We search the heavens for signs of intelligent life.
But what would we do if we found it?
Are we ready for first contact?
Would we be smart enough to even know if someone was sending us a message?
We've only been able to detect radio signals for a little over a century.
Extraterrestrial civilizations could have been bombarding
Earth with radio signals for millions and billions of years before then,
and nobody here would have had any inkling that it had ever happened.
And what if we seem just like ants to them.
We all know how we treat ants.
What if the extraterrestrials are smarter than we are,
have technology, weapons that render us helpless?
The history of first contact among terrestrial civilizations,
the humans of east and west,
north and south, has been scarred by genocide.
In all of the cosmos,
is there such a thing as a first contact story with a happy ending?
I know of one first contact story,
but it's too soon to know how it will turn out...
This scientific and architectural wonder of the
world is in Southern China,
it's the largest radio telescope on Earth,
in fact it's the largest telescope of any kind.
The Five-Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope,
or FAST, as it's known.
This dish is a giant listening device for detecting radio waves
that propagate throughout the cosmos.
The mission of this telescope is to solve unanswered questions
about the origin of the universe,
and its early history.
It will also search for pulsars,
those rapidly rotating neutron stars,
and for telltale signs of gravitational waves,
ripples in the fabric of space-time...
And it will search for signs of alien civilizations.
Especially those very far away...
I want to take you to a place where we've begun to
eavesdrop on an intricate global communications network.
We didn't even know it existed until recently.
Complex beyond our wildest imagining,
it was built by a community whose population
is inconceivably vast.
Our distant ancestors, tiny shrew-like animals,
came of age in places not too different from this one.
Forests.
Maybe they knew what we've only recently discovered.
The secret life of this place is filled with drama,
abuzz with conversation.
Much of it is spoken in an electrochemical language,
and it takes place on a scale too small,
and in motion too slow,
for creatures like us to even notice.
But there's something even more amazing that was going
on right beneath our feet, for the longest time,
and on a global scale,
and we had no inkling that it was there.
An ancient, subterranean worldwide web,
a vast neural network is what binds the forest together,
making it an intercommunicating,
and interacting dynamic organism.
One with agency, and the power to influence events above ground.
It's called the mycelium.
It's a hidden matrix, the creation of an enduring
collaboration among fungi, plants, bacteria, and animals.
90% of all the trees and plants on Earth are involved
in the mutually beneficial relationship made
possible by the mycelium.
They exchange nourishment, messages,
and empathy with one another, across species,
and even across the kingdoms of life.
Mushrooms are the reproductive organs,
the fruiting bodies of the mycelium.
To see a mushroom growing wild in the forest is to know
that the great natural Internet is online beneath your feet.
Some mushrooms spread trillions of spores on the breeze,
each spore a paratrooper carrying life's message.
This is mushroom sex.
After a while, in their search for moisture,
this new segment of the mycelium will return down
to the underworld, and link up to the greater network.
The secret lives of trees have been long-hidden from us.
For them, the mycelium is their lifeline to one another.
It makes the forest a community.
They use it to parent,
to nurture each other
and even to devise a stay of execution,
a reprieve from the axe.
When a tree is cut down in the forest,
other trees reach out to the victim with their root tips,
and send lifesaving sustenance, water, sugar,
and other nutrients via the mycelium.
This continuous IV drip from neighboring trees can
keep this stump alive for decades, and even centuries.
And they don't only do it for their own kind.
They do it for the trees of other species.
Why?
Is it because they know that their lives depend on
the health of the whole forest,
and even on beings very different from themselves?
Is it possible that the trees can think in longer terms than we do?
We know they have excellent parenting skills.
Take this fir tree.
This younger tree here is its offspring,
and it requires constant attention.
It's hardly young by our standards, 60 years old.
But young trees don't know that if they grow up too quickly,
there will be too much air in the cells of their trunks.
Later, when the stormy winds and predators come,
they'll be weak and vulnerable.
Like the young of other kingdoms,
the fir wants to grow into the light as soon as possible.
But the mother fir shades it with her branches so that
it cannot binge on sunlight,
and grow up too fast for its own good.
How many forests have I been in without any awareness
of what was really happening all around me?
Who are we to search for alien intelligence when we can't even recognize,
or respect, the consciousness all around us,
and even beneath our feet?
This stately maple senses that the tiny caterpillar
is nipping at its leaf.
A signal is sent through the tree,
just as it would go through our own nervous system.
But not nearly so fast.
Again, the trees live on a much slower time scale.
The speed of"ouch" for a tree is only an inch,
every three minutes.
So, it will take at least an hour for the tree to react
by generating the chemical that will chase this pest away.
When a predator strikes, the first thing a tree does
is to take a saliva sample in order to sequence the DNA of the invading species.
It then tailors its chemical response to the special
vulnerability of its enemy.
In certain cases, it releases the precise pheromone that
will attract its enemy's enemy to do the tree's fighting for it.
Is it fair to say that the trees have a deep knowledge
of chemistry, entomology, and other earth sciences?
How exactly is their knowing different from ours?
Is it any different when we humans do these things?
Throughout nature, we find these electrochemical
conversations between the life-forms of different
species and kingdoms.
But what of a conversation between different worlds?
What might we share with the intelligent civilization of another world?
Science and mathematics.
The symbolic languages of the scientist, mathematician,
and the engineer avoid those things that are lost
in translation from one culture to another.
Symbolic languages, including those used in programming,
have a much higher degree of precision than words do.
They are not as open to misinterpretation.
I know of only one nonhuman symbolic language,
and only one instance when we humans made contact with
the life-form that uses it.
Their knowledge of astronomy and mathematics would astonish most of us.
Their commitment to resolving their differences democratically,
and reaching the broadest possible consensus through debate,
is unparalleled by any human society that I know.
Tens of millions of years ago,
they had been carnivores,
but they gave that up to become vegans.
It changed their world,
and resulted in surpassing beauty wherever they wandered.
They are explorers who use their symbolic language
to tell each other about the things they have discovered on their travels.
This is their night sky.
I want to tell you their story.
This is the shore of the Panthalassic Ocean,
a sea that covered Earth's entire Northern Hemisphere
in a period named the Ordovician.
We've compressed all of the time from this very second,
back to the beginning of the universe,
into a single calendar Earth year, a Cosmic Calendar.
Every month represents a little more than a billion years.
Every week, nearly 300 million years.
Every day, about 40 million years.
The Big Bang is the first moment of New Year's Day.
Our present, right now, is at the stroke of midnight on
New Year's Eve.
I'm standing on the morning of December 20th on the Cosmic Calendar,
480 million years ago in Earth's history.
This was the time when life began to diversify.
It's remembered as the Great Ordovician Biodiversity Event.
It came 40 million years after life's first big leap
into diversification known as the Cambrian explosion.
This was the dawn of the arthropods,
the invertebrates who wear their skeletons on the outside,
instead of on the inside,
as we would one day do hundreds of millions of years later.
The arthropods of the Ordovician pioneered the most
successful body plan ever evolved by life.
Even today, more than 80% of all living animals are arthropods.
But around the time the plants began to venture out
of the waters, a crustacean staggered ashore,
and made a home in the new world of the land.
Insects evolved from the crustaceans.
A thought I do my best to hold at bay whenever I'm dining
in a seafood restaurant.
We think that the insects and the plants colonized
the land at about the same time, 400 million years ago,
or December 21 on the Cosmic Calendar.
This was a time when giant mushrooms towered over the world's trees,
which were then no more than a few feet high.
Mushrooms this gigantic make you wonder just how big
the underground network that supported them must have been.
And this was the time on Earth when life learned how to fly.
The insects would have it all to themselves for another 90 million years.
No flying reptiles, no birds, no bats to gobble them up,
just other bugs.
Powered flight was a huge evolutionary leap for insects,
allowing them to spread all over the planet.
The insects put human pretensions to shame.
Their tenure on Earth is hundreds of times greater than ours.
They look much the same to us today,
as they did to the dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous.
Even back then, you didn't want to mess with a wasp.
They've always been voracious hunters.
Yes, there were giant redwoods on the Earth 240 million years ago.
That wasp is out hunting for food for her young.
Wasps did their thing for another 100 million years.
And then, something happened on an almost microscopic scale
that would paint the Earth in a whole new spectrum of colors.
Back then, there was no such thing as an animal partner to
aid the plants in their fertilization,
to efficiently transport their seed to the reproductive
organs of distant plants, in other words,
to play cupid for them.
The drama unfolding here is not the struggle between
the spider and the wasp,
it's those tiny particles sticking to the wasp's legs.
Nothing much to look at, just a few grains,
but this magic dust, called pollen,
contained the power to transform the world,
and to make possible some of the most beautiful
sights ever seen on this planet.
Even today, more than 100 million years later,
this is still true.
Each grain of pollen sculpted differently by evolution,
each a novel strategy for survival,
sharpened by vast expanses of time.
Pollen is tough.
It has to be.
It's so well-built that you can fire it from a gun,
and it will emerge unscathed with its identity fully intact.
The wasps had nurtured their young during their helpless,
larval stage by bringing home game for them to feast on.
The pollen was rich in protein,
a meal for the grubs when Mom came home without any kills.
Over the eons, a new kind of life-form evolved,
one that stopped bringing meat home for dinner.
This new creature brought only the magic dust that the flowers made.
Bees.
They had no appetite for the mangled parts of dead insects.
They went on the all-pollen diet, and it was no fad.
The bees became fully committed pollinators.
The plants rewarded them handsomely by evolving
evermore alluring female sexual organs,
in outrageous colors and seductive forms.
They concocted delicious secretions, sweet nectars,
that would keep the bees coming back for more,
again and again.
The Age of the Flowers had begun.
Bees are masters of time,
traveling across 100 million years,
and they are none the worse for wear.
These beings did more than anyone else to fill the
Palace of Life with sustenance and beauty.
We will explore its treasures and mysteries later on our voyage.
For thousands of years,
bees have been symbols of mindless industry.
We always think of them as being something like
biological robots, doomed to live out their lives in lockstep,
shackled to the dreary roles assigned to them by nature.
This is our first contact story.
It happened in a place called Brunnwinkl in rural Austria,
in the early 1900s.
From the time Karl von Frisch was a child,
he longed to understand what the other animals knew,
how they perceived the world.
He wanted to know if tiny fish saw color,
or had a sense of smell.
He invented experiments to explore animal experience,
and he filmed them.
Starting in the early 20th century,
he was the first to use the new medium of motion pictures
to create popular science entertainment and communication.
For thousands of years,
humans have noted the eccentric dances of the bees.
But no one had ever looked at them with the kind of respect
that assumed there was a reason to their dancing.
Before Karl von Frisch,
no one ever thought to ask why they moved this way and
that way in a succession of elaborate figure eights...
Von Frisch studied every tiny bee gesture,
and became fascinated by a mystery he couldn't explain.
He would set out a dish of sugar water for a bee from
his experimental hive.
The bee would feast upon it before flying back home.
The marked bee would later return to dine on
the delicious sugar water.
Von Frisch noted that in just a few hours,
a multitude of other bees would join her there.
They were always her fellow hive mates.
But here was the really amazing thing,
von Frisch knew that the other bees had not
followed the marked bee to the feeding place.
How?
Because he had the hive closely watched at all times.
He had been careful to use sugar water, and not honey,
so that the bees' sense of smell could not guide them to the reward.
He continued to move the dish of sugar water farther away,
until it was several kilometers from the hive.
Still, the hive mates would find their way to it.
So, how did the painted bee reveal the exact location
of the sugar water with such precision that her hive mates
could unerringly find their way there?
There was a secret message in her choreography.
What had seemed to countless generations of observers
to be nothing more than the meaningless,
spasmodic motions of a dumb animal was actually a complex message,
an equation informed by mathematics, astronomy,
and an acute knowledge of time,
all synthesized to convey the location of the riches
she hoped to share with her sisters.
The dancer used the angle of our star, the sun,
to indicate the general direction of the food's location.
Von Frisch noted that when a bee danced straight upward,
she meant, "fly toward the sun."
And when she moved downward, she meant,"fly away from it."
Her swivels left and right conveyed the food's exact coordinates in space,
sometimes kilometers away.
The duration of her dance, down to a fraction of a second,
indicated the length of time it would take her fellow bees to get there.
She even factored in wind speed to more finely calibrate the message she danced.
And this was true at any time of the year,
and from hive to hive, from continent to continent.
Bees can do the math.
Why do I call this a first contact story?
Two species as different as any you can imagine,
humans and bees, evolved on evolutionary pathways that
diverged 600 million years ago.
And yet, these two species and as far as we know,
only they and we on this planet,
managed to create a symbolic language written
in mathematics and science.
We lived side-by-side with the bees for millennia,
never dreaming of the complexity of their communications.
What we've learned about bee society in the decades since
von Frisch puts some of our loftiest human aspirations to shame,
and changes forever our idea of intelligent life on Earth.
We live in a time when the world's democracies are
even more fragile than ever.
But there are places on Earth where that's not true.
Where every individual has a voice.
Where corruption is unknown.
Where the community acts only when it has arrived
at consensus through reason and debate.
This is one of those places.
Contrary to popular belief, the hive is no monarchy.
The queen is no absolute ruler controlling the other bees.
The queen's role is almost entirely reproductive.
Any female bee, and that's what the vast majority of bees are,
can ascend to the throne given the right food and the space to grow.
When the weather warms, and the trees bloom,
she graciously passes her scepter to a new generation of queens.
That's the time in the life of a hive,
in late spring or early summer,
when about half the hive's bees, around 10,000 of them,
grow restless.
They decide it's time to leave the mother hive,
to found a new colony, they know not where.
Once they depart, there's no turning back.
It takes courage to leave home with no way back,
to risk everything, and choose the unknown.
That pushing and shoving is not meant to be hostile.
The workers are putting the queen on a rigorous
exercise program so that she can lose weight,
and get back into flying shape.
When everything's ready,
it's time for the first leg of their odyssey.
It's time to swarm.
With a new queen now installed on her throne in the original hive,
the old Queen Mother has pride of place at the very
center of the swarm of adventurers.
Hundreds of their most senior members, scouts,
are dispatched on missions of reconnaissance over a five kilometer radius.
The scouts reconnoiter the local trees for the best possible new home.
And they're extremely picky.
Not just any place will do.
The front door, a hollow in a tree,
must be too high for bears and other marauders to
easily reach in and plunder their precious honey.
Total square footage is of critical concern.
Honeybees don't hibernate.
They'll have to heat the place for the long winter,
and be sure to produce enough food, honey,
to see them through.
Each scout must measure the exact dimensions,
height, width, and depth.
If it's even slightly too small, or too large,
the entire swarm will be wiped out before the next spring.
When all the scouts return, the bees are ready to hold
their annual convention.
Each scout finds a place to stand on the swarm.
There, she presents her argument for the best site
she has discovered.
This house-hunting discourse is conducted in
their scientific and mathematical language.
Hundreds of scouts now use the waggle dance to advertise
the home that they've found.
At first, opinions vary widely,
as each advocate attracts her share of followers.
At our political conventions, people routinely lie.
They press our buttons, demonizing, scapegoating,
appealing to our fears.
But the bees can't risk that.
In both cases, ours and theirs,
the future depends on seeing reality clearly.
But for some reason,
we are easily manipulated and deceived.
The bees somehow know that they have to stick to the facts.
They have to be accurate.
They can't oversell.
They act as if they understand that it matters what's true.
That nature won't be fooled.
The scouts who have found the optimum sites for the
swarm's new home are the most passionate waggle dancers.
Close scientific observation over many decades affirms
this astonishing fact,
each bee has a platonic ideal of home in mind.
Moreover, the members of the swarm don't take the
testimony of the most popular dancers on faith.
Many of them go to see for themselves.
Skepticism is a survival mechanism.
The fact-checkers fly off to the site to make
an independent evaluation.
Just think for a minute how articulate the waggle
dance messaging has to be.
It's the coordinates for one particular tree in
a whole forest of them.
The scouts make a beeline for it every time.
If the hollow turns out to be as good as advertised,
they will return to the swarm, where they,
too, will dance its praises.
Without deceit, or violence, or back-hive deals,
the scouts are the first to arrive at consensus.
But the larger population remains to be persuaded.
Once they all align behind one dance,
once they've achieved unanimity on the best new place to call home,
the great migration can begin.
Within 60 seconds of the first takeoff,
10,000 bees depart in formation for their new home.
With the sun as their compass,
the airborne colony turns to its queen for leadership.
The swarm is a kind of mind, a collective consciousness to
which every individual bee makes a contribution.
Now that the move is complete, it's time to unpack,
decorate the nursery, stock the pantry,
and make the place their own, until the weather warms,
and the trees bloom again.
And so it has been for tens of millions of years.
This intimate knowledge of the lives of the bees is the
legacy of Karl von Frisch, who was the first to decrypt
their symbolic language, to make contact with a completely
different kind of mind.
Today, we study bee brains.
We are building a bridge over the chasm that has separated
two species for half a billion years.
And yet, after all that time,
there are places where our species and theirs converged,
agriculture, architecture, language, and politics.
We now know that bees sleep,
and some scientists suspect that they dream.
What knocked us out of our trance,
so that we could finally recognize another intelligence
that had always been there?
A few generations before von Frisch,
one man did more than any other to open the way.
For me, he was the greatest spiritual teacher of the last thousand years.
The flowers he planted here long ago still bloom.
The hive he founded, and studied with open eyes,
continues to flourish.
It was he who figured out how the Palace of Life could
evolve from a modest one-room structure to an edifice of soaring towers,
reaching to the stars and it was he who
first glimpsed the secret lives of our fellow earthlings.
Somewhere, there's a place called the Halls of Extinction,
a shrine to all the broken branches on the tree of life.
But that tree still lives,
it's seen 4 billion springtimes since it first took root.
Its flowers burst forth with unforeseeable possibilities.
A tiny, one-celled organism evolves into you
and everything else that is Earthlife.
There's just no way of predicting, for now, anyway,
where life can lead.
No way of foretelling the forms and capabilities that
can issue from simpler organisms over vast expanses of time.
Life itself can be seen as an emergent property of chemistry,
science as an emergent property of life,
a way that life has found to begin to know itself.
Four billion years.
These are the most ancient towers that life built.
Nobody knew this palace existed.
It was hidden by the mists of time, and enshrouded in myth.
But one man dared to part that curtain.
He studied as many kinds of life as he could.
He sailed to a group of islands on the far side of
the planet in search of exotic species.
He studied the bees, the flowers, the finches,
mollusks, and earthworms, for 30 years.
A radical pattern emerged, one that would shake the world.
It still does, he debunked the story of Adam and Eve.
Humans are not the kings of life, created separately,
and charged with its management but instead,
an upstart offspring of its stately, ancient family.
He waited to tell the world what he had discovered until
he could demonstrate its truth beyond a shadow of a doubt.
But then he made another great leap,
Charles Darwin was also one of the first to recognize that
if all life is related,
there were certain philosophical implications.
If we were not created separately from the other animals,
must we not share more of who we are with them?
Our awareness, our relationships with others,
even our feelings?
Instead of a single island of human perception in the universe,
Darwin realized that we are surrounded by other
ways of being alive and conscious.
For Darwin, science was a pathway to a deeper level
of empathy and humility.
When word reached him that a local farmer was mistreating his sheep,
Darwin dropped his research to make an arrest of the man.
He exposed the horrendous suffering of wild animals
caught in the jaws of steel traps,
and experimented on surgically without benefit of anesthesia.
Throughout his entire life, he was haunted by an image of
the helpless dog who licked his tormentor's hand while
being dissected by a scientist.
And this compassion extended even to our own species.
He recognized the blindness of his 19th century contemporaries.
In his autobiography, he recounted the story of
an African woman who jumped off a cliff to her certain death,
rather than submit to being enslaved by the Portuguese.
Darwin observed that if she had been a Roman matron from classical antiquity,
she would be viewed very differently.
We would be naming our daughters after her.
It was he who began the scientific study of the hidden
world beneath the forest floor.
Darwin worshipped nature.
His knowledge of science informed and drove his compassion to new heights.
Behold, Saccorhytus coronarius.
When it lived, 550 million years ago, it was microscopic.
But for us now, it looms large because this creature is
the earliest common ancestor we've yet found,
a physical connection we share with almost every animal on Earth.
If we could only take that connection to heart.
If some day, we could synthesize all our knowledge
of life, and use it to build an Arch of Experience,
a way for us to really feel what it's like to be the other.
What if we could truly know the joy of a giant condor
riding the thermals high in the Andes,
or the anguish of a humpback whale singing to its lover
across the vast Pacific, or the fear in the heart of
our most hated enemy, how would that change this world?
And all of them, and each of us,
made from the same toolbox, with the same genetic
material, but on different evolutionary voyages.
Are there other possible worlds in the cosmos where
life's pathways converge and intersect?
Remember our friends, the tardigrades,
who can rise from the dead to thrive on Earth in those
hellish places where no one else can live?
They have survived all five mass extinctions,
and they can even live in the vacuum of space without protection.
These creatures, too small to see with the naked eye,
have been observed by scientists,
using a scanning electron microscope,
doing something that we like to think only humans do.
They're not performing any of the known biological functions
that organisms need to survive.
They're gently giving each other pleasure,
affection, tenderness for its own sake.
If bees dream, and tardigrades snuggle,
are there countless roads in the universe that life can
take to wonder and to love?
If we could stand beneath the Arch of Experience,
or build one inside ourselves,
maybe we'd be able to give our first contact story a better outcome.