Extraterrestrial Civilizations by Isaac Asimov Read Free Book Online Page A

across the line into the region of no evidence at all I will not do.
    Therefore,
until evidence to the contrary is forthcoming
, I must conclude that, on the basis of what we know of life (admittedly limited), a world without liquid is a world without life. Insofar then as the Moon seems to be a world without liquid, the Moon would seem to be a world without life.
    We might be more cautious and say that a world without liquid is a world without life-as-we-know-it. It would be tiresome, however, to repeat the phrase constantly, and I will say it only now and then to make sure you don’t forget that that is what I mean. In between, please take it for granted that in this book I am speaking of life-as-we-know-it, whenever I speak of life. Please remember also that there is not one scrap of evidence, however faint or indirect, that speaks for the existence of life-not-as-we-know-it.
    Even now, we may be rushing to a conclusion too rapidly. The astronomers at their early telescopes could see clearly that there was no water on the Moon in the sense that there were no seas, great lakes, or mighty rivers. As telescopes continued to improve, no sign of “free water” on the surface ever showed up.
    Yet might there not be water present in minor quantities, in small pools or bogs in the shadow of crater walls, in underground rivers and seepages, or even just in loose chemical combination with the molecules making up the Moon’s solid surface?
    Such water would surely not be observable through a telescope, and yet it might be enough to support life.
    Yes, it might—but if life had its origin through chemical reactions taking place randomly (and we will discuss this in a later chapter), then the larger the volume in which those random processes take place, the greater the chance that they would finally succeed in producing something as complicated as life. Furthermore, the larger the volume in which the process took place, the more room there would be for the kind of prodigal outpouring of death and replacement that serves as the power drive for the random process of evolution.
    Where only small quantities of water exist, the formation of life becomes very unlikely; and if it does form, its evolution is very slow. It simply passes the bounds of likelihood that there would be time and opportunity for a complex life form to form and flourish, certainly not one complex enough to develop intelligence and a technological civilization.
    Consequently, even if we admit the presence of water in quantities not visible through the telescope, we can at best postulate only very simple life. There is no way in which we can imagine the Moon to be the home of extraterrestrial intelligence—assuming it has always been as it is now.
MOON HOAX
    Again I say that it is
not
the concept of extraterrestrial intelligence that is hard to grasp. It is the reverse notion that meets with resistance. Telescopic evidence (in the Moon’s case) to the contrary, it remained hard to imagine dead worlds.
    In 1686, the French writer Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) wrote
Conversations on the Plurality of the Worlds
, in which he speculated charmingly on life on each of the then known planets from Mercury to Saturn.
    And though the case of life on the Moon was already dubious in Fontenelle’s time and grew steadily more dubious, it proved quite possible to hoodwink the general public with tales of intelligent life on the Moon as late as 1835. That was the year of the “Moon Hoax.”
    This took place in the columns of a newly established newspaper,
The New York Sun
, which was eager to attract attention and win readers. It hired Richard Adams Locke (1800–1871), an author who had arrived in the United States three years before from his native England, to write essays for them.
    Locke was interested in the possibility of life on other worlds and had even tried his hand at science fiction in that connection. Now it occurred to him to write a little science