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.Or on purpose.The ansible rings, and Cain takes the call.More accurately, the call takesitself to him, and turns out to be irritatingly argumentative.He bangs onthe wall of Abel s chamber until his currently liquid friend siphons out,warms up, and becomes his usual gaseous-solid self. I was having a reallynice bath, Abel protests. Why did you have to interrup Because See, you re doing it ag Shut up.We ve got trouble.The Prospectus. It s been a failure? Worse.It s been a huge success. Oh, no. Headquarters wants us to do a series.Ten million volumes.Abel dissolves into gibbering turbulent vortices, then pulls himselftogether. We don t have time to visit ten million habitats, Cain.Let alonedescribe them.Cain has coiled into a morose helix, legs tucked away inside to stophimself chewing them in distress.(He is now convinced that three have goneastray.probably that annoying little Fomalhautese.) Suddenly, Abelexpands to three times his normal volume. I know! We can recycle! Cainremains unenlightened and Abel explains his idea. We keep the samestructure for all of the Prospecti, and just change the names.There are onlyso many different ways for lifeforms to work, after all.276 THE UNIVERSALITY OF EXTELLIGENCE A lot more ways than ten million, Abel.Think again. No, I don t mean parochial differences, we can steal those from publicsources, rip off a few macros from the newscasters.easy.What I mean is,if we write one master version in terms of generalities, then there has to bea way to specialise it to a mere ten million instances. He rushes off to try theidea out.Cain is left wondering how the Earth Prospectus can be modified todeal with magnetic creatures in the photospheres of stars.But he suspectsthat Abel is right: there has to be a way.It would be wonderful to find solid evidence of alien life, even if it wasjust at the level of bacteria.We would learn a lot about our place in theuniverse, and about our own likely origins.It would be far morewonderful, though, to make contact with intelligent aliens.Unless, ofcourse, they are like those in Independence Day, who equate contactwith conquest.Intelligence alone, however, is not the true Holy Grailhere.Many creatures on this planet are intelligent.The reallyinteresting developments arise when an intelligent species starts tobecome extelligent: when it can store its cultural capital independentlyof individual minds, and that store becomes available for all (or, at least,many) individuals to use and to contribute to.It is extelligence that hasgiven humanity its literature, philosophy, economics, science, andtechnology.We invented the term in Figments of Reality, and its use hasspread.It is not the same as culture.So, if we want to bandy ideas about the nature of the universe or theprice of CDs with an alien, then we d better choose an extelligent alien.If extelligence is a parochial, that could be difficult: we could be the soleextelligent species in the galaxy.But if extelligence is a universal, theremust be extelligent aliens out there, somewhere.Which brings us to thecentral question of xenoscience: is extelligence a universal or aparochial? Until now, we have merely asserted that extelligence is auniversal, and assumed that it is without further discussion, but now weneed to justify that assertion.We ve faced similar problems before: let s review how we handledthem.We used a particular technique to establish the kind of biologythat we are likely to find in other evolutionary systems.We identifiedcertain innovations in terrestrial evolution, and we showed that these277 WHAT DOES A MARTIAN LOOK LIKE?could be considered as universals if they had happened many timesindependently; we labelled them as parochials if we found them onlyonce.We also devised a more general theoretical test for universality: ageneric trick offering a clear evolutionary advantage.Universals arethings that we would expect to see in any re-run of Earth s evolution,but they would be associated with differently structured organisms thesecond time round.We would also expect to find them in alienevolutions especially those sharing much commonality with our own,such as carbon-based life on an aqueous planet.In contrast, we wouldnot expect to see any of our parochials in alien evolutionary stories.Nevertheless, we can appeal to parochials to give some validity toalien invention, provided those parochials are instances of universals.So we used Xenopus, the frog with nasty habits , to validate Niven andPournelle s grendels, and we used the male egg-pouch of the seahorseto validate part of the Yilané s reproductive strategy.In that sense weexpanded the parochial example into a generalisation, which opened upa phase space of possibilities, from which we chose invented an alienexample.Xenopus generalised to a biological transformer thattransduces offspring into parent with no intermediate.Earlier, weexpanded the Earth-salmon example into the generalisation biologicaltransformer (the other way round) transducing through anotherspecies , and then invented the slamen at the core-mantle boundary.Universals tell us what kinds of innovation to expect photosynthesis,penises, skeletons, antibiotic secretion (and therefore antibioticresistance) but we have to be imaginative to deduce anything aboutaliens from Earthly parochials
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