Page Content (OCR)
96 benefit of contact would be learning about advanced social behavior and political forms that are stable and encourage longevity; we might learn how they survived World War III or prevented it from happening. Bracewell thought it a matter of chance whether we would succeed in stabilizing the political situation as it existed in 1963." Stability also has been seen as a requirement for entry into a galactic society. “The achievement of great stability and serenity would seem a prerequisite for a society willing to make the expensive and enormously prolonged effort required to contact another world,” asserted Walter Sullivan. Bracewell proposed that the achieving of stability for a long- enough period was a prerequisite to formation of, and membership in, a galactic chain of communities." For some, the absence of evidence of other technological societies drives a conclusion that our own civilization may be doomed. Von Hoerner thought that scientific and technological civilizations do not endure for long; if they did, we would have found them. Jill Tarter, endorsing the view that there can be many civilizations only if they are relatively stable and long-lived, concluded that we have no other indication that there is any possibility that we can somehow get through this stage of potential for nuclear destruction.” Others reject the pessimistic scenario. Charles Seeger, the first astrono- mer to work full time on SETI, said that he did not share the “paranoid fear of the imminent end of our species.” Perceptions of risk change over time. Sullivan commented in the 1994 revision of his book We Are Not Alone that the prospects for survival of technological civilizations seemed better than they had 30 years before. Creatures with a higher cognitive intelligence, like shooting stars that sud- denly flash across the black vault of night, come into being from time to time, then quickly fade away. WI. Dee IANNIS Worries about population growth, resource exhaustion, and environ- mental degradation have driven some pessimists to conclude that techno- logical societies are inevitably short-lived even if they do not exterminate themselves with nuclear weapons. Burger, speculating that other techno- logical civilizations would experience uncontrolled growth and foul their environments, concluded that “the present drama unfolding on planet Earth makes it seem highly likely that energy-guzzling technological soci- eties have only a short life span.”'® Here again, many have blurred the dis- tinction between a setback for a civilization and its destruction. Probabilities: Longevity Other Means of Self-destruction —wWilliam Burger, 2003"