Walking
past the open door of a writer's workshop that was held this spring at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, much of the conversation was of the sort you might expect
from any other group of students honing their craft as creative writers. They
pondered which aspects of the human condition are most important to convey
through their art. They examined their motivations for writing. And
continually, they struggled to make themselves understood by readers who may be
very different from themselves. But there is a critical difference from other
creative writing classes. The intended audience for this class — if it exists
at all — lives on a planet circling a distant star.
Each
Wednesday at 2:10 p.m., at the west edge of campus in a spacious, modern, and
nondescript room on the first floor of the aptly-named Classroom Building, these young writers began a three-hour session pondering their craft in a course the registrar's
office listed as "English 5560. Writing for an Extraterrestrial Audience."
From the first day of class, students were asked to contemplate what they would
say as part of a team responsible for sending a message to intelligent life on
other worlds. As if that's not hard enough, "each piece should 'stand alone'
for reading and appreciation by a terrestrial audience," said Jeffrey
Lockwood, the instructor of the class.
In late
September 2008, Lockwood will join leading scientists in the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) for the "Searching
for Life Signatures" conference, to be held at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. In his paper scheduled for the session "Historical, Philosophical and
Sociological Aspects of SETI," Lockwood will suggest that SETI scientists
can learn some serious lessons in interstellar
message composition by examining the work of his students.
Letters
to ET
For their
first in-class assignment, each student wrote a brief "letter to ET."
Some messages were similar in spirit to the pictures of a man and woman engraved
into the metal plaques borne by two Pioneer spacecraft that now drift aimlessly
through interstellar space. Christine Ingoglia, a graduate student who entered
the university's Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program in creative writing in the
Fall of 2007, started with a basic description of our appearance: "We look
like — two arms, two legs, head, torso, symmetrical." Similarly, fellow
MFA student Meagan Ciesla's summary — "We need food, air, water, and think
we're the most intelligent" — was reminiscent of a message transmitted
from the Arecibo
radio telescope in 1974, which described the chemical basis of life on
Earth, and showed a picture of only one terrestrial species: Homo sapiens.
Other
messages penned that first day of class in Laramie were more philosophical. "We
are an adolescent species searching for our identity," wrote Ann Stebner,
a senior English major completing a minor in Environmental Values. "We
know our species' origins," wrote senior psychology major Dana Rinne, "but
we fear individual deaths." Rinne, who plans to do graduate work in social
psychology or cognitive psychology, described the course as an opportunity to
contemplate the intersection of philosophy, science, and mind.
Grasshopper
Dreaming
As Jeffrey
Lockwood was completing his Ph.D. in entomology at Louisiana State University in 1985, there was little to predict he would today be trying to express the
human condition to aliens. After completing a dissertation on the behavioral
ecology of Nezara viridula, more commonly known as the southern green
stink bug, he joined the University of Wyoming's Department of Renewable
Resources as an entomologist. Two decades later, Lockwood is Professor of
Natural Sciences and Humanities, and he teaches in both the Department of
Philosophy and the MFA Program in Creative Writing.
Many of
Lockwood's writings betray his background as an entomologist even by their
titles, such as his recent book Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious
Disappearance of the Insect That Shaped the American Frontier. Other works,
such as his book Grasshopper Dreaming: Reflections on Killing and Loving,
suggest his scholarly concerns are broader than those of many scientists. And
so, on the days this past spring when he was not encouraging students to ponder
celestial audiences, he could be found teaching a philosophy course in
ecofeminism, looking for new approaches to environmental ethics.
Where
the Buffalo Roam
One is
reminded constantly that this campus in a town with a population of 27,000 — about
half of them students — is in a large state with a sparse population. One native
Wyoming
student in this writer's workshop, for example, attended high school in a
one-room schoolhouse located a hundred miles from the nearest town. There were
only two other students in that rural schoolhouse: her siblings.
Another
member of the class, running a few minutes behind schedule on the day of my
visit, explained that the battery on her tractor was dead that morning. She
apologized, saying it took her longer than usual that day to feed her buffalo
before coming to campus.
It seems
only fitting, then, that this university with the motto "New Thinking,"
located a two-hour drive from the nearest large city, provided the weekly
gathering place for a dozen inquisitive students and one innovative instructor
to ponder whether the vast expanses of space beyond Earth could also provide a home
for creative writers, and if so, what we should tell them in our first messages.
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