The Sounds of Our Discontents

IN 2009, AN Australian scientist Charles Lineweaver and colleagues published a paper in the Astrobiology magazine called ‘Signatures of a Shadow Biosphere’ where they made a tentative case that ‘aliens’ may already be living on earth. By ‘aliens’, they did not mean ‘Men in Black’ or ‘ET’ but rather ‘weird forms’ which rely on different biochemistries and progressively span out in a ‘hierarchy of weirdness’. They conjectured that these forms could be living in extreme conditions—deep ocean vents, volcanic interiors and so on—and have evolved as distinct ecological forms or they could be biochemically merged with known lifeforms which makes them difficult to distinguish. For at least a century or more, this idea that there are other forms of life has had many iterations—from vast transnational search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) projects to Japanese horror cinema—and they are usually motivated by two distinct causal arguments.

One, the sheer immensity of what is unknown—less than 1 per cent of microbial life has been studied—forces upon us epistemic humility. More starkly, we simply don’t know what we don’t know. Lineweaver describes these vast chasms of ignorance using an evocative image: ‘Imagine the surface of the Earth, and imagine if you had only explored 1 per cent of it. But that 1 per cent was spread out all over. So you can imagine if you’ve only explored 1 per cent of the ocean, you might not have seen Australia or New Zealand. That seems to be the situation we’re in with microbial life.’ The other motivation is the gargantuan time scales involved when we talk about the universe. There is a general consensus that earthlike planetary objects began to form nearly 9 billion years before our solar system began, which in turn means, by the weight of probabilities, sites with other types of life most likely abound somewhere. Faced with these two ways of conceptualising ‘weird’ lifeforms, we are perhaps surrounded by ‘alien’ forms that have diverged from the tree of life which we can look for only through heuristics and a careful assembly of painstakingly collected evidence. Till we find something, we remain afloat in a vat of cosmic emptiness.

Nearly 60 years before Lineweaver and others published their paper, Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi was already joking about these probabilities when he met fellow scientists Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller and Herbert York in the summer of 1950 at Los Alamos, New Mexico over lunch. Among other things, they discussed two separate events that had then been reported: one, trashcans had gone missing from the streets of New York; and two, there was a spate of UFO sightings in America that summer. With a wink and nod, Fermi argued that the New Yorker magazine—which had then run a cartoon showing aliens stealing trashcans—could indeed be right. A parsimonious scientific explanation demanded that the smallest number of variables be used to explain the maximal number of observations. Fermi reasoned that the universe was vaster and older than the time it would take for an alien civilisation—little green men—to arrive on earth. But this obviously was contradicted by evidence, or rather by a lack of evidence. Fermi famously then asked, ‘Where is everybody’? Over time, as measurements about the universe’s vastness improved and as man’s speed of travel improved, this openended question acquired the colour of a paradox. It has since then been called Fermi’s Paradox, of which there are now strong, weak and proto versions. What is constant in all of them is the underlying sense of absence.

More recently, Chinese science-fiction writer Liu Cixin offers us a concept called ‘the dark forest’ that sociologist Luo Ji voices in his novel. He asks us to imagine a dark forest in which there is nothing but quiet. An observer could very well think that there is no sign of life there and we could interpret that as an empty forest. Instead, Liu offers another way to think about this absence of sound. He suggests that perhaps the forest is full of life, but it is also full of predators who emerge at night. Every living being in the forest therefore avoids emerging out at night in fear and out of self-interest. The question that Liu leaves us wondering about is simple but stark: how should we characterise the universe—as an empty forest or a dark forest full of predators.

In all of the above—from Lineweaver’s ‘weird’ lifeforms, Fermi’s absentee aliens to Ciuxin-Ji’s dark forest—the motif of absence, a negative presence, that vast silent magisterium has enabled us to draw the contours of not just what is out there but also forced us to inspect in detail what is present within. We can do this within the context of astrophysics, biology or science fiction. But these questions about what silence or absence means in our mental models of the world has been with humanity for much longer. We have called this absence of evidence, this non-being by different names: silence, absence, emptiness, void and others depending on the hour and need. Any effort to speak of silence forces us into a linguistic cul-de-sac from which we don’t know how to back out satisfactorily. French philosopher George Bataille wrote in the early 20th century that ‘the word silence is still a sound, to speak is in itself to imagine knowing; and to no longer know, it would be necessary to no longer speak’. This idea that knowledge is intimately tied to sound, to our abilities to articulate our inner voices, is perhaps most influentially seen in the opening word of the Quran, which begins with the word ‘iqra’ or ‘recite’. In the Quranic epistemic world, it was only by speaking aloud the words and signs of God that we could claim to know something. Without such utterance, such an effort to communicate, what awaits us is a great envelope of a silence—or a ‘veil of ignorance’. Much of human history has been an effort to break away from this vast canopy of silence, or non-knowing, under which man has lived. Thus when Swiss theologian Max Picard writes that ‘silence is as much part of history as noise; the invisible as much a part of history as the visible’, it doesn’t come across as strange but merely as a statement of fact.

The irony, of course, is that we live in an age that doesn’t know how to find ‘silence’ or its variants. On the one hand, meditation classes and silent retreats flourish with professionals paying thousands of dollars in fees to experience silence and to learn the analytics of stillness. A lucky few, such as the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who ended up at the St Wandrille, a Benedictine abbey in northern France, discover natural repositories of silence in religious orders and eventually immerse in their structured quiet. This quest to find silence ought not to be surprising. In the oldest of human traditions, we see silence is exalted, often because of its abilities to facilitate an introspection. In the Mahabharata, the blind king Dhritarashtra learns from his charioteer-counsel Sanjaya that one of the names of Krishna is Madhava, which we are told is ‘because of his silence’—a name that we learn from Bibek Debroy is born from a relatively obscure etymology: the ‘ma’ of Madhava comes from the word mauna, or silence, and dha from dhyana, or meditation. In some Yeshivas of the Jews, they observe what is called ‘Ta’anit dibur’, or a fast of speaking. If man is a glutton in a world full of words, then silence is means to temper his appetite.

In contrast to these traditional understandings of the importance of silence, our lives are today filled, not necessarily with more sound, but rather with more white noise and accompanying dumb furies. Gossip and vitriol, harangues and grandstanding that were previously limited are scaled up to global proportions, which in turn produce disquiets that have non-local roots and foreign cures. It is as if the detritus of our private worlds now steadily spin themselves into a fury and attach onto our spectral presences that flit across social media platforms to consume and be consumed by it. The psychological, and in due course political, consequences of this are still too early to fully recognise. If newspapers and commercial printing precipitated the breakdown of old norms of cohesion and instead facilitated the construction of ‘imagined communities’ and nation-states thereafter, what does the steady disintegration of our inner silences now portend? Perhaps a growing suspicion towards foreigners amid us, loneliness in crowds and, ultimately, an omnipresent fear that predators are among us—all of which prepare grounds for authoritarianism in all its guises.

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