IS THERE LIFE IN OUTER SPACE?

By LANCE MORROW

WRITING HIS NATURAL HISTORY IN THE FIRST CENTURY A.D., Pliny the Elder reported that when water rises into the atmosphere to form rain clouds, it sucks up with it shoals of fish and sometimes quantities of stones. Fish and stones hover above us in the sky. Elsewhere, Pliny offered an item about a woman who gave birth to an elephant. He was, occasionally, a supermarket-tabloid sort of Roman.

A Pliny pattern persists. The scientific side of the observer's mind demands objective evidence, as the great naturalist usually did; but the brain's mythopoeic, magic-thinking side is lured to marvels--to alchemy, to spells, to bat people on the moon or aliens on other planets. Can these matters be addressed with a whole mind? Can the two instincts of the brain--Einstein and Elvis-sighting--be made to fit together like compatible spoons?

Extraterrestrials? The physicist Enrico Fermi rejected the possibility. "Where are they?" he demanded. They would have shown up by now.

But science today is offering an elaborately conditioned answer about where extraterrestrial life might possibly be. Two American astronomers have found a planet or two outside our solar system whereon conditions exist (liquid water the temperature of hot tea, for example) that may be hospitable to life.

Why are human beings fascinated by alien life? The primary answer (human curiosity in the face of mystery) is obvious enough. "All men by nature desire knowledge," Aristotle said.

Speculation titillates the mind but usually ends by subtly demeaning the human place in the cosmic scheme. The Earth that the ancients took to be the center of the drama becomes ever more marginal, a receding speck. Astronomers' searches tend to assume that the aliens would be superior to earthlings, perhaps evolved beyond Earth's ability to comprehend them.

The Earth constricts. We imagine ourselves to be prisoners in solitary confinement, tapping crude coded messages on the dungeon wall and hoping for an answering tap--without which we stare at the queasy possibility that we are truly, absolutely alone. Such an abyss 1) may be infinitely more depressing than the assumption of human inferiority or 2) may argue, conversely, for the divine uniqueness and therefore preciousness of the human enterprise. An agnostic will split the difference and think of Voltaire: "Remember your dignity as a man."

The fascination with extraterrestrials may reflect an exhaustion of the secrets and novelties of Earth and of earthly behavior, which, on the whole, we have come to think, is nothing to write home about. We know one another too well. Perhaps a master system of intergalactic ethics dictates that no planet may have contact with another until it has subdued its own self-destructive violence. Maybe the Earth is under a sort of quarantine.

If that should prove to be true, the actual encounter with alien life might mark a higher stage in earthly progress, a liberation. Then theology, history, astronomy--all the strands of human thought and striving--would converge in a fusing shock of understanding that would also be a planetary self-transcendence.

Until then, however, it will go on raining mackerel and speckled trout and stones upon the human mind.