Astrogator's Logs

I’m the wall with the womanly swagger. – Judy Grahn, She Who

During Thanksgiving dinner at a dear friend’s house, another guest airily stated that climate change is a myth.  An environmental scientist and once a department chair in a well-known university, he now writes regularly for such venues as The Wall Street Journal using arguments along the lines of “There was radical climate change on earth way before humans came along.”  And like many self-satisfied self-promoters, he’s set on Transmit Only.

I was spoiling to kick him in a tender spot of his anatomy and it was obvious the other guests shared my wish.  But then the visit would have revolved around him.  So I looked straight at him and said, “If you really believe this, go discuss it with the people of Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Maldives, who are watching their land go under water as we speak.”  We all essentially ignored him for the rest of the visit. We had a terrific time.

I thought of this incident during the Stone Telling 2 roundtable.  Among other questions, Julia Rios, the discussion moderator, asked me, “In your own life you’ve chosen to engage in battles, and to speak out against things you perceive as unjust. How do you reconcile those choices with the costs attached to them, and is there ever a time when you choose not to engage?”

After I had answered Julia’s question, it lingered in my thoughts.  I often say (only half in jest) that humanity consists of several subspecies which happen to be interfertile.  We’re far more hardwired culturally than we’d like to think.  Progressive notions notwithstanding, facts almost never change the minds of adult humans unless something happens to affect them concretely in their health, status or wallet.  Battles against injustice, vested interests, willful ignorance, complacency, cruelty never end.  Before this relentless flood, people like me are Dutch boys with fingers in the dam.

Halfway through my fifth decade, I still haven’t learned to leave well enough alone.  By deed and by word, I’m still fighting on many fronts.  I’ll go to my grave angry, though the waters of Lethe will close over my small efforts as if I’d never been.  Yet after a lifetime of battles, I don’t have even a partial answer about how to engage effectively — especially since anger is still a heavily punished transgression for women.

Naturally, intelligent fighters adjust their strategy and tactics to fit circumstances.  Sometimes you have to be Odysseus, sometimes Alexander.  But I think there are two powerful weapons tikkun paladins need to use more often.  One is laughter.  Another is celebration.  The two share a crucial attribute: they’re not defensive; they assume legitimacy.

Accusing someone of humorlessness is a standard bludgeon used by knuckle-draggers of all persuasions.  “Can’t you take a joke?” is the constant taunt to outsiders grudgingly allowed into previously exclusionary clubs.  In all fairness, much humor relies on Us-versus-Them distinctions.  What’s amazing, though, is how fast bullies crawl off (bawling “You’re mean to me!”) when you turn humor against them.  There’s a reason why satirists and cartoonists are among the first to be arrested in dictatorships.  Of course, this tactic can get you badly hurt or killed.  Men in particular grow furious when women laugh at them.

I once was at another party where the guests were finance professionals.  The host held forth about the deep wisdom of polygamy: it’s nature’s way, our ape cousins have harems (obviously he knew zilch about either bonobos or chimpanzees) and as a dominant male himself, etc.  The other women guests were fuming, but too polite to contradict him.  Finally, I smiled at him sweetly and said, “I agree with you.”  Into the dead silence that ensued, I dropped, “Personally, I could handle at least three husbands.”  The women burst out laughing.  Several of the men spent the rest of the evening huddled in the kitchen, muttering darkly into their drinks.

The other way to short circuit reactionaries is to celebrate.  When some dim bulb bleats “Diversity brings down quality,” my reflex reaction is to verbally rip them to shreds.  However, a far more satisfying response is to issue invitations to a feast and call the endless rosters of Others who excel in a specific domain or task.  Women don’t write space operas?  Andre Norton, Ursula Le Guin, Alice Sheldon (aka James Tiptree Jr.), Joanna Russ, Joan Vinge, C. J. Cherryh, C. S. Friedman, Joan Slonczewski, Octavia Butler, Melissa Scott, Laura Mixon, Sydney van Scyoc, Kristin Landon, Elizabeth Bear, Gwyneth Jones, Liz Williams… without pausing to think and listing just those whose works I’ve read.

Celebration serves a dual purpose.  Not only does it lift the morale of those who stand arrayed against oblivious idiocy; it also prevents (ab)use of the “tone” argument.  Celebration recognizes past achievements and encourages forging ahead, rather than stooping to pick up every piece of broken furniture flung in our path.  Let god-wannabes stew in their own toxic wastes.  We have worlds to build and sustain.

Here’s the small personal roster of worlds I’m part of and want to celebrate as loudly as possible: my modest contribution to alternative splicing regulation and dementia research; Crossed Genres, Science in My Fiction, Stone Telling; my slowly emerging fictional universe, and the artists who depicted it so beautifully: Heather D. Oliver, Kathryn Bragg-Stella; and this site, now starting its fourth year, whose blog portion consistently hovers at high positions in Technorati rankings.

“Well we made a promise we swore we’d always remember,
No retreat, baby, no surrender.
Like soldiers in the winter’s night with a vow to defend,
No retreat, baby, no surrender.”

Bruce Springsteen, No Surrender

Images: 1st, Pict warrior Guinevere (Keira Knightley) in Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur; 2nd, andártissa (resistance fighter) in WWII Greece (national historical archives); 3rd, Haldír of Lórien (Craig Parker) in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.

A lengthy quote from my article The Agency That Cried “Awesome!” appeared in today’s Guardian on a page that tracks the NASA debacle.  Another chunk appeared on Futurismic (thank you, Mr. Raven!).  The post itself showed up on the front page of The Huffington Post.

Also, L. Timmel Duchamp, author of the Marq’ssan Cycle and founder of Aqueduct Press, invited me to the year’s-end roundup she hosts at her blog, Ambling Along the Aqueduct. My list of books, albums and films, with commentary, appeared today.

Image: Cool Cat, Ali Spagnola

“Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.” – Anonymous ancient proverb

In the 1961 film The Guns of Navarone, Greek resistance fighters and Allied demolition experts set out to destroy a nest of large cannons so that a rescue convoy can go through the straits the guns overlook.  A young Greek who’s part of the mission goes after a group of Germans gunslinger-style, jeopardizing the venture.  The Germans cut him to ribbons.  When the mission members meet at their rendezvous point, his sister María (Iríni Pappás) says to his partner Andréas (Anthony Quinn, obligatory at that time whenever swarthy ethnics were required): “Tell me what happened.”  Andréas replies: “He forgot why we came.”

Last week, NASA administrators forgot why we came.  They forgot the agency’s mission, they forgot science, they forgot their responsibility to their own people and to the public.  Instead, they apparently decided that all publicity is good, as long as they don’t misspell your name.

Ever since I became fully conscious, I’ve dreamed of humanity exploring the stars.  These dreams were part of the reason I left my culture, my country, my family and came over here, determined to do research.  Every launch made my heart leap.  I wept when I saw the images sent by the Voyagers, Sojourner negotiating Martian rocks.  I kept thinking that perhaps in my lifetime we might find an unambiguous independent life sample.  Then, at long last, astrobiology would lift off and whole new scientific domains would unfurl and soar with it.

Instead of that, last week we got bacterial isolate GFAJ-1.  We got an agency which appears so desperate that it shoved experiments with inadequate controls into a high profile journal and then shouted from the rooftops that its researchers had discovered a new form of life (de facto false, even if the results of the increasingly beleaguered Science paper stand).

This is not the first or only time NASA administrators have been callously cavalier.  Yet even though the latest debacle didn’t claim lives like the Challenger incident did, it was just as damaging in every other way.  And whereas the Challenger disaster was partly instigated by pressure from the White House (Reagan needed an exclamation point for his State of the Union address), this time the hole in NASA’s credibility is entirely self-inflicted.  Something went wrong in the process, and all the gatekeeping functions failed disastrously.

Let’s investigate a major claim in the Science paper: that GFAJ-1 bacteria incorporate arsenic in their DNA, making them novel, unique, a paradigm shift.  Others have discussed the instability of the arsenate intermediates and of any resulting backbone.  Three more points are crucial:

1.  This uniqueness (not yet proved) has come about by non-stop selection pressure in the laboratory, not by intrinsic biochemistry: the parent bacterium in its normal environment uses garden-variety pathways and reverts to them as soon as the pressure is lifted.  This makes the “novel life” claim patently incorrect and the isolate no more exotic than the various metallophores and metallovores that many groups in that domain (Penny Boston, Ken Nealson) have been studying for decades.

2.  The arsenic-for-phosphorus substitution in the DNA is circumstantial at best.  The paper contained no sequencing, no autoradiography, no cesium chloride density gradients.  These are low-tech routine methods that nevertheless would give far more direct support to the authors’ claims.  Density gradients are what Meselson and Stahl used in 1958 to demonstrate that DNA replication was semi-conservative.  Instead, Wolfe-Simon et al. used highly complex techniques that gave inconclusive answers.

The reagents for the methods I just listed would cost less than $1,000 (total, not each). A round of sequencing costs $10 – the price of a Starbucks latte. In a subsequent interview, Oremland (the paper’s senior author) said that they did not have enough money to do more experiments. This is like saying that you hired the Good Year blimp to take you downtown but didn’t have enough money for a taxi back home.

3.  Even if some of the bacteria incorporate arsenic in their DNA, it means nothing if they cannot propagate.  Essentially, they can linger as poison-filled zombies that will nonetheless register as “alive” through such tests as culture turbidity and even sluggish metabolism.

NASA spokespeople, as well as Wolfe-Simon and Oremland, have stated that the only legitimate and acceptable critiques are those that will appear in peer-reviewed venues – and that others are welcome to do experiments to confirm or disprove their findings.

The former statement is remarkably arrogant and hypocritical, given the NASA publicity hyperdrive around the paper: embargoes, synchronized watches, melodramatic hints of “new life”, of a discovery with “major impact on astrobiology and the search for extraterrestrial life”.  This is called leading with your chin.  And if you live by PR, you cannot act shocked and dismayed when you die by PR.

As for duplicating the group’s experiments, the burden of proof lies with the original researchers. This burden increases if their claims are extraordinary.  The team that published the paper was being paid to do the work by a grant (or, possibly, by earmarked NASA money, which implies much less competition). For anyone else to confirm or disprove their findings, they will have to carve effort, time and money out of already committed funds — or apply for a grant specifically geared to this, and wait for at least a year (usually more) for the money to be awarded.  It’s essentially having to clean up someone else’s mess on your own time and dime.

Peer review is like democracy: it’s the worst method, except for all others.  It cannot avoid agendas, vendettas, pet theories or hierarchies.  But at least it does attempt judgment by one’s peers.  Given the kernel of this paper, its reviewers should have been gathered from several disciplines.  I count at least four: a microbiologist with expertise in extremophiles, a molecular biologist specializing in nucleic acids, a biochemist studying protein and/or lipid metabolism and a biophysicist versed in crystallography and spectrometry.

Some journals have started to name reviewers; Science does not, and “astrobiology” is a murky domain.  If the scientific community discovers that the reviewers for the GFAJ-1 paper were physicists who write sciency SF and had put on the astrobio hat for amusement and/or convenience, Lake Mono will look mild and hospitable compared to the climate that such news will create.

Because of the way scientific publishing works, a lot of shaky papers appear that never get corrected or retracted.  As a dodge, authors routinely state that “more needs to be done to definitively prove X.”  Even if later findings of other labs completely contradict their conclusions, they can argue that the experiments were correct, if not their interpretation.  Colleagues within each narrow domain know these papers and/or labs – and quietly discount them. But if such results get media attention (which NASA courted for this paper), the damage is irreversible.

People will argue that science is self-correcting.  This is true in the long run – and as long as science is given money to conduct research.  However, the publication of that paper in Science was a very public slap in the face of scientists who take time and effort to test their theories.  NASA’s contempt for the scientific process (and for basic intelligence) during this jaw-dropping spectacle was palpable.  It blatantly endorsed perceived “sexiness” and fast returns at the expense of careful experimentation. This is the equivalent of rewarding the mindset and habits of hedge fund managers who walk away with other people’s lifelong savings.

By disbursing hype, NASA administrators handed ready-made ammunition to the already strong and growing anti-intellectual, anti-scientific groups in US society: to creationists and proponents of (un)intelligent design; to climate change denialists and young-earth biblical fundamentalists; to politicians who have been slashing everything “non-essential” (except, of course, war spending and capital gains income).  It jeopardized the still-struggling discipline of astrobiology.  And it jeopardized the future of a young scientist who is at least enthusiastic about her research even if her critical thinking needs a booster shot – or a more rigorous mentor.

Perhaps NASA’s administrators were under pressure to deliver something, anything to stave off further decrease of already tight funds.  I understand their position – and even more, that of their scientists.  NIH and NSF are in the same tightening vise, and the US has lost several generations of working scientists in the last two decades.  Everyone is looking for brass rings because it’s Winner Take All – and “all” is pennies.  We have become beggars scrambling for coins tossed out of rich people’s carriages, buskers and dancing bears, lobsters in a slowly heating pot.

NASA should not have to resort to circus acts as the price for doing science.  It’s in such circumstances that violence is done to process, to rigor, to integrity.  We are human.  We have mortgages and doctors’ bills and children to send to college, yes.  But we are scientists, first and foremost.  We are – must be – more than court jesters or technicians for the powerful.  If we don’t hold the line, no one else will.

The paper: Wolfe-Simon F, Blum JS, Kulp TR, Gordon GW, Hoeft SE, Pett-Ridge J, Stolz JF, Webb SM, Weber PK, Davies PCW, Anbar AD, Oremland RS (2010) A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus. DOI: 10.1126/science.1197258.

My early summation of this paper: Arsenic and Odd Lace

Images: Top, María tries to keep her brother focused on the mission in The Guns of Navarone; middle, the Meselson and Stahl experiment; bottom, Quiros circus, Spain, 2007.

A colleague once called me a hopeful romantic. There’s more than a grain of truth to that. So it’s ironic that the two Wikipedia entries which quote me are linked to my critiques of extraordinary claims that did not provide even ordinary evidence.

The first was my review of Ward and Brownlee’s Rare Earth, in which I pointed out errors that cast serious doubts on their hypothesis. When I wrote the review, I didn’t know that one of their major advisors was Guillermo Gonzalez, an unabashed creationist who made his science fit his philosophy. A few things from my review must have registered, since subsequent editions corrected at least some of these errors (for example, their initial statement that both Mars and Venus are tidally locked).

Yesterday I discovered that I appear in a second Wikipedia entry about “arsenic DNA” — the purported genetic material of the fabulous beastie that NASA announced last Friday during its science-by-press-conference. This entry is fluctuating right now, as people are editing it back and forth (plus they incorrectly call me a microbiologist).  Those of you who are keeping track may know I was an early pebble in the avalanche of criticism that has since fallen on that work, led by Dr. Rosemary Redfield of UBC and summarized by Carl Zimmer in Slate.

I have more to say about the Science paper but first I must meet immovable looming deadlines. For now I will only say that I wish the work had been as exciting as its hype promised. Because I’m an old-fashioned scientist — and a hopeless romantic.

Images: 1st, Stick in the Mud, Steve Jurvetson; 2nd, Outlier, Ben Shabad.

Update: More, as promised, in The Agency That Cried “Awesome!”

When you hear about lots of cherries, bring a small basket. — Greek proverb

About a week ago, I started receiving a steady and progressively swelling stream of e-mails, asking me if I knew anything about the hush-hush “amazing astrobiology discovery” that NASA would announce on December 2. I replied I would opine when I read the associated paper, embargoed by Science until after the press conference. I also added that my bets were on a terrestrial extremophile that pushes the exotic envelope. Many bloggers and news sites disagreed, posting entries with titles and guesses taken straight from the pulp SF era.

Today NASA made its announcement and Science released the paper. To give you the punchline first, the results indeed concern a terrestrial extremophile and show that bacteria are very flexible and will adapt to suboptimal conditions. This is not exactly news, although the findings do push the envelope… slightly.

What the results decidedly do not show is a different biochemistry, an independent genesis or evidence for a shadow biosphere, contrary to co-author Paul Davies’ attempts to shoehorn that into the conclusions of an earlier (2008) related paper. It’s not arsenic-based life, it’s not an arsenic-eating bacterium and the biology textbooks don’t need to be rewritten.

The experiment is actually very clever in that it follows a given to its logical conclusion. The researchers took an inoculum from the hypersaline, alkaline Mono lake and grew it in serial dilutions so that the medium contained progressively increasing amounts of arsenic (As) substituting for phosphorus (P). Lake Mono has arsenic levels several orders of magnitude above the usual, so bacteria living in it have already adapted to tolerate it.

The bacteria that grew in severely P-depleted and As-enriched conditions were identified as members of a halophile (salt-loving) family already known to accumulate intracellular As. When deprived of P, they grew slowly and appeared bloated because they were full of structures that look like vacuoles, cellular organelles that manage waste and grow larger and more numerous when cells are under stress. Additionally, there was still some phosphorus in the growth medium (it’s almost impossible to leach it completely) and there is no direct proof that As was incorporated into the bacterial DNA [see addendum]. So essentially the bacteria were trying to do business as usual under trying circumstances.

Phosphorus means “lightbringer” because the element glows faintly under illumination, giving its name to Venus when it’s the Morning Star. It is deemed to be among the six elements vital for life (in alphabetical order: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur; often acronymed as CHNOPS, which sounds like the name of an Egyptian pharaoh). Indeed P appears in all three classes of biomolecules. It’s obligatory in nucleic acids (DNA, RNA) and phospholipids, the primary components of cell membranes; phosphate groups are crucial covalent additions to proteins, regulating their activity and ligand affinities; it’s also the energy currency of cells, primarily in the form of ATP (adenosine triphosphate). On the scale of organisms, bones contain phosphorus in apatite form and it’s also an essential nutrient for plants, though P excess is as much a problem as its lack.

Arsenic is directly below phosphorus in the periodic table, just as silicon is directly below carbon. Arsenic is highly toxic to lifeforms precisely because it looks similar enough to phosphorus in terms of atomic radius and reactivity that it is occasionally incorporated in metabolic intermediates, short-circuiting later steps in cascades. [This, incidentally, is not true for silicon vis-à-vis carbon, for those who are contemplating welcoming silicon overlords. Silicon is even more inferior than arsenic in its relative attributes.] Arsenic was used in pesti-, herbi- and insecticides (and in stealth murders), until it became clear that even minute amounts leaching into the water table posed a serious health problem.

The tables in the Science paper are eloquent on how reluctant even hardy extremophiles are to use As instead of P. Under normal growth conditions, the As:P ratio in their biomass was 1:500. When P was rigorously excluded and As had been raised to three times the level in lake Mono, the As:P ratio remained at a measly 7:1. Furthermore, upon fractionation As segregated almost entirely into the organic phase. Very little was in the aqueous phase that contains the nucleic acids. This means that under extreme pressure the bacteria will harbor intracellular As, but they will do their utmost to exclude it from the vital chains of the genetic material.

As I wrote elsewhere, we biologists are limited in our forecasts by having a single life sample. So we don’t know what is universal and what is parochial and our searches are unavoidably biased in terms of their setup and possible interpretations. The results from this work do not extend the life sample number. Nor do they tell us anything about terrestrial evolution, because they showcase a context-driven re-adaptation, not a de novo alternative biochemistry. However, they hint that at least one of the CHNOPS brigade may be substitutable in truly extreme (by our circumscribed definition) conditions.

On the larger canvas, it was clever of NASA to disclose this right around budget (-cutting) time. But it would have been even cleverer if they had managed to calibrate the hype volume correctly — and kept squarely in their memory the tale of the boy who cried wolf.

Addendum 1: The paper has evidence that the DNA of the final isolate contains 11% of the total arsenic by incorporation of radioactivity and mass spectrometry comparison studies. However, important controls and/or purification steps seem to be missing. The crucial questions are: exactly where is arsenic located, how much substitution has occurred in the DNA, if any, and how does it affect the layers of DNA function (un/folding, replication, transcription, translation)? Definitive answers will require at minimum direct sequencing and/or crystallographic data. The leading author, Felisa Wolfe-Simon, said that this is fertile ground for thirty years of future work — and in that, at least, she’s right.

Addendum 2: Detailed devastating critiques and dissections are appearing.

The paper: Wolfe-Simon F, Blum JS, Kulp TR, Gordon GW, Hoeft SE, Pett-Ridge J, Stolz JF, Webb SM, Weber PK, Davies PCW, Anbar AD, Oremland RS (2010) A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus. Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1197258.

My extended analysis: The Agency That Cried “Awesome!”

Note for young(er) readers: the title is a take off on Arsenic and Old Lace, Joseph Kesselring’s black comedy about decorous yet murderous old ladies, later made into a film by Frank Capra starring Cary Grant.

Images: 1st, the vacuolated cells of the As-fed bacteria (Wolfe-Simon et al, Figure 2E); 2nd, the elements important to life; 3rd, Mono Lake (LA Times)

As is common with me, things have once again come in groups.  In addition to the acceptance of The Wind Harp, a book has just come out with a tiny contribution from me.  It is The Rough Guide to the Future by biochemist, science historian and science writer Jon Turney.  The book surveys new technologies and their impact on humanity and the planet, and includes the hopes, fears and predictions of “fifty of the world’s leading futurologists and scientists” (blush!)  Here’s Jon’s introduction to it, and here’s my contribution:

Highest hopes: In decreasing order of likelihood, that we will conquer – or at least tame – dementia, which will make the increase in average life expectancy individually worthwhile and collectively feasible; that we will pick up an unambiguous SETI signal (search for extraterrestrial intelligence); and that we will decipher the ancient script Linear A and find out that the Minoans were indeed enlightened, if not matriarchal.

Worst fears: Most of our activities will devolve into inward navel-gazing (“social” Internet, virtual reality) rather than outward exploration, and our politics (broadly defined) will force all research into applied/profit mode, doomed to produce results and reagents that will make the long-term survival of the planet and all its species increasingly problematic.

Best bet: Barring a natural or human-created catastrophe, we’ll muddle along just as before and run out of resources and lebensraum before we’re able to establish either a sustainable terrestrial footprint or expand beyond Earth.

Additionally, I will be one of the reviewers of Rise Reviews, the brainchild of Bart Leib, the co-founder of Crossed Genres and Science in My Fiction.  As Bart said in his blog:

“I’m pleased to announce that I will soon be launching Rise Reviews, a site dedicated to reviewing quality speculative fiction that did not receive professional pay.

This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. See, most review sites either only review fiction from professional-paying markets, or take most of what they review from those markets. I don’t hold that against them – every review site receives FAR more review requests than it could possibly accomplish, and each one has to decide for itself how to narrow down the pile.

But the result is that, more often than not, smaller presses which don’t pay pro rates are the ones that get passed over. And that’s what Rise Reviews will cover. Many of these publishers produce excellent quality publications, and I hope that Rise will be able to help bring new writers and smaller presses to the attention of readers.”

Rise Reviews will be a partial corrective to those who think, à la Tangent, that only Leaden Era-style speculative fiction (aka boys and their toys) deserves to be read and reviewed.  And it may give an incentive to independents to start paying in more than copies, even if it’s the proverbial $5 — it will make the works eligible for reviewing in Rise.  The site will launch January 1, 2011 with a veritable avalanche of reviews across subgenres.

Images: The covers of The Rough Guide to the Future (by Tom Cabot/ketchup) and the 1st year anthology of Crossed Genres (by Nicc Balce).

“Nothing is as soft as water, yet who can withstand the raging flood?” — Lao Ma in Xena (The Debt I)

Being a research scientist as well as a writer, reader and reviewer of popular science and speculative fiction, I’ve frequently bumped up against the fraught question of what constitutes “hard” SF. It appears regularly on online discussions, often coupled with lamentations over the “softening” of the genre that conflate the upper and lower heads.

In an earlier round, I discussed why I deem it vital that speculative fiction writers are at least familiar with the questing scientific mindset and with basic scientific principles (you cannot have effortless, instant shapeshifting… you cannot have cracks in black hole event horizons… you cannot transmute elements by drawing pentagrams on your basement floor…), if not with a modicum of knowledge in the domains they explore.

So before I opine further, I’ll give you the punchline first: hard SF is mostly sciency and its relationship to science is that of truthiness to truth. Remember this phrase, grasshoppahs, because it may surface in a textbook at some point.

For those who will undoubtedly hasten to assure me that they never pollute their brain watching Stephen Colbert, truthiness is “a ‘truth’ that a person claims to know intuitively ‘from the gut’ without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.” Likewise, scienciness aspires to the mantle of “real” science but in fact is often not even grounded extrapolation. As Colbert further elaborated, “Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything.” And therein lies the tale of the two broad categories of what gets called “hard” SF.

Traditionally, “hard” SF is taken to mean that the story tries to violate known scientific facts as little as possible, once the central premise (usually counter to scientific facts) has been chosen. This is how authors get away with FTL travel and werewolves. The definition sounds obvious but it has two corollaries that many SF authors forget to the serious detriment of their work.

The first is that the worldbuilding must be internally consistent within each secondary universe. If you envision a planet circling a double sun system, you must work out its orbit and how the orbit affects the planet’s geology and hence its ecosystems. If you show a life form with five sexes, you must present a coherent picture of their biological and social interactions. Too, randomness and arbitrary outcomes (often the case with sloppily constructed worlds and lazy plot-resolution devices) are not only boring, but also anxiety-inducing: human brains seek patterns automatically and lack of persuasive explanations makes them go literally into loops.

The second is that verisimilitude needs to be roughly even across the board. I’ve read too many SF stories that trumpet themselves as “hard” because they get the details of planetary orbits right while their geology or biology would make a child laugh – or an adult weep. True, we tend to notice errors in the domains we know: writing workshop instructors routinely intone that authors must mind their p’s and q’s with readers familiar with boats, horses and guns. Thus we get long expositions about stirrups and spinnakers while rudimentary evolution gets mangled faster than bacteria can mutate. Of course, renaissance knowledge is de facto impossible in today’s world. However, it’s equally true that never has surface-deep research been as easy to accomplish (or fake) as now.

As I said elsewhere, the physicists and computer scientists who write SF need to absorb the fact that their disciplines don’t confer automatic knowledge and authority in the rest of the sciences, to say nothing of innate understanding and/or writing technique. Unless they take this to heart, their stories will read as variants of “Once the rockets go up, who cares on what they come down?” (to paraphrase Tom Lehrer). This mindset leads to cognitive dissonance contortions: Larry Niven’s work is routinely called “hard” SF, even though the science in it – including the vaunted physics – is gobbledygook, whereas Joan Slonczewski’s work is deemed “soft” SF, even though it’s solidly based on recognized tenets of molecular and cellular biology. And in the real world, this mindset has essentially doomed crewed planetary missions (of which a bit more anon).

Which brings us to the second definition of “hard” SF: style. Many “hard” SF wannabe-practitioners, knowing they don’t have the science chops or unwilling to work at it, use jargon and faux-manliness instead. It’s really the technique of a stage magician: by flinging mind-numbing terms and boulder-sized infodumps, they hope to distract their readers from the fact that they didn’t much bother with worldbuilding, characters – sometimes, not even plots.

Associated with this, the uglier the style, the “harder” the story claims to be: paying attention to language is for sissies. So is witty dialogue and characters that are more than cardboard cutouts. If someone points such problems out, a common response is “It’s a novel of ideas!” The originality of these ideas is often moot: for example, AIs and robots agonizing over their potential humanity stopped being novel after, oh, Metropolis. Even if a concept is blinding in its brilliance, it still requires subtlety and dexterity to write such a story without it devolving into a manual or a tract. Among other things, technology tends to be integral in a society even if it’s disruptive, and therefore it’s almost invariably submerged. When was the last time someone explained at length in a fiction piece (a readable one) how a phone works? Most of us have a hazy idea at best how our tools work, even if our lives depend on such knowledge.

To be fair, most writers start with the best of intentions as well as some talent. But as soon as they or their editors contract sequelitis, they often start to rely on shorthand as much as if they were writing fanfiction (which many do in its sanctioned form, as tie-ins or posthumous publication of rough notes as “polished products”). Once they become known names, some authors rest on their laurels, forgetting that this is the wrong part of the anatomy for placing wreaths.

Of course, much of this boils down to personal taste, mood of the moment and small- and large-scale context. However, some of it is the “girl cooties” issue: in parallel with other domains, as more and more women have entered speculative fiction, what remains “truly masculine” — and hence suitable for the drum and chest beatings of Tin… er, Iron Johns — has narrowed. Women write rousing space operas: Cherryh and Friedman are only the most prominent names in a veritable flood. Women write hard nuts-and-bolts SF, starting with Sheldon, aka Tiptree, and continuing with too many names to list. Women write cyberpunk, including noir near-future dystopias (Scott, anyone?). What’s a boy to do?

Some boys decide to grow up and become snacho men or, at least, competent writers whose works are enjoyable if not always challenging. Others retreat to their treehouse, where they play with inflatable toys and tell each other how them uppity girls and their attendant metrosexual zombies bring down standards: they don’t appreciate fart jokes and after about a week they get bored looking at screwdrivers of various sizes. Plus they talk constantly and use such nasty words as celadon and susurrus! And what about the sensawunda?

I could point out that the sense of wonder so extolled in Leaden Era SF contained (un)healthy doses of Manifesty Destiny. But having said that, I’ll add that a true sense of wonder is a real requirement for humans, and not that high up in the hierarchy of needs, either. We don’t do well if we cannot dream the paths before us and, by dreaming, help shape them.

I know this sense of wonder in my marrow.  I felt it when I read off the nucleotides of the human gene I cloned and sequenced by hand. I feel it whenever I see pictures sent by the Voyagers, photos of Sojourner leaving its human-proxy steps on Mars. I feel it whenever they unearth a brittle parchment that might help us decipher Linear A. This burning desire to know, to discover, to explore, drives the astrogators: the scientists, the engineers, the artists, the creators. The real thing is addictive, once you’ve experienced it. And like the extended orgasm it resembles, it cannot be faked unless you do such faking for a living.

This sense of wonder, which I deem as crucial in speculative fiction as basic scientific literacy and good writing, is not tied to nuts and bolts. It’s tied to how we view the world. We can stride out to meet and greet it in all its danger, complexity and glory. Or we can hunker in our bunkers, like Gollum in his dank cave and hiss how those nasty hobbitses stole our preciouss.

SF isn’t imploding because it lost the fake/d sensawunda that stood in for real imaginative dreaming, just as NASA isn’t imploding because its engineers are not competent (well, there was that metric conversion mixup…). NASA, like the boys in the SF treehouse, is imploding because it forgot — or never learned — to tell stories. Its mandarins deemed that mesmerizing stories were not manly. Yet it’s the stories that form and guide principles, ask questions that unite and catalyze, make people willing to spend their lives on knowledge quests. If the stories are compelling, their readers will remember them after they finish them. And that long dreaming will lead them to create the nuts and bolts that will launch starships.

Images: 1st, Stormtrooper Walking from Grimm’s Pictures; 2nd, the justly famous Sidney Harris classic from What’s So Funny About Science?; 3rd, Jim Parsons, The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper, photo by Robert Trachtenberg for Rolling Stone; 4th, The Gate, by Peter Cassidy.

Note: This is part of a lengthening series on the tangled web of interactions between science, SF and fiction.  Previous rounds:

Why Science Needs SF
Why SF Needs Science
Why SF Needs Empathy
Why SF Needs Literacy
Why SF Needs Others

I guess this one might be called Why SF Needs Fiction!

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day the main character is James Stevens, a butler proud to serve his master, Lord Darlington – a rather dim aristocrat with political ambitions who becomes close to Mosley’s philo-Nazi Blackshirts. Stevens sacrifices all vestiges of self-expression, including the possibility of love, to become the perfect servant. His dignity and sense of office forbid him to question social and political rules and he remains loyal to the master-servant ideal even when its time is long past.

A week ago, Mas Penewu Surakso Hargo, known as Mbah (Grandfather) Maridjan, died on Mount Merapi in the Yogyakarta region of Java (founded as a sultanate in 1755). Maridjan, like his father before him, had been appointed guardian of Merapi by the sultan of Yogyakarta. He was in charge of ceremonies to appease the spirit of the mountain and he described his job as being “to stop the lava from flowing down”.

In 2006 and again in 2010, Maridjan refused to evacuate when Merapi erupted, calling himself and his fellow villagers the fortress whose function was to protect the sultan’s palace. Both times, others followed his example on the strength of his moral authority. He was found in a praying position, overwhelmed by pyroclastic flow from the mountain. Also killed were thirteen people who were in his home trying to persuade him to leave. The local populace is clamoring for a new guardian, and the sultan plans to appoint one soon.

Most people consider Stevens a deluded pathetic figure, despite his massive dignity and loyalty. Ditto for Harry Randall Truman, who elected to stay on Mt. St. Helens in 1980. In contrast, many consider Maridjan admirable, a laudable example of spirituality and adherence to principle, even though his actions led to preventable deaths.

Inevitably, there are more threads to this braid. Truman and Maridjan were in their mid-eighties; both voiced the sentiment that their time had come, and that such a death was preferable to dwindling away in increasing helplessness. The people of Yogyakarta are trying to preserve the pre-Islamic heritage of Indonesia against mounting pressure from the increasingly hardline official policies and the imams who enforce them. Additionally, many Merapi evacuees were left with nothing but the little they could carry, in a nation that has a rich legacy and tremendous recources – but one that also has had more than its share of natural and man-made disasters and whose political, ecological and economic status is wobbly.

Maridjan is admired as the keeper and transmitter of endangered cultural knowledge. I have already discussed this issue from the angles of deracination and art. The time has come to also point out the problems and dangers of tradition.

There’s no doubt that unique cultural customs keep the world multicolored and kaleidoscopic. Even though I’m an atheist and consider all organized religions unmitigated disasters for women, I’m still moved by the Easter ceremonies of the orthodox church. However, I’m not interested in their Christian-specific narrative. What moves me are the layers embedded in them: the laments of Mariam for her son are nearly identical to those of Aphrodite for Adonis, and they’re echoed in folk and literary poetry in which mothers lament dead sons (the most famous is Epitáfios by Yiánnis Rítsos, set to unforgettable music by Mikis Theodorákis). When I hear them, I hear all the echoes as well, see all the images superimposed like ghostly layers on a palimpsest. For me, that’s what lends them resonance and richness.

But there are times when I must part most decisively with tradition. There are plenty of traditions whose disappearance has made (or will make – many are still extant) the world a better place: from spreading bloody wedding sheets to foot binding to female genital mutilation; from forbidding women to sing lest they distract their husbands to knocking out teeth of new wives to show they will rely on their husbands’ prowess henceforth; from slavery and serfdom to polygyny and concubinage; from having unprotected sex with virgins to “cure” sexually transmitted diseases to “laying hands” on a child sinking into a diabetic coma.

Then there are the power-mongering charlatans who prey on fear and despair, particularly when hard times fall upon people: sickness, natural catastrophe, occupation, war. It’s true that Western medicine follows the heroic model – and as such it’s outstanding at treating acute illnesses but tends to over-specialize, sometimes at the expense of a holistic approach that treats the root cause rather than the symptoms. It’s equally true that modern technology has allowed ecological depradations at an enormous scale that threaten to become irreversible. Finally, it’s painfully true that deracination and colonialism often go hand in hand with modernization. Oppressed people revive or revert to traditions, often the last vestiges of suppressed cultural identity, as an act of resistance.

However, prayers don’t shrink a tumor nor frighten invaders away and the sun rises and sets whether beating hearts are offered to it or not. Too, if someone jumps from an airplane or a high ledge without a parachute, no amount of belief in divine favor will waft them away on a magic carpet or give them wings. Nor were traditional states pre-lapsarian paradises, as an objective reading of Tibetan, Aztec and Maori history will attest.

When we didn’t know the reasons behind phenomena, such customs were understandable if not necessarily palatable. Not any more, not with today’s knowledge and its global reach. The mindset that clings to the concept that incantations will stop a volcano is kin to the mindset the refuses to accept evolution as established fact. Standing in the path of a meteor is not the same as standing at Thermopylae, romantic notions of doomed last stands notwithstanding. The 300 Spartans who stood at Thermopylae had a concrete goal as well as a symbolic one: they stopped the Persian army long enough to give the rest of the Greek city-states time to strategize and organize. And the rarely-mentioned 1,000 Thespians who stood with them did so against their particular customs – for the sake of the new-fangled, larger concept of living in freedom.

In the end, the traditions that deserve to survive are those that are neutral or positive in terms of improving human life across the hierarchy of needs (and that includes taking care of our planet). Mbah Maridjan was the guardian of the mountain, which put him in the position of caretaker of his fellow villagers as well as of the putative Merapi spirit. If he saw his function as loyalty to an abstract principle of servitude rather than protecting his very real people, he was misguided at best – and his stance had far worse repercussions than those of Ishiguro’s Stevens, who only harmed himself and the woman who hoped to love him.

I once read an almost certainly apocryphal tale of a young woman who asked her rabbi, “Rebbe, is it ever acceptable to eat pork?” “Never!” said the rabbi. “Pig meat is always treff. Why do you ask?” “During last winter’s famine, I fed my young brothers sausages,” replied the girl. “It was either that or watch them starve.” “In that case, it was kosher,” decided the rabbi.

That’s the type of humane traditionalism I can live with. Tribalism was adaptive once, but has become a mixed blessing at best. Tradition encourages blind faith, satisfaction with rote answers and authority – and history demonstrates that humans don’t do well when they follow orders unquestioningly. As for the questing mindset ushered and encouraged by science, I will close with words I used elsewhere:

Science doesn’t strip away the grandeur of the universe; the intricate patterns only become lovelier as more keep appearing and coming into focus. Science leads to connections across scales, from universes to quarks. And we, with our ardent desire and ability to know ever more, are lucky enough to be at the nexus of all this richness.

Images: top, pyroclastic cloud from the Rinjani volcano, part of the Ring of Fire to which Merapi also belongs (photo by Oliver Spalt); middle, a Han Chinese woman’s “golden lotus”; bottom, wayang kulit — the Javanese shadow puppets, part of the Yogyakarta people’s heritage.

Those who read Standing at Thermopylae know I promised a response to whiny vaporings that appeared on the Apex blog. My response is now up: Steering the Craft. It talks of embroidered jackets and starships, of bread and roses. Here’s the end:

Susan Seddon Boulet, Shaman Spider Woman (1986)

War for the Country
By Viktoría Theodórou – Poet, resistance fighter

A soft mat she found and sat, on the leaves.
A song emerges from the flute of her throat,
low, so her light-sleeping comrades don’t awaken,
just so she accompanies their dreams.
Her hands don’t stay idle, she takes up thread and needle
to darn their socks with the hand grenade
she always carries at her waist, with it she lies and rises.
The grenade in the sock, round and oblivious
to its fire, thinks it’s a wooden egg,
that the country was freed and the war ended
and Katia is not a partisan in the snow-covered woods –
that she sits by the window behind the white lilacs
and sews the socks of her beloved, who returned whole.

by Larry Klaes, space exploration enthusiast, science journalist

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

How Might They Vanquish Us?

We have now looked at the most obvious motives (to us at least) for an alien species to want to crush humanity and found most of the feared concepts wanting.  Now it is time to explore the ways in which said alien marauders might take us out of the galactic picture.  Ironically, while the potential motives for invasion and destruction are often outright implausible, the methods available to a smart but aggressive species that might want us gone are often even more likely and effective than the usual imagined scenarios for the conquest of Earth.

If asked to visualize how an alien race might come after humanity, the scenario that seems to jump to most people’s minds is of giant spaceships hovering over major cities (Skyline is just the latest incarnation of that scenario), or a whole fleet of shiny silver spinning disks carrying  alien hordes wearing shiny silver spacesuits and gripping laser rifles in their clawlike hands.

Now while one cannot entirely rule out the possibility that one day Earth’s skies will be filled with large and dangerous alien vessels up to no good for us, the idea that more advanced beings would engage in a battle for Earth and against humanity in a manner similar to the scenarios described above seems about as efficient as targeting our world for its supply of water with all the much easier and more effective alternatives available.

If you want to get rid of humanity and don’t care if most of the flora and fauna inhabiting our globe also gets destroyed in the process just so long as the planet remains intact, all you need to do is attach some rockets to a collection of planetoids and aim them at Earth.  Humanity could be doing this with some of the smaller varieties of space rocks in just a few decades if we choose to, so a species that has actually made it to our Sol system via starship would be able to do the same.

Depending on the size and mass of the planetoid and where the ETI would target it, our civilization if not our very species could be rendered helpless in short order in a style reminiscent of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.  Indeed, a number of small planetoids have recently come close to Earth.  Astronomers discovered them just a few days before their close encounters, leaving too little time to develop any countermeasures had they been on an intercept course.  And these objects were guided only by forces of nature!  A deliberate use of planetoids to smash us into submission or worse is a scenario that has been discussed and written about, but a real organized defense system is still decades away.

An even more frightening concept is to use a starship itself as a weapon.  A large vehicle moving at relativistic speeds, even a fraction of light speed, could hit Earth with more force than humanity’s entire nuclear arsenal at its peak in 1990 (55,000 nuclear bombs).  Such a weapon would be very hard to track and virtually impossible to stop with our present technology.

The details on this scenario, along with a very interesting discussion as to why an ETI might do such a thing to us and others (take out any potential aggressors/competition before it does the same thing, in essence) may be found on Winchell Chung’s fascinating Web site.

Keep in mind that while Chung does make some very compelling arguments, he is also a very big space war gamer.  Having a galaxy full of mature, peaceful, and altruistic beings may make for a nice place to live on a cosmic scale, but a rather dull RPG.  Going on the offensive with other species is also a pretty good guarantee that even an advanced ETI that gave up aggression and war ages ago may not like being threatened or seeing others in such a state and may take action against such a paranoid and self-serving race.

Another method for taking us out is one that has probably happened naturally across the Universe since the first stars came along:  Supernovae.  An exploding star would not only vaporize the members of its system but also spread deadly radiation for hundreds of light years around.  Earth has obviously survived having its native life forms become completely extinct by many stellar explosions over the last four billion years.  We can even thank a supernova for being here in the first place, as it was the violent death of an ancient star some five billion years ago that kick-started the cloud of dust and gas that became our Sol system, along with giving the elements needed for the evolution of life.

However, if an advanced species knew how to trigger and control a stellar detonation, they could fry our entire galactic neighborhood.  Other methods of sterilizing whole solar systems includes smacking two black holes together and directing galactic jets, which are streams of particles and radiation thrown out by massive black holes in the cores of some galaxies.  One hopes it won’t be possible to harness such energies, but who knows what beings that can survive and grow for eons in this Universe might be capable of?

Another cosmic weapon that fascinates and frightens is known as the Nicoll-Dyson Beam.  Dyson Shells are a fascinating concept in their own right:  Freeman Dyson envisioned a society taking apart its solar system and building a vast swarm of communities around its sun to collect as much energy from it as possible (right now 99% of Sol’s energy gets “wasted” into space).  From a distant vantage point, anyone monitoring such a system would see its star gradually dim in the optical realm and brighten in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Being able to collect and utilize so much energy from a sun has many benefits for an advanced technological society – and a few dangers for others as James Nicoll would later point out.  Dyson Shells would be able to focus and redirect the solar energy they collect into tight and powerful beams called a phased array laser.  The beams could easily destroy whole worlds many light years from the Dyson Shell.

Whether Dyson Shells actually exist and if their makers would use them as galactic-scale weapons is another matter, though there have been actual SETI programs which attempted to find these astroengineering projects.  This page from the Orion’s Arm web site gives an interesting visual and text description of this idea.

Is SETI Itself Dangerous?

There have been many who warn about sending greetings and other messages into the Milky Way and beyond.  The idea behind METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligences) is that since it may be hard for an alien species to find Earth and humanity among the 400 billion star systems of the Milky Way, we should increase the chances for detection by broadcasting into deep space towards what we think are favorable cosmic places for intelligent life.  The idea behind SETI is that alien beings are conducting their own METI programs, since that is probably the easiest way for humanity to detect another society in the galaxy at present.

The main and obvious issue with METI is that we do not know what other kinds of beings are out there.  Folks such as Carl Sagan have speculated that aggressive species tend to wipe themselves out before they can achieve space travel.  However, this has the flavor of painting an alien race with the traits and behaviors of our species.  What if there were species which cooperated as a unit and still decided that other beings must go before they become a threat to them?  Or what if they felt that other species, being viewed as inferior, were in need of a serious “makeover” that would effectively destroy whatever made the target species unique?

Some have speculated that an ETI might take out humanity and any other species at our stage of development by operating a METI program that carried what we might call an artificial virus.  The target species would pick up the alien “message” and in the process of decoding it would unleash a program that could do all sorts of dangerous and deadly things, from taking down our technology to giving us the plans for a superbomb that would detonate once we built it from the instructions given in the message.  Other potential scenarios involve converting humans into puppet slaves or replicating the alien species on Earth to take over and then aim more such messages at other potential worlds to continue the galactic conquest.

Of course it would seem easy to make sure that this never happens by simply keeping the alien message isolated or just never building the design plans.  However, the combined excitement of detecting an ETI signal and the often wild, vast, and intricate nature of the Internet could bring about the spreading of the virulent message and be released by those who feel it is their right to have and know such information.  In addition, as we see in the news on a regular basis, there are those groups of humans who might deliberately want to open up this cosmic Pandora’s Box to spread death and destruction across our planet for their own purposes.

This Web site goes into detail about the possibilities for an alien species to take out Earth without ever having to leave home either in person or even through a robot vessel:

Final Thoughts

This essay began thanks to Stephen Hawking’s well-publicized views on alien intelligences which he thought would not be a good thing for us to encounter any time soon.  While there is of course the possibility that we might encounter an alien species that is a threat, I was unsatisfied and disappointed with Hawking’s version of this scenario.  It struck me as not only being one-sided, limited, and old fashioned in thinking, but far too reminiscent of numerous recent Hollywood-style science fiction plots – an industry not exactly known for originality, deep thought or rigorous scientific accuracy.

Hawking’s take on alien life feeds into this negative, paranoid, and inward-looking attitude regarding the unknown that seems to be growing in human society these days.  While it is prudent that we do not just jump into the galaxy without at least having some idea who and what is out there, focusing on the idea that all alien beings are hostile monsters and that we should dismantle our radio telescopes and hide under our beds are not exactly the actions of a healthy, maturing society.  Besides, if an ETI were out to get us, remaining ignorant of the Universe and trying to be undetectable is not the way to go.

As I have pointed out in this essay, an advanced alien species would be able to destroy us in short order and we would have little recourse to stop them at present.  The fact that it has not happened may mean they simply haven’t found us yet, but it may also mean that we are either lacking in large numbers of intelligent galactic neighbors or that taking out another species that has barely gotten its feet wet in the cosmic ocean is not the way to behave as a galactic society.  We still have far more to worry about from members of our own species bringing down civilization than any hypothetical alien species.

Another thing I do know about human nature:  No matter how many warnings and precautions and even laws that get thrown up to control people when it comes to what society thinks is in its best interests, there will always be individuals and groups of people who defy these rules either because they disagree with them or because it is in their nature to go against the grain.

This will apply to voyaging into space as much as anything else.  The only reason it hasn’t happened already is due to the technological difficulties in making a deep space mission a reality.  However, once we establish a serious foothold in space in our Sol system, I know there will be groups that will not want to remain confined to our celestial neighborhood but will want to venture to those countless stars surrounding us.  This will keep happening for as long as humanity lasts.

This is the eventuality we must prepare for, because I will agree with Hawking on one thing:  If life’s evolution is similar everywhere, then it is likely that some other species will also share our drive and desire to see what it out there beyond their home world.  It may be only a matter of time before we are visited.  How we respond to them depends not only on their intentions but on how much we have learned and evolved when it comes to understanding the Universe as well.  Hopefully we will not let our fears turn a potential friend into an enemy.

Images: 1st, a meteor strike (Virgin Media); 2nd, a radiotelescope transmitting DNA to the galaxy (Jon Lomberg); 3rd, Jeriba Shigan (Louis Gossett, Jr.) and Willis Davidge (Dennis Quaid) in the film version of Barry Longyear’s novella Enemy Mine.

by Larry Klaes, space exploration enthusiast, science journalist

Athena’s note: Larry’s article is particularly timely, given the recent buzz about the Earth-type planet Gliese 581g.

Part 1

Part 2

For those who may still wonder and question just how much weight the words of the famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking hold for the concept of alien intelligences and their potential reactions to encountering humanity, consider this:  A new science fiction film coming out this November titled Skyline recently released its theatrical trailers.

One of the older Skyline trailers begins with the line:  “On August 28th, 2009, NASA sent a message into space farther than we ever thought possible… in an effort to reach extraterrestrial life.”

Now it is true that on that date a transmission was broadcast into deep space by a NASA-owned radio telescope located in Australia.  This collection of messages from people all over the world (sent as part of the Hello from Earth campaign) was aimed at a planet in the red dwarf star system of Gliese 581, which is only 20.3 light years, or 194 trillion kilometers from us.  That may seem like a long way to Earth-bound humanity, but on a celestial scale the Gliese 581 system is a near neighbor.  As of this writing, the transmission has traveled just over one light year.  That isn’t even far enough to reach our closest stellar neighbors, the Alpha Centauri system 4.3 light years away, let alone merit the title of the farthest-flung human message ever.

As a final point, we simply don’t know if life of any kind exists on or near the target of Hello from Earth, the fourth world circling the star Gliese 581.  However, astronomers now think at least one and possibly three planets in that system have the potential to possess liquid water, a major ingredient for the formation of at least terrestrial types of life.  Of course the transmission is not going to stop once it reaches that alien planet.  The messages will spread outward and onward into the galaxy at light speed, which will give them an increased chance of being detected some day by an ETI, assuming any exist in the signal path.

After this inauspicious beginning to the trailer, the viewer is treated to some apparently real news broadcasts about Hawking’s alien warnings interspersed with images of strange bluish-white meteor-like lights dropping down upon Los Angeles.  In the news segments, former CBS Television news anchor Dan Rather intones that “if extraterrestrials visit us, the outcome might be similar to when Columbus landed in America.  In other words, it didn’t turn out too well for Native Americans.”  The trailer caps off this dire warning with the text “Maybe we should have listened.”  And done what, I have to ask?  Cover Earth in black tarp with some stars painted on the outside and hope nobody notices us?

Too late.  The menacing spaceships of the alien Columbuses, looking like gothic metal sculptures, are bearing down on the places where the lights landed.  The name of the film flashes on the screen, then comes a close-up of one of the alien vessels hovering over LA.  Its underside open wide like the jaws of some immense beast, it’s pulling thousands of tiny screaming, tumbling humans up through the air and into itself for reasons yet unknown, but ones the audience has little trouble imagining may not be for the benefit of humanity.

A final text warning commands us “Don’t look up!”  The injunction is directly counter to everything our society has been taught in terms of social progress and evolutionary development – to say nothing of what the recently deceased astronomy popularizer Jack Horkheimer said at the end of every episode of his PBS program, Star Gazer, which was to “Keep Looking Up!”

More Than One Side to the Alien Encounter Debate

Aside from the near-certainty that Skyline will be little different or better than the majority of alien invasion stories of the last one hundred years, using the real words of a real scientist (and a cosmologist at that) to give a sense of weight and urgency to just one side of the concept of alien interaction with our species ultimately blurs and overshadows the wider range of possible outcomes for what may one day define the ultimate course of humanity among the stars.

While it is true that the primary overall purpose of Skyline is a material one – to line the pockets of its makers with money by appealing to the basic instincts of those who will provide said profits – the film (and Hawking) are nevertheless contributing to the debate on how we should deal with other intelligences in the Cosmos.  This is the case whether the filmmakers had any deep intentions of doing so or whether the idea is plausible.

Too many science fiction stories about aliens tend to focus on the negative aspects of encounters between different sentient species, thus biasing (and reflecting) public thought on this topic.  So it is both fitting and important to take a look at just how plausible dire predictions like Hawking’s truly are.  Of course, there are certain limits as to how much one can reasonably determine what an ETI may do in regards to humanity in its present state: not yet knowing for certain if there is any life beyond Earth tops the list here.  However, we do possess enough scientific and technological knowledge to make some plausible determinations on just how likely our greatest fears about our galactic neighbors might be.

Just as SETI requires its hypothetical subjects to share some common elements with humanity in order to work, any beings who wish to harm us must also think and behave somewhat like us.  So when examining types of invading aliens, I am excluding the ones with abilities we would consider to be godlike: able to appear at will anywhere or anytime and commanding so much knowledge and power as to make the act of rendering us extinct a quick and easy exercise.  I presume that if such superbeings wanted us gone, it would have happened by now.

The fact that this has not happened could mean a number of things: they are much too smart and nice to harm others; they don’t care about us one way or the other; or they will destroy us but just haven’t gotten around to it yet.  So I will not speculate further on superETI, except to warn that beings able to do just about anything blur the line between science and fantasy.  In addition, I make no pretense that my lists of alien motives and weaponry are in any way complete, so further ideas are welcome.

The Why of Alien Invaders

Since invading another world across interstellar distances requires serious time and resources, our hypothetical alien marauders will not attempt to take down humanity and its home planet on a whim or to follow some cliché of galactic hegemony.  Like the future humans in the 2009 film Avatar who travelled 42 trillion kilometers to reach the Alpha Centauri system moon Pandora for its mineral wealth to aid their ailing civilization, our invaders will have to come up with a compelling reason to travel all that way if they ever literally want to leave the ground.

Of all the “whys” for an alien assault on Earth, taking our planet as a new place to live and utilize because their homeworld is dying or destroyed for one reason or another, is at least as old as H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.

Well’s 1898 novel was a reflection on how European colonizers of the era were treating the people and places they were colonizing and an extrapolation of the idea of advanced beings responding to the slow but inevitable demise of the habitability of their home planet, in this case Mars.  The numerous astronomical reports of seemingly straight lines on the Red Planet since 1877 had led to speculation that they were artificial.

The wealthy American astronomer Percival Lowell championed the idea that the lines were actually immense canals built by the Martians to bring water from the icy white polar caps to quench their drying, dying cities.  While Lowell seems to have assumed the superior Martians would eventually accept the end of their species and become extinct with dignity, Wells imagined these same creatures not wanting to go down with their planetary ship, thus their invasion of Earth.

Of course, one advantage Wells’ Martians had over just about any other species in the Milky Way galaxy was living so relatively near to our world.  A conventional rocket can propel a spacecraft to Mars in a matter of months, as they have in reality since the early 1960s.  However, it is an entirely different matter to send a ship between even the nearest stars.  Unlike the vessels of science fiction which are equipped with fanciful warp and hyper drives or have a convenient cosmic wormhole nearby, our current knowledge of what it would take to get from one star system to another is fraught with technological and celestial hurdles that make even a slow multigenerational ship a daunting task.

So even if an alien planet was going down the drain ecologically, geologically or cosmically, would it be wise (to say nothing of practical) to send a fleet across interstellar space to take over another star system?  Unless their sun was turning into a red giant or going supernova, it would be far easier to utilize the worlds in their own solar system for resources and settling.  For example, if an alien society was in desperate need of water like Lowell’s and Wells’ Martians, it would be much cheaper to mine the many, many comets that we know circle other stars, just as they do at the fringes of our Sol system.  And while we have yet to detect any exomoons, we do know that most of the moons circling the four Jovian planets are covered in water ice and some, like Jupiter’s Europa, probably have deep global water oceans.

The same goes for mineral resources.  The Milky Way galaxy alone is estimated to contain many billions of solar systems.  Presumably they have lots of planetoids and comets in addition to their major worlds, just like our celestial neighborhood.  It is also probable that many of those worlds are uninhabited but rich in elements that a technological civilization would find useful.  So even if our marauding aliens do want to journey all the way across the galaxy for gold or oil or whatever, why focus on Earth and its environs when the pickings are so easy and plentiful elsewhere?   Hauling all those rocks home would be expensive as all get out.  So trying to colonize a solar system that already has one intelligent species, even if that species is just starting to explore and utilize space, might be more trouble than it is worth.

Now let’s look at another classic reason for an ETI to want to come to Earth:  Dinner.  It has become practically an old joke that some aliens would see all the teeming life forms covering our planet and consider us an open buffet.  Not only do we once again invoke the question of whether it would be worth going to all that time and expense for a meal when there are probably much closer snacks at home; it is also virtually certain that our biochemistries would be so different that Earth organisms would be poison or cardboard to an alien creature (and vice versa).  The vastly different genetics would also prevent interspecies breeding, especially since it is unlikely that we and they will look anything alike.  As for needing a race of slaves, robots would be much less expensive and far more efficient.  Mission Serving Man sounds like some very old and very low-grade science fiction.

If it is just too much to fly all the way here for rocks or a meal, are there any other reasons why an ETI might still want to exterminate us?  We may not be a threat *now*, but perhaps there might be others who could see us as future cosmic competitors for available places and resources.  If the galaxy has beings who think in very long terms, certainly much longer than most present humans do, they may not want to wait until our descendants are arriving at their doorsteps and may want to take us out now instead.

I for one would like to think and hope that a stellar island of 400 billion suns over 100,000 light years across with perhaps 100 billion galaxies beyond our Milky Way in a Universe 13.7 billion light years wide would be plenty for everyone.  However, perhaps some cosmic real estate is more choice than others and its finite nature makes it a valuable target worth fighting for.  One estimate I saw in a Scientific American article from 2000 said the galaxy could be conceivably colonized in just 3 million years – a very short time compared to the 10 billion year age of the Milky Way.  The fact that our planet appears to be free of any alien conquerors/settlers may say something about that idea, or perhaps conquest and colonization is not as popular as we might imagine (and often do).

Even if we and others decide to be planetary homebodies for many generations, there will come a day when a home system’s main source of light and heat, their sun, will begin to die out.  Our yellow sun is no exception:  Sol is expected to start making things pretty unbearable on Earth in just a few billion years as it begins to expand into a red giant.  Even if Earth is spared being swallowed up by this bloated monstrosity of hot gasses, our planet will be charred into molten slag, killing anything living that remains.  Earth will later turn into a frozen iceball as Sol shrinks into a white dwarf and eventually a dead, dark cinder.  Even if our planet survives all this in at least its physical presence, when Sol goes completely so will Earth, its icy battered carcass floating off into the depths of the Milky Way as a rogue world.

So while we do have several billion years to prepare for this event, eventually nature will force our hand and make us choose either flight or extinction.  Even staying in distant parts of our system will become impossible once Sol starts collapsing upon itself.  And this is the fate of every star some day, even the very long lived red dwarfs, though some suns will also turn supernova or collapse into neutron stars or black holes.  I know things will be very different in those distant epochs, but anything beyond briefly visiting Earth or anyplace else nearby in those eras seems infeasible at best and deadly at worst.

Have other species around other suns realized this about their celestial hearths as well?  Will they decide to stay at home and wait for the end, or will they pack up and look for worlds where their suns won’t be going out quite so soon?  Will the fact that we have at least a few billion more years of relative safety be appealing to such refugees?  What happens when it is our species’ turn?  Perhaps there are many vague and hidden factors that will render all this speculation and prediction moot, but at least this idea has the merit of being a plausible reason why one might take up interstellar voyaging.

Another reason ETI might want to come to Earth is religion.  Perhaps like certain segments of humanity there are alien beings who strongly believe it is their sacred duty to share the Good News with everyone else, whether they want it or not.  Will alien missionaries ply the stars seeking to convert other species to what they perceive as The Truth, perhaps affecting “heathens” in the same way that missionaries affected other cultures in their zeal to save souls – settling in some very nice real estate in the process.  What will happen when a human group and an alien collective of very intense and very certain religious missionaries encounter each other?  Or is religion a primarily human concept?  Well, so far we have not been forced to worship any strange alien deities by clergy from the stars, unless some of our current religions were the direct result of an ancient missionary visit.

Images: 1st, the obligatory destruction of the White House by aliens, here in Independence Day; 2nd, alien appetites shown on Mars Attacks trading cards (Gelman, Brown and Saunders); 3rd, a bored godlike alien as embodied by Star Trek’s Q (John de Lancie); 4th, squabbles over choice real estate in Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds; 5th, A Case of Conscience by James Blish, an early SFnal example of planetary missionary fervor.

Part 3

Gliese 581 may be small as stars go, but it looms huge in the vision field of planetfinders.  As of yesterday, measurements indicate the system has six planets of which three are Earth-size and -type, within the star’s habitable zone, with stable, near-circular orbits.

The Gliese 581 system has a persistent will-o-the-wisp quality.  Almost each of its planets (c, d, e and now g) has been pronounced in turn to pass the Goldilocks test, only to have expectations shrink when the data get analyzed further.  The first frisson of excitement arose when 581c was determined to be Earth-type, which quickened the usual speculations: atmosphere? water? life?  We don’t know yet and our current instruments cannot detect biosignatures at that distance (short of an unencrypted request for more Chuck Berry).  But there are some things we do know.

Gliese 581 is a red dwarf, a BY Draconis variable.  This makes it long-lived; on the minus side, it may produce flares and is known to emit X-rays.  Planets in its habitable zone are so close to it that they are tidally locked, always presenting the same face to their star.  The temperature differentials resulting from the lock imply hurricane-force winds and tsunami-like tides.  Gliese 581g, like 581c, is large enough to retain an atmosphere; the hope is that, unlike 581c or Venus, its specific circumstances have not resulted in a runaway greenhouse effect.

The real paradigm shift is the discovery that this solar system has many earth-size rocky planets, in contrast to the hot-Jupiter/hot-Neptune preponderance in most others.  The second enticing attribute of Gliese 581 is its relative closeness — a distance of merely 20 light years.  It is still millennia away by our present propulsion systems.  But I nurse the dream that if we see anything remotely resembling a biosignature, we will strive to reach it.  In the meantime, I suggest we give it a name that fires the imagination.  Perhaps Yemanjá, the Yoruba great orisha of the waters, in the hope that the sympathetic magic of the name will work.  Perhaps Kokopelli, the trickster piper of the American Southwest cultures, who may entice us thither.  I will conclude with the final words of my first article on Gliese 581:

“Whether Gliese 581c [g] is so hospitable that we could live there or so hostile that we could only visit it vicariously through robotic orbiters and rovers, if it harbors life — even bacterial life, often mistakenly labeled “simple” — the impact of such a discovery will exceed that of most other discoveries combined. Unless supremely advanced Kardashev III level aliens seeded the galaxy like the Hainish in Ursula Le Guin’s Ekumen, this life will be an independent genesis, enabling biologists to define which requirements for life are universal and which are parochial.

At this point, we cannot determine if Gliese 581c [g] has an atmosphere, let alone life signatures. If it has non-technological life, without a doubt it will be so different that we may not recognize it. Nor is it a given, despite our fond dreaming in science fiction, that we will be able to communicate with it if it is sentient. In practical terms, a second life sample may exist much closer to home — on Mars, Europa, Titan or Enceladus. But those who are enthusiastic about this discovery articulate something beyond its potential seismic impact on biology and culture: the desire of humanity for companions among the sea of stars, a potent myth and an equally potent engine for exploration.”

Images: Top, comparison of the Sun and Gliese 581 habitable zones (the diagram is by Franck Selsis, Univ. of Bordeaux; the image of 581g was originally created for 581c by Ginny Keller); bottom, Kokopelli playing his flute.

Note: This article has been reprinted on Huffington Post.

…like amnesiacs
in a ward on fire, we must
find words
or burn.

Olga Broumas, Artemis

In the last few weeks, I’ve been watching the circus show of the (now postponed) Qu’ran burning with disbelief. Christians and Muslims have been playing variants of “If you don’t pay attention to my tantrums, I will shoot this dog” that was done far better by the National Lampoon. Government officials and media pundits are seriously suggesting that burning of a book that exists in millions of copies by a sad clown will touch off jihads. Yes, symbols are powerful — but fundamentalists will use any excuse for mayhem and bloodshed, whether they are white supremacists or the Taliban.

The real reason that many Muslims hate the US is because it has bombed two Muslim nations back into the Stone Age, is poised to do so to a third, and continues to pile up civilian casualties at a 100-fold ratio to US soldier deaths, while calling them “collateral damage”. Furthermore, to feed its petroleum addiction the US continues to staunchly support the primary source of militant Islamism: Saudi Arabia, whose deep pockets fund the madrassas that turn discontented, disillusioned Muslims into radical fundamentalists. However, it is equally true that imams and mullahs have issued death fatwas against books and their authors (Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Taslima Nasreen, Salman Rushdie, the Danish cartoonist who depicted Muhammad, to list just a few).

A favorite pastime of such militant religious thugs is destruction of knowledge. Islamists, like the self-labeled “man of God” Terry Jones and the medieval Catholics, burn books, burn schools, burn girls who try to attend school. They smash artworks – sculptures and paintings in the Kabul museum, the Bamiyan Buddha statues – following the example of the 9th-century Christian iconoclasts. People of this ilk burned the libraries of Alexandria. In those days of inscribing by hand, many works existed as single-number copies. As a result of this destruction, most ancient writers, scientists and philosophers are known to us only as names or sentence-long fragments.

This loss, in all its enormity and poignancy, has been portrayed only three times in contemporary popular media. It is the center of Fahrenheit 451 and of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, a thinking person’s mystery-cum-novel of ideas. It is also depicted in the recent film Agora, a romanticized version of the life of the legendary mathematician and philosopher Hypatia.

Catholic apologists took Agora to task for inaccuracy and “inciting to hatred against Christians”. This advocacy is odd on its face, given that there was no “Catholic” church at the time, and the Alexandrian Patriarchate went into the Orthodox fold after the schism. Nevertheless, the circling of wagons is understandable, especially since Agora came out at the same time that Belgian authorities finally decided to investigate child abuse cases despite the Catholic church’s attempts to stonewall them. Their hodgepodge “arguments” (italicized) include:

— Hypatia’s death was “purely” political; it had NOTHING to do with her gender, religion or occupation — which makes you wonder what their definition of political is.

— Alexandrian mobs routinely rampaged and she just got caught in the crossfire. This is routinely followed by the directly contradictory she was killed as a reprisal for the execution of the monk Ammonius (who had stoned the prefect Orestes, as shown in the film). In other words, Hypatia’s murder was not random and had everything to do with what she was and represented.

— The loss was small in any case, since Hypatia wasn’t THAT great a scientist/philosopher, she just rode on great men’s toga tails. This “reasoning” is very common (read Watson’s original depiction of Rosalind Franklin or Joanna Russ’ How to Suppress Women’s Writing). Conveniently, none of Hypatia’s own writings survived the various burnings. From my side, I could use this argument to point out that her loss far outweighed that of the monk.

— The REAL Alexandria library had been burned earlier by Caesar’s troops. The Serapeum library, whose destruction is shown in Agora, was unimportant. This shows interesting value judgments. Furthermore, Theodoros Vrettos, in his book Alexandria, City of the Western Mind, presents convincing evidence that the fire in Caesar’s time happened at the harbor, nowhere near where the main library stood.

There are more of these, but you get the gist. Make no mistake, Agora has its share of stiffness and clunk. As far as I’m concerned, its major error is to show Hypatia young at the time of her death. In fact, she was somewhere between fifty and sixty when Christian fanatics flayed her alive. Although the death of someone beautiful and young may pluck harder at heartstrings, the choice served to render older women once again invisible. Also, Rachel Weisz, radiant though she may be, is single-note chirpy whether she’s teaching upperclass youths, figuring out the truth behind the arbitrary Ptolemaic epicycles, or proclaiming her adherence to philosophy. Helen Mirren, Charlotte Rampling or Lena Olin would have made far more nuanced, haunting Hypatias.

Conversely, I applaud Amenábar’s choice to show Hypatia focused on her work, and not willing to be deflected from it by pretty faces and the security they promise. The fact that all men in full possession of their faculties are shown in love with her is fine with me. It’s a welcome reversal of the usual setting; at least Hypatia deserves such adoration, unlike most male film “heroes”.

However, the film’s title names its true core. Agora means “marketplace”, but it had a more specific meaning in older Greek: it was the place where people met to discuss ideas. The film celebrates love of learning, the beautiful workings of the mind, and laments the fragility of reason at the face of close-minded fanaticism. Hypatia’s death is a coda – as she tells Orestes, the thugs have already won. It is the looting of the library that gives the film its emotional power. It’s the burning of all these irreplaceable scrolls that makes you weep.

In conscious homage to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, Agora occasionally zooms out to view earth from space. As it does so, the screams and weapon clashes fade. And that may be the film’s second powerful point: in the vastness of the universe, we are nothing – except what we make of ourselves and our world. We can choose the way of the Taliban, the Teabaggers, the Hareddim, the Inquisitors. Or we can take the path of Hypatia. Between these two alternatives, there is no conciliation or compromise.

Images: top, Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) and Orestes (Oscar Isaac) watch the library burn in Agora; middle, book burnings past and present; bottom, a Hypatia figure in Fahrenheit 451.

Note: This article has been reprinted on Huffington Post.

by Larry Klaes, space exploration enthusiast, science journalist

Athena’s note: Many readers assumed that I wrote this article, especially those who are familiar with my views on ETI.  I wish I had, but please note the byline.  Though this is superfluous, I should add that I completely agree with Larry.

Part 1

Several months ago, the famous British physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking shared his views on extraterrestrial intelligences (ETI) with the intelligent beings of the planet Earth. This was done in no small part as a way to gain publicity for his new television science series, Stephen Hawking’s Universe, video clips of which may be seen here.

Hawking thinks that if biological life evolved elsewhere in the Cosmos as it has here on Earth, then there is a good chance it will have a territorial and predatory nature similar to most creatures on this planet. These behaviors would persist even in species that achieve sentience and technologies that exceed ours.

Sounding very much like the alien invaders from the 1996 science fiction film Independence Day, Hawking’s advanced ETI would roam the galaxy in massive starships that serve as both transportation and home. Having used up the resources of their home world (and presumably the rest of their solar system), Hawking’s ETI would search for suitable worlds to “conquer and colonize,” using them up as well (subduing and/or removing any living native competition in the process) and then moving on to the next set of viable targets.

There are numerous issues with Hawking’s scenario, which even a modest student of science fiction knows goes back over a century, with the invading Martians of H. G. Wells’ classic The War of the Worlds being the most notable of the premise that alien intelligences might treat us the way most human cultures have treated others on Earth for millennia, right up to the present day. The numbers of novels, books, films, television series, and articles that have been made about this subject since Wells’ day would fill a decent size library. So why are Stephen Hawking’s views on this matter receiving so much attention from the media and public?

The most obvious reason is that Hawking is a famous and brilliant scientist, one of the few whom the general populace recognizes with ease, like Albert Einstein, even if they don’t always know or understand his work and ideas. These factors combine to make the public and media think that professionals like Hawking are therefore experts on virtually every subject in existence, including the nature and behavior of hypothetical ETI.

While few would dispute the high intelligence and knowledge of Hawking when it comes to his chosen career fields, the truth is that on the matter of extraterrestrial life he has no deeper insights than any other human on Earth, past or present. Hawking is still subject to his culture, era, and species when it comes to ETI. Even Einstein, to whom Hawking has often been compared, followed the trends of his place and time when it came to aliens. Einstein assumed there were intelligent beings living on Mars and even wrote about an optical method of communicating with the imagined Martians in 1937. Einstein did this despite the fact that by that time most professional astronomers seriously doubted that the Red Planet either had or could support complex, intelligent life forms.

This is not intended to be a putdown of these great thinkers. Instead, it shows that when it comes to predicting the forms and motivations of ETI, after two millennia of contemplation on the subject and just a few decades of actually searching for them, all we really have to go on for solid evidence are the inhabitants of a single planet called Earth and the tantalizing clues slowly popping up across the rest of the Universe.

So why do Hawking and so many others assume a Universe full of predatory life forms, be they amoebae or beings of superior intelligence and technology? Going along the theme that even great scientists are subject to the knowledge limits of their time, culture, and profession, life on this planet has long been viewed and portrayed as one which is in a constant struggle for survival against both the environment and other creatures, including and especially one’s own species. There is of course a great deal of truth to this, as virtually every terrestrial organism spends much of its life fighting for food, living areas, and mates, through either physical force or more stealthy manipulations.

However, in recent decades, it has been recognized that life forms across the board, especially those that exist in societies, are far more altruistic and cooperative than it may seem on the surface. Even humanity, despite its abilities to make war on a globally destructive scale and despoil entire ecosystems, is much more cooperative and conscientious of ourselves and our surroundings than we tend to give ourselves credit for. We have finally begun to recognize and act upon the fact that Earth is not some limitless playground that will tolerate our ancient instinctual needs and behaviors indefinitely. This has brought about our efforts to preserve and protect the remaining resources and biota of Earth – imperfectly, of course, but at least a global response is underway – and we have so far succeeded in avoiding a nuclear war or other similar form of drastic artificial catastrophe, something our military and political leaders considered both survivable and winnable not so very long ago.

With this being the case, would future humanity extend its current instinctual drives in an uncontrolled manner into the rest of the galaxy once we begin expanding our species beyond the boundaries of its home world? Would our children become what Hawking fears about ETI?

While no one can guarantee absolute certainties in either direction with our limited knowledge and experiences in these areas, I will say that I think living in space and on the other worlds of our Sol system, none of which are presently survivable upon without either dwelling inside protective enclosures or being heavily modified (which could take centuries if not millennia to work for the latter case), will force our space-residing descendants to work together for their mutual existence and evolution. The very harsh nature of reality beyond Earth will not tolerate the excesses and foolishness our species has been largely able to get away with for most of its existence.

Of course it is possible that future science could create a form of humanity genetically tailored to occupy just about any corner of the Sol system, on-worlds and off, or they could abandon biology altogether and place the human mind in a mechanical form and/or create a new kind of mind-being called an Artilect.

Granted, these scenarios are not something that will happen next week to be sure, plus they have numerous hurdles to overcome even if they are possible. However, they do illuminate the point that the best kinds of beings to survive and thrive on a cosmic scale are not necessarily the type of humanity that exists on Earth now, or any other form of life suited for one world only. Add to this fact that a spacefaring society would find vast amounts of resources among the planetoids and comet which we know exist throughout the stars and perhaps a species that spends its time marauding inhabited planets makes a bit less sense, if not as enthralling for the entertainment of our species.

Perhaps what Hawking and others fail to completely grasp is that any alien intelligences which do emerge in our galaxy will come from a world that is not a carbon copy of Earth and may in many cases evolve on a Jovian type moon, or a Jovian type world itself, or perhaps in some other kind of environment that current science would not consider to be a place for any kind of life. There is no certainty that even the behaviors or organisms everywhere are literally universal, including the kind that devour their home worlds and then have the ability and will to pack up and do the same thing again and again across the heavens. To be even more specific, the kind of actions and goals that may work for a creature confined to its home world may not be feasible beyond their domain of origin.

The fact that even someone as educated and intelligent as Stephen Hawking should view other societies in the Milky Way galaxy with fear under the presumption that all intelligences evolved in similar ways and will continue to behave in an instinctive manner even if they achieve interstellar travel shows how much of humanity still thinks and lives as if the whole of existence revolves and focuses around our one planet.

Accepting the fact that the vast majority of us have remained Earthbound and will continue to do so for at least a few more generations, our species nevertheless has been intellectually aware for centuries now that we dwell on a rocky planet circling one of hundreds of billions of suns in a vast celestial island. Just as the elements which make up this world are also found throughout the Universe, it is equally possible that biological organisms do universally behave just as Hawking predicts. The question remains, however: do they evolve into beings of higher intelligence who still retain certain instincts or do they eventually move away from them? Or does something completely different happen and is it unique for every species? That will be the focus in Part 2, along with a look at how events might go and why if an ETI ever did attack us and our world.

Images: Top, two archetypal hostile aliens — the xenomorph of the Alien tetralogy and the hunter of the Predator series; middle, the truly terrifying Kang and Kodos of Rigel VII and The Simpsons; bottom, the alien fleet approaches Earth’s moon in the V remake.

Part 2

Part 3

I recently had an exchange with a progressive friend. He had just announced that he had become a fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), a prominent transhumanist venue. Since I had trod that path before him, we inevitably came to the part where I pointed out that transhumanism is composed almost exclusively of white American men — and its upper echelon entirely so (H+ devotees invariably counter that most of their gofers are female and/or ethnic, so there!). Whereupon my friend replied: “Yes, it’s a white boys’ club. As far as I know that’s not because of a policy of exclusion. It’s because primarily white boys think about this stuff.” Which puts him in the same group (and class) as Larry Summers, who declared that women aren’t in the sciences because their brains just aren’t wired for numbiz.

Now, I’d been thinking and talking about issues colonized by transhumanists ever since I became a biologist: genetic engineering, prostheses, organ replacement and regeneration, longevity, brain function – for the simple reason that they are core domains in biology (to say nothing of medicine, society, etc). And ain’t I a woman? A dark ethnic one, at that? So no, Virginia, thinking Bik Thotz is not limited to white boys. But I guess that a thought doesn’t count as big (or even as a thought) until/unless a white boy utters it. Or, as a reviewer for one of my research manuscripts once opined, “If what you report were true, someone would have discovered it.”

The exchange made me realize the fatal error I committed about two decades ago: I neglected to call my thoughts a movement, give it a sonorous name and the glitzy rhetoric to match and register it as a non-profit with me as CEO – or President of the Board, I’m not picky. I could have become the Madame Blavatsky of transhumorism… er, transhumanism.  After all, given what passes as biology in the movement, I could do it half-asleep: I would recycle my Biochem 101 primer decked out in shiny costume jewelry with futuristic terms sprinkled liberally on the word salad. If qualified biologists objected to my prophesications, I would call them bioluddites and sic my devoted groupies on them. And like Pharaoh Hatshepsut, I would attach a beard to my chin and stroke it thoughtfully for more gravitas (and to illustrate postgenderism in action).

Alas, I did not avail myself of the golden opportunity. Instead, I opted to do basic research in the neurobiology of mental retardation and dementia. Not for me the mindmelds of the Humanity Plus Summits (where, this year, a satellite workshop will discuss “whole brain emulation, mind transfer, digital personalities, gradual replacement techniques…” – perhaps with hefty participation by the Syfy channel). Not for me the acolytes who would swoon from interacting with my Second Life babelicious bod. This lack of prescience will preclude me from being a Rupturee. No frolicking in the Matrix Hereafter in a clingy black patent leather outfit.

But I know myself too well. I’d be bored stiff in any place where charlatanism passes for provocative thinking or cutting edge science. Cults are very similar in that you have to actively suppress your brain processes to play along. I told my friend that we should revisit this conversation when his stint at the IEET is done. Unless the Singularity happens first, of course.

Image: Agent Smith and his homogeneous whitebread associates (The Matrix)

More references for those thirsting for enlightenment:

Girl Cooties Menace the Singularity!
Is It Something in the Water? Or: Me Tarzan, You Ape
If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution!

Chirality (handedness) is intrinsic to life across scales yet surprisingly absent from speculative fiction. The single time I recall a plot point hinging on it is during Mal’s battle with the Operative in Serenity. I have decided to explore this attribute in a series, which I will cross-post here and at Science in My Fiction.

The first article, Southpaws: The Hops in Humanity’s Beer, is up at SiMF today. Versions of it appeared very early on this blog with the title The Left Hand of Light and at HuffPo. I will follow with articles on carbon compounds (aka organic chemistry), biomolecules, brain lateralization… in short, whatever falls under the broad rubric of handedness and pleases my left-handed, left-leaning sensibilities!

Image: Southpaw by RobtheSentinel.

(best read to Oysterband’s Dancing as Fast as I Can)

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes,
and oh, my friends —
It gives a lovely light!

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

To anyone wondering about the unusually long silence on the blog — I’ve been working solo in the lab and closing out my two small grants. I’ve gone once again to half salary, to nurse my tiny seed corn until the fate of my pending grant gets decided.

On other fronts, I’ve managed to keep my hanging gardens going despite the weather. Last weekend we went on an art walk in that lovely corner of New England tucked between Newport and South Dartmouth, which is Cape Cod minus tchotchkes and tourists. I’m wrestling with several invited stories, articles and reviews — though I need to impose some discipline, because they keep jostling each other for attention in my head.

I was one of the judges in the short story contest of Science in My Fiction. The ten finalists were excellent and hard to rank. They also had several commonalities. All but one and a half were resolutely earth-bound; all but two unfolded in the US or a vague post-apocalyptic landscape; all took their kernels from biology and focused on the brain/mind; and they contained zero romance. In short, cyberpunk… but they engaged well with the scientific concepts that fueled them.

I also gave a solo talk and participated in two panels at Readercon. In my talk, Citizens of the Universe, Citizens of the World, I discussed the importance of wide horizons to writing speculative fiction with authenticity and legitimacy. The panels were Avatar and the Future of Planetary Romance and The Body and Physicality in Speculative Fiction. Both were thought-provoking and lively – and if you guessed that I had much to say and did so, you’d be right. The second panel could easily have lasted three hours. We were just getting warmed up when we had to roll our tents.

On the Saturday of Readercon Joan Slonczewski, Jack McDevitt and Sue Lange came to dinner. Given the topics we covered, I should have registered this as a panel!

And I still take the occasional moment to shake my head over such things as the seriously flawed longevity gene study (another spectacular case of hype over rigor, especially for a journal like Science) and the witchhunts by those whose appetite for destruction has overwhelmed their reasoning capacity. The Democratic leadership should grow a spine and re-read the tale of the scorpion and the frog.

Images: top, Loie Fuller, Serpentine Dance (1896); bottom, the hanging gardens of North Cambridge.

(Title borrowed from Kurt Vonnegut)

In the novel and film 2010, when the Monolith builders force Jupiter into nuclear ignition they also program poor put-upon HAL to broadcast, non-stop “All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landings there.”

Arthur C. Clarke was deemed uncannily prescient when he wrote this, because many astrobiologists believe that life may exist under Europa’s thick ice crust: the moon harbors an underground water ocean and has geothermal energy courtesy of its huge planet. But recent news from the Cassini-Huygens mission could prove the prophet wrong. Before we encounter life on Europa, we may find it on Titan.

The Cassini data essentially show complex surface chemistry, as the Voyager data did for Mars. They also show mysterious absences of items expected to be abundant, given Titan’s specifics – acetylene and hydrogen in particular. Such results always carry the cautionary sentence that “non-biogenic processes yet unknown” could cause these anomalies. But organisms feeding on the missing chemicals is definitely on the list of these processes, something that several astrobiologists (Chris McKay, Derek Schulze-Makuch, David Grinspoon) suggested five years ago by speculating that acetylene would be tasty to Titanian life.

Titan, unlike bone-dry Mars, has enormous lakes – although they contain liquid hydrocarbons, rather than water. The lightest in that family (methane and ethane) are poor solvents because they’re non-polar, unlike water and ammonia. Nevertheless, they do act as solvents for the rich organic soup churned by Titan’s thick atmosphere of ammonia and methane (Carl Sagan’s “tholins”, from the Hellenic word for murky). And although chemical reactions will be slow in Titan’s ambient temperature of –190 Celsius (room temperature is 24 Celsius), all bets are off once enzymes are involved.

If we can conclude definitively that there is life on Titan, we will have walked one step further to the right of the Drake equation. We share material with Mars by meteorite exchange, so any life that existed or still exists there may have shared its beginnings with us. There can be no such ambiguity for Titan, given its distance and conditions. Whatever we find there, from bacteria to placidly grazing hydrogen balloons, it will be the product of an independent genesis. And it will be very different from us, finally making it possible to rigorously determine which aspects of life are parochial and which are universal.

This brings us full circle to HAL’s warning. If life exists elsewhere in the solar system, it will be both a boon and a burden. Such a discovery will give a major boost to astrobiology, which will finally have a legitimate topic to explore beyond the armchair vaporings of famous physicists – and to crewed space exploration, beyond the depressing and trivial prospect of sending more people in fungus-infested tincans into low terrestrial orbit.

At the same time, as I wrote elsewhere, we may destroy alien life even if we are careful. Such an outcome will deprive us of precious, irrecoverable knowledge that will help us make sense of our universe and our own planet, even if the new life consists entirely of bacteria (to say nothing of the moral equivalent of genocide if it’s more advanced than that). It may be that none of these worlds are ours, except for us exploring them and becoming their stewards.

Note: The article is now also on Huffington Post, sans images and references.

Images: Huygens on Titan, Craig Attebery (NASA); “Ammonia!  Ammonia!” by Robert Grossman, The New Yorker.

References:

C. P. McKay and H. D. Smith (2005). Possibilities for methanogenic life in liquid methane on the surface of Titan. Icarus 178, 274-276.

Schulze-Makuch, D., and D.H. Grinspoon (2005) Biologically enhanced energy and carbon cycling on Titan? Astrobiology 5, 560–564.

D. F. Strobel (2010). Molecular hydrogen in Titan’s atmosphere: Implications of the measured tropospheric and thermospheric mole fractions. Icarus, in press.

R. N. Clark et al (2010). Detection and Mapping of Hydrocarbon Deposits on Titan. J. Geophys. Res., in press.

Last week, bio-entrepreneur icon Craig Venter burst yet again into the limelight.  He announced that a team under his direction inserted a chemically synthesized genome into Mycoplasma and succeeded in getting the resulting bacterium to propagate. The work duly appeared in Science and the predictable shouting ensued, from fears that humans are “playing God” to hails of “artificial life”.

Several important issues got lost in the din. Let’s leave the obvious potential objections aside – after all, humans started futzing the moment their frontal cortex became prominent and the consequences of this, intended and not, have decisively affected earth and all life on it.  Instead, let’s examine the clothes of this emperor closer up. To stick with the metaphor, Venter’s latest is like exactly reproducing a large cloak onto a new piece of fabric identical to that of the original. It’s not like creating a new garment or even cutting and pasting from previous garments to make a quilt, crazy or otherwise.

The Venter work is not a discovery, let alone a paradigm shift. It’s a technological advance and even then not of technique but only of scale. The experiment is merely an extension of a well-known principle that every biology lab uses routinely: namely, that bacterial genomes can be modified almost at will (barring a few indispensable regions) and in such ways as to turn the bacteria into potent mini-factories for specific proteins. The Venter bacterium is actually pedestrian because it carries an exact duplicate of a naturally occurring genome. Its only artificial aspects are the molecular “flags” that its makers included in the synthesis to mark the artificial genome for further tracking – standard operating procedure in all such modifications.

Most decidedly, this is not artificial life (though I hasten to add that there is nothing mystical or long-term unknowable about components of living cells and organisms, including the eventual ability to tweak them). To propagate the synthesized chromosome, the Venter team used a bacterium whose endogenous DNA had been removed but was otherwise intact. This means that they used existing natural components to do the real task of propagation – the entire structure and machinery of the host cell. This makes the endeavor even less groundbreaking than injecting genetic material into a mammalian egg or stem cell (as was done to produce Dolly the sheep with far less advanced technology).

Lastly, this does not bring us a single step closer to engineering customized functions, from vacuuming up oil spills, excess CO2 or methane to producing chlorophyll or unique drugs. Creating a synthetic cell totally de novo is theoretically doable but far below the event horizon. Altering existing genes and/or creating ones for novel functions is more distant still, because making the coding part is only a small part of the task — if we figure out how to get them to encode it, for starters. Persuading them to express at the right place and time is equally crucial. So is coaxing them to work in eukaryotic cells which, unlike easy-going bacteria, have carefully guarded compartments – the nucleus in particular.

In short, the Venter endeavor was expensive, glitzy – and banal. My advice to bioethicists is to save their energy for truly fearsome items, such as recombinant bacteria or viruses that may arise from species pushed together by abrupt dislocations of habitats (and for the inevitable push for a broad research-suffocating patent from this work). I’ve done far more “dangerous” work in my near-constant cloning than this sheep attempting to pass as a wolf… nay, a lion.

Note 1: The article is now featured at Huffington Post.

Note 2: The article has also been reprinted at io9.

by Larry Klaes, space enthusiast and science journalist

A slightly different version of this article appeared on The Tompkins Weekly on May 10, 2010.

Not since 2000 has an impending year so intrigued and concerned the general public like 2012. Many people have a vague idea that the world is heading towards some kind of doom because of a calendar created by an ancient and mysterious race. They see every new natural and artificial disaster as one more bit of proof that everything will come to a crashing end – on December 21, 2012 to be exact.

What are the real facts behind all the stories, hype, and concern about 2012? Ithaca’s Science Cabaret devoted its last program of the spring to this very year and topic. Titled “2012: Truths and Fictions”, the subject was tackled from two key angles by Ann Martin, a Ph.D astronomy candidate at Cornell and Wendy Bacon, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Bacon began with a very brief background on the Maya, the Mesoamerican culture which supposedly started all this fuss. Settled primarily in what is now southern Mexico and the bordering nations of Belize and Honduras, the Maya society (the letter n is added to the end of their name only when speaking about their language) existed from roughly 1500 BCE to 1500 CE when the Spanish conquistadors began settling their region. The Maya did not die out, however: Today between 4 and 9 million descendants of this once great society still live in the area, speaking twelve diverse languages and nestled among the rainforests and the remnants of the magnificent temples built by their ancestors.

Martin then took the stage to explain that a Cornell Web site titled “Ask an Astronomer” which started in 1997 and currently has over 800 answers to commonly asked questions about the heavens, began showing a noticeable increase in questions pertaining to 2012.

Martin examined some of the recent 2012 documentaries from The History Channel and the recent film with the year as its title. She noted that for the cable programs, sensationalism was prevalent. “Our days are numbered! Prepare for doomsday!” were some of the themes from the programs on The History Channel. As for what exactly is supposed to happen in December of 2012, Martin explained that we have been given three choices: A New Age style time of renewal, the actual end of the worlds, and a major astronomical event.

Bacon took the microphone from Martin to describe the Long Count calendar of the Maya which started our society’s focus on 2012. The Long Count began on August 11, 3114 BCE, a date chosen more out of numerical symmetry than anything else. The calendar’s choice of 2012 as its time to recycle is due to matching the number of days from its ancient origin. When Maya society began to collapse from the top down in our tenth century CE, the Long Count of measuring days went with it.  “2012 is based on something that hasn’t been used in a very long time,” stated Bacon.

Responding to the question of why our modern society has focused on a calendar system that has not been used by the people who originated it in centuries, Martin suggested that one reason is that 2012 will come about sooner than, say, the calendar of the Maya’s neighbors – the Aztecs – which will not see the end of its current cycle until 2027.

The Cornell astronomer then addressed the various celestial fictions that have arisen regarding 2012. As one example, some claim that Earth will align with the center of the Milky Way galaxy on December 21 of two years hence and this will somehow bring about a terrible disaster. Using a simple diagram, Martin showed that our world aligns with the center of our galaxy twice a year as Earth orbits the Sun, and has done so for roughly the last five billion years.

Martin dismissed claims that our globe will be destroyed when it plunges into the galactic core, which is over 26,000 light years away. She also explained that Earth and humanity will not be affected by plunging through the plane of the Milky Way or if the planets in our Solar System line up (which they will not do on any day in 2012). She noted further that Earth will not be struck by the mythical planet Nibiru, or be fried by the Sun if Earth’s magnetic field should suddenly reverse itself.

“The public should be excited about the Maya and astronomy,” said Martin. “But instead, people are freaking out about 2012 for false reasons. This is a real shame.” Martin and Bacon both expressed concern about how uncertain and frightened many people (in North America at least) are about the year 2012 due to these unsubstantiated rumors. The scientists foresee a backlash against science from these events, which Martin calls a “loss of cosmophiles” or people who might otherwise love learning about the Cosmos.

Images: Chichén Itzá temple/Maya glyph composite, Aaron Logan; glyphs from La Mojarra Stela 1, Veracruz, Mexico — the left column gives a Long Count date of 8.5.16.9.7, or June 23, 156 CE; Maya calendar cartoon, Dan Piraro.