But first, a terrific poem which came back to me through the ages from my long-lost school days provoked by the recent words of 'the Kraut':
'IS there anybody there?' said the Traveller, |
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Knocking on the moonlit door; |
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And his horse in the silence champed the grasses |
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Of the forest's ferny floor. |
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And a bird flew up out of the turret, |
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Above the Traveller's head: |
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And he smote upon the door again a second time; |
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'Is there anybody there?' he said. |
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But no one descended to the Traveller; |
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No head from the leaf-fringed sill |
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Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, |
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Where he stood perplexed and still. |
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But only a host of phantom listeners |
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That dwelt in the lone house then |
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Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight |
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To that voice from the world of men: |
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Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair, |
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That goes down to the empty hall, |
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Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken |
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By the lonely Traveller's call. |
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And he felt in his heart their strangeness, |
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Their stillness answering his cry, |
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While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf, |
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'Neath the starred and leafy sky; |
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For he suddenly smote on the door, even |
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Louder, and lifted his head:— |
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'Tell them I came, and no one answered, |
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That I kept my word,' he said. |
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Never the least stir made the listeners, |
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Though every word he spake |
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Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house |
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From the one man left awake: |
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Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, |
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And the sound of iron on stone, |
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And how the silence surged softly backward, |
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When the plunging hoofs were gone. |
I love that poem - how could I have forgotten it for so long? Anyway, on to 'the Kraut' who had some fascinating ruminations in The WaPo last week. He asks one of those simple but deadly questions, "Are we alone in the universe?" He was prompted to this by the, probably undue, excitement in cosmological circles (or should that be 'ellipses?) at the discovery of some planet-like objects circling suns in much the same way as our tired, battered, old planet does. Instantly this raises the question of whether or not we are alone in the universe. "Is there anybody there?" we mutter, and answer comes there none!
As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy — a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.
That silence is maddening. Not just because it compounds our feeling of cosmic isolation, but because it makes no sense. As we inevitably find more and more exo-planets where intelligent life can exist, why have we found no evidence — no signals, no radio waves — that intelligent life does exist?
The silence, as they say, is deafening! And perplexing.
It’s called the Fermi Paradox, after the great physicist who once asked, “Where is everybody?” Or as was once elaborated: “All our logic, all our anti- isocentrism, assures us that we are not unique — that they must be there. And yet we do not see them.”
'The Kraut' quotes something called The Drake Equation (1961) which seeks to enumerate how many advanced civilisations there must be in just our galaxy alone. Apparently if you add in the information gained from modern satellite sources the number should be very great indeed. And yet ... and yet ... despite all our signals sent out at the speed of light and our monitoring devices which could pick up the sound of an alien's fart from a zillion miles away - there is nothing, just the vast, endless emptiness of nothing.
Personally, I am not too unhappy because I always reckon that people - or beings, if you like - are nearly always trouble in the end and are therefore best avoided! But 'the Kraut', being 'the Kraut', has an even gloomier explanation:
Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the answer is to be found, tragically, in the final variable: the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.
In other words, this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness but a tragic story about our destiny. It is telling us that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe — an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, nearly instantly so.
He lists the many man-made possibilities available to those madmen who, seeking a salvation in an after-world, would be happy to pull the trigger and bring about 'apocalypse now'. But then, in a startling and original piece of thinking, he points to the only thing likely to save us - politics!
Rather than despair, however, let’s put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence and on humanity’s own short, already baleful history with its new Promethean powers: Intelligence is a capacity so godlike, so protean that it must be contained and disciplined. This is the work of politics — understood as the ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing while simultaneously restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts.
There could be no greater irony: For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty — statecraft). Because if we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction.
We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics — in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations — is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it.
Good man, 'the Kraut', he makes you think.
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