Astrogator’s Logs

by Larry Klaes, space exploration enthusiast, science journalist

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.

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.

Images: Top, Agent Smith and his homogeneous whitebread associates (The Matrix); bottom, Erin Dollar, maker and modeler of sophisticated philosophical accessories.

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.

There have been many branches on the hominid tree, but now a lone species walks the earth. We had company once, though, at least in Europe and West Asia – the Neanderthals.

Until recently, the scientific consensus was that they were sufficiently different from Homo sapiens that no interbreeding took place. We knew that they controlled fire; constructed tools, shelters and garments; took care of their weak, injured and elderly; and buried their dead with grave goods. But until two decades ago it was widely believed that they had attributes which disadvantaged them to such an extent that competition with modern humans led to their extinction (for example, lack of capacity for complex language, almost exclusive dependence on hunting for sustenance… to say nothing of the Tarzanist view that their doom came about because — horrors! — they allowed women to join the hunt).

This idea of Neanderthals as grunting, shuffling dead-end cavemen began to change as our techniques allowed us to examine Neanderthal fossils with more precision and depth. In the mid-eighties, bone and genetic analysis proved that their ability to hear and produce sounds was almost identical to ours (including a human-like FOXP2 gene, whose function is critical for language). Sequencing of their melanocortin gene indicated that some might have red hair and light skin.

Finally, the just-published draft sequence of their genome (headed by Svante Pääbo’s team from the Max Planck Institute) showed that up to 4% of the genes of non-Africans may come from them. If confirmed, this means that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons indeed interbred when the latter first came out of Africa – most likely in the Middle East, before further migration.

The two branches of humanity share 99.7% genetic identity. They show differences in genes involved in cognitive development, skeleton structure, energy metabolism, skin physiology. They also differ in regulatory regions and microRNAs. This information will eventually help us answer the question of what makes us uniquely “human” – perhaps even what has made us so adaptable that we now threaten to overwhelm the earth.

When I read about the conclusions from the draft sequence analysis, tears sprang to my eyes, just as they do at spaceship and planetary probe launches. It moved me inexpressibly to think that they haven’t vanished but are with us still, a thread in our fabric, a whisper in our song.

Note 1: The best fictional depiction of the interaction between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons is Dance of the Tiger by Björn Kurtén, a distinguished vertebrate paleontologist who was Swedish — as is Pääbo.

Note 2: The article is now featured at Huffington Post.

Lest anyone is worried that I’m slacking off, the reason for the (comparative) silence is that I’ve been toiling on three almost simultaneous articles.

– An expanded version of You Only Find What You’re Looking For appeared in Science in My Fiction. Opening paragraph:

“Extraterrestrial life is a staple of SF and the focus of astrobiology and SETI. Yet whereas SF has populated countless worlds with varying success, from Tiptree’s haunting Flenni (Your Haploid Heart) to Lucas’ annoying Ewoks, real ETs remain stubbornly elusive: nobody has received a transmission demanding more Chuck Berry, and the planetary probe data are maddeningly inconclusive. Equally controversial are the shadowy forms on Martian asteroid ALH84001, though the pendulum has swung toward wary favoring of the biological possibility after scientists discovered nanobacteria on earth and water on Mars.”

– I was invited to be part of a Mind Meld at SF Signal. The question was “What are some of the coolest robots in science fiction? Why?” I won’t put excerpts of this here, to avoid spoilers! Here’s a hint, though: my answer partly aligns with what I said in The Souls in Our Machines.

– My article Miranda Wrongs: Reading too Much into the Genome, which discusses naive views of genetic engineering, appeared on H+ Magazine. Opening paragraph:

“When the sequence of the human genome was declared essentially complete in 2003, all biologists (except perhaps Craig Venter) heaved a sigh of gladness that the data were all on one website, publicly available, well-annotated and carefully cross-linked. Some may have hoisted a glass of champagne. Then they went back to their benches. They knew, if nobody else did, that the work was just beginning. Having the sequence was the equivalent of sounding out the text of an alphabet whose meaning was still undeciphered. For the linguistically inclined, think of Etruscan.”

Revel in the bounty while it lasts! May will be grant-writing time again.  After that, I’ll concentrate on fewer, larger writing chunks.  In particular, my stories are banging urgently within my head.

Images:  top, T’uupieh of Titan, assassin, singer (Joan Vinge, Eyes of Amber); bottom, cartoon by Polyp.

Some people walk on water //
Some just keep falling down.

– from Ramon, by Laurie Anderson

Whenever the imminent death of SF from lack of scientific knowledge and/or mindset comes up, some people wring hands and point fingers at YA fantasy or the “feminization” of the domain, some spring to action:  Kay Holt and Bart Leib, the founders/editors of Crossed Genres, just launched a blog titled Science in My Fiction.  As Kay says, both in words and in the playful image she created to celebrate the launch (right):

“The purpose of the Science in My Fiction blog is to get science fiction and fantasy writers and fans thinking ahead of science again. Playful bloggers will take a look at recent scientific developments and extrapolate potential futures from them. // This is a fight for survival of the fiction. It’s time to seize culture and do science to it!”

Visitors to Astrogator’s Logs will recognize some SiMF contributors: Peggy Kolm, Calvin Johnson and yours truly.  The first post is Extrapolative Fiction for Sapient Earthlings by Kay Holt.  Posts will initially appear twice weekly and may increase to thrice weekly once the contributors find their rhythm.

Go take a look!

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.

“…full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

– Shakespeare, MacBeth, Act V, Scene V

James Cameron made two films that are high on my list of favorites: Terminator 2 and Aliens – not least because powerful women are central to the stories (even though he gave them the most conservative and clichéd motivation for heroism: maternal protectiveness).  He was a taut, visually inventive storyteller once.  But all his films after The Abyss increasingly resemble the Hindenburg: bloated, self-indulgent, lacking originality and subtlety in all but F/X.

The latest iteration, Avatar, is the culmination of these traits and a poster boy of the industry’s tendency to let CGI spectacle be the sole concern.  A quarter of a billion dollars went into the film, the GNP of a small country, yet they couldn’t pay a decent SF writer a paltry sum to give even a whiff of freshness to the story. The characters are stale broad stereotypes, the plot reheated canned slurry, the dialogue rusty nails scratching a cement slab. The borrowings are endless, starting with the ersatz Campbellian mythology that failed so abysmally to add resonance to Star Wars.  But the definitive stamp of hackery is that many elements are frank rip-offs of older Cameron creations.  The vaunted 3-D effects are devoid of unique payoff and the Pandoran life forms look like shiny hood ornaments.

The worldbuilding is equally shoddy.  As I said in SF Goes McDonald’s, scientific accuracy is not crucial in SF.  However, consistency and informed imagination are.  A moon as close to a gas giant as Pandora is would be awash in radiation and wracked by earthquakes and volcanoes like Jupiter’s Io.  Also, its independent biogenesis would give rise to life forms that would not remotely resemble us.  But let’s concede that point for the sake of audience identification.  Since all Pandoran animals are six-limbed and four-eyed, the Na’vi would share these evolutionary attributes.  This would actually make them far more interesting.

The clunky clichés and logic gaps of Avatar are wince-inducing even if you accept the film’s premises.  Here’s a species that’s essentially the “neocortex” of a sentient planet – yet they have… nuclear families and hereditary chiefs.  The conceptualizations of the avatars and of the Na’vi neural links to the Pandoran flora and fauna are too silly to dissect.  If the link worked as advertised, they wouldn’t need to hunt (or, conversely, killing an animal would have concrete physiological repercussions).  I discussed mind uploading in Ghost in the Shell. If you want to see a linked, communing ecosphere done right, read Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean or follow Odo’s individuation struggles in Deep Space 9. And if you want action with stunning animation, elegiac depth and heartbreaking stakes, watch Hayao Miyazaki’s Mononoke Hime.

The Na’vi are sexed-up Ewoks and Pandora is a prelapsarian Eden where they can live dilemma-free with Stone Age technology.  Yet like all Others, they’re helpless until a White Alpha Male steps down literally from on high to rally them to battle, while in turn they enable him to reconnect with his inner Mother Earth anima.  Soft-focus imperialism and New Age fuzziness mix queasily with post-genocidal sentimentality about Noble Savages — a pernicious mindset that I described in And Ain’t I a Human?

It’s bad enough that films since the maturation of F/X have been aimed at 15-year-old boys.  Far worse is the fact that the most lavish Hollywood films have been made by their directors’ 15-year-old inner boys – tightly conjoined with plans for lunch boxes and video games whose complexity far exceeds that of the films.  Welcome to Infantileland, where crudity, banality and sloppiness rule, where clouds of sycophants allow directors to call themselves Emperor of the Universe or Master Jedi without a trace of irony.  In one of my visions of hell, I’m forced to endlessly watch Lucas’ Star Wars (except, perhaps, episode V), Jackson’s King Kong, all of Spielberg’s SF/F and Cameron’s Avatar.

There’s nothing wrong with adults enjoying Disney-level spectacle, as long as they don’t make it their moral, intellectual or esthetic measuring stick.  An artist with Cameron’s credibility and clout should undertake real challenges that inspire our innate desire to explore instead of recycling militaristic violence porn and preachy feel-good platitudes.  He did it incredibly well before, he can do it again.  And some childish dreams should remain dreams.  They work far better as beckoning beacons.

Images: top, Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in James Cameron’s Terminator 2; middle, David Switzer’s cover for Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean; bottom, Q’Orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas in Terence Malick’s New World.

Update: The Huffington Post just re-printed this article. I’m donning my asbestos space suit!

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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.

Quiet has been reigning in my head lately. I can concentrate on my tasks, my mood is the best since I recovered from my operation (as long as I ignore the fibromyalgia that resulted from the shock to my system) and I even have occasional chunks of time for original writing.

This is the result of neither Modafinil nor meditation but of something much simpler: I walked away from electronic forums. Facebook’s gone, Yahoo and Google discussion groups are gone except one, RSS feeds are gone. I’m tracking two blogs that interest me and an artist friend’s works through Livejournal. But I’ve essentially left the Second Life building.

When I belonged to several forums, my head resembled a gull rookery, awash with noise, random peckings and guano. Facebook was by far the worst offender, even after I ruthlessly pruned my friends list to a quarter of its size. And trying to reason with loud ill-informed semi-illiterates on scientific or political threads got tedious, sort of like having to handle teenagers who seriously think they’re the first and only ones to discover — nay, invent — sex.

Don’t misunderstand me, the Internet is a great resource for quick (though often unreliable) references and images. It’s also a decent medium for keeping in touch with distant friends. But its forums, unless they exercise draconian moderation, encourage problematic aspects of human nature and culture: evanescent trivia; hysterical narcissism and mob swarming; regurgitation of undigested skimmings. Lacking the nuances of body language and required to be soundbite-long, most Internet exchanges rank low as meaningful communication, to say nothing of depth or wit.

By disconnecting, I pulled free from the constant white noise that turns into a black hole of distraction. Of course, I annulled some of the beneficent effects of Internet quiet by writing a series of articles for a high-visibility venue — especially the most recent one, which dealt with the impossibility of immortality, uploading in particular. The article got slashdotted and was also highlighted in one of the blogs I still track, with the predictable outcome: it attracted many thoughtful, thought-provoking comments;  it also attracted commenters who objected strenuously to the article without having read it. Some brandished Star Trek, The Matrix and Kurzweil’s Singularity at me as science textbooks (or gospels, take your pick).

I’m tempted to collect the latter (with meta-comments added) in an anthology titled Uppity Biologist Deflates Nerds’ Wet Dreams with Wetware. Alas, ars longa, vita brevis. I’ll have to delegate this to my uploaded mindclone,  while I continue to struggle with the very real problem of dementia in the lab.  But, most importantly, quiet still reigns in in my head.

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”.

by Calvin W. Johnson

Today I have the pleasure of hosting my friend Calvin W. Johnson, who will give us his thoughts on Battlestar Galactica and Caprica.  Dr. Johnson is Professor of Physics in San Diego State University where he does research in computational quantum mechanics.  He’s also an author with poems and SF stories in many venues, including Analog and Asimov’s.  You can find some of them at his home page, http://www.physics.sdsu.edu/~johnson/writing/.

One of the earliest and most lasting narrative models in science fiction is Frankenstein.  The recent SciFi channel reboot of Battlestar Galactica owes itself as much to Mary Shelley as to the original 1978 television series. In the original, the robotic Cylons are creations and inheritors of a now-extinct reptilian race; in the 2003 reboot, the Cylons are our own creation. Like Frankenstein’s creature (in the novel), the reimagined Cylons are as capable of tormented philosophical reasoning as they are of homicidal rage.

It is the Cylons’ self-doubt that saves the human race from extinction, which is lucky considering the forty thousand surviving humans are so flawed and back-biting that a brace of ambitious bonobos armed with a bottle of window cleaner and some lead-tainted Mexican candy could have wiped them out. In current parlance Battlestar Galactica was “dark,” a quality currently all the rage  (see also: Christopher Nolan’s two Batman movies).  The first two seasons frequently had brilliant writing and acting, but by the final season Battlestar Galactica (or BSG to its friends) deteriorated into a self-parodying soap opera. We were told at the beginning of episodes that the Cylons “have a plan,” but it became increasingly clear that creator Ron Moore was making it up as he went along; by the series finale he had written the reboot’s most compelling creation, Kara “Starbuck” Thrace, into such a corner that he could only end her story by having her melt into the wind like an bad odor.

But Battlestar Galactica was the best thing going on the SciFi channel. Ominously, and not in a good way, the Powers That Be agreed to a prequel, Caprica, set 58 years “before the fall.” Caprica details the story of how the Cylons were created and how humanity sowed the seeds of its own destruction. (Warning: mild spoilers ahead).

Caprica takes us back to a shinier, happier time to meet Zoe Greystone, the 16-year-old scion of a cybernetics corporation. Part genius, part whiny goth girl, part secret religious fanatic (a monotheist in a world of polytheists), she is killed off in the first few minutes. Eventually, she is resurrected cybernetically, much to the regret of everyone, herself included.

If this sounds familiar, why yes it is, even more so than Frankenstein. When one thinks of a prequel written in response to a successful, gritty science fiction phenomenon, one can only invoke…

Star Wars.

The parallels are uncanny.

Recall: in the Star Wars prequels, Lucas takes us back to a shinier, happier time, to meet Anakin Skywalker, a technologically brilliant yet whiny child who secretly falls in with the sinister cult of the Sith, is nearly killed, then resurrected in a cyborg body to terrorize the galaxy.

Wow. I get goosebumps just thinking about the parallels, and not in a good way.

Caprica is far better than The Phantom Menace, but that is a low bar, and neither is Caprica as compelling as the opening Battlestar Galactica miniseries. We are supposed to sympathize with Zoe’s grieving father, a Bill Gates-like character, but his distance from wife and work also distances him from the audience. Much more intriguing is Joseph Adams, a well-dressed lawyer who lost his wife and daughter in the same bombing that killed Zoe, and who is attempting to reconnect with his young son William, all the while in a dangerous dance with a Mafia-like gang from his Tauron homeworld. Young William, of course, grows up to be Bill Adama, who helps to save the human race 58 years later as captain of the Galactica. The Adama drama is much more compelling than the dull Frankenstein, I mean Greystone, family but is curiously underplayed here despite a few dramatic scenes.

The technology of Caprica is not only flashier but also significantly more advanced than in Battlestar Galactica; I suppose the First Cylon War seriously knocked civilization back on its heels. Among the advance is a kind of virtual reality; I tend to despise virtual reality stories on principle, although here the stupid factor is significantly less than Star Trek holodecks or The Matrix, again low bars (I realize such a statement is hate-mail bait).  Oddly enough, the tech I liked the best was a kind of smart paper; less dramatic but much more realistic.

BSG, as does all science fiction, provided a platform to play out current anxieties: terrorism, genocide, abortion, religion. It’s clear that Caprica will touch upon at least two major themes: the tension between heritage and assimilation among immigrants facing bigotry, and religion. Most discussions about religion in science fiction are ill-informed and inane, and have none of the critical depth or insight found in, say, Life of Brian or South Park. In both BSG and Caprica, however, the religion proxy discussion is more intriguing, mostly because the writers allow the characters the sincerity of their beliefs or, better yet, realize the insincerity of all our beliefs and non-beliefs.

Watching Caprica I was struck when one character, questioning the monotheism of another, asks: do you really want to believe in a universe run by a single God who gets to decide what is right and what is wrong, with no recourse, no appeal? In other words: polytheism as the ultimate checks-and-balances for governing the universe. For science fiction, this counts as a deep insight.

The pilot for Caprica was released as a DVD and download in April; it is set to premiere as a series in early 2010. It’s unlikely to be as awful as spinoffs often are — for example, I couldn’t even bear to try the Stargate: Atlantis spinoff from SG-1 — but I am not holding my breath. In fact, I’ll probably wait for the DVD.

I saw District 9 yesterday.  This gory bore won an 88% rating at the Tomatometer?  As well as rave reviews from intelligent, well-educated people across the age spectrum?  Once again, as with Star Wars, I find myself wondering if I’m in a parallel universe.

After a gritty documentary-style start with an interesting premise, the film abandons all pretense of depth or subtlety and becomes a derivative, unrelenting splatterfest.  Toss Alien Nation, The Fly and Enemy Mine in a bowl, add a splash of Cry, The Beloved Country and Starship Troopers, mix a bit of E. T. and Close Encounters — not forgetting Kafka’s Metamorphosis with some Robocop dressing and a pinch of Chaplin via Wall-e… and you get an idea of what a jumble of recycled clichés District 9 is.

Coherence, scientific or any other kind, is non-existent.  The aliens are insectoid and seem to have castes differing in mental capacity, yet all appear to be male (since they reproduce by laying eggs, either females or hermaphrodites would be prominently represented or they would have a queen; and if the latter, the humans could have stopped their reproduction cycle by killing her).  They have bio-weapons that humans cannot use — yet the aliens can’t use them either until the mutating human’s genetic signature begins to match the weapons’ trigger setting. Their ship has remained stubbornly dead for twenty years, but activates instantly when the plot demands it.  The black fluid one of them creates is good for everything, from powering ships to altering DNA.  Two individuals with totally different physiologies become buddies.  There’s also the obligatory precocious tot (addressed, with numbing predictability, as “son” by “his father”).  The upper-caste aliens have completely human motives and responses.  All the humans except one are single-note stereotypes.  And the quasi-sympathetic anti-hero undergoes a Lamarckian change that’s as bogus as the uplifting life-lesson that accompanies it.

The cruelties of segregation, the plight of refugees, our treatment of Others — those are burning subjects.  So is the question of how we would interact with sentient aliens.  None of them gets real treatment here.  Instead, the film manipulates its viewers into feeling virtuous by being superficially “daring”.  District 9 is neither science fiction nor social commentary; it’s violence porn — or, as producer Peter Jackson himself called it on io9, splatstick.

Several decades ago, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon) wrote a story in which aliens eyeing the lush terrestrial real estate introduce something in the water or the air that makes men kill women and girls systematically, rather than in the usual haphazard fashion.  Recent events have made me wonder if a milder version of Tiptree’s Screwfly Solution might be affecting the brains of self-defined “technoprogressive visionaries”… in which case we’re doomed if not to extinction, at minimum to a future that will make Saudi Arabia seem paradisiacal.

Exhibit 1: The upcoming Singularity Summit, exclusively a white boys’ treehouse, about which I wrote more extensively in Girl Cooties Menace the Singularity!

Exhibit 2:  The upcoming Mammoth Book of Mindblowing Science Fiction, modestly subtitled The 21 Finest Stories of Awesome Science Fiction.  I know two of the authors in it personally, and consider one a friend.  Nevertheless, all the stories are (rewind tape) by American or British white men.  When called on this, the editor of the collection explained that stories by women didn’t peg his mindblowing meter, because “women write more about people and their feelings”.  Oooh, these nasty girl cooties again!  Not to mention that if there are no people in a piece of writing, it’s called a manual.

Exhibit 3: The Lifeboat Foundation discussion list which, unfortunately for anthropologists and cartoonists, is not public.  In it, self-identified visionaries agree (in harmonious accord with fundamentalists) that the scarcity and silence of women in most mindblowing places are natural outcomes of such proven attributes as “alpha male rape genes” and women’s “wired for coyness” brains.  These people are not even remotely acquainted with biology, but feel completely entitled to pose as experts because they’ve written clunky science fiction and now collect speakers’ fees as futurists.  I discussed another aspect of this in On Being Bitten to Death by Ducks.

Intrinsically, these occurrences are as worthy of attention as the whining of a mosquito swarm.  However, one reason that Pod People come to mind is that the excuses have been identical in all three cases. The litany goes as follows:

1.    We can’t have population quota representation, because this is all about superior quality/qualifications that non-males and non-whites simply lack.
2.    Would you rather we included token women and minorities?
3.    My wife/girlfriend/mistress/concubine is a feminist and/or non-white and she agrees with me.
4.    Your humorless PC hysteria alienates those who would support you if only you were polite.

Of course, parity is not even remotely demanded — a mere one or two representatives often suffice as a sop (to such lows have we fallen). The bleatings about qualifications and tokenism are absurd, given the vast, stellar non-male non-white talent pool.  The excuses sound even lamer (if not malicious) when one scans the predictable, often mediocre, rolodex-friend picks actually made in cases 1 and 2 above… and in more instances than I care to recall at other times.

In the vast majority of cases, non-male non-whites are overqualified for whatever position or role they are chosen to fill.  The tokenism excuse has been obliterated countless times no matter how often the goalposts move, particularly when evaluations are made truly blind.  Whenever musicians audit behind screens, or names are removed from manuscripts and grant or college applications, the number of women and non-whites skyrockets.  As soon as Harvard adopted blind admissions in my junior year, the girl to boy ratio went from 1:7 to 1:3 in one year, just from the incoming class.  This was immediately followed by shrieks of rage by alumni, who whined that more girls would lower Harvard’s standards as well as its reputation.  These, by the way, were mostly legacy admissions that had scraped by on gentlemen’s Cs.

So what we have here are people so embedded in their privilege that pointing it out to them instantly strips away the progressive veneer and elicits poop-flinging that would make a baboon blush.  Women and other Others are still furniture – and though furniture is useful and can be decorative, it’s not supposed to move, dammit!  From there it’s a short jump to the transhumanist vision of a world where, as the Sad Children cartoon says, “being white and rich will be even more awesome” – and where all others will be either properly docile courtesy of happifying pills or outright extinct in favor of infinitely malleable cyborg dolls.

I think that true equality will come when non-white non-males can be as mediocre as white men.  And when that time comes, I guarantee you that the quality of mindblowing anthologies won’t budge.  In the meantime, we’ll have to make do with the overqualified Others that occasionally squeak past the endless hazing gauntlet – if the stuff in the water doesn’t get us first.

Update: Graham Sleight reviewed Ashley’s collection in Strange Horizons… and his mind was decidedly underblown.  A fellow traveler of feminazis?  Objective pundits should investigate!

A recent entry by Mike Treder at the IEET site (Institute of Ethics and Emerging Technologies) discusses the Singularity in connection with the upcoming Singularity Summit organized by the SIAI (Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence).

I was totally unaware of this event until I visited the IEET site. Given what I know as a scientist about the likelihood of the Singularity, I couldn’t muster much interest. But ever the curious cat, I toddled over and examined the roster of speakers. All are white men. For several, their sole relevant qualification is that they believe in the imminence of the Singularity.

I pointed this out in my comments at the IEET — and a SIAI representative informed me that they had looked really hard for qualified women and, since they found none, “would you rather we picked a token female with nothing to say?” Then one of the speakers chimed in, to let me know that “the gender war was a thing of the eighties”. It got even funnier after that, as more Freudian slips showed underneath the space suit of what passes for original progressive thinking.

How highly qualified are those so carefully chosen for admission to the boys’ treehouse sanctum? Let me give you a whiff. One of the participants is a dotcom millionaire who has concluded that giving the vote to women doomed capitalist democracy. One of the two speakers that sorta kinda qualify as biologists is the originator of the concept of quantum microtubules (the biomolecular equivalent of Intelligent Design). The other stepped down from on high to deliver unto transhumanists the revelation that mitochondrial dysfunction is linked to cellular damage… a radical notion hidden away by those power-hungry biologists in, oh, every Biochemistry 101 textbook since the seventies. Of course, this representation is not surprising, since the participation of a bona-fide biologist in such an event would be the equivalent of an astrophysicist attending an astrologers’ convention.

So I gave this some thought and came up with a solution that will give this event the unquestionable authority and nuanced expertise it deserves: Invite Sarah Palin. She’s as qualified as several of the speakers, her views on the future largely jibe with theirs, she’s all woman (no passé crap like feminism for her) and she’s just become available, so her fee should still be reasonable. Better yet, the SIAI should go for Anne Coulter. She’d fit the agenda and milieu even better, and her Ayn Rand-approved style would only further burnish the occasion.

I’ll be sending the SIAI an invoice for program development consulting.

Image: Aubrey Beardsley, drawing for Aristophanes’ Lysistrata: The Lacedaemonian Ambassadors (detail)

Update 1: After the many discussions sparked by this article, SIAI included a female speaker in the program… a SIAI employee.  This is so telling that comments are superfluous.

Update 2: Women didn’t feel welcome at the SS (appropriate initials, come to think of it) nor comfortable with the ideas presented.  I’m surprised… not.