Ferris makes his case about life ... somewhere out there
By John Rogers, Associated Press writer
There's a "Saturday Night Live" gag going back more than 20 years that still makes Timothy Ferris chuckle. It seems those crazy Voyager folks put a bunch of Earth music on a record in 1977 and blasted it into outer space hoping that someone would be listening. "Everything from Beethoven to Chuck Berry" was included, the story goes, and almost immediately it raised a reply in Martian-speak. When the folks at NASA finally translated it, it said: "Send more Chuck Berry!" That's the kind of attitude Timothy Ferris hopes people who see his new two-hour PBS documentary, "Life Beyond Earth," might have. Playful, irreverent and open to the possibility that maybe there are a few Chuck Berry fans out there, just waiting for a recording of "Johnny B. Goode" to float by. "What I'm always most interested in doing in a film like this is in reaching people who don't think of themselves as interested in science," says Ferris, who produced the Voyager spacecraft record that "SNL" spoofed. "It's most gratifying when you can find someone who isn't interested in science and take them down a path of learning." It's the same path his parents took their 12-year-old son down in 1956 when they bought a $32 telescope and sent him out to the back yard with it. "It was a terrible telescope," he remembers with a laugh. "No one could see anything through it except me and I couldn't see all that much. To change powers you had to take the eyepiece apart." Still, when he saw Mars through the thing, he was hooked. "Astronomy is kind of an amazing pursuit," he muses all these years later. "It became the central interest of my life, I guess." So much so that the University of California, Berkeley, professor emeritus and former writer and editor for Rolling Stone magazine has written nine books on the subject, including, "Coming of Age in the Milky Way," which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In 1985 he released the PBS documentary, "The Creation of the Universe." His latest film, airing on PBS stations from 8 to 10 tonight, divides its subject matter into two parts. The first, somewhat slower hour looks at how life evolved on Earth, setting the stage for the second half, in which Ferris and others take up the idea that if intelligent life could develop here, then why wouldn't it develop somewhere else? Not everyone, of course, agrees. So to shoot down his critics' contention that if intelligent life forms really were out there they would have dropped in and said hello by now, Ferris at one point during the film dons a tux and sits down to a candlelight lobster dinner. The only thing missing is the lobster. But he's sure, he says, that if one is out there it will walk through the door sooner or later. When it doesn't, he still refuses to concede that it doesn't exist. "Lobster have their own agenda," he tells the viewer. "They don't want to come to my house. "I have an opinion, which is that life is abundant in the universe and that intelligent life is abundant as well," he says in a phone interview. "Of course my opinion is worth no more than anyone else's. What I'm optimistic of is that we're now really entering a period where it will be possible to replace these opinions with facts." Only recently, he notes, has science discovered there are stars out there that have their own planets, just like our sun. "That's a case of moving from an assumption to something that is inevitable," he says. "But we cannot yet take a picture of any of those planets." What's more, he says, we aren't close to having the rocket power to travel the distances required to visit them. And perhaps neither do the life forms that may occupy them. "That would take enormous time and expense," he says. So the best hope of finding someone out there, he concludes, is by sending out radio messages, something the Earth has only been doing for about a century. Add on a few more centuries, he says, and those messages might finally begin to reach somebody who will reply. So when we finally find life in another galaxy we won't be communicating with it face-to-face but in some form closer to a telephone conversation. "I don't know if there will ever be a lot of handshakes," Ferris says seriously. Then he adds playfully: "Maybe that's not bad. Especially when you're dealing with someone who has 14 tentacles for hands." Photo by The Associated Press
Timothy Ferris poses beside the Porsche he drives across the Utah desert on a road sectioned to represent the 5 billion years of the Earth's life in "Life Beyond Earth."