IS THERE INTELLIGENT LIFE ON EARTH? 265 



life in the absence of suitable oxygen-mediating enzymes of which you would 

 have no knowledge. You would probably also conclude that life could not have 

 arisen on Earth in the past — oxygen being destructive to all large molecules of 

 which living organisms might be made. Of course, you would be wrong. There is 

 life on Earth, perhaps even intelligent life. 



We might consider another way of looking at Earth and its inhabitants, a 

 way that I owe to the lively imagination of a good friend, the great biologist Paul 

 Weiss of Rockefeller University and other places. Weiss (1965) has written an 

 interesting fantasy about a visit by a Martian observer to Earth. The Martian 

 spaceship arrives in the evening just as many vehicles are moving toward a 

 drive-in theater for the night's entertainment, and it descends to observe these 

 curious wheeled creatures moving along smartly in rather striking stop-and-go 

 patterns, apparently governed by some master mind that flashes signals in red, 

 yellow, and green. The observer follows them to the drive-in theater where he is 

 able to get down a little closer as they huddle in formation before the flashing 

 superintelligence. He there identifies their squirming occupants as internal 

 parasites. Later, when the evening's ceremony breaks up, and the curious 

 wheeled earthlings take off from the drive-in theater, the Martian observer is 

 excited to see what appears to be some kind of sacrificial mating act, 

 consummated when two earthlings rush together at high speeds, become 

 intricately entangled and are hauled off by other earthlings and their internal 

 parasites to be reconstituted as shiny new earthlings. 



But let us be serious. Consider some of the more obvious manifestations of 

 life on earth that might be revealed to the remote sensing devices of an exploring 

 spacecraft from another planet. Prominent among these would be curious 

 geometrical configurations characterized by high thermal, hydrocarbon, and 

 radioactive concentrations and linked together by radiating linear networks rich 

 in the same components, plus lead, mercury, and other trace elements of 

 biological interest. What might a Martian observer conclude about this? Might he 

 think that he had arrived on the scene at a late stage in the degeneration of 

 earthly life or, by analogy with J. R. R. Tolkien's "hobbit" fantasy, that he had 

 arrived at the moment that evil forces radiating out from local strongholds were 

 about to overwhelm all that once had been wholesome in Middle-Earth. 



Well, let me be explicit. My theme is that man is fast approaching a crucial 

 test of one of the great universal generalizations — of Le Chatelier's principle, 

 which states that, whenever a system in equilibrium is disturbed, it tends to react 

 in such a way as to restore the equilibrium. Of course, we are all aware that 

 equilibrium outside of a test tube is a will-o'-the-wisp thing. What we really 

 mean is a condition of steady state or dynamic equilibrium, a condition that is 

 always evolving but wherein things tend to remain more or less in balance. The 

 question is whether man will come into balance with his ecosystem as a result of 

 conscious thought and deliberate action, which he is perfectly capable of doing, 

 or whether he will leave matters to the operation of the often catastrophic forces 

 with which nature eventually brings all living beings into balance within the 



