Rendezvous With Gentry Lee

When I sat down with legendary scientist, NASA engineer, and sci-fi author Gentry Lee in a crowded Austin hotel lobby, I had one question for him: Are we alone in the universe?

It’s a question that he has spent most of his career entertaining in some form or another, and almost two hours interrogating in the new documentary Starman, which premiered at the SXSW Film & TV Festival last weekend. So naturally, I don’t expect him to have a ready-made answer when I pose the question to him. And sure enough, he looks a little perplexed when this is how I begin our interview.

“You want to know the answer to the question?” Lee asks. But suddenly, a glimmer appears in his eyes, and the most energetic 82-year-old I’ve ever met launches into the first of many spirited rambles that make up our 22-minute conversation.

“First of all, as of this moment, there exists no incontrovertible evidence that life exists anywhere else in the universe except on the planet Earth,” Lee says. “That's on this side. However, there are at least a billion planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone. And the idea that not a single one of them has produced life seems very, very difficult to accept. So from my point of view, when people ask me, I say, ‘First, as of this day, we don't know of any. Secondly, I believe that it exists somewhere.’”

“If we encounter extraterrestrials who are advanced, it won't matter if they're malevolent or benevolent because they will be so far advanced beyond us.”

It’s a statement not unlike what Lee says for much of Starman, a documentary directed by Robert Stone which chronicles Lee’s life and career. Starting off with the momentous moon landing in 1969, the documentary follows the space race via Lee’s incredible career, from his time as the chief engineer on the Galileo mission, to his work on the Mars rovers, to his collaboration with Carl Sagan on Cosmos, and his friendship and work with legendary sci-fi author, Arthur C. Clarke. Lee is subject, tour guide, and friendly face in Starman, and he feels exactly the same in real life. Any anxiety I had about sitting down with a legend in both the fields of space science and science-fiction dissipated as soon as Lee started talking excitedly about space — it was like speaking with a friendly professor who only wanted to teach you everything he knew. A professor who likes to name-drop his friend Arthur C. Clarke more than once in conversation.

“My colleague Arthur C. Clarke made the statement, ‘If we encounter extraterrestrials, it is likely that their technology will be indistinguishable from magic,’” Lee says. “And why? I tell people all the time, ‘If we encounter extraterrestrials who are advanced, it won't matter if they're malevolent or benevolent because they will be so far advanced beyond us... We are infants.”

Inverse spoke with Lee about Starman, his thoughts on Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama getting the Hollywood treatment, and whether he does find the answer to whether we’re alone in the universe.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

This documentary chronicles your career as both an engineer and a sci-fi author while following up with that question of whether extraterrestrial life exists. Was that actually a question that followed you throughout your life, or was it a coincidence?

As soon as I had big thoughts ... maybe 13, 14, I realized that this one was way, way up there. I was not like Carl Sagan who said that when he was age 12, he knew what he was going to do. I am a certified knowledge junkie. He can attest to that. I love learning. In fact, one of the characters in the Rama books when asked, "What are the most important things in life?" says, "Two things, learning and loving. That's what life is all about." And that to me is what life is. You got to realize historically, we are the only generation that will ever explore the solar system for the first time. When I was your age, we knew almost nothing about the solar system.

And look at all the things we know now. It's staggering. It's equal to, or perhaps even greater, than the age of exploration started by Henry the Navigator in Portugal that led to the discovery of the new world. And now after we finished exploring the solar system, there's going to be a long pause because the nearest star is four light years away. Now, if you don't know how far a light year is, it's 6 trillion miles. And so with our technology today, to get to another star, it takes 10,000 years.

So, we're living in a very special time. And all these new discoveries, what they do is they help us to understand who we are in context. When you grow up, most of the time you're associated with your family and your neighborhood and things like that. And at some moment in life you have an epiphany and you say, "Oh, there's my state, my country, the Earth, the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, and so forth."

“I think the biggest prediction that comes from science fiction that's really important is the relative status of us in the universe.”

The documentary goes into your partnership with Arthur C. Clarke. I want to ask about the old question of whether sci-fi can predict the future. We've seen some of these things come to pass with technology that has been reflected in sci-fi, like Star Trek. Is there stuff that you and Clarke believed what is this now, but hasn't panned out?

Well, Arthur and I used to have conversations about what we thought might happen. I'm going to tell you something — we never predicted email and smartphones, which have revolutionized our lives. He did suggest that we would have watches at one point that we'd be able to communicate with other people, but nothing like what that is.

I think the biggest prediction that comes from science fiction that's really important is the relative status of us in the universe. Our thinking is all homocentric. It's all about human beings. And incidentally, one of the things that relieves you to appreciate the Earth is recognizing there's all kinds of life on the Earth. One of my favorites, I have all these avocations he knows about, are octopuses. Octopuses are brilliant. They have multiple brains. And the reason they're more important than elephants and dolphins is that they split off from us in the evolutionary tree 800 million years ago. So if you were to try to imagine what an extraterrestrial intelligence might be like, don't look at elephants, don't look at chimpanzees, they're too much like us. Look at octopuses.

What do you make of the fact that we've explored more of space than we've explored of the deep seas?

I think that there are many reasons for that. If Sylvia Earle were here, she would say we're going to get there. But it's very, very difficult to explore the bottom of the ocean just as it's very, very difficult to explore space. And I think that when human beings start realizing how everything on this planet is related to every other thing on the planet ... I'm a system engineer, and a system engineer incidentally knows how everything is related to everything else. And I think there will be major activities to explore the oceans and understand it.

Back to the Arthur C. Clarke question and you about technology and what sci-fi has predicted, what would Clarke write about? What would you write about?

Well, when Arthur and I started writing together, the first thing we said is we are going to not write fantasy. I'm going to define some things for you. There's plausible, not implausible, and implausible. Fantasy is implausible. Star Wars is a perfect example of implausible. The laws of physics are violated at every turn. So we agreed, Arthur and I, that we would write not implausible. In other words, it didn't have to be completely plausible, it just had to be no one could prove that it couldn't be. And that's why if you read the Rama books, you'll see that there are a lot of extraterrestrials in there and then we delve into where they came from. Now people have said to me, "Well, don't you think that that was close to fantasy?"

I said, "Okay. You have to realize that not implausible does not mean that you suspend your imagination. You just have to say, is it possible? And if it's possible, that's true." Now, the place that Arthur made his biggest mistake was imagining human beings leaving the Earth and traveling outside into the solar system. If you recall, he has human beings in [2001: A Space Odyssey] already heading out for Jupiter and in later things, they're already way out there. I do not believe that human beings will even be on Mars in your lifetime.

Why? I'm an engineer. I can give you a whole bunch of reasons about how difficult it is. Mars is not a hospitable place. It's a long way away. Anybody who ever goes there has to have a round trip that's at least in the years. And you have to live in a little place about the size of this for that whole time. And as you may be seeing already, some of our astronauts just up in orbit around the Earth are having biological problems when they're coming down. And somebody said, "What do you think is the biggest thing against sending humans to Mars?" I said, "Biology."

You talk about the realities of space travel in space versus how it's depicted in Hollywood at some point in the documentary. You talk about Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival as being one of the most realistic depictions of how extraterrestrials would actually appear to us. Do you believe pop culture has attained a better understanding of space science in the years in your whole career since Space Odyssey to now?

Okay. I try to employ a modified thumper policy, and that means I try not to say bad things about anything. But Hollywood directors are generally scientifically illiterate and they do not know what can happen and what can't. I'll give you a perfect example. There was a movie made called Armageddon where there was an asteroid the size of Texas and they were going to blow it up with one hydrogen bomb. It would require a million hydrogen bombs to blow up an asteroid the size of Texas.

Then the other thing is that there is a fondness in Hollywood of depicting extraterrestrials that look like the Pillsbury Doughboy. The reason I thought that Denis Villeneuve did such a great job with Arrival is that those extraterrestrials in appearance and in language were completely outside our kin. The probability that any extraterrestrial that we ever encounter will look anything like us at all is almost zero.

Speaking of Denis Villeneuve, he is in talks to adapt Rendezvous with Rama. You’ve been a part of the Rama franchise, as you helped co-write the sequels with Arthur C. Clarke. Do you have any thoughts on Denis taking on something that's obviously very dear to your heart?

Well, it's been quite a while since he announced that he was going to take it on. And he's been sidetracked by doing more Dunes.

In fact, just last month in December, I was having a conversation with Morgan Freeman about the Rendezvous with Rama. In case you don't know, Morgan Freeman owns the rights to the Rendezvous with Rama movie. But he and I were talking about how long is this going to happen? Morgan started buying an option 20 years ago. I said, "Morgan, when you first became engaged in this activity, I thought maybe there would be a movie in my lifetime. Now I'm not sure about it at all." So where it stands right now is there is some activity, but there is no defined date as of this moment.

But would you trust him to adapt Rendezvous with Rama?

Well, I will be engaged. And if I were to trust anybody, I would trust Denis. Okay? Now you have to realize that there is a difference between a book and a movie ... The best science fiction book written in the last 10 years is The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Lu. It is brilliant. I picked it up. I didn't sleep the whole night. I read it all the way to the end and he said he was influenced by Arthur. And so I also watched the English-language adaptation. And for reasons that we can go into, the book is all in China. Everything happens in China.

And I don't think they ever make it as clear as the book does that the idea behind the San-Ti is to communicate with the smartest people on Earth and try to get them on their side and then prevent them from moving forward. And that gets lost, I believe. But I really love the show.

The conclusion you make in the documentary kind of brings us back to Earth. You talk about the environment and climate change and how you have come to appreciate just the majesty of nature in a lot of ways. Is that the conclusion that you come to in the documentary, or am I extrapolating?

No, no, that's exactly right. But you have to understand that I have been passionate about nature my entire life. I've probably been to 40 National Parks. I spend my time when I have discretionary time. I can't do some of the things that I ... I did a whitewater rafting trip last year. There was nobody on the boat half my age. There's a picture of me standing in the Green River after that trip.

I always had this passion for nature, but it didn't fall into line with my understanding of how different the Earth was until we began exploring the solar system. And I said, "Oh my gosh, what do we have here?" And that's what I say in the documentary, it's paradise. And I want to reach out to everybody and say, "Wake up. We are the stewards of this place. We have to take care of it. If we don't, we have basically violated everything that came about and caused us. We all came from one single life process that began many, many years ago. Everything on Earth reproduces using DNA. The only way that can happen is if there was one or perhaps more ways that this all got started. We owe our existence to the Earth and yet we don't take care of it."

“We owe our existence to the Earth and yet we don't take care of it."

We have to look down and take care of our Earth before we look to the stars.

Well, those two things go hand in glove.

Just 100 years ago intelligent people on this planet believed that there was life on all the planets. And here it is now we know about these amazing other places and we're learning more about it all the time. In fact, I'm following on a daily basis what they're learning from the samples on Mars, and Perseverance is going around and getting scientifically selected samples. And I go home and I say, "This is absolutely wonderful." In the latest sample that they got, they found hydrated minerals in the rocks. Now everybody says, "Are they going to find life?" I said, "I don't know if they're going to find life, but everything that they're finding says the conditions for life once existed on Mars. Did it occur? We won't know. We have to get those samples back."

And somebody says, "Well, why do we have to get the samples back?" "Because it's only on the planet Earth that we can look at what's going on and say, 'Oh, I don't have a good enough instrument to figure that out. I'm going to build an instrument and do it' and so forth." So somebody said, "What is the most important thing right now in answering the question, is there any life in the solar system?" And I said, "It's to continue to explore the places where it might be."

Starman premiered March 8 at the SXSW Film & TV Festival. It does not yet have a distributor.