Freeman Dyson

QUESTION: Where should we be looking for life?

DYSON Everywhere. I think the obvious places are the planets: Mars and satellites of Jupiter, asteroids and comets. The places which are reasonably accessible to our instruments, all these places in the solar system.

On the other hand, I think it's quite likely that we'll discover life in places that nobody expected it. That is the way it usually is with exploring, that you find something which nobody expected, and then it's a big discovery. We could find life in paradoxical places, having nothing to do with planets. Life could be in interstellar gas clouds; it could be floating free and orbiting around the sun. There are all sorts of possibilities which people haven't yet investigated.

QUESTION: So where might life exist in the universe that not everyone's thought of?

DYSON Carl Sagan thought of all kinds of interesting places where life might be. One of his ideas was that it could be floating in the atmosphere of Jupiter, in the form of large gas bags like hot air balloons which would be able to live there quite happily. In the atmosphere of Jupiter; there are all the chemicals you need for keeping alive: there is water, there is carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen, and there's sunlight. By moving up and down, you can reach any temperature you want. That's a possibility, and it's not just true of Jupiter. It's true of any other planet which has a thick atmosphere— you could think of this also on Venus, though the chemistry's not as good. You can imagine it on Saturn or Neptune, any of the planets which have big atmospheres.

Then there are comets which are, normally speaking, zooming past the sun. We only see them when they come zooming past the sun, but normally they are living quietly out beyond Neptune in a place called the Kuiper Belt which is just a huge ring of small chunks of ice that live out there. Actually, that is a rather convenient place for living. Again, you have all the chemistry you need for staying alive, and all you need there is to have a plant that's able to grow a greenhouse around itself so it can keep warm in the light from the sun, even when the sun is far away

QUESTION: Give us the prospectus for how humans could live outside of Earth

DYSON The Kuiper Belt is not only a place where we might find things living, we might also go and live there ourselves one day. Not in the next hundred years, but maybe in 500 years. It would be a friendly place for life because the speeds at which these little comets are floating around are quite slow, much slower than when they are close to the sun.

When you're out there in the Kuiper Belt, you might be living on an object, say, a little comet where you're growing trees and other things you need in order to sustain life. Another comet will come floating by about once a week or so, close enough for you to buzz over there in your little space craft and visit the neighbors. It's a friendly place in that way, sort of an archipelago of small islands. If you wanted to build a metropolis there that would also be quite easy. As objects float by, you simply hook them with lassoes and attach them loosely to where you're living so you could build up a metropolis over a hundred years, about as rapidly as, say, Chicago or San Francisco was built up by appropriating real estate.

The real estate is there in enormous quantities. There's about a thousand times as much surface area in the carpal belt as there is in the planets. That's why I consider this as a more likely place for life to be because there are more possibilities open.

QUESTION: If extra-terrestrial intelligent life were discovered and you could ask just one question about a specific intelligent species, what would be your question?

DYSON Well, if we did discover extra-terrestrial intelligence, then of course there's a whole lot of questions we'd want to ask. But the first thing is not to ask questions which presuppose some really restricted set of ideas, but just to keep our eyes open and look.

Then, one of the first questions which would arise is—do these things have anything corresponding to language? It's quite possible you could have intelligence without language. It's hard for us to imagine because our intelligence is so bound up with language. I don't see any reason why another intelligent species should think at all the way we do.

QUESTION: If there's no reason to believe intelligence extra-terrestrial think like we do, is it possible that we could discover evidence of intelligent extra-terrestrial and yet be able to make nothing of it?

DYSON I was up in the North Pacific last summer, on an island called Hansen Island where Paul Spong lives. He's a Canadian who studies whales. He has the whole island instrumented with hydrophones and underwater cameras, and he records the conversations of the whales who live there permanently. For 30 years he's been recording their conversations. No question that these animals communicate. No question that they're highly intelligent.

In 30 years he has not understood a single word. He doesn't understand anything about what they're saying. So I think it's perfectly possible, in fact, it's perhaps more than likely, that we'll have at least as great of difficulties to understand extra-terrestrials.

QUESTION: You've written that our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes and in some sense friendly to life.

DYSON I have an enormous respect for the complexities of things. I like the universe to be as complicated as possible, because that gives us more things to think about—and it seems, in some ways, that that's the way the universe is. There's such an incredible variety of things which has no particular reason to exist. As Darwin remarked: The Creator must have been uncommonly fond of beetles because he made so many different kinds.

That's true, of course, wherever you look: He made so many different kinds of stars, He made so many different kinds of planets. He made so many different kinds of everything. And that's one reason for hoping that he made many different kinds of intelligent creatures. We don't yet know, but at least we have good grounds for hoping, I think.

QUESTION: Your view of life is, life isn't incidental or accidental; it doesn't have a doomed or short-termed future.

DYSON If the universe is open, which is probably the actual case, we have immense periods of time ahead of us. One has to think of the past as just a flash in the pan, so to speak. Ten billion years that the universe has existed is just preliminaries. We know several of the types of stars which are already around will last a hundred times as long as the sun. So it doesn't need to be limited by just the amount of time the sun is still around. The sun will still be around for five billion years which is a good bit of time as far as we're concerned.

Looking at the universe as a whole, time stretches on and on, and you have new things happening and new possibilities open to life and intelligence.