“THE ANTHROPOMORPHIC PROBLEM”

“Seriously,” Norman said, “I think somebody has to ask the question: should we consider not opening it up?”

“Why?” Barnes said. “Listen, I just got off the phone-”

“-I know,” Norman said. “But maybe we should think twice about this.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tina nodding vigorously. Harry looked skeptical. Beth rubbed her eyes, sleepy.

“Are you afraid, or do you have a substantive argument?” Barnes said.

“I have the feeling,” Harry said, “that Norman’s about to quote from his own work.”

“Well, yes,” Norman admitted. “I did put this in my report.”

In his report, he had called it “the Anthropomorphic Problem.” Basically, the problem was that everybody who had ever thought or written about extraterrestrial life imagined that life as essentially human. Even if the extraterrestrial life didn’t look human-if it was a reptile, or a big insect, or an intelligent crystal-it still acted in a human way. “You’re talking about the movies,” Barnes said.

“I’m talking about research papers, too. Every conception of extraterrestrial life, whether by a movie maker or a university professor, has been basically human-assuming human values, human understanding, human ways of approaching a humanly understandable universe. And generally a human appearance-two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and so on.”

“So?”

“So,” Norman said, “that’s obviously nonsense. For one thing, there’s enough variation in human behavior to make understanding just within our own species very troublesome. The differences between, say, Americans and Japanese are very great. Americans and Japanese don’t really look at the world the same way at all.”

“Yes, yes,” Barnes said impatiently. “We all know the Japanese are different-”

“-And when you come to a new life form, the differences may be literally incomprehensible. The values and ethics of this new form of life may be utterly different.”

“You mean it may not believe in the sanctity of life, or ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ ” Barnes said, still impatient.

“No,” Norman said. “I mean that this creature may not be able to be killed, and so it may have no concept of killing in the first place.”

Barnes stopped. “This creature may not be able to be killed?”

Norman nodded. “As someone once said, you can’t break the arms of a creature that has no arms.”

“It can’t be killed? You mean it’s immortal?”

“I don’t know,” Norman said. “That’s the point.”

“I mean, Jesus, a thing that couldn’t be killed,” Barnes said. “How would we kill it?” He bit his lip. “I wouldn’t like to open that sphere and release a thing that couldn’t be killed.”

Harry laughed. “No promotions for that one, Hal.” Barnes looked at the monitors, showing several views of the polished sphere. Finally he said, “No, that’s ridiculous. No living thing is immortal. Am I right, Beth?”

“Actually, no,” Beth said. “You could argue that certain living creatures on our own planet are immortal. For example, single-celled organisms like bacteria and yeasts are apparently capable of living indefinitely.”

“Yeasts.” Barnes snorted. “We’re not talking about yeasts.”

“And to all intents and purposes a virus could be considered immortal.”

“A virus?” Barnes sat down in a chair. He hadn’t considered a virus. “But how likely is it, really? Harry?”

“I think,” Harry said, “that the possibilities go far beyond what we’ve mentioned so far. We’ve only considered threedimensional creatures, of the kind that exist in our threedimensional universe-or, to be more precise, the universe that we perceive as having three dimensions. Some people think our universe has nine or eleven dimensions.”

Barnes looked tired.

“Except the other six dimensions are very small, so we don’t notice them.”

Barnes rubbed his eyes.

“Therefore this creature,” Harry continued, “may be multidimensional, so that it literally does not exist-at least not entirely-in our usual three dimensions. To take the simplest case, if it were a four-dimensional creature, we would only see part of it at any time, because most of the creature would exist in the fourth dimension. That would obviously make it difficult to kill. And if it were a five-dimensional creature-”

“-Just a minute. Why haven’t any of you mentioned this before?”

“We thought you knew,” Harry said.

“Knew about five-dimensional creatures that can’t be killed? Nobody said a word to me.” He shook his head. “Opening this sphere could be incredibly dangerous.”

“It could, yes.”

“What we have here is, we have Pandora’s box.”

“That’s right.”

“Well,” Barnes said. “Let’s consider worst cases. What’s the worst case for what we might find?”

Beth said, “I think that’s clear. Irrespective of whether it’s a multidimensional creature or a virus or whatever, irrespective of whether it shares our morals or has no morals at all, the worst case is that it hits us below the belt.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that it behaves in a way that interferes with our basic life mechanisms. A good example is the AIDS virus. The reason why AIDS is so dangerous is not that it’s new. We get new viruses every year-every week. And all viruses work in the same way: they attack cells and convert the machinery of the cells to make more viruses. What makes the AIDS virus dangerous is, it attacks the specific cells that we use to defend against viruses. AIDS interferes with our basic defense mechanism. And we have no defense against it.”

“Well,” Barnes said, “if this sphere contains a creature that interferes with our basic mechanisms-what would that creature be like?”

“It could breathe in air and exhale cyanide gas,” Beth said. “It could excrete radioactive waste,” Harry said.

“It could disrupt our brain waves,” Norman said. “Interfere with our ability to think.”

“Or,” Beth said, “it might merely disrupt cardiac conduction. Stop our hearts from beating.”

“It might produce a sound vibration that would resonate in our skeletal system and shatter our bones,” Harry said. He smiled at the others. “I rather like that one.”

“Clever,” Beth said. “But, as usual, we’re only thinking of ourselves. The creature might do nothing directly harmful to us at all.”

“Ah,” Barnes said.

“It might simply exhale a toxin that kills chloroplasts, so that plants could no longer convert sunlight. Then all the plants on Earth would die-and consequently all life on Earth would die.”

“Ah,” Barnes said.

“You see,” Norman said, “at first I thought the Anthropomorphic Problem-the fact that we can only conceive of extraterrestrial life as basically human-I thought it was a failure of imagination. Man is man, all he knows is man, and all he can think of is what he knows. Yet, as you can see, that’s not true. We can think of plenty of other things. But we don’t. So there must be another reason why we only conceive of extraterrestrials as humans. And I think the answer is that we are, in reality, terribly frail animals. And we don’t like to be reminded of how frail we are-how delicate the balances are inside our own bodies, how short our stay on Earth, and how easily it is ended. So we imagine other life forms as being like us, so we don’t have to think of the real threat-the terrifying threat-they may represent, without ever intending to.”

There was a silence.

“Of course, we mustn’t forget another possibility,” Bames said. “It may be that the sphere contains some extraordinary benefit to us. Some wondrous new knowledge, some astonishing new idea or new technology which will improve the condition of mankind beyond our wildest dreams.”

“Although the chances are,” Harry said, “that there won’t be any new idea that is useful to us.”

“Why?” Barnes said.

“Well, let’s say that the aliens are a thousand years ahead of us, just as we are relative to, say, medieval Europe. Suppose you went back to medieval Europe with a television set? There wouldn’t be any place to plug it in.”