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295 civilization would program such cultural and political sensitivity about an unknown society into a machine. The first probe to visit may not know what it will encounter. These speculations about alien behavior assume a degree of omniscience that may not exist. They also assume benign intent. Many optimists assume that extraterrestrials will have reached a utopian state that they will eagerly share with us. They will not have succumbed to runaway technology, environmental disasters, or war; they will have full control of their technology, show sensitivity to their environment, and be peaceful.” In other words, their society will resemble the ideal toward which we are striving. Drake foresaw that we would learn what “ultimate social systems” are arrived at in other civilizations. We may discover that evolution leads to a single preferred mode of life. “If this be so,” he wrote, “let us know now.” Another astronomer, Alistair Cameron, suggested that we might receive valuable lessons in the techniques of a stable world government.”* Those who lived through the attempt of national states to impose visions of societal perfection in the twentieth century may have reservations about adopting someone else’s perfect social system. Discussing fascism and communism, New York Times critic-at-large Edward Rothstein warned that utopias, for all their promises of freedom, turn out to be extraordi- narily rigid places, full of rules and demarcations. In practice, that rigidity has turned into cruelty. The twentieth century was unique not in the kinds of utopia imagined, but in the relentless attempts to bring them into existence and the technol- ogy to make them seem possible. The utopian “science” of Marxism and the utopian nationalisms of fascism carried the model to extremes: grand visions of a new age combined with horrific exorcisms and totalitarian control. What goes absolutely wrong, Rothstein warned, is the attempt to make everything absolutely right. Dystopias are failed attempts at utopias.” Political scientist James Scott, examining schemes to improve the human condition through social engineering, found repeated patterns of failure. Soviet collectivization, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the planned city of Brasilia, and compulsory ujamaa villages in Tanzania were examples of ambitious projects that extracted a high price from the people they were intended to help. Those people were the victims of what Scott called high modernist ideology—the belief that society can be designed to conform with what are believed to be scientific laws. The imposed ideas of high modernists, who thought that they knew better than ordinary human beings, sometimes had disastrous effects on their peoples.*” Their Utopia Will Be Good for Us Their Utopia Will Be Good for Us