Astrogator's Logs

My readers probably know that I’m one of those who think there is intelligent life in the universe besides humanity, although I also think that the timespace constraints for meeting (even by signaling) and the biological and cultural hurdles for mutual comprehension are formidable.

We have sent information about ourselves to the universe: in addition to the unavoidable EM transmissions, we put plaques and voice recordings in the Pioneers and Voyagers. These qualify as METI, Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligences.  The probes by themselves are messages, tiny bottles flung into the vast ocean of space.

Dr. Tibor Pacher, a Hungarian physicist working in Germany and a space enthusiast, has started a program called Faces from Earth to continue and expand these efforts, in the hopes of inspiring more people about space exploration — especially the young. Mr. Larry Klaes, a US journalist and also a space enthusiast (and a long-time friend and contributor to this blog) just wrote about Tibor’s work at Seti League: Facing the Galaxy.

Please visit both links and consider whether you might like to join. There’s a 6-minute video at Tibor’s site, with several faces and statements about why people think this is an important endeavor. Halfway into the video, you will see a face you may recognize… and catch a glimpse of my lab.

Image: One of the posters for Faces from Earth.

Note: The music for Tibor’s video is For Arnhem Land by Aalborg World Soundtracks.

I recently saw a xkcd strip about the Spirit rover.

I’m notoriously immune to the usual causes that are supposed to make women weep.  But tears sprang to my eyes when I saw the strip.  Just as I wept while I watched the little robots tending the spaceborne trees in Silent Running; at the launches of the Voyagers; and when I saw the drawing of Sojourner that showed it leaving human footprints on Mars.

These are just instruments.  They’re not fluffy, they’re not cuddly.  But they represent the best in us – the builders, the gardeners, the explorers.

ETA: My friend Calvin asked an important question in his comment to this entry: “Do you think these robots are pushing our neoteny buttons? The Spirit rover (as well as Wall-E) have the large “eyes” of a child. And the squat proportions of the robots in Silent Running (as well as R2D2) also seem to echo the proportions of a child.”

I considered this possibility.  But the Mars rovers and the Voyagers lack several crucial attributes of neoteny: roundness, softness, cooing gurgles.

R2D2 adhered more closely to the neotenic model, and he didn’t arouse these reactions (in me, at least).  For me, their roles are what make them so enormously touching — the quiet, uncomplaining, unsung preservation and propagation of supremely “humane” values.

Images:

Top, a portion of the xkcd strip Spirit.

Center, Swirl, by Joe Bergeron.

Bottom, a gardener in Silent Running.

— W. B. Yeats

January 2010 will mark three years since the launch of Starship Reckless. The experience has been wondrous for me, and I want to thank all my visitors, regular and irregular, for making the journey an unalloyed pleasure. For those of you who are lurking, I’m curious to know what your (pre)occupations are and what drew you to the site. Drop me a line when you have a moment, here or by e-mail.

And unless a meteorite pierces the hull or we get too close to a black hole, we’ll keep flying…

“…for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.”

— Ulysses; Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Image: Galactic Vista by John Whatmough

Music: Serenity, “Love” by David Newman

Eleven years ago, Harvard Alumni Magazine asked me why I wrote The Biology of Star Trek despite my lack of tenure.  My answer was The Double Helix: Why Science Needs Science Fiction.  In it, I described how science fiction can make science attractive and accessible, how it can fire up the dreams of the young and lead them to become scientists or, at least, explorers who aren’t content with canned answers.

The world has changed since then, the US more than most.  American culture has always proclaimed its distrust of authority.  However, the nation’s radical shift to the right also brought on disdain for all expertise – science in particular, as can be seen by the obstruction of research in stem cells and climate change and of teaching evolution in schools (to say nothing of scientist portrayals in the media, exemplified by Gaius Baltar in the aggressively regressive Battlestar Galactica reboot).

This trend culminated in the choice of first a president and then a vice-presidential candidate who flaunted their ignorance and deemed their faux-folksy personae sufficient qualifications to lead the most powerful nation on the planet.  Even as the fallout from these decisions deranges their culture, Americans cling to their iPods, SUVs and Xboxes and still expect instant cures for everything, from acne to old age, seeing scientists as the Morlocks that must cater to their Eloi.

Science fiction is really a mirror and weathervane of its era.  So it comes as no surprise that the dominant tropes of contemporary speculative fiction reflect the malaise and distrust of science that has infected the Anglosaxon First World: cyberpunk and urban fantasy have their feet (and eyes) firmly on the ground.  Space exploration is passé, and such luminaries as Charlie Stross delight in repeatedly “proving” that the only (straw)people to still contemplate crewed space travel are deluded naifs who can’t/won’t parse scientific facts or face unpalatable limitations.

I’ve been reading SF since the early seventies, ever since my English became sturdy enough to support the habit.  In both reading and writing, I favor layered works that cross genre boundaries.  This may explain why I have a hard time getting either inspired or published in today’s climate, in which publishers and readers alike demand “freshness” as long as it’s more of the same.  Yet old fogey that I’m becoming, I do believe that people who write SF should have a nodding acquaintance with science principles and the scientific mindset.

So imagine my surprise when the following comment met with universal approval on a well-known SF blog: “There seems to be a common feeling with people coming into SF that you need to know real science to write good SF. Which is of course rubbish.”

Let me rewrite that statement for another genre: “There seems to be a common feeling with people coming into historical fiction that you need to know real history – or at least the history of the era you plan to portray – to write good historical fiction or alternative history.  Which is of course rubbish.”

Cell phones in a Renaissance novel?  Tudor court ladies on mopeds?  Why should anyone notice or care?  Likewise, “cracks” in the event horizon of a black hole?  Instant effortless shapeshifting?  Only an elitist jerk would object, spoiling the fun and causing unnecessary angst to the author!  Never mind that such sloppiness jolts the reader out of the suspension of disbelief necessary for reading the story – and is particularly unpardonable because a passable veneer of knowledge can be readily acquired by surfing the Internet.

Many of today’s SF writers and readers don’t just proudly proclaim that they don’t know nuthin’ ‘bout no science; they also read only within ever-narrowing subgenres – and only contemporaries.  When I attended an SF workshop supposedly second only to Clarion, a fellow participant castigated me for positing the “completely absurd” ability to record sounds off the grooves of a ceramic surface.  Of course, this is essentially a variation of sound reproduction in phonographic records.  No wonder that much of contemporary speculative fiction tastes like recycled watery gruel or reheated corn syrup.

Please understand, I don’t miss the turgid exposition, cardboard-thin characters and blatant sexism, parochialism and triumphalism of the Leaden… er, Golden Era of SF (though the same types of attributes and attitudes have resurfaced wholesale in cyberpunk).  My lodestars are Le Guin, Tiptree, Anderson, Zelazny, Butler, Cherryh, Scott – and Atwood, despite her protestations that she does not, repeat not, write science fiction.  They all prove that top-notch SF can incorporate gendanken experiments that contravene physical laws: FTL travel, stable wormholes, mind uploading, a multiplicity of genders and earth-like planets, anthropomorphic aliens, to name only a few.

Fiction must be the dominant partner in all literary efforts.  Imaginative storytelling trumps strict scientific accuracy. Nevertheless, SF requires convincing, consistent worldbuilding.  This in turn demands that the author stick to the rules s/he has made and that the premises adhere to known laws once the speculative exceptions have been accommodated: if a planet is within a red dwarf sun’s habitable zone, its orbit has to be tidally locked barring incredibly advanced technology.  If a story contravenes or doesn’t depend on science, real or speculative, it’s not SF.  It’s magic realism or fantasy.  Not that it matters, as long as the plot and characters are compelling.

Avast, Impudent Cooties!

There have been recent lamentations within the tribe about SF losing ground to fantasy, horror and other “lesser” cousins.  Like all niche genres, speculative fiction further marginalizes itself by creating arbitrary hierarchies that purport to reflect intrinsic worth but in fact enshrine unexamined cultural values: hardcover self-labeled hard SF preens at the top, written mostly by boys for boys; print-on-demand SF romance skulks at the bottom, written almost exclusively by girls for girls (though the increasing proportion of female readership is exerting significant pressure on the pink ghetto walls).

The real problem is not that science is hard to portray well in SF.  The problem is impoverished imagination, willful ignorance and endless repetition of recipes.  In short: failure of nerve.  Great SF stories are inseparable from the science in them.  A safe, non-demanding story is unlikely to linger in the readers’ memory or elicit changes in their thinking.

If science disappears altogether from SF or survives only as the gimmick that allows “magic” plot outcomes, SF will lose its greatest and unique asset: acting as midwife and mentor to future scientists.  This is no mere intellectual exercise for geeks.  To give one example, mental and physical work on the arcships so denigrated by Stross et al. would also help us devise solutions to the inexorable looming specter of finite terrestrial resources.

Rick Sternbach: Solar Sail

The political and social pseudo-pieties of the US cost it several generations of scientists, some in their prime.  The full repercussions won’t appear immediately, but already the US is no longer the uncontested forerunner in science and technology and its standard of living is dropping accordingly.  Breakthroughs in physics and biology are happening elsewhere.  Of course, all empires have a finite lifespan.  Perhaps the time has come for the Chinese or the Indians to lead.  But no matter who is the first among equals in the times to come, I stand by the last sentence in my Double Helix essay: “Though science will build the starships, science fiction will make us want to board them.”

Update 1: Huffington Post just re-posted this article (without the accompanying images, though, which add texture to the story).

Update 2: The article is now also on the new blog I Like a Little Science in My Fiction.

Traveler from afar who sailed to our shores –
ask the Sea Rose for a gift…

Most of my friends know that I write fiction.  Publication started fifteen years ago, when five of my stories (collected in the file In the Realms of Fire) appeared in After Hours, a venue pointed out by my friend and fellow writer Calvin Johnson.

Since then, in addition to writing The Biology of Star Trek and the essays here and elsewhere, I spun six novels in an alternative universe where the Minoans survive the explosion of the Thera volcano.  The saga starts in the Bronze Age and extends into the far future.  A small press is interested in the first novel in the series, Shard Songs, which gives me strong motivation to finish it.  The trouble is that the entire opus needs global editing – a full-time job that requires focus and calmness of mind.

Several friends saw parts of the saga as it unfolded.  It inspired two of them (Heather D. Oliver and Kathryn Bragg-Stella) to create the beautiful artworks that grace the site’s cover, blog logo and gallery.  However, none of it had officially seen the light of day till this August and I had serious doubts about its publication potential.  This was in part because it doesn’t fit into any category and ignores several recipes… er, rules.

In it, legends, songs, vision quests and geasa intertwine with genetic engineering, wormhole travel, planetary settlement and sapient aliens.  Some portions have multiple narrators, the cultures are not Anglosaxon and an invented language whispers through it: my version of the lost Minoan tongue.  Worse yet, in an era where dismemberments earn a work a PG rating, kudos and awards whereas glimpses of a nipple earn it an NC-17 rating and snide sniggers, my saga contains as much sex as it does war – and though it’s not romance, love is a powerful engine in it.

Then, in August, Crossed Genres accepted Dry Rivers, a brief story from the  saga that takes place in Minoan Crete.  The just-released issue 13 of Crossed Genres contains Planetfall, a much longer braid from the saga’s tapestry.  Planetfall consists of five linked stories whose human protagonists are descendants of the characters in Dry Rivers and Shard Songs.

I don’t know if any of these novels will ever get published.  But these two green shoots have given me great joy and hope.  It was my tremendous luck to have devoted friends who urged me to keep writing the saga; to meet Kay Holt and Bart Leib whose vision of Crossed Genres focused exactly on hard-to-categorize works like mine; and to enjoy the unwavering certainty of Peter Cassidy, who’s convinced that one day the entire saga will emerge from its cocoon and unfurl its wings.  Dhi kéri ten sóran, iré ketháni.

As a companion piece to Calvin’s excellent Caprica review, my article about mind uploading (and other proposed methods of individual immortality, feasible and otherwise) just appeared in H+ Magazine: Ghost in the Shell: Why Our Brains Will Never Live in the Matrix

There will be a third article, then we’ll see if they’re game for more!  My thanks to the wonderful editor-in-chief of H+ Magazine, R.U. Sirius of Mondo 2000 fame.

Update 1: They say good things come in threes.  When I got home tonight, I found a surprise package: Jack McDevitt’s just-released novel, Time Travelers Never Die.  It contains a dedication, an acknowledgment “for acting as a guide and translator at Alexandria” and there is an Andreadis fellowship in that universe — for linguists, I think.  Thanks to Jack for inviting me to share his exciting journey.  I’m eager to read the book… and wonder: what will the third good thing be?

Update 2: The H+ article was slashdotted.  The funniest comment there was “Shhh.  Nobody tell Kurzweil!”  And the Andreadis fellowship in Time Travelers is for classical studies.  Very fittingly, its first recipient is named Aspasia Kephalas.  The former name is a nod to the Miletian courtesan partner of Pericles, famed for her intelligence and learning; the latter is street-Greek for “Brainiac”.

Yours truly pontificates in the latest issue of Crossed Genres. And I don’t have even a Master’s in Futurism!

Many thanks to Peggy Kolm, whose post about The Biology of Star Trek drew the editors’ attention, and to Kay Holt for the penetrating queries.

Excerpt:

Crossed Genres: We send astronauts up; we try to keep everything very clean and very sterile. Am I right in guessing that it just doesn’t seem viable if the population is going to stay there for very long?

Athena Andreadis: Well, these are not self-sustained, long- term missions. The real reason for the sterility is not to contaminate exoplanetary samples. Also, if you read the fine print, you find out that one of the major and most time consuming tasks in places like the space station is scrubbing the fungus off of surfaces because there are no countervailing entities to take care of it. Not very heroic. All these macho alpha-type people up there going ‘scrubba-scrubba’.

Image: Blue Moo, by Sandra Boynton (detail)

… Centauri Dreams, where my friend Paul Gilster is graciously hosting my more extended take on the new Star Trek film.  I think that the mixed reactions are universal among those who loved the original Star Trek’s optimism and civility.   Here is the closing paragraph of my extended essay, to whet your appetites:

ST|| is an odd-numbered film in the series, so I’ll give it a long space tether. However, if Uhura degenerates into the Angel in the House or if the certain-to-come sequels become more generic, I will put ST|| permanently in the same category as Star Wars. Those who have read my essay on Star Wars know how dire a fate this is. And though my wrath may not equal that of Khan, if enough of my ilk get disaffected we may abandon all the old lumbering dinosaurs and manage to relaunch the real McCoy — the Firefly-class starship Serenity, with its true love of endless skies and its persistent aim to misbehave.

Ulysses, Alfred Tennyson

I just saw the Star Trek film.  Not surprisingly, it received an avalanche of good reviews (I recommend Stephanie Zacharek’s in Salon).  Though it’s far from perfect, it captures and renews the essence of its source without servility or campiness.  It’s an alternative universe fanfiction, in the best sense.  I considered Jackson’s Lord of the Rings an unexpected gift, and didn’t think I’d receive another of this kind.  Star Trek doesn’t pass the Bechdel test but, as I fervently hoped, Uhura does much more than answer phones… and much better than smooch Kirk.

This is the first time that I find myself looking forward to more of a remake.  It’s fitting and deeply, viscerally satisfying that the show which made SF mainstream and which has always stood out because of its idealism and optimism bids fair to become a potent myth for yet another generation.

Eleven years ago, Random House published my book To Seek Out New Life: The Biology of Star Trek.  With the occasion of the premiere of the Star Trek reboot film and with my mind still bruised from the turgid awfulness of Battlestar Galactica, I decided to post the epilogue of my book, very lightly updated — as an antidote to blasé pseudo-sophistication and a reminder that Prometheus is humanity’s best embodiment.  My major hope for the new film is that Uhura does more than answer phones and/or smooch Kirk.

Coda:  The Infinite Frontier

A younger science than physics, biology is more linear and less exotic than its older sibling.  Whereas physics is (mostly) elegant and symmetric, biology is lunging and ungainly, bound to the material and macroscopic.  Its predictions are more specific, its theories less sweeping.  And yet, in the end, the exploration of life is the frontier that matters the most.  Life gives meaning to all elegant theories and contraptions, life is where the worlds of cosmology and ethics intersect.

Our exploration of Star Trek biology has taken us through wide and distant fields — from the underpinnings of life to the purposeful chaos of our brains; from the precise minuets of our genes to the tangled webs of our societies.

How much of the Star Trek biology is feasible?  I have to say that human immortality, psionic powers, the transporter and the universal translator are unlikely, if not impossible.  On the other hand, I do envision human genetic engineering and cloning, organ and limb regeneration, intelligent robots and immersive virtual reality — quite possibly in the near future.

Furthermore, the limitations I’ve discussed in this book only apply to earth biology.  Even within the confines of our own planet, isolated ecosystems have yielded extraordinary lifeforms — the marsupials of Australia; the flower-like tubeworms near the hot vents of the ocean depths; the bacteriophage particles which are uncannily similar to the planetary landers.  It is certain that when we finally go into space, whatever we meet will exceed our wildest imaginings.

Going beyond strictly scientific matters, I think that the accuracy of scientific details in Star Trek is almost irrelevant.  Of course, it puzzles me that a show which pays millions to principal actors and for special effects cannot hire a few grad students to vet their scripts for glaring factual errors (I bet they could even get them for free, they’d be that thrilled to participate). Nevertheless, much more vital is Star Trek’s stance toward science and the correctness of the scientific principles that it showcases.  On the latter two counts, the series has been spectacularly successful and damaging at the same time.

The most crucial positive elements of Star Trek are its overall favorable attitude towards science and its strong endorsement of the idea of exploration.  Equally important (despite frequent lapses) is the fact that the Enterprise is meant to be a large equivalent to Cousteau’s Calypso, not a space Stealth Bomber.  However, some negative elements are so strong that they almost short-circuit the bright promise of the show.

I cannot be too harsh on Star Trek, because it’s science fiction — and TV science fiction, at that.  Yet by choosing to highlight science, Star Trek has also taken on the responsibility of portraying scientific concepts and approaches accurately.  Each time Star Trek mangles an important scientific concept (such as evolution or black hole event horizons), it misleads a disproportionately large number of people.

The other trouble with Star Trek is its reluctance to showcase truly imaginative or controversial ideas and viewpoints.  Of course, the accepted wisdom of media executives who increasingly rely on repeating well-worn concepts is that controversial positions sink ratings.  So Star Trek often ignores the agonies and ecstasies of real science and the excitement of true or projected scientific discoveries, replacing them with pseudo-scientific gobbledygook more appropriate for series like The X-Files, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica.  Exciting ideas (silicon lifeforms beyond robots, parallel universes) briefly appear on Star Trek, only to sink without a trace.  This almost pathological timidity of Star Trek, which enjoys the good fortune of a dedicated following and so could easily afford to cut loose, does not bode well for its descendants or its genre.

On the other hand, technobabble and all, Star Trek fulfills a very imporant role.  It shows and endorses the value of science and technology — the only popular TV series to do so, at a time when science has lost both appeal and prestige.  With the increasing depth of each scientific field, and the burgeoning of specialized jargon, it is distressingly easy for us scientists to isolate ourselves within our small niches and forget to share the wonders of our discoveries with our fellow passengers on the starship Earth.  Despite its errors, Star Trek’s greatest contribution is that it has made us dream of possibilities, and that it has made that dream accessible to people both inside and outside science.

Scientific understanding does not strip away the mystery and grandeur of the universe; the intricate patterns only become lovelier as more and more of them appear and come into focus.  The sense of excitement and fulfillment that accompanies even the smallest scientific discovery is so great that it can only be communicated in embarrassingly emotional terms, even by Mr. Spock and Commander Data.  In the end these glimpses of the whole, not fame or riches, are the real reason why the scientists never go into the suspended animation cocoons, but stay at the starship chart tables and observation posts, watching the great galaxy wheels slowly turn, the stars ignite and darken.

Star Trek’s greatest legacy is the communication of the urge to explore, to comprehend, with its accompanying excitement and wonder.  Whatever else we find out there, beyond the shelter of our atmosphere, we may discover that thirst for knowledge may be the one characteristic common to any intelligent life we encounter in our travels.  It is with the hope of such an encounter that people throng around the transmissions from Voyager, Sojourner, CoRoT, Kepler.  And even now, contained in the sphere of expanding radio and television transmissions speeding away from Earth, Star Trek may be acting as our ambassador.

Note: Like anyone who’s breathing, I have been tracking the Phoenix Lander. So I thought this might be a good moment to share a personal memory of one of its ancestors. That one did not survive to fulfill its mission, but the dream stayed alive. What I said then is even more true today, almost a decade later. The Greek version of this article was published in the largest Greek daily, Eleftherotypia (Free Press).

It’s slightly cloudy — unusual for sunny Florida. The ocean-scented air is alive with birds: gulls, pelicans, hawks. On a wooden platform, a group of people of all ages and colors is squinting fixedly at a point on the horizon about two kilometers away, where a gantry holds a slim rocket that balances a tiny load on its nose. A level voice announces from the loudspeakers: “The T minus ten holding period is over. We’re going forward.”

The people break into wild cheers, then fall eerily silent. Curious children are shushed and told to look there, there! Final adjustments are made to cameras and binoculars. The minus ten holding period is the last chance to abort. The weather was such that until this moment the decision to launch could change.

Like heartbeats, the announcements come. “T minus five… minus three… minus one… T minus thirty seconds… minus twenty seconds… minus ten seconds…” Now you can hear a pin drop. “Nine… eight.. seven… six… five… four…. three… two…” All the spectators shiver, holding their breath.

“Liftoff!”

A fiery flower unfurls on the horizon. From within it emerges a dark blue arrow that pierces the sky, followed by a cloud of white smoke. The ground shakes from the aftershocks. Seconds later, the sonic boom reaches the group. Many of its members are wiping tears without making any effort to hide them — despite the Anglosaxon tradition that discourages public displays of emotion.

And so, in front of my eyes, accompanied by tears and cheers, loaded with blessings and expectations, on January 3, 1999, the Polar Lander left for Mars. After a year of travel, it will touch down on the South Pole of Mars and search for subterranean water.

Why is this mission important? Today Mars is bone-dry, but its surface features betray that it enjoyed liquid water in the past — gullies, wadis and coasts of now-vanished seas are clearly visible in its photos.

Wherever there’s water, there is life. Martian life, if it exists, is almost certainly at the bacterial stage. But if we find it — or just its petrified remains — this will give us the very first proof that we are not alone, that our Universe, vast as it is, may perhaps contain companions.

Such a discovery will overshadow even the upheavals brought about by Copernicus and Darwin. It will break our eternal isolation and force us to completely revise our ideas of the universe and our place in it. The existence of extraterrestrial life will make us understand that we occupy no special place in the universe, that we are observers or fellow travelers and not, by the grace of any god, lords of creation. And it will force us to remember yet again that humanity is a single entity, traveling on a lone ship that makes it way through an indifferent sea.

For a bearer of such a heavy literal and symbolic load, the Polar Lander is miniscule. The size of a small fridge, jam-packed with instruments, it resembles a beetle, with the fragile solar panels standing in for wings. Among other things, it carries a microphone. For the first time, we will hear the sounds of the winds on another planet.

The inventiveness required to put together a space mission is almost unbelievable. As an example, the two tiny instruments that will detect the potential underground water and send the results to the orbiters must achieve the following: land unscathed after enduring the heat of atmospheric entry; pierce like missiles a thick layer of ice without harming their electronic circuits; enter the ground in the correct orientation without rudders, parachutes, engines or further instructions from Earth; and last but not least, do exact measurements with fragile instruments the size of a small human finger. Such demands are the order of the day for NASA’s technical personnel.

The morning before the launch, the engineers and scientists who achieved these miracles explained to us the goals of the mission and the details of the craft and its instruments. All were trembling with tension and fatigue, but their eyes burned with their vision.

These men and women, whose names will never become known or celebrated like those of the astronauts, already dedicated four years of their lives to this mission — and will give as many in the future, analyzing the information sent by the spacecraft. Like the artisans who built Stonehenge, the Pyramids, Aghia Sofia, the Taj Mahal, these people grow old in obscurity, with their only reward the knowledge that will be added to the annals of the species — and with their sole but immense privilege to be the first who glimpse the New Worlds.

Because, in the end, that is the real mission. Exploration of space is the large collective effort of this era that will change all our lives. Not only because we may discover alien life. Closer to home, this exploration is the guarantee for our continuation.

Earth is truly the Garden of Eden, but its magnanimity has spoiled us. Now, having grown used to the caresses of a planet ideal for our needs as well as the luxuries of advanced technology, we have almost exhausted the finite resources of our paradise. With the pressures of the human population, the rest of the biosphere is contracting daily and the quality of life is dwindling for all except the privileged.

It is true that we have not solved our problems here, and inevitably we will take them with us wherever we go. However, if we wait till the last moment to launch the ships with the seeds of terrestrial life, the likelihood of finding another welcoming harbor before we suck our parent planet dry will dwindle to zero. We must prepare for this great step now, while we still have leeway.

All this is felt by those that came to wave farewell to the Lander. That is why they brought their children to share the stargazing, something very unusual for Americans who almost always separate their social activities by age: they want the next generation to remember that this tiny spacecraft and its companions carry our future.

Sojourner, the Lander’s predecessor, was the first to walk on Mars — a kid’s toy cart, which sent us thousands of pictures of the planet’s surface. A famous cartoonist showed it leaving human footprints, and he was right: these miniscule spacecraft, that have opened windows to the universe for us without costing even a millionth of a military aircraft, are the expression of our best selves. And they, along with our radio and television emissions, are our heralds and ambassadors to the unknown.

The day after the launch, the NASA PR office showed us around. The Space Center is within a national forest full of endangered flora and fauna. If the Federal Government had not inadvertently protected it, that entire coast would be a solid cement wall. The paths cross canals full of water lilies where alligators sun themselves. Egrets and cranes fish in the shallows. Above the rioting semi-tropical greenery rise the scaffoldings of the launch pads and the buildings where the spacecraft are built.

The building where the craft undergo final assembly is so large that it creates thermals. As a result, it is constantly circled by a fleet of hawks — a fitting retinue. Its vast interior creates such local temperature gradients that often it rains or fogs. Like an Escher drawing, it teems with skywalks and protrusions that hold entire labs. Looking down from the top you feel like a feather, as though here gravity doesn’t hold sway.

The launch pad that we visited is called Alpha. From there rose the Apollos for their trips to the moon. The pad is a giant Meccano set, a plaything for Titans. The surrounding wire fences are full of holes, from the jagged fragments of asphalt that erupt from the floor whenever it siphons the flames of liftoff.

I bent and took a piece of the worn, burnt asphalt. These scaffoldings don’t launch just spaceships and falcons. Around them fly the dreams of all humanity. This place is sacred, it has received sacrifices — the crew of the first Apollo, the crew of the Challenger, the nameless technicians of the missions. And the deity to whom these offerings are dedicated is Prometheus, who rose against mightier powers. His rebellion made us who we are and brought us here, in pain and in glory.

Credits: Top, Prometheus Stealing Fire, by André Durand.
Bottom, the Phoenix Lander on Mars, by Corby Waste.

by Larry Klaes, space exploration enthusiast and optimist

An abbreviated version of this article appeared on The Tompkins Weekly on April 14, 2008.

In early February, a 230-foot wide radio antenna in Madrid, Spain transmitted the Beatles song “Across the Universe” into the Milky Way galaxy, aimed specifically at Polaris, the North Star, located 431 light years from Earth. Paul McCartney approved of this event, which was handled by NASA through its Deep Space Network of radio telescopes spread across the planet. John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, considered the broadcast of this song to be “the beginning of the new age in which we will communicate with billions of planets across the Universe.”

One month later, astronomers in the United Kingdom announced they would be sending their own broadcast to the star 47 Ursae Majoris, namely an advertisement for the snack manufacturer Doritos, with more ads to follow that one to the stars.

While both of these transmissions are mainly publicity stunts – the Beatles song commemorated several simultaneous anniversaries and the Doritos ad will help the UK raise funds to save its threatened astronomy and physics programs — these actions do illuminate an important question that has been part of an increasing debate: How wise is it to announce humanity’s presence to the rest of the Universe?

The first SETI attempt, a message beamed toward M13 (the Great Cluster in Hercules) on November 16, 1974, by the Arecibo radio telescope. From left to right are numbers from one to ten, atoms including hydrogen and carbon, some interesting molecules, the DNA double helix, a human with description, basics of our Solar System, and basics of the sending telescope.

Since 1960, when the former Cornell astronomer Frank Drake conducted the first modern Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project which he named Ozma, scientists have been listening and looking for any signs of alien civilizations in our galaxy and beyond. The hope has been that — since we do not yet have interstellar vessels — someone out there is sending a deliberate radio or optical message to us, or using an omnidirectional beacon, or leaking electromagnetic signals into space just like we have been for the last century with our radio, television, and radar broadcasts.

In the nearly five decades since Drake’s Project Ozma, no definite signals of an intelligent alien origin have been found. This does not mean that ETI do not exist, but some have wondered if, in a galaxy with 400 billion stars systems stretched across 100,000 light years of space, it might help the situation to transmit messages into the Milky Way galaxy to facilitate getting the attention of any possible cosmic neighbors to encourage them to let us know they exist.

Scientists such as Drake and the late Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan view finding an intelligent alien civilization as a major boon to humanity in terms of vastly increasing our scientific and technological database. Other experts are rather uneasy about the prospect. They cite historical examples of what happens when an advanced culture encounters a more primitive society as reason to be very cautious about sending electromagnetic greetings into deep space. Some advocate sending no messages at all until we are more developed and better understand who and what inhabit the galaxy.

For good or ill, a few deliberate attempts have been made to signal extraterrestrial intelligences, starting with the Arecibo Message sent from the giant radio telescope to a distant globular star cluster named Messier 13 in 1974. The 1970s also witnessed the first launching of several robot probes that have left the Solar System with engraved messages for any beings who may one day find them drifting through space.

Within the last decade, Professor Alexander L. Zaitsev of the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics at the Russian Academy of Science has emerged as a strong advocate of messaging to extraterrestrial intelligences, also known as METI. Zaitsev also orchestrated several METI projects, such as the Cosmic Calls of 1999 and 2003 and the Teen Age Message of 2001, all sent from the 230-foot wide radio telescope at the Evpatoria Deep Space Center in the Ukraine. Moving at light speed (186,000 miles per second), these messages will arrive at their targeted star systems in the latter half of this century.

In a paper Zaitsev published in 2006, the scientist notes that “SETI is meaningless if no one feels the need to transmit.” Zaitsev also feels that if there are advanced cultures bent on harming humanity, they will find us eventually, so it is in our best interests to seek them out first. Zaitsev sees the great distances between stars and the physical limits imposed by attempting to attain light speed serve as a natural protective barrier for our species and any other potentially vulnerable beings in the galaxy.

Scientist and science fiction author David Brin feels that in spite of the celestial limitations noted by Zaitsev, any transmissions sent spaceward without first being discussed by a broad range of disciplines is both improperly representative of humanity and poses the danger of attracting beings that may bear us ill will.

“As newcomers in a strangely quiet Cosmos, shall we shout for attention?” asks Brin. “Or is it wiser to continue quiet listening? We propose an interdisciplinary symposium, to be the most eclectic and inclusive forum, by far, to deliberate the METI issue. It is not too much to ask that METI people hold back until the world’s open, scientific community can get a chance to examine their proposal.”

Paul Gilster of the Tau Zero Foundation (founded by Marc Millis, former head of NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program) that conducts research into interstellar travel, also recommends restraint. “Two aspects of METI trouble me deeply,” he says. “The first is that serious messaging has taken place without any consensus or indeed consultation here on Earth. The various signals sent from Evpatoria in the Crimea were simply announced, yet such messages have implications for our entire species and at the very least should be considered in an international, multi-discipinary forum before being sent.

“The second troubling aspect of all this is that recent messages from NASA and European sources have been treated in the press more or less as larks, the assumption being either that extraterrestrials are benign or that they do not exist in the first place. I favor a moderate, cautious approach to deliberately announcing our presence to the Universe.”

Seth Shostak, the Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute, is not terribly concerned about any kind of alien invasion. Like Zaitsev, Shostak agrees that a technologically sophisticated civilization could find Earth and humanity if they chose to; as one example, our military and planetary radars are among the brightest electromagnetic sources produced by our species.

As the Chair of the International Academy of Astronautics SETI Permanent Study Group, Shostak and his team have been looking into how we should respond to a message from an ETI received on Earth. Brin and others claim that the study group’s members are too narrowly focused in their representation of the sciences. Shostak maintains that in addition to their focus being on replying to a received alien transmission, the group has neither the right nor the ability to police the rest of humanity on what they broadcast — an issue that will only grow more complex as our technology becomes more sophisticated.

Personally, I am in the middle. I see the legitimate points of both sides, though I think some of our attempts at contact might be perceived as childish (or at least very basic) by any advanced ETI. Also, I wonder how many galactic cultures are similar to ours at this point in time, if any exist at all. Unless our galaxy is composed of societies and beings a lot like the ones in Star Trek, my feeling is that many of them will be either really behind us (and not even intelligent/aware at all) or so beyond us as to make communication nearly pointless.

Humanity is already sending messages into the galaxy and that is only going to increase, not diminish. So we had better deal with this, rather than hope people restrain themselves when they have the chance to broadcast a message into deep space.

Even if ETI don’t understand what we are sending them, they will likely be aware that there is some kind of intelligence on Sol 3 and may want to respond to us. We should ready ourselves for the realization that we are not on some isolated island in the middle of nowhere, but part of a much larger galactic community – even if the community is “just” a lot of star systems with no high level inhabitants – and we should start acting accordingly.

And even if no ETI ever picks up our leakage or broadcasts, our descendants will be heading out into the galaxy one day, so one way or another we will make our presence known – and that is what we need to prepare for: how alien societies, if they exist, will react to us. I think that any society, no matter how advanced now, had to develop much as we did, just as all life on this planet had to evolve and all our ancestors struggled to make it to the present. So maybe they will “get” us and at least know what we are going through, because they were once children, too.

Which begs the question, are there others out there at our level, making lots of noise into the galaxy, wondering where everybody else is? Have we just not gotten their messages yet, or have they been silenced by somebody who preys on such naive behavior? Or are we the only ones like ourselves in the galaxy?

I think we need to be brave and forge ourselves into the galaxy. If we stay at home and hide under the beds, we might live a bit longer, but we won’t evolve any.

Mobilis in Mobile: Ellen Ripley/Alien Queen hybrid
in starship Auriga (Alien Resurrection)

Views of space travel have grown increasingly pessimistic in the last decade. This is not surprising: SETI still has received no unambiguous requests for more Chuck Berry from its listening posts, NASA is busy re-inventing flywheels and citizens even of first-world countries feel beleaguered in a world that seems increasingly hostile to any but the extraordinarily privileged. Always a weathervane of the present, speculative fiction has been gazing more and more inwardly — either to a hazy gold-tinted past (fantasy, both literally and metaphorically) or to a smoggy rust-colored earthbound future (cyberpunk).

The philosophically inclined are slightly more optimistic. Transhumanists, the new utopians, extol the pleasures of a future when our bodies, particularly our brains/minds, will be optimized (or at least not mind that they’re not optimized) by a combination of bioengineering, neurocognitive manipulation, nanotech and AI. Most transhumanists, especially those with a socially progressive agenda, are as decisively earthbound as cyberpunk authors. They consider space exploration a misguided waste of resources, a potentially dangerous distraction from here-and-now problems — ecological collapse, inequality and poverty, incurable diseases among which transhumanists routinely count aging, not to mention variants of gray goo.

And yet, despite the uncoolness of space exploration, despite NASA’s disastrous holding pattern, there are those of us who still stubbornly dream of going to the stars. We are not starry-eyed romantics. We recognize that the problems associated with spacefaring are formidable (as examined briefly in Making Aliens 1, 2 and 3). But I, at least, think that improving circumstances on earth and exploring space are not mutually exclusive, either philosophically or — perhaps just as importantly — financially. In fact, I consider this a false dilemma. I believe that both sides have a much greater likelihood to implement their plans if they coordinate their efforts, for a very simple reason: the attributes required for successful space exploration are also primary goals of transhumanism.

Consider the ingredients that would make an ideal crewmember of a space expedition: robust physical and mental health, biological and psychological adaptability, longevity, ability to interphase directly with components of the ship. In short, enhancements and augmentations eventually resulting in self-repairing quasi-immortals with extended senses and capabilities — the loose working definition of transhuman.

Coordination of the two movements would give a real, concrete purpose to transhumanism beyond the uncompelling objective of giving everyone a semi-infinite life of leisure (without guarantees that either terrestrial resources or the human mental and social framework could accommodate such a shift). It would also turn the journey to the stars into a more hopeful proposition, since it might make it possible that those who started the journey could live to see planetfall.

Whereas spacefaring enthusiasts acknowledge the enormity of the undertaking they propose, most transhumanists take it as an article of faith that their ideas will be realized soon, though the goalposts keep receding into the future. As more soundbite than proof they invoke Moore’s exponential law, equating stodgy silicon with complex, contrary carbon. However, despite such confident optimism, enhancements will be hellishly difficult to implement. This stems from a fundamental that cannot be short-circuited or evaded: no matter how many experiments are performed on mice or even primates, humans have enough unique characteristics that optimization will require people.

Contrary to the usual supposition that the rich will be the first to cross the transhuman threshold, it is virtually certain that the frontline will consist of the desperate and the disenfranchised: the terminally ill, the poor, prisoners and soldiers — the same people who now try new chemotherapy or immunosuppression drugs, donate ova, become surrogate mothers, “agree” to undergo chemical castration or sleep deprivation. Yet another pool of early starfarers will be those whose beliefs require isolation to practice, whether they be Raëlians or fundamentalist monotheists — just as the Puritans had to brave the wilderness and brutal winters of Massachusetts to set up their Shining (though inevitably tarnished) City on the Hill.

So the first generation of humans adjusted to starship living are far likelier to resemble Peter Watts’ marginalized Rifters or Jay Lake’s rabid Armoricans, rather than the universe-striding, empowered citizens of Iain Banks’ Culture. Such methods and outcomes will not reassure anyone, regardless of her/his position on the political spectrum, who considers augmentation hubristic, dehumanizing, or a threat to human identity, equality or morality. The slightly less fraught idea of uploading individuals into (ostensibly) more durable non-carbon frames is not achievable, because minds are inseparable from the neurons that create them. Even if technological advances eventually enable synapse-by synapse reconstructions, the results will be not transfers but copies.

Yet no matter how palatable the methods and outcomes are, it seems to me that changes to humans will be inevitable if we ever want to go beyond the orbit of Pluto within one lifetime. Successful implementation of transhumanist techniques will help overcome the immense distances and inhospitable conditions of the journey. The undertaking will also bring about something that transhumanists — not to mention naysayers — tend to dread as a danger: speciation. Any significant changes to human physiology (whether genetic or epigenetic) will change the thought/emotion processes of those altered, which will in turn modify their cultural responses, including mating preferences and kinship patterns. Furthermore, long space journeys will recreate isolated breeding pools with divergent technology and social mores (as discussed in Making Aliens 4, 5 and 6).

On earth, all “separate but equal” doctrines have wrought untold misery and injustice, whether those segregated are genders in countries practicing sharia, races in the American or African South, or the underprivileged in any nation that lacks decent health policies, adequate wages and humane laws. Speciation of humanity on earth bids fair to replicate this pattern, with the ancestral species (us) becoming slaves, food, zoo specimens or practice targets to our evolved progeny, Neanderthals to their Cro-Magnons, Eloi to their Morlocks. On the other hand, speciation in space may well be a requirement for success. Generation of variants makes it likelier that at least one of our many future permutations will pass the stringent tests of space travel and alight on another habitable planet.

Despite their honorable intentions and progressive outlook, if the transhumanists insist on first establishing a utopia on earth before approving spacefaring, they will achieve either nothing or a dystopia as bleak as that depicted in Paolo Bacigalupi’s unsparing stories. If they join forces with the space enthusiasts, they stand a chance to bring humanity through the Singularity some of them so fervently predict and expect — except it may be a Plurality of sapiens species and inhabited worlds instead.

Note: This post also appeared in George Dvorsky’s Sentient Developments during my guest-blogging stint in May 2009.

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

from The Blind Men and the Elephant
by John Godfrey Saxe, based on a story from India

“Sunset from the Surface of Gliese 581c” by Karen Wehrstein

The recent indirect discovery of a planet orbiting red dwarf Gliese 581 raised strong ripples of interest and speculation. The smallest exoplanet yet discovered, it has been called earth-like based on three attributes: its calculated radius is one and a half times that of earth; its orbit appears to be inside its star’s habitable zone (by definition, the region where water can remain liquid); and its conjectured temperature falls within terrestrial norms.

The planet’s other intrinsics are quite un-earthly. Ten times closer to its dim, flare-racked primary than earth is to the sun, Gliese 581c completes an orbit in 13 days. It is five times the mass of earth, making its gravity about twice as strong. Because of its proximity to its star, it is probably tidally locked, with hurricane winds raking the twilight zone, and tides several hundred times the strength of terrestrial ones tugging its seas, if it has any. Nevertheless, the planet may also harbor a stable atmosphere — and if that is combined with the presence of water, the question of life automatically rears its head.

Most scientists were ecstatic that a small planet (probably rocky, possibly containing oceans) had finally been discovered, taking us one more step to the right across the terms of the Drake equation. Hopeful artists created wishful views of the planet. But there were some interesting negative reactions as well.

Adherents of the Singularity scenario argued that such planets are beside the point, because by the time a rocket reaches the Gliese system (just 20 light years away, yet still a journey of millennia with our present propulsion means), we will have evolved past our present “carbon-bound” configuration. Others warned of the dangers of sending out long-generation colonists without supervision, so to speak. Still others recalled the Fermi paradox, and lamented that if earth-like planets are as common as this, the deafening silence that SETI has garnered bodes ill for the frequency of advanced life or the surivival of technological civilizations in our galaxy.

The naysayers, in their sophistication, missed a crucial point. Whether Gliese 581c 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 LeGuin’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 has an atmosphere, let alone life signatures. If it has developed 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 were enthusiastic about this discovery articulated 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 inner and outer exploration.

The Repercussions of Planetary Settlement

by Athena Andreadis

Art image: David Noever, NASA/Marshall Flight Center

Part 6: The Descendants

Among its consequences, genetic engineering may also reverse a problematic human trend towards biological homogenization which is as dull and dangerous as its cultural equivalent. By eventually recognizing that we are one species and interbreeding enthusiastically to celebrate that fact, we have stopped our further evolution by extinguishing isolated breeding pools. We have overtaken earth, first by being adaptable, then by dint of our technology. From a jaundiced ecological viewpoint, the recent explosion of humanity has been likened to a lemming population boom or a moth infestation. Such booms are invariably followed by busts — and in our case, a crash would also mean irreversible loss of technology.

From our very beginnings, we tended to consider ourselves the jewel in the crown of creation. We believed that at least some of us had been created in the image of the local deity. Yet by considering our germ line sacrosanct, we have painted ourselves in a biological corner. Each terrestrial species has a finite lifespan. Moreover, most successful species branch, whereas we humans are down from a half dozen relatives to a single representative — Homo Sapiens sapiens. If we insist in remaining unchanged, without evolving or radiating, we may degenerate and disappear without intervention of a great catastrophe either from something home-brewed like war or from a random event, such as the impact of a rogue comet. We’ll blink out not with a bang, but with a whimper.

In that respect, our absolute dominance in our current configuration has not served us well for the next step. Deeply embedded in all our plans and ideas is the not-so-hidden assumption that we will fundamentally remain as we are. But the difference between living on Earth and anywhere else is qualitatively different from living in New York versus living in the Arctic. Almost certainly, if we really wish to go into space as long-term explorers, rather than as tourists, we will have to accept radical change — and with it the disquieting possibility that we will not be the crowning spire of the next cycle, but its foundation.

Interestingly enough, we actually seem to be designed for rapid speciation. The successive branchings of the humanoid group have come at ever shorter intervals: the genus Homo arose 5 million years ago; Sapiens, 0.5 million years ago; Sapiens sapiens, 0.05 million years ago. If you put 1,000 people in a row, the first in the line would be the very first Cro-Magnon, the last in line one of us. Our species is actually very young, and almost certainly in biological flux — except for our insistence that we are the perfected end product.

Settling on other planets will speciate humanity even if we forego genetic engineering, because it will create relatively isolated breeding pools in circumstances radically different from those on earth. Human groups also developed characteristics specific to their terrestrial environment — the Mongolian epicanthic fold, the heat-efficient Inuit compactness, the heat-dissipating Tutsi lankiness, the enlarged heart of the Nepalese and Ecuadorians; last but not least melanin, whose dosage increased where appropriate to provide shelter from sunburn, unwittingly causing humanity endless woes. Genetic alleles that are anathema today spread quickly and widely through populations for very good reasons in the past: a mutant hemoglobin made carriers resistance to malaria, while killing homozygotes with sickle cell anemia; a mutant ion transporter did the same for cholera, but killed homozygotes with cystic fibrosis. Between the expense of interstellar travel and the discomfort from different gravity, pressure and other planetary specifics, we will see differentiation much faster.

Speciation means this, in practical terms: At some point, the pools will no longer be able to interbreed. Our colonials will not just have different accents. They won’t be Brazilian Portuguese, or Egyptiot Greeks — or even those real aliens, Australians. They will no longer be humans as we define the term. To put in succinctly, they will not be someone that we can easily love either in the fundamental biological sense or in the equally influential cultural one — and in the end, that is the commonality that binds us.

In that respect, TV science fiction has served us poorly, by depicting humanoid aliens as ersatz samurai like the Klingons or fake Tibetans like the Bajorans. Written science fiction has done much better in presenting visions of such offshoots of humanity — for example, Kingsbury’s Courtship Rite and Cherryh’s Forty Thousand in Gehenna. In effect, by sending out long-term planetary expeditions, we will create aliens more surely than by leaving picnic trash on an uninhabited planet. Our first alien encounter, beyond earth just as it was on earth, will be with ourselves as seen through the distorting mirror of divergent evolution.

The differentiation of humans into truly separate branches will force us to face our hard-wired fear of anyone who is almost like us, but not quite. The last true such encounter was roughly 40,000 years ago, between the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnon, though it has been replayed in countless first contact situations between cultures ever since (not to mention the exchanges between the sexes). Ever since humans became sapient, they enhanced their self-esteem and justified their raids by insisting that those beyond the next hill (or for that matter, those cleaning their latrines and/or bearing their children) were subhuman, despite the indisputable and well-known fact that all aliens were fully human by the sole criterion that is biologically relevant; namely, production of offspring.

Such xenophobia was once a survival mechanism, but now it’s as useful as our appendix and wisdom teeth. And despite our other strengths, embracing the alien is decidedly not high on our list of attributes. Certain segments of the scientific and space aficionado communities have been cheerfully discussing how to interact with Little Green Women and Men. Well, the armchair philosophers will get the chance to practice their theory when humanity splits into groups of cousins who won’t look like the usual Hollywood brands of benevolent aliens — not like angels, not like human newborns and not like snuggly, cuddly Ewoks.

This prospect is one of the scariest aspects of venturing into space, yet at the same time one of the most exciting. It’s also a development that will guarantee the survival if not of our species, then certainly of our legacy. It has taken us a long time to reach a fragile and imperfect unity, cemented by the understanding that we are all really one large family. To go to the next stage, we must voluntarily renounce that unity and relax our iron grip on the evolution that we have arrested. After all, don’t forget that if not for sudden jumps in speciation, most of them caused by environmental pressures — an asteroid hit here, an Ice Age there — we wouldn’t be here. Planetary settlement helped along by judicious application of genetic engineering is merely the continuation of this trend, except that some of the process will be under our control. Stasis ends in death not only culturally but also biologically. If we don’t go into the next stage, our descendants won’t just lead lives devoid of meaning, doomed to repeat outworn patterns in the confines of a worn out planet. They will also peter out, dead branches of a dried-up tree.

If we allow ourselves to grow up and give rise to other sapients, it’s quite possible that our descendants will be as kind to us as we were to our ancestral species. However, whether we like each other or not, I hope that they inherit our curiosity, because that’s the one indispensable ingredient for success. And despite all the caveats I listed, I think we will venture to the stars — for knowledge, for glory, but above all, because we thirst to know what is behind the next bend in the path. Compared to the oceans that we and our inheritors will navigate, our efforts until now are like the launching of paper boats in a bird fountain.

“There is the sea, and who will drain it dry? Precious as silver,
inexhaustible, ever new, it blooms the more we reap it.
Our lives are based on wealth untold, the gods have seen to that.”

Clytemnestra in Agamemnon, by Aeschylus

Making Aliens 1: Why Go at All?