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225 Cyclopean Optimism The authors of the Project Cyclops report speculated that interstellar communication has been going on in our Galaxy ever since the first intelligent civilizations evolved in large numbers some 4 or 5 billion years ago. All participants would have accumulated an enormous body of knowledge handed down from race to race, from the beginning of the communicative phase. Included in this galactic heritage we might expect to find the complete natural and social histories of countless planets and their species, a sort of cosmic archaeological record of our Galaxy. As new races came of age and made contact with the galactic community they would inherit this body of knowledge, add to it, and, in turn, pass it on to still younger races when they made contact. The Cyclopeans foresaw a synchronization of scientific development among the cultures in contact. They hoped for the development of branches of science not accessible to one race alone but amenable to joint efforts, the discovery of the social forms and structures most apt to lead to self-preservation, and new aesthetic forms and endeavors that lead to a richer life.*° Many optimists foresee that communication with extraterrestrials will accelerate our intellectual growth. “Interstellar contact would undoubtedly enrich our civilization with scientific and technical information which we could obtain alone only at very much greater expense,” Drake assured us; “there is probably no quicker route to wisdom than to be the student of more advanced civilizations.” Walter Sullivan hoped that knowledge of a more advanced civilization might enable us to leapfrog centuries ahead. In their novel The Cassiopeia Affair, Chloe Zerwick and Harrison Brown imagined that the more advanced civilization would enable us to bypass centuries of development by providing us with a kind of cosmic technology assistance program. Shostak speculated that we might skip eons of history.” If this flow of information actually occurred, we could compare our knowledge and our perceptions with those of other minds in different environments, illuminating voids in our own knowledge and suggesting new generalizations. Drake proposed that we would learn profound aspects of intelligent life that we as yet have not begun to imagine. We would begin to appreciate biological and cultural systems grounded in evolutionary processes separate from our own. This is bound to emphasize the narrow interrelatedness of all human experience.» As aliens would view the universe somewhat differently, Sagan predicted that they would be interested in things we never thought of. By comparing our knowledge with theirs, we could gain insights that might have passed A Shortcut to Wisdom