’ worth of Bach, Beethoven, Gibbon, Shakespeare, Lao Tzu, Homer, Van Gogh and Rembrandt, Newton and Einstein, Darwin and Watson and Crick, the proudest products of our little world. Yet we appreciate that our wisdom and science are limited, our art to some degree provincial. There may be an audience somewhere among the stars for Virgil and Dante and Kubrick and Kurosawa, just as there may be some humans who genuinely enjoy the poetry of the crystalline inhabitants of Ursa Major AC + 79 3888, but it is apt to be a limited audience. Our movies and plays are not likely to find a wide popular following in the Milky Way galaxy—any more than many humans settling down on the sofa after dinner are likely to want to watch an infrasonic opera that lasts ten years, the cast of which are alien invertebrates who dine on live spiders.
What do we have to offer those extraterrestrials whom our art and science leave cold? And what have they to offer us?
The answer, I suggest, is nature itself, the raw reality of our unique world. Here, in the sands and waves and wind, the incomparable birds and bears and snakes in the grass, lies the bedrock of our common ground with all other living beings in the universe.
And here, too, we are unique. Though natural laws are constant throughout the known universe, their manifestations are so fantastically various that no two things above the molecular level are likely to be the same, anywhere. There is almost certainly no willow tree in the galaxy exactly like the willow I see outside my window, no field of wildflowers identical to those on the distant hillside, no sky just like the skies over Montana or Montenegro. Nor are there any beings identical to us: Each individual jostling on a city sidewalk is wreathed in a halo of the unique.
Suppose you are an alien travel buff. You order, from the vast computer archives that have been downloaded to your planet from the interstellar network, a movie of the Grand Canyon on Earth. You start up this program and lean back (or put on the helmet, or whatever) and find yourself on a raft going down the Colorado River. The data have of course been reprogrammed to suit your sensory apparatus: If you see in the ultraviolet and hear in the dog-whistle range, that’s what you’ll get from the sim. (We on Earth will have to shoot our sims in a wide-bandwidth way, in order to accommodate alien audiences with vastly differing sensory patterns; what’s missing can be interpolated by alien programmers.)
Now here is a genuinely unique experience. You are on another planet. You feel the raft bouncing down through the rapids, feel the spray on your face (if you have a face) and the wind through your hair (or fur, or on your scales), see the sunlight (or the heat radiation) on the water. If you want human companions along, you have them; if they disgust you (those teeth! those feet!) the program will make them go away. Stop to camp for the night if you like, or go for a hike and spot a squirrel, or dive into the water and see what the currents are like beneath the surface. It’s up to you. It’s your trip. You’re in another world.
This sort of thing, it seems to me, will always find an audience—not on every alien world, to be sure, but on many. If so, the main traffic on the galactic network is reality itself, in demand both to be experienced directly by armchair travelers, and as raw material for artists eager to incorporate alien environments as sets for their latest productions.
A planet that turns inward, then, may well find itself looking outward anyway, if only because the wide and wonderful universe is more complex and ingenious than are any of its inhabitants. If, as I have been saying, progress in communications is essentially a matter of increasing the data rate, then we may expect that nature, the richest data base of all, will always represent the ultimate communications experience for every sensate being—that the made-up, synthetic world of the simulations will turn itself inside-out, letting the stars in once again.
So I don’t think that our world is in great danger of forsaking the outer universe, or that other worlds are, either. All roads lead to the cosmos, and the stranger the experiences the aliens may share with us, the more they will bring us back to reality.
*I should think that computers are among the most likely forms of technology to be found elsewhere in the universe. The digital computer is based on a fundamental realization—essentially, that anything that can be quantified can be digitized—that should be as accessible to alien scientists as the law of gravitation or the value of pi. Computers are extremely flexible, and they’re dirt cheap: Silicon, the basis of the microprocessing chip now employed in virtually all terrestrial computers, is basically sand.
*Had the pornographers invested a fraction of their profits in R & D, this brave new world might already be upon us. As is, the VR grapevine is alive with discussions of the prospects for VR sex—”dildonics,” in the jargon—with thinkers musing about the morality of sexual encounters between individuals thousands of miles apart, who may never meet, and who may, furthermore, elect to present themselves in the VR environment dressed in faces and bodies that do not resemble their own.