This is a blog post from
Science-fiction is a map of the imagination. Only sometimes the map becomes the territory. The excitement around star KIC 8462852 is a perfect illustration of this involution. Dubbed “Tabby’s Star” after its discoverer Tabetha Boyajian, it is located 1480 light years away in the Cygnus constellation. The star’s mysterious flickering had set off a worldwide frenzy last month, when when a theory was put forward that orbiting “alien megastructures” were causing the aperiodic dimming. These structures, called a Dyson Swarm, are essentially enormous floating solar panels that hoover up all that light which would be wasted on an uncaring universe otherwise.
A preliminary scan has not indicated any radio-communication emitted by an extra-terrestrial civilisation. While this silence is hardly conclusive, science-fiction fans were probably relieved. There was a faint air of unease over these discoveries. Dyson structures were big in SF nearly 30 years ago. Their “buzz” quotient has long since expired among the sci-fi buffs. It would be supremely embarassing to meet aliens who still thought they were cool.
While 1,500 light years is a mere sliver in the cosmic scale, 30 years is an eternity in publishing. The frenzy, however, did highlight the serpent-swallowing-its-tail relationship between science and science-fiction.
The mind behind the megastructures is 91-year old Freeman Dyson, a member of the “Greatest scientists never to receive a Nobel prize” club, who set down the concept in 1960. Dyson in turn cited the 1937 novel Starmaker by Olaf Stapleton for the idea. Though little known today, Stapleton was a writer’s writer, known for the epic sweep of his private cosmos. He envisaged “shells” that could completely enclose a star and drain its energy. Realising that such a construct would be unstable, however, he instead proposed that a ‘swarm’ of planet-sized solar-powered generators would do the job.
But why would any alien race bestir to undertake these gargantuan engineering projects? To move up the Kardashev Scale. Nikolai Kardashev, a Soviet scientist, proposed a way to rank civilisations throughout the universe. Kardashev got this idea when the first Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) began, by looking for radio transmissions.
When extremely powerful radio bursts were detected from a source designated CTA-102, he began to build a mental picture of the aliens that were presumably responsible for the transmissions. A Type 1 civilisation would utilise all the energy possible from its own planet, a Type 2 from the star the planet orbits, and Type 3, the galaxy itself — that’ll surely take a lot of 5-year Plans. Professor Sholomitskii followed up Kardashev’s idea. And when he announced, through TASS, that the signal was from a “supercivilisation”, it seemed that Science-Fiction was hopelessly lagging behind reality. Closer observations however showed that the source were quasars, beacons blazing across an ocean of night, powered by the death screams of stars infalling into super-massive black holes.
With tantalising evidence of these god-like aliens illuminating the heavens, science-fiction writers began to up their game. James White’s classic, All Judgement Fled , which came out in 1968, saw a mile-long alien spaceship — ambitious at a time when real spacecraft were the size of small van.
The construction boom in Megastructures exploded with Larry Niven’s Ringworld a year later. Niven conceived of a colossal ring that ran all around a star. The inner surface, facing the star, would receive light and heat. The total surface area would be real estate equivalent to 3 million earths. The detailed scientific explanations and design of this rotating world fired up the imaginations of fans, and its influence can still be seen today in computer games like Halo.
Then the master stepped in; Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama , published in 1973 is a lyrical saga suffused with a sense of primal discovery. After a horrific asteroid impact, the world’s governments form SPACEGUARD to detect incoming dangers. This organisation finds a colossal object entering the solar system — the unknown contact is designated Rama — as Clarke decided that the supply of Roman names for astronomical objects would have run out by then. When they find it decelerating, a team of astronauts is despatched to intercept and investigate. They discover a giant cylinder, 50 kilometres in length, made out of an unknown material. What’s more, the cylinder is hollow. The explorers succeed in entering and a fantastical sight awaits them — the spin of the cylinder is producing artificial gravity allowing a topsy-turvy world — with the sea overhead and clouds at their feet. No trace of the “Ramans” is found, with automated systems urging the ship onwards. Clarke took the classic tropes of the Hollow Earth, think Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Verne, and made it astonishingly new.
The Age of the Megastructure was upon us. Just three years after Rama, NASA commissioned the landmark “Space Settlements” study to look at potential long-term habitation in outer space. Gerard O’Neill came up with the “O’Neill Cylinder”, which is very similar to Rama. Reality was in a furious race with fiction. Even if a building is never constructed, the very existence of its blueprint exerts an influence.
John Varley went on an excursion near Saturn in his 1979 novel Titan , where a gigantic rotating torus is found. Varley’s mashup of high technology and far magic was platformed on the same NASA study, which mentioned the “Stanford Torus” as a design option. The Matt Damon film Elysium uses this to construct its haven for the super-rich. Greg Bear opted for a 290-km-long hollowed-out asteroid for his 1985 novel Eon . Niven returned again with The Bowl of Heaven featuring a Shkadov thruster — a “stellar engine” that can move an entire star, planets in tow. Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves starts with the Moon blowing up, forcing humanity to escape into giant ark-like space habitats to avoid the rain of debris. Eventually the gravitational stresses were too strong and this subgenre, dubbed the “Big Dumb Object”, collapsed under its own mass.
The idea of detecting aliens by their mighty works is not new. Indeed, nearly two centuries ago, the same concept was proposed in reverse. The 19th-century scientist Thomas Dick advocated the building of giant mathematical signs hundreds of miles across in Siberia as a method of signalling the Moon. Dick’s calculations had assured him that no fewer than 22 trillion aliens inhabited the solar system, of which 4 billion resided on our satellite. By building a “large triangle or ellipsis”, Dick was hopeful that “were the inhabitants of the moon to recognize such a figure, erected on an immense scale as a signal of correspondence, they might perhaps erect a similar one in reply”.
The mathematician Gauss had suggested that one could plant forests in the shape of immense right-angled triangles — this was too slow for Dick. Ever the practical Scotsman, the structures could also "at the same time accommodate thousands of inhabitants who are now roaming…like the beasts of the forest". Dick, however, knew that funds would be lacking and lamented that “it is likely that for ages to come we shall remain in ignorance of the genius of the lunar inhabitants”.
Around the same time, Viennese astronomer Johann von Littrow, was favouring digging vast concentric trenches in the Sahara, filling them with kerosene and setting them on fire. Littrow and Dick were pioneers of METI (Messaging Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), which took off when astronomers seemed to detect a network of canals criss-crossing Mars. Just like the X Prizes today, there was the Guzman prize, instituted in 1891, awarding 100,000 francs to “the person of whatever nation who will find the means within the next ten years of communicating with a star (planet or otherwise) and of receiving a response”.
For Dick, finding aliens was much a religious imperative as it was a scientific one. As a natural theologist, someone who sought to see the workings of God in all of Creation, a magnificent universe without anyone to observe it was blasphemy.
Still, there can be a range of responses; when I mentioned the Tabby’s Star megastructure to a friend, he immediately pointed out the scale of the tenders that had to be floated for such a massive infrastructure project, the resultant potential for corruption and nature of the inquiries that would then have to be conducted.
In 1869, the poet Charles Cros spoke of the “joy and pride” if another world was to communicate with us. “The eternal isolation of the spheres is vanquished” he wrote. This sentiment drives us still.
Sceptics have urged focusing on natural explanations for anomalies like Tabby’s Star. That is missing the point. The most profound scientific discovery that our species can make is a non-discovery; that we are alone in this illimitable universe. That in our galaxy, which has billions of earth-sized worlds, we inhabit the only one with life. That we gaze into the depths of the night-sky and find it to be a mirror.
Postscript:
Spaceguard was founded in 2077 according to Clarke’s 1973 novel. The U.S. Congress eventually asked NASA to begin a search program for dangerous asteroids. The SPACEGUARD Survey was founded in 1992.
