COLUMN - IN ORBIT - Of Whales and Aliens:

Quincy Market - Photo by Chris Wood

Half my little life ago, under the influence of P. cubensis – aka psychedelic mushrooms – I, and two of my reprobate friends, found ourselves among a sea of tourists in Quincy Market. After overhearing a mini Sopranos-style imbiber declaiming loudly upon the niceties of female lace, frilly clothing, and all things that tied, we shambled on through the colorful commerce toward nature, or what was left of it down near the Harbor.

We found ourselves noses to Plexiglas at the outdoor tank of the Boston Aquarium, attempting to make “Hoover,” the great bull seal and for us the aquarium’s main attraction, speak. Hoover was a character: After diving and holding his breath, he'd release spiral swirls of air bubbles like rustling aquatic theater curtains, building suspense for the performance just to come.

Then, he would emerge and bellow such gems as “urgh-urgh-urgh hell-hell-Hell-HELLO How AH ya?” or “Guh-guh-guh-GUH-GUH-GUH-GEHT-outta-HEAH.”

This time, however, although we would dearly have loved to have seen the best free show in town, the talking seal, despite our loud imprecations, did not respond, preferring apparently to wait for a larger audience or to slumber amid his substantial and slippery harem.

Our efforts did not go unnoticed, however. A drunk upon his bench awoke from his slumber. “Hey-ya,” he yelled, “get offa ThEAH!"

While Hoover got his Boston accent not from that drunk who slept on a bench near his tank, but from the Swallows, the Maine couple who named him for his vacuum-like capacity to down fish—and then, when he grew too big, gave him to the Boston Aquarium—there was something enchantingly kindred about him—so much so that he received a human-style obituary from The Boston Globe.

With such intelligent mammals in the oceans that cover two-thirds of this watery orb we land animals have christened Earth, I wonder why, for the first time in 24 years, The International Whaling Commission has found it necessary to attempt to roll back the ban on commercial whale hunting. Even the hunters of whales realize they are tempting fate.  Moby-Dick tells us of the Nantucket legends of the first indigenous harpooners, rowing toward the legless Leviathans of the deep. By Melville's time, the industry had become both lucrative and romantic, attracting young men from across the continent to the urbane port of New Bedford, then a most cosmopolitan city itself coursing—with a questionable captain—through the greater ocean of space. Before setting off Ishmael takes in a sermon for sailors delivered by an ex-harpooner priest. As he listens the wood of the pulpit reminds him of the prow of a ship:

Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth; and "vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;" when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten—his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean—Jonah did the Almighty's bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!

And in guiding the young mariners, Father Mapple, the ex-harpooner cleric, seems himself to lose his moorings: “He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with his hands, and so remained, kneeling, till all the people had departed, and he was left alone in the place.”  

Unlike our oceangoing legless cousins, we landlubbers are good at killing with our hands. Before their smiling visages became a fixture at Sea World and on the face of Flipper in the '60s TV show, dolphins were disparaged as “herring hogs” for their tendency to rob fishermen's nets. Sea mammals were hunted for lamp oil, for meat, and for “superior lubricant for precision timepieces.” While alive they could be feared but in the main they were treated as resources, not beings.  A member of the “toothed whales” (odontoceti), which also include narwhals (Melville's "sea unicorns," which have big tusk-like teeth jutting out of their foreheads) and beluga whales, in the suborder Delphinidae, which also includes “killer whales” (or “orca”), and beaked and pilot whales, dolphins—largely due to the militarily funded, brilliantly creative, and somewhat unhinged researcher John Cunningham Lilly in the '60s—came to captivate the human imagination.  

Great Blue Whale

I have a very early memory of being with my father, Carl Sagan, who was trying to talk to a dolphin as another man walked about. It was probably Lilly.

My mother, Lynn Margulis, who would have been divorced from my father at the time, suspects I did meet Lilly, although not in the Virgin Islands at his main lab, but in Boston or Cambridge or in Florida. She herself met Lilly once through my father and instantly thought Lilly was “clever and self-centered, much like Timothy Leary.”

In his biography, William Poundstone writes of how my father, at a restaurant with Lilly, asked their pretty waitress out. Although she declined, she agreed to one of Lilly's crazy experiments, sharing a special flooded living quarters with a dolphin—who happened to be one of the five who played Flipper on the TV show.  

Apparently Flipper had needs. (He was not alone; according to Princeton University's D. Graham Burnett, these “powerful sea mammals with fixed grins [who] now and again ...rake, butt, and sodomize each other...have presented challenges to their keepers from the earliest days of captivity.") The waitress-cum-interspecies-experimental-subject found herself following a path of least resistance that included acquiescing to the relentless sexual advances of Flipper, satisfying him with her hand. The dolphin was not, according to Poundstone, so lucky with my father, who in turn rebuffed the TV star.

Perhaps dolphins are not as smart, noble, or linguistic as we'd like to project. Dolphins, Burnett says, “though they can jump almost twenty feet in the air...very rarely sort out how easy it would be to roll over the top of an encircling trap.” But is it not also true, as the recent British Petroleum Earth Day oil spill suggests, that we are also in a kind of trap, one not confined to a little net in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but extending across all the continents and the seven seas, into the groundwater and the atmosphere, a trap that may spell the demise of ourselves as well as the dolphins and whales we cavalierly kill?  

Cosmologist Stephen Hawking has recently blitzed the media with warnings that aliens not only probably exist, but when they find us they'll probably want to eat us. To me this also sounds like projection. Coming here for food is not like the harpooners setting sail to procure whale oil. Interstellar spaces are far greater, and the proteinaceous rewards far more meager. Distant aliens coming here makes about as much sense as flying a supersonic jet to Morocco for a garbanzo bean.

Physicist Michio Kaku counters Hawking's surmise that aliens may prove to be as destructive as Columbus and company when they wiped out Native American populations. If aliens arrived, he opines, it might be more like the United States experience during the Vietnam War, with the aliens wanting to get out ASAP.

To me, Hawking's Columbus and Kaku's “Vietnam” scenarios seem, to quote Nietzsche, all too human. They relate our hypothetical meeting with aliens to other examples of human encounters within the history of our own dangerously self-absorbed species. Indeed, Hawking, bless his cosmic book-selling heart (In an interview on Larry King Live, he told King it was nice to see him after these ten years and closed by saying he hoped to see him again when his book came out), advised Larry that the invaders will “have a mouth opening because they will have to take in nutrition ...and they will probably have legs because they will need to move around, and they will have eyes—but don't expect them to look like Marilyn Monroe.”  Whew—that would be scary—being eaten by an army of Marilyn Monroes from outer space!

Seriously, though, what is this obsession with hypothetical aliens when we are living among some of the most fascinating sentient beings in the universe and have only barely begun to establish contact with them?

What does it mean to communicate with an “alien” when we barely have the first idea of how to understand the intricacies of rain forest plant communications, nuclei-trading mycelial networks, and ultraviolet light-detecting superorganisms of bees, let alone the conscious or unconscious minds of a humpback, great blue or white whale—whose mathematical, philosophical, aesthetic and perceptual abilities may—for all we know—far outstrip those of our greatest geniuses (whose intelligences we also don't judge by their skill in bloodshed)?

In Basel in 2008 at a conference ethnopharmacologist Dennis McKenna characterized psychedelic drugs as “molecular messages sent by Gaia” one of whose messages is that we—like monkeys excitedly trading glowing bits of a mysterious crashed starship found in a jungle—are not so smart. Indeed: why should we worry about hypothetical interspecies communication (even Hawking says intelligent aliens are unlikely to exist within 100 light-years or we would have detected them already) when we do not even understand the local “starship” of our own fellow species?

Burnett may be right that dolphins are not that smart. But we may not be that smart either. Nonetheless, if brain size has anything to do with it, some individual whales may be far smarter than individual human beings. Considering how much extra intelligence goes on beyond the level of conscious rational awareness—in our immune system, in our physiology, and in our intuitions—it's almost overwhelming to consider the capacity of a white or blue whale's unconscious mind. Despite their size (which you'd think would make them easy for our scientific sleuths to track), these animals—the biggest ever in evolution, weighing 200 tons each, the hearts as big as a car, their brains ten times more voluminous than ours—we do not even know where the blue whales go to breed.

If such whales with whom we share this oceanic planet remain deeply mysterious, intelligent aliens in our midst, the same may also be true of a far larger being, even closer to us. I speak of the planetary biosphere of which we humans seem to be minute parts, not unlike some of the cells of our own bodies which, if they are sentient, which some may well be, likely have zero conception of the coffee-sipping, car-driving wholes of which they are part.

Fossil and mass spectrometric evidence strongly suggests that Gaia—visionary scientist James Lovelock's name for this systemic, cybernetic, intelligent-acting nexus of life forms at Earth's surface taken as a physiological whole—regulates the chemistry and temperature of our planet's surface in the unconscious manner of a living being. Whales are fellow mammals with whose sentience we can empathize, even if we can't understand them or they us. But, conscious or not, the living biosphere appears to be a far bigger fish, so to speak, one whose existence we've barely divined.

If we are to worry, we should worry about this complex beast of a planet with whose vast, mostly unconscious living intelligence we have been seriously meddling.  Compared to the possible actions, which may soon be visited on us by this leviathan, the alien of which we are a metastatic part, the concerns voiced by our charismatic physicists are distracting at best, irresponsible at worst.

The media-grabbing headlines about being detected and eaten by distant aliens seem histrionically misplaced. The cosmological worrywarts are not providing a public service so much as displacing our local guilt over degrading and killing off whole species of our own very real and close fellows. I'm not laughing, and I signed the petition to keep alive the ban on whale hunting. But it would be a rather fitting bit of cosmic irony if this giant intelligence, this greater leviathan of which we are part, this Brobdingnagaian body we are feeding on, this living surface of Earth whose physiological abilities still remain unknown and thus in a sense alien to the majority of people on Earth, itself turns out to have an immune-like system capable of regulating us out of existence, and does so, without us ever having truly established communication with it, while we twitter on about the man-eaters in the stars.

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