Washington, D.C.: Late December 1976
Albert arrived late that afternoon at Washington National from Escanaba. His family had gone all out to have the kind of festive Christmas he remembered from his youth to ease his pain. That sentiment warmed him, even though it snowed nearly every day he was there. Now, brandy in hand to dull his thoughts, Albert looked out on a dusting of snow on the bleak landscape of the city, reflecting on what might have been.
Carmen was a weak tropical storm. She brushed the southeastern edge of Puerto Rico as she gathered strength and headed for the Dominican Republic. There was little wind damage, but she dumped fifteen inches of rain in eight hours, there was flooding in various parts of the island, and two hundred lost their lives.
The memory was vivid, like it only happened yesterday. Esther was driving—still high from the good time they'd had at the party. The wind and rain kept picking up as she drove, with her usual skill, effortlessly through mud holes and curves up the mountain. By the time they turned onto 635, the ditches were rivers and the rain became torrential. Visibility forced her to slow as they worked their way up to the Observatory and the cabana, still three miles ahead.
Esther joked about how she, "...Guessed that she wouldn't be going back to D.C. tomorrow." To her dozing husband when it happened. A torrent of mud came from the left and struck Esther's side, hard, smashing her window and forcing them off the road, down the steep mountainside. As they crashed into trees and slowed momentarily, Albert climbed out of his own smashed window, grabbed a tree limb and reached for Esther inside the car. He couldn't see her in the dark, and the car kept going down the mountain. Albert clung to that tree as mud surged past him like a river and the wind howled, soaked to the skin. Finally, it stopped, and all there was, was the sound of the wind and rain, muffling his cries for Esther. "Esther! Esther, can you hear me! Please, Esther, are you all right? If you are, let me know. Please let me know. Esther! Esther!" Albert's anguished cries blew off in the wind until he was hoarse and could cry no more. He fell silent, holding on to that tree in the cold rain as the storm raged on.
After a terrible night in that tree, the morning brought bright sunshine and warmth. Albert found his way to the ground and climbed the steep slope back to the road, where others were waiting in their cars, stopped by the slide. Two days later, they found the smashed car with Esther in it, 500 yards down the mountain. Albert cut a lock of her hair to remember her by, and shipped her crushed remains back to West Virginia in a closed casket. She would be buried near that little church they were married in, next to her father and mother. He sent the pastor money for the funeral, but didn't attend. Albert knew no one there and didn't want to explain.
They said it was caused by woodcutters denuding the slopes to provide firewood for the villages. But the history of tragedy from these storms stretched back a thousand years, well before the arrival of Columbus and European record keeping. Esther was just the last of the unfortunate in nature's fury. The only thing certain was that everyone died sometime. The only question was when and how. Albert finished the required reports and wrote the two articles needed to fulfill the requirements of his grant. The articles were accepted and published in obscure journals, read by few and added but a drop to an ocean of knowledge about a Universe that is still little understood.
That was the trouble with the scientific method. Theories were exciting and abundant. Proving them was another matter. Albert knew we just weren't smart enough to know which theories were right. Some theories were easily proven, but most fell by the wayside. The worst theories, like Aristotle’s, seemed to take the longest to disprove. In spite of his grief, a theory was forming in Albert’s mind. The American Association for the Advancement of Science was holding its annual meeting in Washington D.C. just after the New Year. When the AAAS, the oldest professional society in the United States, met in D.C., it provided a unique opportunity for federal government and foundations based in the Nation's Capital to drop in on the greatest collaboration of scientific minds ever assembled. It took membership and special credentials to be on the program. Albert wasn't on the program. He was an AAAS member but he was only visiting. His work didn't make the cut.
Still, it was good to rub elbows with great scientists like Sagan, Margaret Mead, Jonas Salk, or Paul Erhlich. Here one could sample the theories and results of widely disparate disciplines and get some view of overall scientific progress. The problem was, for all our science, the world’s scientists weren't making much progress. The nuclear promise had turned into a nuclear nightmare. Nations were poised to unleash their nuclear arsenals on each other. Accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and the little reported one in the Ural Mountains all pointed to a release of the evil genie from its bottle.
Medical progress was becoming a two-edged sword. The reduction of infant mortality and childhood diseases, along with greater food production through science was causing the human population to grow at the explosive rate predicted by Paul Erhlich, stressing the planet's ecosystem and increasing the virulence of drug resistant new diseases. Threats of new, heretofore unknown, diseases lay right around the corner.
Science was unleashing, at an alarming rate, new substances into the environment. Some of these substances, like poly biphenlnyl chlorides--PBCs, asbestos, DDT, and fluorocarbons, were learned to be harmful only after they were in widespread use.
The Earth was becoming polluted at an alarming rate. Jacques Cousteau was one of the first to see and raise the alarm about the widespread poisoning of his beloved ocean world. Air pollution was less obvious, but its effects on cities like Los Angeles and Venice were undeniable. Evidence of mankind's inability to control its own wastes was manifesting itself in the most remote and pristine corners of the world.
By their nature, scientists were an optimistic lot, and were quick to seize upon these problems as opportunities. With new tools, like the proposed Hubbell Space Telescope and personal computers, scientific enthusiasm was contagious. The keynote address that year, God and the Astronomer, started a media frenzy and gave astronomy, the oldest science, just the boost it needed. Unfortunately, all this enthusiasm did not help Albert in his dilemma. He was buoyed by some of the presentations, but nagged by depression when he thought of his prospects and Esther.
Spurred by the enthusiasm, the advocates of SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, gained more support. Still, what they were proposing was expensive. It involved building large arrays of radio telescopes to multiply the listening and transmitting power of these devices that only a very few knew how to operate. Listening for sounds our ears don’t hear against the background radiation from natural phenomenon in space, the idea that someone could pick up a feeble intelligent radio signal was almost absurd. Still, it was an intriguing idea that garnered enough interest to continue. It seemed strange to Albert that money was going to be spent on expensive equipment with little or no chance of success, when he couldn't find a job as an astronomer. But that's the way it always was.
And then there was the fringe element. Around the meeting hung the followers of the parasciences. Believing that science alone, could not explain unexplained phenomenon, these self appointed experts touted theories that intelligent life from outer space had been and was visiting Earth regularly. Their theories, supported by physical evidence from ancient artifacts, blurred photos and movies, and anecdotes, generally credited aliens with planting intelligence, as in the ancient civilization theories, or investigating humans to see if we were likely candidates to meet or conquer. Taking a lead from the movies and countless people who had seen unexplained lights in the night sky, intelligent beings were said to have visited in strange, well-lit, rotating, spacecraft. Aliens had the power to put people in trances and kidnap them for medical experiments.
A large following believed that the US Government had found an alien craft with occupants alive that crashed in New Mexico near Roswell in 1947 and then covered the incident up. People liked conspiracy theories. They were convenient ways of explaining huge gaps in any real evidence. It was easy to blame "the government" for a lack of information. Fear and loathing showed in the idea that extraterrestrials would find us so "alien" that they would hide themselves from us while they studied us. A common theme among science fiction writers was that extraterrestrials would want to eat us or use our bodies in other diabolical ways.
Albert thought otherwise, but found it difficult to express his views among the true believers. Albert met Edwin Wood, former director of Arecibo, at the meeting. They had lunch together. Edwin was back in Columbus, Ohio. Wood said that running science programs was getting too political. He announced that he was running for Congress. "How strange," Albert thought as he heard Wood explain. "A scientist running for political office. That would be like John Glenn running for the Senate or a sports hero or actor for President." Albert kept his thoughts to himself. As Wood talked on about what was wrong with government science programs and how he would improve them, Albert's thoughts couldn’t help but drift back to that awful night in Puerto Rico. He wished he hadn't met Wood and been reminded of it.
The AAAS Meeting gave Albert a new direction. With all of science before him, he realized that understanding extraterrestrials lay in understanding ourselves. In a larger sense, we were too primitive, too ignorant, to figure things out. We just didn't know enough. Not knowing fueled our fears. So, our imaginations, a product of our intelligence, conjured up fertile scenarios of fear. History was replete with people who followed bizarre ideas and traditions to their death, never knowing they were wrong. Some ideas, like those of Plato in The Republic, became models for well-structured government, and others, like those of Adolph Hitler in Mien Kampf, led to tyranny and destruction.
"We are too weak, too easily swayed by the written and spoken word of those in power. Our elementary intelligence is our own worst enemy," he wrote. These thoughts encouraged Albert to forge on. Trapped in his apartment by his classes and the winter, Albert put his developing theory to paper. He called it, The Kaleidoscope Effect. The key to extraterrestrial intelligence, as Sagan and others had pointed out, was within mankind itself. If Darwin's theories were correct, and there was no evidence to contradict them, then life evolved by selection of the species, and intelligence was an inevitable result of natural selection.
Albert could not imagine the environments of alien planets. But the environment of Earth, with its relatively constant gravitational pull, regular fluctuations of climate, oxygen and water cycle, and rich mixture of elements, was a fertile incubator of life. Most life was doomed. If life couldn't reproduce, or it consumed or damaged its food supply, or it was eaten by other, stronger life forms in its narrow niche of existence, it simply became extinct. After countless extinctions, terrestrial life forms had developed patterns of behavior designed to increase their chances of survival in their niche. Patterns of behavior associated with intelligent life included the ability to seek out and find food. These patterns of behavior became thought of as intelligent when a life form began to adapt its environment to its own needs.
The ability to see or detect food is critical to survival, Albert knew. The ability to move easily over the planet's terrain is essential, as is the ability to grasp food. The most intelligent creatures on Earth have large brains with many neural connections. They move easily about their environment, and have elaborate means for communicating. They tend to be predators. While they use a variety of ways of sensing their prey, vision is the easiest and most dominant way. Tool use is the first manifestation of technologically intelligent life. In order to use tools, eye to hand coordination is essential. All of these attributes, together, give intelligent life mastery of their own destiny. Just when thinking occurs is unclear. The results of thoughtful behavior are obvious.
Somehow, after four billion years of evolution from microbes, Cro-Magnon Man appeared. The ultimate predator, he could plan and execute his hunt, and learn from his failures. Although his sense of smell and hearing were quite good, he hunted with his eyes, and stored the visual images in his brain. While Cro-Magnon participated in habitual behavior one could discern as instinct, he could also break the pattern if he wanted or needed to and adapt to his environment. Gradually, over thousands of years, tool use and oral history developed, passing on a legacy to the generations to follow. Albert knew that humans weren't smart enough, even with all we've learned.
However, the capacity of the human brain to learn was immense. The brain's twenty billion cells were connected in ways that allowed it to store massive amounts of information. Just how memory worked was unknown, but the visual cortex, directly behind the eyes, seemed to absorb everything seen in a lifetime. For lack of another theory, Karl Pribram's idea that memory was kept in holographic patterns in the chemicals of the brain was as plausible as any. It was estimated that eighty-nine percent of the brain's activity involved the visual cortex. Folk knowledge portrays the eyes as the windows to the soul. In Albert's mind, our eyes were our windows to the brain.
Any intelligent life capable of traversing the distance between stars could be assumed to be far superior in both intelligence and understanding to ours. Upon arrival, their concern would be to allay our primitive fears and teach us, in our terms, what they were about. The quickest way to our brains would be through the windows to our brains. Albert envisioned this process as a psychedelic loading of information to our brains directly through our eyes. In the biblical sense, we would "see the light." Hence, The Kaleidoscope Effect, named after the wondrous multicolored visions created by bits of colored paper in the mirrored parlor toy. Albert could see no reason why superior intelligence would want to study us or remain invisible in our presence. The intriguing ideas of parallel universes, or "short cuts" across the barrier of the speed of light, would still not affect an alien intelligence's approach. Quite simply, meeting such beings would be like meeting God.
Soon after the meeting, Albert was back teaching classes. He tried his ideas out on his students, and they were receptive. Surprisingly, the scientists he was still in touch with were too. He took the idea on the road to obscure societies and discussion groups. Aside from the meager research on the human brain Pribram had pulled together, there was no credible research on the behavior of extraterrestrials. As plausible as his idea seemed, there was no way to prove it. The National Science Foundation wasn't going to give him money to study the impossible.
