Astrogator's Logs

by Larry Klaes, space exploration enthusiast, science journalist, SF aficionado (plus a dissenting coda by Athena)

There is an interesting parallel between John Carter as the main character of the Mars series of adventure novels begun by Edgar Rice Burroughs (from here on called ERB) one century ago this year, and the recently released Disney film of the same name.

Both arrived on their respective worlds – the fictional man Carter on planet Mars, a.k.a. Barsoom, and the motion picture John Carter in cinemas all over planet Earth (a.k.a. Jarsoom) – with relatively little fanfare. Both Carters initially encountered natives who had no real idea who they were and were ready to kill them off. Yet somehow both survived their hostile environments and slowly earned the understanding and respect of their newfound worlds, eventually going on to change things for the better and having a wild time in the process.

Now of course the film version still has a long road ahead to achieve its equivalent of what the novel hero achieved in his fictional and serialized lifetime. To be honest, I do not know if it will ever become as popular and influential as the novels were in their day, if for no other reason than too many other fictional series influenced by the ERB works have left their much stronger mark on the cultural mindset in the intervening century. In addition, while John Carter is better than I feared, the very ironic fact that it looks rather derivative of the very genre it spawned may permanently hobble its journey across the cinematic and cultural landscape.

So why should I make a big deal out of a film and series that its parent company will probably write off as a financial loss, one that most of today’s audience is almost totally unfamiliar with, and in truth its core plot was not terribly original or new when ERB produced its first installment back in 1912?

For the following reasons: The film did not become the bloated mess that I thought Hollywood was going to turn it into (and which many film critics who I do not think would know or understand science fiction and its history if they proverbially bit them continue to insist it is while mentioning its big budget in the same breath). The John Carter series deserves to be honored, understood, and appreciated for all it has done both for science fiction/fantasy and for influencing later real scientists like Carl Sagan, who talked about his love for the series as a youth in an episode of Cosmos. Finally, the real story and history behind the influences – hinted at in the film – that spawned John Carter and affected our views of life on Mars and elsewhere are more than worthy of being reintroduced to new generations as well.

The plot of John Carter is essentially that of ERB’s first novel in the series, A Princess of Mars: Confederate war veteran and Gentleman of Virginia John Carter goes into a cave in the Southwestern United States and wakes up millions of miles away on the planet Mars. There he meets several of the remaining native populations on that world, all of whom are battling with each other and the elements as Mars is slowly drying up. Carter’s Earth-developed muscles allow him to jump quite high and punch very hard in the lower Martian gravity, abilities which quickly earn him the awe and respect of key natives. In the end, our hero defeats the bad guys, wins the hand of the beautiful Princess of Helium, Dejah Thoris, and then involuntarily ends up back on Earth.  Carter spends most of his Jarsoomian exile trying to get back to Mars and his wife, which he eventually does.

I must confess: I did not read any of the John Carter novel series until rather recently, despite knowing about them for most of my life. I am not a big fan of fantasy fiction and that is what I considered these works to be. I also assumed that the prose would not have aged well in the intervening decades.

I have since read the first novel and, like the film, found it to be not as bad as I feared. Both were rather entertaining and I found myself actually caring about the characters, always a key point for me with any story. As just one example, I recall being both surprised and moved when it was revealed in the novel that Sola was the daughter of Tars Tarkas.

Based on past experience with Hollywood’s efforts at science fiction (and John Carter really is basically SF and not fantasy), along with Disney’s historical habit of making major changes in their productions to suit their intended audiences and their less-than-stellar promotional efforts for this film, I expected John Carter to be an expensive and flashy mess, one that was as much about the original A Princess of Mars as the “re-imaged/re-invented” Star Trek film from 2009 was about the original Star Trek television series: A shell resembling the franchise but full of hot air and junk underneath. Instead I witnessed a film that actually got the main characters and plot points, along with the essence and feel of the novel – no small feat there. I just wish that more people were aware of this and could appreciate it. Ironically, science fiction is starting to become more “acceptable” to the mainstream audience due to the reimaged Battlestar Galactica and especially The Hunger Games series, whose first film came out right after John Carter and financially steamrolled our Martian hero and every other current movie in its path.

I found the film to capture the feel and look of the novel as I and others imagined it quite well. From the flying battle cruisers to the appearance and behavior of the warrior Tharks, this cinematic world of Barsoom is one I think ERB would have said well matched his visions of his creation.

There were a few notable changes from the novel, most of which only make sense in light of the medium and era. One was the addition of clothing on John Carter and the residents of Barsoom. In the novel, most natives went either naked or nearly so and did not even think twice about being in such a state (Dejah Thoris only wore strategically-placed ornate jewelry, for example). John Carter even arrived on Mars sans clothing. For obvious reasons the film could not replicate this situation from the novel; besides, it probably would have been too distracting even if such a thing were allowed by the modern film industry.

The women of Barsoom fared rather well from their “modernization” in the film, though it should be noted that even in the first novel I did not find them to be just the damsels-in-distress one might be led to believe from the decades of artwork depicting that alien world.

The two main Martian city-states depicted in the film, Helium and Zodanga, employed female soldiers as readily as male ones. I had to wonder if this situation was due to the fact that the Martian environment was dying and people and resources were in ever-dwindling supply, but no one ever seemed to question or even react to the idea of women in their military. The audience was not given enough cinematic time to learn very much about these societies in any event.

The Thark Sola was an intelligent and compassionate individual in addition to being a strong warrior. She endured a fair deal of suffering from her harsh culture to remain true to herself and her beliefs. Sola also became open to new ideas as the story progressed, such as flying, despite her father and chief Tars Tarkas earlier intoning that “Tharks do not fly!”

The most notable woman of the series is of course Dejah Thoris. While she remained a beautiful princess and the focus of John Carter’s admiration and desire, for the film Dejah also became a highly capable scientist as well as a warrior who more than held her own in battle. When the Helium leadership was ready to cave in and acquiesce to the demands of the Zodanga leader to marry Dejah in the hope of saving their society from defeat and destruction, Dejah was the only one who not only balked at this forced union but saw how Helium’s being united with the more barbaric city-state of Zodanga would actually undermine her culture and eventually all the people of Barsoom.

Dejah’s demonstrated scientific knowledge and technical skills were strong enough that the main “bad guys” of the film, the highly advanced species known as the Thern, considered Dejah to be a serious impediment to their plans for Barsoom while simultaneously admiring her abilities. As for the actor who played the Princess of Helium, Lynn Collins was an excellent choice for the character. She not only played Dejah with both intelligence and an air of royal nobility, Collins’ years of martial arts training also showed convincingly in her numerous scenes of hand-to-hand combat – including the several occasions when Carter got behind Dejah for protection!

The Thern are another cinematic modification from the novel. In A Princess of Mars, Martian natives make a trip down the River Iss when they feel ready to pass on from this life. They believe at the end of that river is where they will meet the goddess Issus and go on to a paradisiacal afterlife. Instead the mythology and the journey are a trap set by the Thern, descendants of the White Martians, who use monstrous creatures such as the white apes to kill and eat the unwary pilgrims and enslave or consume in turn those who survive the ordeal.

In the film, the Thern are an advanced alien race (they appear as humanoids but can also shapeshift) who travel from one inhabited world to another and “feed” off the energies expended by the native populations as they struggle with each other and use up or neglect their planet’s natural resources. One Thern named Shang implies to Carter that Earth and humanity are next on their menu once they are done with the dying Barsoom.

The Thern have a very interesting and quite alien technology which looks like a tangled mass of blue fibers, whether it is one of their structures or a weapon (Dejah Thoris recognizes its artificial nature). They also travel between worlds by sending “copies” of themselves similar to a fax using a medallion that operates on specific verbal commands. Whereas in the novel, Carter mysteriously arrives on Mars after simply falling asleep in a cave, our hero is accidentally transported to Barsoom by Thern technology. While of course there is no actual explanation given as to how the mechanism works, the audience is at least handed some kind of plausible reason for Carter’s celestial journey that is no worse than using a faster-than-light drive for a fictional starship. Besides, the JC series is all about the destination, not the journey.

The film version of the Thern left me wondering if perhaps there are advanced societies in the galaxy who view other alien species as lesser creatures to either be ignored or utilized for their own purposes. While they held some genuine admiration for Dejah Thoris, I got the impression that their whole attitude about using Barsoom until it was dry and dead and all the other worlds they have come across could be summed up as “It’s nothing personal, it’s just business.”

I have often wondered if an advanced ETI, using the Kardashev Type 2 or 3 labels for simplification, would mow over whole worlds and species as they developed their interstellar existence in the same way a construction crew would run over an ant colony on their building site. I would like to think that such sophisticated and experienced beings would be a bit more sensitive than that, but we are still so very clueless about anyone else in the Milky Way galaxy and beyond.

Athena’s afterword: Unsurprisingly, my view of John Carter (henceforth JCM) is far more jaundiced than Larry’s.  JCM is dull, curiously inert, with zero frisson or sensawunda despite the non-stop eye candy.  Although the novel it’s based on predated and influenced Star Wars, Avatar, etc, it was a given that the film’s late arrival would doom it to looking stale unless its makers were truly bold.  Pressing Pixar’s Stanton into service made success a possibility but Disney standard hackery prevailed: the deletion of crucial words from the film’s title (Mars, because other films with Mars in their titles bombed; Princess, because… it might give the film girl cooties) signals this fatal lack of conviction.

True, JCM is not a total failure; however, given its semi-infinite budget and the longueurs recognized even by its champions, this is a pathetically low bar.  It’s a near-failure even as film space opera — which by tradition has low standards for coherence, opting instead for assaultive FX pyrotechnics.  Of course, JCM’s science is non-existent even within its own silly framework (example: the intermittence and variability of Carter’s locust-like jumping abilities).  At least, unlike Cameron’s Na’vi, Stanton forbore from putting breasts on female Tharks.  In fact, JCM’s core failure lies in its clumsy, generic narrative and its paper-thin worldbuilding and characters, for whom it’s impossible to care.  Additionally, by being mostly faithful to the novel, JCM’s makers reproduced its highly problematic underpinnings.

The cultures in JCM are based (snore) on ancient Rome and the Celtic and German nations that opposed it  – as filtered through the lens of someone who learned history from comics or fifties Hollywood films.  JCM’s obvious muscular-christian underdrone further underlines its poverty of imagination.  There is no internal logic to the conflicts: they must simply exist, so that 1) we can see the neat-o flying machines and 2) the savior can become indispensable and lead his disciples to victory.  Its pace is as lumbering as its six-legged war beasts; neither its tone nor its visuals ever coalesce.  The relentless battles and fights are choppy and muddy.  The dialogue is clunkier than that of Lucas (a feat I considered impossible), the characters look and speak like Pharaonic wooden statues and the two leads have as much chemistry as pet rocks.  The aptly named Taylor Kitch, blander than lo-fat cottage cheese, doesn’t deserve Lynn Collins’ hot chili and the best that can be said about Thoris and Sola is that neither is a bimbo… or a blonde.

The clichés that literally sink JCM have dogged Hollywood space operas even in their self-labeled progressive incarnations like Star Trek: the White Messiah who out-natives the natives and has their princesses begging for his babbies; the lone feisty-but-feminine metal-bikini-clad woman among a sea (desert?) of men, bereft of any female interactions; the total absence of mothers, when even the non-dyadic Thark family structure gets twisted into providing Sola with a father; natives as noble savages who prevail, Ewok-like, over much superior technology once they choose the right (non-native) leader; hierarchical dog-eat-dog warrior societies; imperial rule by charismatic autocrats as the sole viable method of governance; the dog-like mascot whose sugary cuteness could elicit a full-blown diabetic coma.

People will undoubtedly try to argue that ERB was “a man of his time”.  This is an excuse used ad nauseam for other SF/F “founders” such as Tolkien – who in fact was deemed a regressive throwback even by his own circle before he got canonized into infallibility by his acolytes.  Ditto for ERB.  As one example, John Carter is a “gentleman of Virginia” who served with distinction in the Confederate Army.  Romantic lost causes aside, it means that ERB deliberately made his hero someone who chose to uphold the institution of slavery.  And, of course, the names… oh, how they thud!  Zodanga.  Woola. Tardos Mors.  Barsoom (rhymes with bazoom and va-va-voom, underscored by the Frazetta opulent pornokitch depictions so adored by Tarzanist evopsychos).

Such material can be salvaged in only two ways: either by radical re-imagining (which briefly was the route of the Battlestar Galactica reboot before it collapsed under its maker’s pretensions) or by being played as stylish high camp (which was why the Flash Gordon 1980 remake was such a breath of fresh air).  Like a good bone structure underneath flesh gone to flab, there were glimpses of what might have been had Stanton and his paymasters been braver.  But that would be a parallel universe where Barsoom truly came alive.  Stanton tries to elicit extra sympathy (and remind us of Wall-E) by dedicating JCM to Steve Jobs – but his latest opus resembles a clunky, bloated Microsoft PC.  It makes me once again think how immensely grateful I am that The Lord of the Rings was not directed by an American.

Images: John Carter (Taylor Kitch) realizing that not even super-jumping abilities will get him out of this mess; Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins) all undressed up with nowhere to go; Dejah Thoris and John Carter trying to find escape clauses in their contracts; Sola (voiced by Samantha Morton) in WTF? posture.

Part 2

The first round of the NIH budget petition that I discussed in my previous entry fell 400 signatures short by the deadline. Research scientists are nothing if not tenacious, so a second round has begun. I think this will make it, but it speaks volumes about the US public’s acceptance/understanding/appreciation of biomedical research that scientists can’t collect 25,000 signatures in a month — even a shorter one like February.

Speaking of tenacity in a more cheerful context, Chris Jones recently spoke with me on Trek.fm about life in concentric circles, starting with extremophiles on Earth, moving out to Mars, Europa, Titan, Enceladus… then onto solar systems beyond ours, whether populated by watery Neptunes or super-Earths.

– Reiner Maria Rilke, the first line of The Duino Elegies

You may recall I wrote about the condition of biomedical research a while ago: Of Federal Research Grants and Dancing Bears.

The NIH, the sole major funding source for such research, has stagnated for the last decade. People are trying to get a measly single-digit increase this year to staunch the bleeding. To get considered, the relevant petition must gather 25,000 signatures by this Sunday, March 18. If you care about basic research or therapeutic applications, follow this White House link. You will need to create an account, but the only thing they request are your name and e-mail. You can also boost this signal, if you wish. This part of the future may still be in our hands, if we don’t sit passively by.  Thank you.

Image: Allies, Susan Seddon Boulet.

No matter how lucky and cosseted we are, at some point in our lives we will experience a flat tire, a broken bone… and, in today’s First World, a site hack. Being a Mac user, I’ve been spoiled in that regard. However, yesterday I detected the dreaded signs that this site had been hacked: the blog dashboard turned into a shapeless mess that would not accept new uploads (though I could still moderate comments); and while loading, the site flashed a redirect address whose suffixes are known to be the sign of hijackers. A large number of WordPress-run blogs in the service provider that hosts my site got hit with this Trojan, which infects all the index.php files and also leaves behind backdoor scripts for later re-entry.

Every task requires the right tools and the person with the knowledge to use them. In this case, I found the right person in Jim Walker of TVCNet/Hack Repair. He was willing to walk me through the repairs on the phone, for free. When it became apparent that the extent of the infection exceeded my capacity to deal with it manually, he took care of it immediately and thoroughly, for a extremely reasonable fee. It took him about six hours and he worked late into the night, not stopping till he delivered the site, scrubbed clean and intact, back into my anxious embrace.

After my experience with Jim, I know more about the workings of sites, just as I learned a lot while watching John McCoy, who set up the components of the site and still does the heavy-duty updates and tweaks that go past my own knowledge boundaries. I am glad and grateful that such people exist. They’re members of the conspiracy of the competent that quietly holds up the world. The experience also made me realize how much this site, obscure as it is, means to me. It has become an integral part of my identity. Jim and John are my physicians as much as my treasured GP. Thank you.

Top image: the original Trojan horse; burial pithos, Mykonos, ~670 BC.

Anyone with a functioning cortex knew that Rush Limbaugh is a vile slug from the moment he uttered his first nasty lie. His recent comments about accomplished, brave law student Sandra Fluke are not surprising, nor is his stone-ignorant equation of contraception with frequency of intercourse: he must have confused responsible sex with his own frantic consumption of Viagra – now there’s unnaturally-induced sex on demand! However, Limbaugh is not the disease, merely its symptom. The belated, lukewarm bleatings and hedgings from the Republican “leadership” and from his advertisers are telling, as is their obfuscation of the fact that contraception is already covered by health insurance; the sole difference is the existence of a co-pay.

In the last year or so, we have seen exclusion of women from decisions that affect them almost exclusively, attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, to define miscarriage as murder, to add invasive, needless sonograms to the already enormous difficulties of getting an abortion. The freak show parade that is this year’s Republican presidential lineup is banging the tin drum of “returning to family values” — aka female poverty and powerlessness, probably because all of them have little knowledge of and interest in education, the environment, the economy, international diplomacy or anything of value to anyone beyond Ponzi-scheme millionaires who live in gated communities with private security. The US is going the way of Wahhabi Saudi Arabia – perhaps a fitting trajectory, since the country seems unwilling or unable to curb its fossil fuel consumption.

The open war on women declared by the Republican Party shows how the Teabaggers and Jesufascists have kidnapped rational, civil discourse in favor of a punitive primitivism that denies basic human decency and is steadily encroaching on hard-won women’s rights. It is no surprise that most foes of contraception are fundies of abrahamic religions, which are disasters for women in any case. However, make no mistake about it: contraception has nothing to do with freedom of religion. The kernel of this sickening backlash is the wish to deny women autonomy. Nothing changed the dynamics of gender interactions like contraception. For the first time in human history, women could reliably regulate the outcome of sexual congress. It removed the specter of unwanted pregnancy – and with that, women could enjoy sex as uninhibitedly as men, finally undoing the predator/prey equation so beloved of evo-psycho Tarzanists the world over.

Ironically, the exercise of contraception, which makes joyful sex possible, is uniquely human. The only partial exception may be our bonobo cousins, who use sex as social glue (often, note bene, initiated by the female members of the group). Contrary to the corrosive lies of benighted fundies, most animals do not choose sex. They go into heat and mate compulsively. In some cases, females exercise mate choice; in others, mating pairs form monogamous bonds. But only humans incorporate sex into their repertoire of chosen pleasures, whether they’re fertile or not. So contrary to the idiotic natterings that “sex on demand” is animal-like, exercising sexual choice is in fact the highest compliment for the activity. It transforms it from instinct, compulsion or random outcome solidly into something treasured, something freely chosen – which, again contrary to the fundies’ nonsense, makes it far more meaningful and powerful than the joyless autopilot version. It is the opposite of prostitution, which is undertaken as a profession and requires control and foregoing of spontaneous pleasure by its practitioners – not that Limbaugh et al are clear on complex concepts.

This is what contraception made possible, and what is at stake here. If people want human women to become truly animal-like, they should recall that most mammals do not recognize paternity, the most common family unit is a female with sub-adult offspring and female mammals routinely abort or kill offspring when they deem the circumstances unpropitious for raising a brood. And if they think that contraception is murder, they can return to the good old days when masturbation was in a similar category. However, all this hypocrisy and twisting of facts really attempts to cloud the core issue: women as equals. By targeting this, the Jesufascists and their ilk across all nations and religions are playing on the primitive fears of men, especially at times of instability and unrest, when it’s far easier to turn on Others than to act constructively for a better collective future. As James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon) famously had a protagonist state in The Women Men Don’t See:

“Women have no rights, except what men allow us. Men // run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like—like that smoke. We’ll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You’ll see.”

Contrary to Freud’s notorious question, the recurrent problem of civilization, as prevalent today as in ancient Sumer, is how to define male roles which satisfy male egos without wreaking terminal havoc. Women still have essentially no power – Tiptree’s dictum still obtains, even in the First World. I personally believe that our societal problems will persist as long as women are not treated as fully human, including the right to be sexual beings by choice. The resorting to medical excuses in support of available contraception, nice as it is, diverts the attention from the central, irreducible issue of women’s basic autonomy and fundamental rights as full humans. The various attempts to improve women’s status, ever subject to setbacks and backlashes, are our marks of successful struggle to attain our full species potential. If we cannot solve this thorny and persistent problem, we may still survive — we have thus far. However, I doubt that we’ll ever truly thrive, no matter what technological levels we achieve.

From 2008 to 2009 I was a fellow (gratis) of the Institute for Emerging Ethics and Technology. IEET is the public face of a non-libertarian branch of transhumanism that considers itself left-leaning progressive – by US standards, that is. In 2009 I left IEET, because the willful ignorance of biology and the evopsycho blather got to me (as did the fact that there were no non-white non-males in any position of power there). A month ago, they contacted me to ask if I would like to have more of my essays reprinted on their site, and if I’d answer a questionnaire.

The quality of the comments on the IEET site made me decide not to publish there. On the other hand, the questionnaire gave rise to thoughts, especially in light of the steady erosion of women’s status across the globe. I won’t quote lengthy specifics, they’re all around us: from US congressmen trying to pass laws that classify miscarriage as murder to the resurgence of religious fundamentalism and its relentless seepage into mainstream politics. Here’s the list of questions, which I call The Ok, The Bad and the Funny:

The Future of Feminism

1. How do you think “sex selection” is going to impact women? In China and India, millions of female fetuses have been aborted… do you think this will continue as sex selection becomes more widespread? Or will it even out – or even favor girls? I’ve read that sex selectors choose girls over boys in places like South Korea and Japan…
2. Women are advancing quickly in political and business positions. They are now 60% of college students, even in graduate programs. Do you think this trend will continue, enabling women to become the dominant gender in many parts of the world?
3. Getting pregnant no longer requires a male mate. Do you predict a gradual or sudden decline of marriage, for this reason? Do you predict more single mothers-by-choice? An increasingly wide variety of family groups?
4. Will men become irrelevant, if propagation can occur between two women via parthenogenesis? Is this something that is scientifically possible in the near future?
5. Do you think the word “feminism” is going to be dated in 40-50 years, because we’ll moving towards a genderless society? That there will be numerous possible gender options, that are easily changeable? Or will there be “women” for at least the next 100 years?
6. How do you think social institutions will change, as nations become “feminized” due to increasing female presence in power positions? Will increasing women’s power effect education? International relations? Economies? Democracy? the environment?
7. I have noticed that women don’t seem as interested in cryonics, or life extension. Am I right about that? Why is that? Do you think women are as intrigued by immortality as men? If not, how will progress in life extension proceed in a future where men are declining in influence?
8. Do you think male and female sex robots will be prevalent in the future? Will they dominate sexuality? Or will only men be interested in them? Will prostitution, and the sex industry in general, be impacted, or replaced by sexbots?
9. Men presently – generally – have greater physical size and strength than women. Will this change in the future, via various enhancements and augmentations? Will the two genders become physically equal in all aspects? If so, how will this change the dynamics between them?
10. Genetically, it appears that men are likely to be “outliers” – to be at the far extremes in either intelligence or stupidity. Do you see this changes in the future, via genetic engineering? Do you see women eventually winning 1/2 the Nobel Prizes every year, or even more, for example?
11. There are still cultures that practice customs like Female Genital Mutilation and Arranged Marriages and Honor Killings. Do you see those misogynistic practices ending soon? Or will they be tolerated for several more decades, because many are disinclined to assert Western ideals on traditional cultures? How will notions about “religion” change as women gain in power?
12. Do you see other technologies looming ahead that will deeply impact women? A male birth control pill, for example – how would that change society?
13. Finally, do you see women entering science and tech in larger numbers? Do you think they have different interests in these fields? Do you think they have goals and inventions and purposes they want to accomplish, that differ from male goals/inventions/purposes?

The attentive reader will notice several overarching attributes.  Beyond the gender essentialism, half of the questions are “But… what about the men??” including the angst about family configurations, control of reproduction and, not least, sex robots – clearly, a burning issue. Also telling is that the questionnaire is titled “The Future of Feminism” rather than “The Future of Women”. Insofar as feminism is the simple yet radical notion that women are fully human and should be treated as such, it is frankly stunning that many people, and not just Anders Breivik or the Taliban, are virulently hostile to feminism. This speaks volumes about the prevailing assumptions of the first globally linked human civilization and its likeliest future direction: women’s prospects look ever bleaker as the global economy circles the drain, since women are shoved back into chattelship, illiteracy and poverty whenever there’s a downturn or an upheaval. Variations of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale have replayed in many places within my lifetime.

“Feminizing” keeps popping up in the questionnaire as well. It looks like the IEET definition of the term is “if at least one woman is present in X” regardless of the final configuration. As far as I’m concerned, for any X to be feminized it requires more than 50% female representation — and last I looked, men still own and run just about everything on this planet. Equally importantly, “feminizing” that makes a difference also requires the high female representation to be across the board (not stuffed into the lower echelons, as research techs in science or gofers in corporations and governments); last but decidedly not least, it requires that X not be devalued in prestige, authority and compensation because it is XX-heavy (math in Japan, partly because during the shogunate merchants were classified as below peasants, and samurai did not soil themselves with money affairs: their wives handled all that, hence no prestige was attached to numbers; medicine in the USSR: most doctors were women, and the perks and pay scale of the profession were low).

Yet another characteristic of the questionnaire is conflation of cause and effect. As one example, everyone knows that many more women should have won Nobels but they were pushed aside by ambitious men with influential mentors and devoted wives. Lise Meitner, Rosalind Franklin, Chien-Shiung Wu, Jocelyn Bell, Lynn Margulis, Jane Goodall, Susan Berget – to name just the very tip of the iceberg. Additionally, intelligence is far more complex than the isolated genius cliché propagated by the IEET questionnaire. As for idiotic suggestions by evopsychos — as a representative example, the contention that men bequeath genes “for brain size” from the Y chromosome, thereby making men routinely more intelligent than women: beyond contributions to spermatogenesis, the next major function determined by Y-linked genes is ear hair.

Here’s another example of muddled causation:  when women see that most men who sign up for cryonic preservation share the physical and emotional attributes of the male cast in The Big Bang Theory, no wonder they’re electing not to join these men in their thermos jar dreams – or in eternal post-rupture bliss (cryonics’ current zero chance of success strictly aside).

I could go on at considerable length but I won’t beat up on the questionnaire too much: it did try to include sciency questions, basic and unfocused as they were. Some of the questions amused me in a sad way, making me conclude that the movement might best be dubbed “transhumorism”. Nevertheless, the concerns mirrored in it do not bode well for the future of humanity. In the end, we will get the fate we deserve as a species. But I’ll say this much: feminism will become irrelevant when questionnaires like this become irrelevant.

Images: 1st, the cast of The Big Bang Theory (as well as an encapsulation of the dynamics); 2nd, self-explanatory; 3rd, the sex dolls of First Androids.

Life will pull you under if you let it and grind you to fine dust. I decided to steal a moment away from the usual cares while the mild weather lasted. Yesterday, Mr. Snacho and I went walking through The Great Meadows marsh in Concord at sunset – which was also moonrise, as the moon was one day before full. The sky and the water held rainbow colors; the land was infinite shades of brown and gray, deep in hibernation.

We’ve gone to that marsh in all seasons and it has never ceased to be wondrous, despite its obvious domestication. Once we chanced upon an enormous ebony and golden fuzzy caterpillar hurrying on its way to more food that would let it become a moth. We’ve seen all kinds of birds, from chickadees to hawks, as well as the occasional terrapin. I keep hoping that one day we’ll catch a glimpse of the elusive river otters, or the beavers from the lodge that peeks through the reeds.

This time, in the glass-calm water I detected a wake of two nostrils that eventually resolved into a muskrat busily fluffing its pelt. In the middle distance we spied three swans alongside the duck and goose flotillas. And we saw something incredibly beautiful across the sky, the contrast heightened by the bare branches. It coincidentally appeared in NASA’s picture of the day, so I discovered its lay name: the Belt of Venus.

Normally, the earth’s shadow below the reflected reddened sunlight is darker than the sky above. But yesterday, for some reason the shadow was a lovely shade of teal. While it lasted, it felt like we walked inside a shimmering opal pendant.

Whenever I see such beauty, I float on it and dream: what marvels like this will we see if we ever walk under strange skies?

My moon, faraway and alone,
sleepless and tireless, you hung on the balcony.
Come, my shipmistress, come to my window.

– from an old popular Hellenic song

Photos of Great Meadows: Peter Cassidy

Immediately after my discussion of Kepler 22b, Christopher Jones interviewed me for Trek.fm. I first met Chris when he interviewed me about The Biology of Star Trek for Suite 101.

This time around, Chris asked me to opine on the 100-Year Starship symposium, long-generation starships and the future of humanity on- and off-earth.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

— William Butler Yeats, Second Coming

The last few years have been heady for planet hunters. First the hot Jupiters; then the will-o’-the-wisp Glieslings and their cousins; and in the last year, the results from the Kepler mission which detected planetary systems in the low thousands; one of these is Kepler 22.

Kepler 22 is a G5 type star (our sun is G2, about 10% bigger and hotter) 600 light years away with a planetary entourage. For anyone who was in a sequestered jury room or a silently running nuclear submarine, what got splashed across the news media on December 5 was the confirmation that one of the Keplerings is a super-Earth (2.4 times the radius of our planet) that is solidly within the habitable zone of its primary – habitable defined as the region where water can remain liquid. It circles its primary in 289 days and its estimated average temperature is a balmy 22 C/75 F if (big if) it has an atmosphere thick enough for a mild greenhouse effect.

That’s what we know, and it’s important and exciting enough. Here’s what we don’t know, which makes the exclamations of “Twin Earth!” annoying: we don’t know its mass (though the wobble velocity puts an upper limit of 36 Earth masses on it), its composition, the composition of its atmosphere or if it has any moons. Equally annoying are the suggestions to name it The Christmas Planet or the barely less mawkish Hope, right down there with the naming of putative Gliese 581g something like Betty (not even Elizabeth, which at least would celebrate an unforgettable historic figure, plus several literary ones).

The Kepler findings are pinning down the still-loose middle terms of the Drake equation by strongly indicating that most suns have planetary systems, and most planets are of the small rocky variety. Of the approximately 2,000 systems Kepler tentatively identified, about fifty have planets within the habitable zone, of which perhaps ten are “Earth-like” (loosely defined).

Half a percent may not sound like much. But given the quarter trillion suns in our galaxy, the numbers mount up quickly. Plus, of course, the size and location of the newcomer inevitably raises expectations: if Kepler 22b is rocky and has decent amounts of water and a reasonably thick atmosphere, the probability of life moves into the “likely” zone. So it’s not surprising that the Allen Array turned its dishes in the direction of Kepler 22 (no requests for Warren Zevon yet, but the night is still young) – or that the concept art is coming in thick and fast.

It is a great pity that Kepler 22b is so far. Even expeditions with quasi-exotic propulsion systems (or exceptionally nice humans in flawless arkships) would take a long time to reach it. But the lengthening list of not-quite-Earths is a powerful enticement not to abandon the faltering beacon of space exploration. Once again, I will close with what I said about Gliese 581g:

“Whether [Kepler 22b] is so hospitable that we could live there or so hostile that we could only visit it vicariously through robotic orbiters and rovers, if it harbors life — even bacterial life, often mistakenly labeled “simple” — the impact of such a discovery will exceed that of most other discoveries combined. Unless supremely advanced Kardashev III level aliens seeded the galaxy like the Hainish in Ursula Le Guin’s Ekumen, this life will be an independent genesis, enabling biologists to define which requirements for life are universal and which are parochial.

At this point, we cannot determine if [Kepler 22b] has an atmosphere, let alone life signatures. If it has non-technological life, without a doubt it will be so different that we may not recognize it. Nor is it a given, despite our fond dreaming in science fiction, that we will be able to communicate with it if it is sentient. In practical terms, a second life sample may exist much closer to home — on Mars, Europa, Titan or Enceladus. But those who are enthusiastic about this discovery articulate something beyond its potential seismic impact on biology and culture: the desire of humanity for companions among the sea of stars, a potent myth and an equally potent engine for exploration.”

Images: 1st, one of the four Kepler 22b imaginings by space artist Ron Miller. 2nd, comparison of Sol and Kepler 22 (NASA/Ames/JPL).

by David Darling

Today I have the pleasure of hosting my friend David Darling, an astronomer and well-known science writer, who will update us on the multiverse. Dr. Darling has written many books of popular science, including Life Everywhere: The Maverick Science of Astrobiology (in which he mentions my views on Rare Earth and the Anthropic Principle). He also maintains a much-visited website, The Worlds of David Darling that contains The Internet Encyclopedia of Science. His latest book, Megacatastrophes!: Nine Strange Ways the World Could End, his second collaboration with Dirk Schulze-Makuch, will appear next spring.

The multiverse, or theory of many universes, is very much in the news right now because some recent work strongly suggests that it might be true. The basic, mind-boggling idea is that “out there” is more than just the bubble of space-time we happen to live in – what we call the Universe. There are trillions and trillions (and trillions and trillions…) of other universes. Don’t even bother trying to imagine them all or your head might explode.

Surprisingly, the word “multiverse” has been around for a long time. It was coined way back in 1895 by the American philosopher William James, although he probably had something quite different in mind than what modern scientists are talking about.

And what are they talking about? Here’s the first problem we run into in tackling the multiverse concept. When scientists talk about the multiverse they can mean different things. To a cosmologist – someone interested in the origins and evolution of the universe as a whole – the multiverse is a consequence of the nature of the vacuum, which isn’t as empty as we usually suppose. The cosmologist’s multiverse stems from something called chaotic inflationary theory, which itself is a variety of the theory of cosmic inflation. In a nutshell, our universe is like a bubble of spacetime that spawned from a great foaming ocean of spacetime that’s always existed and always will exist. In it’s first few moments, our universe expanded at a fantastic rate before settling down to a more sedate rate of growth. But beyond our universe are other, similar bubbles – other universes – each expanding and each with their own physical constants and laws. One estimate puts the number of such universes at an outrageous 10 to the power 10 to the power 10 million (in other words 1 followed by 10 to the 10 million zeros – aargh!).

On the other hand, to a quantum physicist – someone who deals with the very smallest things in nature – the concept of the multiverse is a different beast. If you believe in something called Everett’s many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which a lot of quantum scientists do, every time an observation is made at the quantum (super-tiny) level, the universe splits into all the possible outcomes that could happen. I’m not even going to get into what counts as an “observation”! Some people say it has to involve a conscious or sentient observer (like a human being); others argue that any measuring instrument will do. It’s complicated. But the underlying message of Everett’s theory is that any time an event (such as a collision between particles) is watched, the universe splits in various ways to take account of all the possible outcomes. Needless to say, this gets pretty crazy pretty fast! If every outcome of every minuscule watched event gives rise to an entirely new universe, then the total number of universes in this quantum physical view of the multiverse is beyond mind-boggling.

So there are these two different multiverse scenarios – the one of the cosmologist and the one of the quantum physicist. And they aren’t mutually exclusive. They could both be right. Trying to figure out the consequences if both types of multiverse are real and co-existent very quickly overwhelms my brain’s paltry (and diminishing) collection of neurons. But let’s just focus on a couple of particulars. In the quantum physicist’s multiverse, there are bound to be a lot of universes that are very similar to the one we live in. In fact there are going to be a lot of universes with other you’s – some of them only very slightly different from the one that we’re in right now. The cosmologist’s multiverse also allows for a vast number of universes, but the chances of almost exact copies of you is more remote. Instead, the cosmologist’s multiverse is populated by an incredible variety of bubbles of space-time in which the laws and basic constants are expected to vary widely. Probably very few are capable of supporting life.

Another distinction between the two types of multiverse is their fundamental nature. The cosmologist’s multiverse is a bit easier to grasp. Put it this way, if there were a parallel you in a bubble-universe that was the product of chaotic inflation then this other you would exist in the familiar three dimensions of space. But an alternative you in Everett’s many-worlds picture is a much more esoteric affair: a creature living in a different quantum branch of something called Hilbert space. Not being a mathematician, I won’t try to explain what Hilbert space is (Google it, if you’re interested). Suffice it to say, it’s an extremely important concept in quantum mechanics – but far from easy to visualize.

Now the exciting thing is, physicists are getting close to being able to test if the multiverse is real. If there are other universes beyond our own, then it’s likely we may have bumped into them in the past, resulting in the cosmic equivalent of fender benders. The impacts ought to show up as dents in the cosmic microwave background – the now much-cooled afterglow of the Big Bang. For some time, the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite has been mapping the microwave background to an unprecedented level of precision. The results will be out soon and may confirm the multiverse theory.

On a different front, theorists have made a discovery that goes to the very heart of quantum mechanics. They’ve shown its very likely that something called the wavefunction – the most important concept in the physics of the very small – isn’t a mere wave of probability as previously supposed, but a real physical object. The most far-reaching conclusion of this is that Everett’s many-worlds interpretation is correct and the quantum physicist’s multiverse is also a fact.

So get ready for expanding horizons. Just a few centuries ago, people thought there was only one sun. Then it turned out the stars were suns too. Then we discovered that our Milky Way Galaxy, with its hundreds of billions of stars, was just one among many galaxies. Then it turned out that galaxies were arranged in clusters, which in turned formed superclusters. Now it seems our universe is just one of an unbelievable number of other universes. Who’s to say the hierarchy doesn’t extend beyond the multiverse?

Images: David Darling, Life Everywhere; bubble universes, Sally Bensusen/SciencePhotoLibrary.

(classical Hellenic: beautiful and good)

When I started dealing with computers, I learned FORTRAN for a crystallography project (this was still the era of perforated cards), then VMS, a UNIX cousin. I got used to bulky cuboids the color of chewed gum, trailing wires like tentacles of beached jellyfish. The language within them matched their appeareance – one made by and for computer geeks (though the alphanumeric version of Rogue was terrific). Late in my postdoctoral stint, however, these sleek, fast apparitions started appearing in the lab: the first Macintoshes, with such exotic capabilities as point-n-click and drag-n-drop.

Ever since then, I and almost all the scientists I know (with exceptions dictated by specific demands) have cleaved to our Apples. The machines were ahead of their time when they first came out, and have been worth every extra penny. They work flawlessly, install and run new applications seamlessly, never crash or munge data – and, yes, they’re beautiful, a feast for the senses. In short, they’re for people who want well-crafted precision instruments and don’t have the time and stamina to endlessly reboot Windows. I’m not starry-eyed about Apple’s business practices but I’m glad they stand against the Microsoft monolith, an alternative to the monoculture that threatens to get humanity conditioned willy-nilly to cynically shoddy work.

Steve Jobs was my age – I turn 56 today. A reminder that we have finite time to realize our aspirations, though he started early and did spectacularly. Few people are as fused to their work as he was to Apple, to the point where people worry about the company’s future after his death. He deserves the tributes that are pouring in and I’m grateful he persevered in his vision of excellence, not just cobble together something that lurches around sort of getting the job done. Although I feel obliged to point out that a woman with his idiosyncrasies, no matter how inspired, driven and charismatic, would have lasted all of half an hour – in Apple or anywhere else.

For my birthday present, I got one of those elegant iMacs that have the CPU incorporated in the back of their slightly curving screen and look like a starship control console. Like Steve Jobs, I too have been checked by cancer – but for as long as I can travel, his Apples will be companions on my journey.

Images: Apple logo modified by Cory Cole; Apple-inspired Eve of Wall-E (from Pixar, another visionary move by Jobs)

Sic itur ad astra (“Thus you shall go to the stars.”)
– Apollo, in Virgil’s Aeneid

Last Friday, several hundred people from a wide cross-section of the sciences and humanities converged on Orlando, Florida, to participate in the DARPA-sponsored 100-Year Starship symposium.  As the name tells, this was a preliminary gathering to discuss the challenges facing a long-generation starship, from propulsion systems to adapting to extraterrestrial homes.

I was one of the invited speakers.  I won’t have the leeway of long decompression, as I must immediately submerge for a grant.  However, I think it’s important to say a few words about the experience and purpose of that gathering.  Given the current paralysis of NASA, activities like this are sorely needed to keep even a tiny momentum forward on the technologies and mindsets that will make it possible to launch long-term crewed ships.

Open to the public, the event lasted two and a half days, the half being summations.  Content-wise, half was about the usual preoccupations: propulsion systems, starship technologies, habitats.  The other half covered equally important but usually neglected domains: biology, society, ethics, communicating the vision.  The talks were brief – we were each given 20 minutes total – and varied from the very broad to the very specific.  The presentations that I attended were overall high quality (though I personally thought “exotic science” should have been folded into the SF panels); so were the questions and discussions that followed them.  The age distribution was encouraging and there were many women in the audience, of which more anon.

Some aspects of the symposium did dismay me.  Structurally, the six or seven simultaneous tracks (with their inevitable time slippages) not only made it hard to go to specific talks but also pretty much ensured that the engineers would go to the propulsion talks, whereas the historians would attend those about ethics.  The diversity quotient was low, to put it mildly: a sea of pale faces, almost all Anglophones.  Most tracks listed heavily to the XY side.  This was particularly egregious in the two SF author panels, which sported a single woman among nine men – none with a biological background but heavy on physicists and AI gurus.  It was also odd to see long biosketches of the SF authors but none of the presenters in the official brochure.

Most disquieting, I sensed that there is still no firm sense of limits and limitations.  This persistence of triumphalism may doom the effort: if we launch starships, whether of exploration or settlement, they won’t be conquerors; they will be worse off than the Polynesians on their catamarans, the losses will be heavy and their state at planetfall won’t resemble anything depicted in Hollywood SF.  Joanna Russ showed this well in We Who Are About To…  So did Chelsea Quinn Yarbro in Dead in Irons.  But neither story got the fame it deserves.

On the personal side, I had the pleasure of seeing old friends and finally seeing in the flesh friends whom I had only met virtually.  I was gratified to have the room overflow during my talk.  My greatest shock of happiness was to have Jill Tarter, the legend of SETI, the inspiration for Ellie Arroway in Contact, not only attend my talk but also ask me a question afterwards.

I hope there is sustained follow-up to this, because the domain needs it sorely.  Like building a great cathedral, it will take generations of steady yet focused effort to build a functional starship.  It will also require a significant shift of our outlook if we want to have any chance of success.  Both the effort and its outcome will change us irrevocably.  I will leave you with three snippets of my talk (the long version will appear in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society):

“An alternative title to this talk is ‘Distant Campfires’. A Native American myth said that the stars are distant campfires, where our ancestors are waiting for us to join them in storytelling and potlatch feasts.  Reaching and inhabiting other planets is often considered an extension of human exploration and occupation of Earth but the analogy is useful only as a metaphor. To live under strange skies will require courage, ingenuity and stamina – but above all, it will require a hard look at our assumptions, including what it means to be human.”

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“In effect, by sending out long-term planetary expeditions, we will create aliens more surely than by leaving trash on an uninhabited planet.  Our first alien encounter, beyond Earth just as it was on Earth, may be with ourselves viewed through the distorting mirror of divergent evolution.”

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“If we seek our future among the stars, we must change for the journey – and for the destination.  Until now, we have participated in our evolution and that of our ecosphere opportunistically, leaving outcomes to chance, whim or short-term expedience.  In our venture outwards, we’ll have to overcome taboos and self-manage this evolution, as we seek to adapt to the new, alien worlds which our descendants will inhabit.

One part of us won’t change, though: if we ever succeed in making our home on earths other than our own, we will still look up and see patterns in the stars of the new night skies.  But we will also know, each time we look up, that we’re looking at distant campfires around which all our relatives are gathered.”

Images: 1st, sunset, September 27, 2011, Sarasota, Florida (photo, Athena Andreadis); 2nd, Spaceborn (artist, Eleni Tsami)

by Joan Slonczewski

Today I have the great pleasure of hosting my friend Joan Slonczewski, who will discuss how textbooks can fire the imagination of future scientists.  Dr. Slonczewski is Professor of Biology at Kenyon College where she teaches, does research in microbiology, and writes a leading undergraduate textbook, Microbiology: An Evolving Science (W. W. Norton). She is also an SF author well-known for incorporating real science in her fiction, as highlighted by her justly famous A Door into Ocean.  Her recent SF novel, The Highest Frontier (Tor/Macmillan), shows a college in a space habitat financed by a tribal casino and protected from alien invasion by Homeworld Security.

When the film Avatar opened, it drew many critiques based on science. The planet Pandora could not exist around a gas giant; the neural-linked ecosystem would have no predators; and the Na’vi should have six limbs, like other Pandoran fauna. The greatest flaw was that the Na’vi have breasts, although their class of creatures are not mammals. Non-mammals having breasts would be an error unthinkable in real science.

Yet I wonder what might happen if an introductory textbook in biology were to receive scrutiny similar to that of Avatar.  If non-mammals should not be shown with breasts, does it follow that true mammals, named for the mammary gland, should indeed show breasts? The typical textbook section on “mammalian diversity” shows scarcely a mammary gland. One would never guess that we drink milk from cattle, mares, camels, and reindeer. The more modern books do show prominent breasts on a human. In other words, a view of life surprisingly similar to Avatar.

I first saw the fictional aspect of textbooks from the viewpoint of a science fiction author writing a college text, Microbiology: An Evolving Science (W. W. Norton).  As a fiction author–my book A Door into Ocean won the Campbell award–I well know the dilemma of “hard SF,” which aims to invent a future world of gadgets that don’t yet exist based on science that actually does. Even “hard” science fiction often dodges inconvenient points about exceeding the speed of light, breathing the air on any planet where the starship lands, and mating with the seductive native “aliens.”

A textbook, I thought, would be different. My coauthor John Foster would correct what I wrote, and our publisher provided a throng of editors and expert reviewers. The art budget paid for stunning visuals from a first-rate graphic arts firm whose artists actually check details in the primary literature.

Our early illusions about textual perfection fell away in the light of reviewer comments based on errors entrenched in other books, and editorial “corrections” that often made clearer English but muddier science. But the art process was what really made me think of fiction. Early on we chose a “palette” in which color conveys information: DNA was purple, RNA was blue, proteins red, yellow, or green. And cell interiors, with their nucleus, mitochondria, and so on, offered a rainbow of colors from lilac to salmon. Our color-coded figures are more than informative; they are gorgeously attractive, so much so that prospective adopters have been known to caress them on the page.

But DNA is not “really” purple, and RNA is not really blue. Chloroplasts are indeed green, as typically shown, but mitochondria are not red aside from a few of their iron-bearing proteins. And what of individual atoms as ray-traced blue and red balls and sticks? This aspect of science art goes beyond fiction–it is fantasy.

Despite their limitations, the visuals in a textbook illustrate in that they form a pattern in the reader’s mind; a pattern that deepens understanding of a concept. This aim of illustration is actually shared by the best science fiction. Frank Herbert’s Dune illustrates how water scarcity drives an ecosystem. Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood illustrates how organisms trade genetic identity for survival.

So if textbook art is “fictional,” what needs to be “correct”? The mental patterns formed by the text and art need to be honest; to spark genuine insights that lead to understanding. A cell’s nucleus is not “really” lavender in color, but the colored shape draws attention to the nucleus as a compartment enclosing the precious DNA. By contrast, an image depicting the nuclear contents as spilling out of the cell would not yield insight, but confusion. A troubling new group of textbooks aim to sow such confusion–books with titles like Exploring Creation with Biology and The Lies of Evolution.  Such books aim to inoculate “inquiring preteens” against the founding principles of biology, geology, and cosmology.

If deliberate confusion is the worst sin of any book, the next worst sin is boredom. Teachers can make students read the most boring book; but will they stay awake?

A key decision we made for Microbiology: An Evolving Science was to tell stories. We told how Bangladeshi women taught the world to fight cholera. How life began out of atoms formed by stars that died long before our own sun was born. How a high school boy testified at the Scopes trial that humans evolved from microbes. How Louis Pasteur as a student discovered mirror symmetry in biomolecules–a tool that astrobiologists may use to reveal life on other worlds.

A textbook, like science fiction, should raise questions. Is there microbial life on Mars–and what might it look like? Textbooks should take the reader to new places where we’ve never been–and perhaps could never go, such as the interior of a cell, the electron cloud of an atom, or a planet where people have three sexes.  Like science fiction, a textbook should inspire people to learn more about real science, and even become scientists.  After Jurassic Park came out, some scientists felt embarrassed by the book’s technical flaws and its portrayal of money-mad dinosaur cloners.  But so many students came to Kenyon College wanting to clone dinosaurs that we founded a new program in molecular biology.

My latest work of fiction, The Highest Frontier, has already drawn complaints. The space elevator won’t work; the casino-financed satellite can’t be built; and the aliens could not really evolve like viruses. Let’s hope at least the book inspires students to pursue virology.

Athena’s coda:  Readers of this blog know the reasons why I detest Avatar, which go beyond its sloppy science; so do some attendees of Readercon 2010, because Joan and I had a lively exchange about it in a panel.  Even so, I entirely agree with what Joan says here, as attested by The Double Helix: Why Science Needs Science Fiction.

In my essays and talks, I have repeatedly used A Door into Ocean as an example of outstanding “hard” SF that does not trumpet its hardness and also contains the additional layers and questioning of consequences that make it compelling fiction.

I also had the privilege of reading the penultimate version of The Highest Frontier.  The novel is an unusual combination of space opera and grounded near-future extrapolation — and Harry Potter aficionados would love it if they found out about it (unfortunately unlikely, given the proliferation of unlinked subgenre ponds in speculative fiction).  It’s fascinating to compare and contrast it with Morgan Locke’s Up Against It, also from Tor.  Both are set in beleaguered space habitats where cooperative problem-solving is the only viable option; both literally brim with interesting concepts, vivid characters and exciting thought experiments.

The two novels are proof of three things: women can write stellar hard SF; scenarios for a long-term human presence in space that ignore biology (very broadly defined) are doomed; and I need not despair of finding SF works that engage me… provided that authors as talented as these continue to be published against least-common-denominator tides.

Images: 1st, a Sharer of Shora (from A Door into Ocean) as envisioned by Rowan Williams; 2nd, Slonczewski’s microbiology textbook opens with the NASA Phoenix lander and asks, “Is there life on Mars?”; 3rd, a glimpse of the habitat in The Highest Frontier.

Note: This article has a coda about the CERN neutrino results, which came out while I was writing it.

Two seemingly disparate but actually related items came up in the news recently. One was the discovery of a planet circling a close binary star system given the placeholder name of Kepler 16. The other was the publication of a viral protein’s crystal structure.

What, I hear you ask, do these have in common? Well, for one both projects used crowdsourcing (now going by the PR-friendly term “citizen science”). The other commonality was the anti-scientist hype: the media trumpeted gleefully that non-scientists are more prescient and clever than scientists. In contrast to plodding experts, prophetic film directors (“OMG, Tatooine!”) and intrepid gamers simply vault over obstacles and gracefully yet squarely hit the target. Kinda like Luke Skywalker homing on the tiny dot of vulnerability in the planet-sized Death Star with little flying experience and eyes wide shut because, ya know, the Force is with him.

Let’s parse the circumbinary planet first. Close to half the stars are in binary configurations, and about half of these have accretion disks. Hence, the likelihood of planets in such systems is very high. Astrophysicists’ models have shown that a planet can stably orbit either around one member of a widely separated pair or around a very tight pair. The first discovery of a planet circling a close binary dates from 1993 (or 2003, if one counts the final confirmation of the original observation). What makes the Kepler 16 system a first is that its planet appears to be smaller than Jupiter. As for prescience, beyond the astrophysicists’ theoretical calculations, Isaac Asimov had written Nightfall and Chesley Bonestell had painted Double Star long before Tatooine was even a solitary neuronal firing in George Lucas’ brain.

So now on to the crystal structure that “had stumped scientists for years but was solved by gamers in a few days”. To begin with, this was not the first crowdsourcing scientific project as touted. The honors for that must go to SETI@home, launched in 1997. There have been many others since, across disciplines. Beyond that, the people in the protein folding contest used a program developed by scientists (FoldIt) and half of the dozen or so participating “gamers” were biologists themselves. Crucially, they were given NMR and X-ray diffraction data to constrain and guide their steps. Finally, the result (a model, which means it’s still hypothetical) primarily aided crystallographers in placing heavy metal elements so as to get well-formed crystals, whose X-ray patterns gave the real, definitive proof of the structure.

Parenthetically, protein folding is a topic of perennial fascination to both creationists and believers in the strong anthropic principle. Many non-biologists, including physicists who blithely delve into biology in popsci books, are fond of intoning ad nauseam that amino acid strings would take billyuns and billyuns of years to fold correctly – hence god/intelligent design/a privileged universe/fine tuning of constants. In fact, with one exception that I can think of, proteins that have been unraveled into amino acid strings never re/fold at all (nor do they fold efficiently or correctly in programs like Rosetta, that presume complete lack of folding). Proteins fold as they get made, while they emerge from the ribosome. So they fold locally to achieve partial energy minima (so-called secondary structure) and these partly folded structures quickly coalesce into the final tertiary structure. On the technical side, making protein crystals is a difficult, delicate art – the biological equivalent of glass blowing. Like coaxing cells into growing, it’s part craft, part experience-based knowledge so deep that it becomes instinct.

Involving many people in parsing scientific data is a tremendous idea: it gets non-scientists familiar with the concepts, process and vocabulary of science, it can accelerate portions of the analysis, and it helps forge a sense of collective purpose and achievement. The great success of crowdsourcing highlights the unique human ability to notice anomalies instead of undeviatingly following protocols as computers do. This human attribute, not so incidentally, is one of the strongest arguments for sending crewed exploration teams to places like Mars.

At the same time, scientists are not stodgy techs in lab coats (whose wearing is almost entirely confined to movies; in real life, MDs are far likelier to sport such togs). To be a good scientist, let alone a great one, you must possess not only knowledge, rigor and stamina but also imagination and the informed, trained intuition that enables you to recognize patterns as well as deviations from them (aka “the prepared mind”). And distributed data churning won’t replace trained experimentation and thinking any time soon – or later.

Anglo-Saxon cultures have a strong anti-intellectual streak. Some of it is the lingering mystique of the British gentleman dilettante; some is the American obsession with self-determination. Yet the same people who treat scientists like class enemies and jeer at their painstaking mindsets and work habits follow woo gurus – from homeopaths to investment advisors to Teabagger televangelists – with unsurprising outcomes.

If people really think that they can do science better than trained scientists, I invite them to apply this reasoning to other domains and have the next person they meet on the street do their root canals or wire their house for electricity. Those who participate in citizen science are praiseworthy, citizens in the full sense of the word. Nothing but good can come from the practice – except for the demagogic triumphalism of those journalists whose self-satisfied ignorance vitiates every hard-won gain achieved by the scientist/layperson partnerships.

It’s a natural human reaction to ridicule what one fears and/or doesn’t understand, though adults are supposed to mature beyond this juvenile tendency. The question then becomes why science, whose record is far better than that of just about any other human endeavor, has become a bugaboo rather than a vision and an integral part of this culture. It’s a question well worth remembering when all the GOP presidential candidates fall all over themselves to deny evolution – and one of them might lead what is still struggling to remain the most powerful country on this planet.

[Click on this image to see legible larger version]

Coda: The news that CERN’s OPERA project recorded anomalous results of neutrino speeds got its share of “Roll over, Einstein” smartass quotes although, thankfully, the hype didn’t reach the proportions of NASA’s “arsenic” bacteria. Neutrinos are literally the changelings of the particle clan but the claim is far from proven and the paper has still not been peer-reviewed.

If it proves true, it won’t give us hyperdrives nor invalidate relativity. What it will do is place relativity in an even larger frame, as Eisteinian theory did to its Newtonian counterpart. It may also (finally!) give us a way to experimentally test string theory… and, just maybe, open the path to creating a fast information transmitter like the Hainish ansible, proving that “soft” SF writers like Le Guin may be better predictors of the future than the sciency practitioners of “hard” SF.

Images: 1st, Double Star by Chesley Bonestell (used as a Life cover in 1954); 2nd, a schematic of a protein structure; 3rd, Neutrinos by ever-sharp xkcd.

Note: This 2-part article is an expanded version of the talk I gave at Readercon 2011.

I originally planned to discuss how writers of SF need to balance knowledge of the scientific process, as well as some concrete knowledge of science, with writing engaging plots and vivid characters. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this discussion runs a parallel course with another; namely, depiction of non-Anglo cultures in Anglophone SF/F.

Though the two topics appear totally disparate, science in SF and non-Anglo cultures in SF/F often share the core characteristic of safe exoticism; that is, something which passes as daring but in fact reinforces common stereotypes and/or is chosen so as to avoid discomfort or deeper examination. A perfect example of both paradigms operating in the same frame and undergoing mutual reinforcement is Frank Herbert’s Dune. This is why we get sciency or outright lousy science in SF and why Russians, Brazilians, Thais, Indians and Turks written by armchair internationalists are digestible for Anglophone readers whereas stories by real “natives” get routinely rejected as too alien. This is also why farang films that attain popularity in the US are instantly remade by Hollywood in tapioca versions of the originals.

Before I go further, let me make a few things clear. I am staunchly against the worn workshop dictum of “Write only what you know.” I think it is inevitable for cultures (and I use that term loosely and broadly) to cross-interact, cross-pollinate, cross-fertilize. I myself have seesawed between two very different cultures all my adult life. I enjoy depictions of cultures and characters that are truly outside the box, emphasis on truly. At the same time, I guarantee you that if I wrote a story embedded in New Orleans of any era and published it under my own culturally very identifiable name, its reception would be problematic. Ditto if I wrote a story using real cutting-edge biology.

These caveats do not apply to secondary worlds, which give writers more leeway. Such work is judged by how original and three-dimensional it is.  So if a writer succeeds in making thinly disguised historical material duller than it was in reality, that’s a problem. That’s one reason why Jacqueline Carey’s Renaissance Minoan Crete enthralled me, whereas Guy Gavriel Kay’s Byzantium annoyed me. I will also leave aside stories in which science is essentially cool-gizmos window dressing. However, use of a particular culture is in itself a framing device and science is rarely there solely for the magical outs it gives the author: it’s often used to promote a world view. And when we have active politics against evolution and in favor of several kinds of essentialism, this is something we must keep not too far back in our mind.

So let me riff on science first. I’ll restrict myself to biology, since I don’t think that knowledge of one scientific domain automatically confers knowledge in all the rest. Here are a few hoary chestnuts that are still in routine use (the list is by no means exhaustive):

– Genes determining high-order behavior, so that you can instill virtue or Mozartian composing ability with simple, neat, trouble-free cut-n-pastes (ETA: this trope includes clones, who are rarely shown to be influenced by their many unique contexts). It runs parallel with optimizing for a function, which usually breaks down to women bred for sex and men bred for slaughter. However, evolution being what it is, all organisms are jury-rigged and all optimizations of this sort result in instant dead-ending. Octavia Butler tackled this well in The Evening and the Morning and the Night.

– The reductionist, incorrect concept of selfish genes. This is often coupled with the “women are from Venus, men are from Mars” evo-psycho nonsense, with concepts like “alpha male rape genes” and “female wired-for-coyness brains”. Not surprisingly, these play well with the libertarian cyberpunk contingent as well as the Viagra-powered epic fantasy cohort.

– Lamarckian evolution, aka instant effortless morphing, which includes acquiring stigmata from VR; this of course is endemic in film and TV SF, with X-Men and The Matrix leading the pack – though Star Trek was equally guilty.

– Its cousin, fast speciation (Greg Bear’s cringeworthy Darwin’s Radio springs to mind; two decent portrayals, despite their age, are Poul Anderson’s The Man Who Counts and The Winter of the World).  Next to this is rapid adaptation, though some SF standouts managed to finesse this (Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean, Donald Kingsbury’s Courtship Rite).

– The related domain of single-note, un-integrated ecosystems (what I call “pulling a Cameron”). As I mentioned before, Dune is a perfect exemplar though it’s one of too many; an interesting if flawed one is Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow. Not surprisingly, those that portray enclosed human-generated systems come closest to successful complexity (Morgan Locke’s Up Against It, Alex Jablokov’s River of Dust).

– Quantum consciousness and quantum entanglement past the particle scale. The former, Roger Penrose’s support notwithstanding, is too silly to enlarge upon, though I have to give Elizabeth Bear props for creative chuzpah in Undertow.

– Immortality by uploading, which might as well be called by its real name: soul and/or design-by-god – as Battlestar Galumphica at least had the courage to do. As I discussed elsewhere, this is dualism of the hoariest sort and boring in the bargain.

– Uplifted animals and intelligent robots/AIs that are not only functional but also think/feel/act like humans. This paradigm, perhaps forgivable given our need for companionship, was once again brought to the forefront by the Planet of the Apes reboot, but rogue id stand-ins have run rampant across the SF landscape ever since it came into existence.

These concepts are as wrong as the geocentric universe, but the core problems lie elsewhere. For one, SF is way behind the curve on much of biology, which means that stories could be far more interesting if they were au courant. Nanobots already exist; they’re called enzymes. Our genes are multi-cooperative networks that are “read” at several levels; our neurons, ditto. I have yet to encounter a single SF story that takes advantage of the plasticity (and potential for error) of alternative splicing or epigenetics, of the left/right brain hemisphere asymmetries, or of the different processing of languages acquired in different developmental windows.

For another, many of the concepts I listed are tailor-made for current versions of triumphalism and false hierarchies that are subtler than their Leaden Age predecessors but just as pernicious. For example, they advance the notion that bodies are passive, empty chassis which it is all right to abuse and mutilate and in which it’s possible to custom-drop brains (Richard Morgan’s otherwise interesting Takeshi Kovacs trilogy is a prime example). Perhaps taking their cue from real-life US phenomena (the Teabaggers, the IMF and its minions, Peter Thiel…) many contemporary SF stories take place in neo-feudal, atomized universes run amuck, in which there seems to be no common weal: no neighborhoods, no schools, no people getting together to form a chamber music ensemble, play soccer in an alley, build a telescope. In their more benign manifestations, like Iain Banks’ Culture, they attempt to equalize disparities by positing infinite resources. But they hew to disproved paradigms and routinely conflate biological with social Darwinism, to the detriment of SF.

Mindsets informed by these holdovers won’t help us understand aliens of any kind or launch self-enclosed sustainable starships, let alone manage to stay humane and high-tech at the same time. Because, let’s face it: the long generation ships will get us past LEO. FTLs, wormholes, warp drives… none of these will carry us across the sea of stars. It will be the slow boats to Tau Ceti, like the Polynesian catamarans across the Pacific.

You may have noticed that many of the examples that I used as good science have additional out-of-the-box characteristics. Which brings us to safe exoticism on the humanist side.

Part 2: Culture

Images: 1st, Bunsen and his hapless assistant, Beaker (The Muppet Show); 2nd, the distilled quintessence of safe exoticism: Yul Brynner in The King and I.

Related entries:

SF Goes McDonald’s: Less Taste, More Gristle

To the Hard Members of the Truthy SF Club

Miranda Wrongs: Reading too Much into the Genome

Ghost in the Shell: Why Our Brains Will Never Live in the Matrix

– paraphrasing The Sayer of the Law.

When franchises get stale, Hollywood does reboots — invariably a prequel that tells an origin story retrofitted to segue into already-made sequels either straight up (Batman, X-Men) or in multi-universe alternatives (Star Trek). Given the iconic status of the Planet of the Apes original, a similar effort was a matter of time and CGI.

In The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, we get the origin story with nods to the original: throwaway references to the loss of crewed starship Icarus on its way to Mars; a glimpse of Charlton Heston; the future ape liberator playing with a Lego Statue of Liberty. As Hollywood “science” goes, it’s almost thoughtful, even borderline believable. The idea that the virus that uplifts apes is lethal to humans is of course way too pat, but it lends plausibility to the eventual ape dominion without resorting to the idiotic Ewok-slings-overcome-Stormtrooper-missiles mode. On the other hand, the instant rise to human-level feats of sophistication is ridiculous (more of which anon), to say nothing of being able to sail through thick glass panes unscathed.

The director pulled all the stops to make us root for the cousins we oppress: the humans are so bland they blend with the background, the bad guys mistreat the apes with callous glee… and the hero, the cognitively enhanced chimpanzee Caesar (brought to disquieting verisimilitude of life by Andy Serkis), not only fights solely in defense of his chosen family… but to underline his messianic purity he has neither sex drive nor genitals. This kink underlines the high tolerance of US culture for violence compared to its instant vapors over any kind of sex; however, since Project Nim partly foundered on this particular shoal, perhaps it was a wise decision.

As it transpires, Ceasar is exposed to little temptation to distract him from his pilgrimage: there are no female hominids in the film, except for the maternal vessel who undergoes the obligatory death as soon as she produces the hero and a cardboard cutout helpmate there to mouth the variants of “There are some things we weren’t meant to do” — and as assurance that the human protagonist is not gay, despite his nurturing proclivities. Mind you, the lack of a mother and her female alliances would make Caesar (augmented cortex notwithstanding) a permanent outcast among his fellows, who determine status matrilinearly given the lack of defined paternity.

Loyal to human tropes, Caesar goes from Charly to Che through the stations-of-the-cross character development arc so beloved of Campbel/lites. Nevertheless, we care what happens to him because Serkis made him compelling and literally soulful. Plus, of course, Caesar’s cause is patently just. The film is half Spartacus turning his unruly gladiators into a disciplined army, half Moses taking his people home — decorated with the usual swirls of hubris, unintended consequences, justice, equality, compassion, identity and empathy for the Other.

Needless to say, this reboot revived the topic of animal uplift, a perennial favorite of SF (and transhumanist “science” which is really a branch of SF, if not fantasy). Human interactions with animals have been integral to all cultures. Myths are strewn with talking animal allies, from Puss in Boots to A Boy and His Dog. Beyond their obvious practical and symbolic uses, mammals in particular are the nexus of both our notions of exceptionalism and our ardent wish for companionship. Our fraught relationship with animals also mirrors preoccupations of respective eras. In Wells’ Victorian England, The Island of Dr. Moreau struggled with vivisection whereas Linebarger’s Instrumentality Underpeople and the original Planet of the Apes focused on racism (plus, in the latter, the specter of nuclear annihilation). Today’s discussions of animal uplift are really a discussion over whether our terrible stewardship can turn benign — or at least neutral — before our inexorable spread damages the planet’s biosphere past recovery.

When SF posits sentient mammal-like aliens, it usually opts for predators high in human totem poles (Anderson’s eagle-like Ythrians, Cherryh’s leonine Hani). On the other hand, SF’s foremost uplift candidates are elephants, cetaceans – and, of course, bonobos and chimpanzees. All four species share attributes that make them theoretically plausible future companions: social living, so they need to use complex communication; relative longevity, so they can transmit knowledge down the generations; tool use; and unmistakable signs of self-awareness.

Uplift essentially means giving animals human capabilities – primary among them high executive functions and language. One common misconception seems to be that if we give language to near-cousins, they will end up becoming hairy humans. Along those lines, in Rise chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans are instantly compatible linguistically, emotionally, mentally and socially. In fact, chimpanzees are far closer to us than they are to the other two ape species (with orangutans being the most distant). So although this pan-panism serves the plot and prefigures the species-specific occupations shown in the Ape pre/sequels, real-life chances of such coordination, even with augmentation, are frankly nil.

There is, however, a larger obstacle. Even if a “smart bomb” could give instant language processing capability, it would still not confer the ability to enunciate clearly, which is determined by the configuration of the various mouth/jaw/throat parts. Ditto for bipedal locomotion. Uplift caused by intervention at whatever level (gene therapy, brain wiring, grafts) cannot bring about coordinated changes across the organism unless we enter the fantasy domain of shapeshifting. This means that a Lamarckian shift in brain wiring will almost certainly result in a seriously suboptimal configuration unlikely to thrive individually or collectively. This could be addressed by singlet custom generation, as is shown for reynards in Crowley’s Beasts, but it would make such specimens hothouse flowers unlikely to propagate unaided, much less become dominant.

In this connection, choosing to give Caesar speech was an erosion of his uniqueness. Of course, if bereft of our kind of speech he would not be able to give gruff Hestonian commands to his army: they would be reliant on line of sight and semaphoring equivalents. However, sticking to complex signed language (which bonobos at least appear capable of, if they acquire it within the same developmental time window as human infants) would keep Caesar and his people uncanny and alien, underlining the irreducible fact of their non-human sentience.

Which brings us to the second fundamental issue of uplift. Even if we succeed in giving animals speech and higher executive functions, they will not be like us. They won’t think, feel, react as we do. They will be true aliens. There is nothing wrong with that, and such congress might give us a preview of aliens beyond earth, should SETI ever receive a signal. However, given how humans treat even other humans (and possibly how Cro-Magnons treated Neanderthals), it is unlikely we’ll let uplifted animals go very far past pet, slave or trophy status. In this, at least, Caesar’s orangutan councillor is right: “Human no like smart ape,” no matter how piously we discuss the ethics of animal treatment and our responsibilities as technology wielders.

Images: top, Caesar; bottom, Neanderthal reconstruction (Kennis & Kennis, National Geographic). What gazes out of those eyes is — was — human.

I get out of my car,
step into the night,
and look up at the sky.
And there’s something
bright, traveling fast.
Look at it go!
Just look at it go!

Kate Bush, Hello Earth

[The haunting a capella chorus comes from a Georgian folk song, Tsin Tskaro (By the Spring)]

I read the various eulogies, qualified and otherwise, on the occasion of the space shuttle’s retirement.  Personally, I do not mourn the shuttle’s extinction, because it never came alive: not as engineering, not as science, not as a vision.

Originally conceived as a reusable vehicle that would lift and land on its own, the shuttle was crippled from the get-go.  Instead of being an asset for space exploration, it became a liability – an expensive and meaningless one, at that.  Its humiliating raison d’ être was to bob in low earth orbit, becoming a toy for millionaire tourists by giving them a few seconds of weightlessness.  The space stations it serviced were harnessed into doing time-filling experiments that did not advance science one iota (with the notable exception of the Hubble), while most of their occupants’ time was spent scraping fungus off walls.  It managed to kill more astronauts than the entire Apollo program.  The expense of the shuttle launches crippled other worthwhile or promising NASA programs, and its timid, pious politics overshadowed any serious advances to crewed space missions.

In the past, I had lively discussions with Robert Zubrin about missions to Mars (and Hellenic mythology… during which I discovered that he, like me, loves the Minoans).  We may have disagreed on approach and details, but on this he and I are in total agreement: NASA has long floated adrift, directionless and purposeless.  Individual NASA subprograms (primarily all the robotic missions), carried on in the agency’s periphery, have been wildly successful.  But the days when launches fired the imagination of future scientists are long gone.

It’s true that the Apollo missions were an expression of dominance, adjuncts to the cold war.  It’s also true that sending a crewed mission to Mars is an incredibly hard undertaking.  However, such an attempt — even if it fails — will address a multitude of issues: it will ask the tough question of how we can engineer sustainable self-enclosed systems (including the biological component, which NASA has swept under the rug as scientifically and politically thorny); it will allow us to definitively decide if Mars ever harbored life; it will once again give NASA – and the increasingly polarized US polity – a focus and a worthwhile purpose.

I’m familiar with all the counterarguments about space exploration in general and crewed missions in particular: these funds could be better used alleviating human misery on earth; private industry will eventually take up the slack; robotic missions are much more efficient; humans will never go into space in their current form, better if we wait for the inevitable uploading come the Singularity.

In reality, funds for space explorations are less than drops in the ocean of national spending and persistent social problems won’t be solved by such measly sums; private industry will never go past low orbit casinos (if that); as I explained elsewhere, we in our present form will never, ever get our brains/minds into silicon containers; and we will run out of resources long before such a technology is even on our event horizon, so waiting for gods… er, AI overlords won’t avail us.

Barring an unambiguous ETI signal, the deepest, best reason for crewed missions is not science. I recognize the dangers of using the term frontier, with all its colonialist, triumphalist baggage. Bravado aside, we will never conquer space. At best, we will traverse it like the Polynesians in their catamarans under the sea of stars. But space exploration — more specifically, a long-term crewed expedition to Mars with the express purpose to unequivocally answer the question of Martian life — will give a legitimate and worthy outlet to our ingenuity, our urge to explore and our desire for knowledge, which is not that high up in the hierarchy of needs nor the monopoly of elites. People know this in their very marrow – and have shown it by thronging around the transmissions of space missions that mattered.

It’s up to NASA to once again try rallying people around a vision that counts.  Freed of the burden of the shuttle, perhaps it can do so, thereby undergoing a literal renaissance.

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, September 1962

Images: Pat Rawlings, Beyond; Randy Halverson, Plains Milky Way; European Space Agency, High Aurora.

Introductory note: Through Paul Graham Raven of Futurismic, I found out that Charles Stross recently expressed doubts about the Singularity, god-like AIs and mind uploading.  Being the incorrigible curious cat (this will kill me yet), I checked out the post.  All seemed more or less copacetic, until I hit this statement: “Uploading … is not obviously impossible unless you are a crude mind/body dualist. // Uploading implicitly refutes the doctrine of the existence of an immortal soul.”

Clearly the time has come for me to reprint my mind uploading article, which first appeared at H+ magazine in October 2009. Consider it a recapitulation of basic facts.

When surveying the goals of transhumanists, I found it striking how heavily they favor conventional engineering. This seems inefficient and inelegant, since such engineering reproduces slowly, clumsily and imperfectly, what biological systems have fine-tuned for eons — from nanobots (enzymes and miRNAs) to virtual reality (lucid dreaming). An exemplar of this mindset was an article about memory chips. In it, the primary researcher made two statements that fall in the “not even wrong” category: “Brain cells are nothing but leaky bags of salt solution,” and “I don’t need a grand theory of the mind to fix what is essentially a signal-processing problem.”

And it came to me in a flash that most transhumanists are uncomfortable with biology and would rather bypass it altogether for two reasons, each exemplified by these sentences. The first is that biological systems are squishy — they exude blood, sweat and tears, which are deemed proper only for women and weaklings. The second is that, unlike silicon systems, biological software is inseparable from hardware. And therein lies the major stumbling block to personal immortality.

The analogy du siècle equates the human brain with a computer — a vast, complex one performing dizzying feats of parallel processing, but still a computer. However, that is incorrect for several crucial reasons, which bear directly upon mind portability. A human is not born as a tabula rasa, but with a brain that’s already wired and functioning as a mind. Furthermore, the brain forms as the embryo develops. It cannot be inserted after the fact, like an engine in a car chassis or software programs in an empty computer box.

Theoretically speaking, how could we manage to live forever while remaining recognizably ourselves to us? One way is to ensure that the brain remains fully functional indefinitely. Another is to move the brain into a new and/or indestructible “container”, whether carbon, silicon, metal or a combination thereof. Not surprisingly, these notions have received extensive play in science fiction, from the messianic angst of The Matrix to Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs trilogy.

To give you the punch line up front, the first alternative may eventually become feasible but the second one is intrinsically impossible. Recall that a particular mind is an emergent property (an artifact, if you prefer the term) of its specific brain – nothing more, but also nothing less. Unless the transfer of a mind retains the brain, there will be no continuity of consciousness. Regardless of what the post-transfer identity may think, the original mind with its associated brain and body will still die – and be aware of the death process. Furthermore, the newly minted person/ality will start diverging from the original the moment it gains consciousness. This is an excellent way to leave a clone-like descendant, but not to become immortal.

What I just mentioned essentially takes care of all versions of mind uploading, if by uploading we mean recreation of an individual brain by physical transfer rather than a simulation that passes Searle’s Chinese room test. However, even if we ever attain the infinite technical and financial resources required to scan a brain/mind 1) non-destructively and 2) at a resolution that will indeed recreate the original, additional obstacles still loom.

To place a brain into another biological body, à la Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, could arise as the endpoint extension of appropriating blood, sperm, ova, wombs or other organs in a heavily stratified society. Besides being de facto murder of the original occupant, it would also require that the incoming brain be completely intact, as well as able to rewire for all physical and mental functions. After electrochemical activity ceases in the brain, neuronal integrity deteriorates in a matter of seconds. The slightest delay in preserving the tissue seriously skews in vitro research results, which tells you how well this method would work in maintaining details of the original’s personality.

To recreate a brain/mind in silico, whether a cyborg body or a computer frame, is equally problematic. Large portions of the brain process and interpret signals from the body and the environment. Without a body, these functions will flail around and can result in the brain, well, losing its mind. Without corrective “pingbacks” from the environment that are filtered by the body, the brain can easily misjudge to the point of hallucination, as seen in phenomena like phantom limb pain or fibromyalgia.

Additionally, without context we may lose the ability for empathy, as is shown in Bacigalupi’s disturbing story People of Sand and Slag. Empathy is as instrumental to high-order intelligence as it is to survival: without it, we are at best idiot savants, at worst psychotic killers. Of course, someone can argue that the entire universe can be recreated in VR. At that point, we’re in god territory … except that even if some of us manage to live the perfect Second Life, there’s still the danger of someone unplugging the computer or deleting the noomorphs. So there go the Star Trek transporters, there go the Battlestar Galactica Cylon resurrection tanks.

Let’s now discuss the possible: in situ replacement. Many people argue that replacing brain cells is not a threat to identity because we change cells rapidly and routinely during our lives — and that in fact this is imperative if we’re to remain capable of learning throughout our lifespan.

It’s true that our somatic cells recycle, each type on a slightly different timetable, but there are two prominent exceptions. The germ cells are one, which is why both genders – not just women – are progressively likelier to have children with congenital problems as they age. Our neurons are another. We’re born with as many of these as we’re ever going to have and we lose them steadily during our life. There is a tiny bit of novel neurogenesis in the olfactory system and possibly in the hippocampus, but the rest of our 100 billion microprocessors neither multiply nor divide. What changes are the neuronal processes (axons and dendrites) and their contacts with each other and with other cells (synapses).

These tiny processes make and unmake us as individuals. We are capable of learning as long as we live, though with decreasing ease and speed, because our axons and synapses are plastic as long as the neurons that generate them last. But although many functions of the brain are diffuse, they are organized in localized clusters (which can differ from person to person, sometimes radically). Removal of a large portion of a brain structure results in irreversible deficits unless it happens in very early infancy. We know this from watching people go through transient or permanent personality and ability changes after head trauma, stroke, extensive brain surgery or during the agonizing process of various neurodegenerative diseases, dementia in particular.

However, intrepid immortaleers need not give up. There’s real hope in the horizon for renewing a brain and other body parts: embryonic stem cells (ESCs, which I discussed recently). Depending on the stage of isolation, ESCs are truly totipotent – something, incidentally, not true of adult stem cells that can only differentiate into a small set of related cell types. If neuronal precursors can be introduced to the right spot and coaxed to survive, differentiate and form synapses, we will gain the ability to extend the lifespan of a brain and its mind.

It will take an enormous amount of fine-tuning to induce ESCs to do the right thing. Each step that I casually listed in the previous sentence (localized introduction, persistence, differentiation, synaptogenesis) is still barely achievable in the lab with isolated cell cultures, let alone the brain of a living human. Primary neurons live about three weeks in the dish, even though they are fed better than most children in developing countries – and if cultured as precursors, they never attain full differentiation. The ordeals of Christopher Reeve and Stephen Hawking illustrate how hard it is to solve even “simple” problems of either grey or white brain matter.

The technical hurdles will eventually be solved. A larger obstacle is that each round of ESC replacement will have to be very slow and small-scale, to fulfill the requirement of continuous consciousness and guarantee the recreation of pre-existing neuronal and synaptic networks. As a result, renewal of large brain swaths will require such a lengthy lifespan that the replacements may never catch up. Not surprisingly, the efforts in this direction have begun with such neurodegenerative diseases as Parkinson’s, whose causes are not only well defined but also highly localized: the dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra.

Renewing the hippocampus or cortex of a Alzheimer’s sufferer is several orders of magnitude more complicated – and in stark contrast to the “black box” assumption of the memory chip researcher, we will need to know exactly what and where to repair. To go through the literally mind-altering feats shown in Whedon’s Dollhouse would be the brain equivalent of insect metamorphosis: it would take a very long time – and the person undergoing the procedure would resemble Terry Schiavo at best, if not the interior of a pupating larva.

Dollhouse got one fact right: if such rewiring is too extensive or too fast, the person will have no memory of their prior life, desirable or otherwise. But as is typical in Hollywood science (an oxymoron, but we’ll let it stand), it got a more crucial fact wrong: such a person is unlikely to function like a fully aware human or even a physically well-coordinated one for a significant length of time – because her brain pathways will need to be validated by physical and mental feedback before they stabilize. Many people never recover full physical or mental capacity after prolonged periods of anesthesia. Having brain replacement would rank way higher in the trauma scale.

The most common ecological, social and ethical argument against individual quasi-eternal life is that the resulting overcrowding will mean certain and unpleasant death by other means unless we are able to access extra-terrestrial resources. Also, those who visualize infinite lifespan invariably think of it in connection with themselves and those whom they like – choosing to ignore that others will also be around forever, from genocidal maniacs to cult followers, to say nothing of annoying in-laws or predatory bosses. At the same time, long lifespan will almost certainly be a requirement for long-term crewed space expeditions, although such longevity will have to be augmented by sophisticated molecular repair of somatic and germ mutations caused by cosmic radiation. So if we want eternal life, we had better first have the Elysian fields and chariots of the gods that go with it.

Images: Echo (Eliza Dushku) gets a new personality inserted in Dollhouse; any port in a storm — Spock (Leonard Nimoy) transfers his essential self to McCoy (DeForest Kelley) for safekeeping in The Wrath of Khan; the resurrected Zoe Graystone (Alessandra Torresani) gets an instant memory upgrade in Caprica; Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) checks out his conveniently empty Na’vi receptacle in Avatar.

Sue Lange’s collection Uncategorized (Book View Café, 2009, $1.99 digital edition) contains fifteen stories published in various venues (among them Apex, Astounding Tales, Sentinel, Mbrane and Aoife’s Kiss). If I wanted to categorize them, I’d call them quasi-mundane near-future SF – but some of the unifying threads that run through them are unusual.

One is Lange’s love and professional knowledge of music, which pops up in unexpected spots in the stories and is the focus of one of them (“The Failure”).  Another is the matter-of-fact attitude toward technology: the people and societies in Uncategorized have come to terms with genetic engineering and its cousins, although they are aware of their problems.  Finally, the points of view are resolutely working class (many springing directly from Lange’s varied work experience). This doesn’t merely mean that the protagonists/narrators are blue collar. Instead, almost all the stories in Uncategorized center around work issues for people whose jobs are not a way of “expressing themselves” but a way to keep food on the table. These are people who cannot afford ennui or angst, who must punch time cards and undergo intrusive HR evaluations.

There’s an additional feature that makes Lange’s blue-collar protagonists stand out: most are women who do “traditionally masculine” work: meat plant workers, plumbers, soldiers, radiation cleanup crews. Furthermore, these women focus on their jobs and many of their co-workers and friends are women as well. In other words, Lange’s stories handily pass the Bechdel test without falling even remotely into the arbitrarily devalued subgenre of chicklit. If you took Rosie the Riveter and transposed her to a near-future alternate US (minus such outworn cyberpunk accessories as pneumatic-boob avatars and Matrix-style gyrations), you’d have the setting for most of the stories in Uncategorized.

Contributing to this gestalt are Lange’s deadpan humor and rapid-fire dialogue, which require some acclimatization but can become as catchy as strong beats and riffs. Her language is unvarnished Bauhaus – there’s scarcely a descriptive adjective or adverb to be found. Ditto for the settings, which are urban grit to the max even in the stories set off-Earth. One recurrent weakness is hurried endings, often accompanied by twists that were predictable (to me at least). Almost all the stories in Uncategorized would have increased their impact if they were longer and/or less sparse, because they grapple with important issues in original ways without fanfare.

Although Uncategorized hews to the premise of its title, some of its stories are thematically paired – one version comic, the other tragic. “The Club” / “How to Dispose of Sneakers” deal with the intractable problem of humanity’s ecological footprint; “BehaviorNorm” / “Buyer’s Club” tackle another intractable problem, the callousness of administrative management (think Dilbert with a touch of Big Brother transhumanism). For me, the standouts in the collection were: “Peroxide Head”, a poignant vignette on what balancing issues might really be like for a liaison to “Others” in Banks’ Culture universe; “The Meateaters”, a no-holds-barred Outland retelling of Eurypides’ Bacchae; “Buyer’s Club”; “Pictures”, a valentine to second chances; and “Zara Gets Laid”, in which sexual intercourse boosts the immunity of bio-augmented radiation cleanup workers (based on solid extrapolation, no less!).

Despite its deceptively plain trappings, Uncategorized subtends a wide arc and is textbook-classic SF: its stories follow “what if” questions to their logical conclusions, pulling no punches. It’s a prickly, bracing read that walks a fine line between bleakness and pragmatism, and it deserves the wider readership it might well have got if its author had been of the other gender.

Introductory note: My micro-bio in several venues reads “Scientist by day, writer by night.” It occurred to me that for lo these many years I have discussed science, scientific thinking and process, space exploration, social issues, history and culture, books, films and games… but I have never told my readers exactly what I do during the day.

What I do during the day (and a good part of the night) is investigate a process called alternative splicing and its repercussions on brain function. I will unpack this in future posts (interspersed among the usual musings on other topics), and I hope that this excursion may give a glimpse of how complex biology is across scales.

To start us off, I reprint an article commissioned by R. U. Sirius that first appeared in H+ Magazine in April 2010. An academic variant of this article appeared in Politics and the Life Sciences in response to Mark Walker’s “Genetic Virtue” proposal.

“We meant it for the best.” – Dr. Caron speaking of the Miranda settlers, in Whedon’s Serenity

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.

The media, with a few laudable exceptions, touted this as “we now know how genes work” and many science fiction authors duly incorporated it into their opuses. So did people with plans for improving humanity. Namely, there are initiatives that seriously propose that such attributes as virtue, intelligence, specific physical and mental abilities or, for that matter, a “happy personality” can (and should) be tweaked by selection in utero or engineering of the genes that determine these traits. The usual parties put forth the predictable pro and con arguments, and many articles get published in journals, magazines and blogs.

This is excellent for the career prospects and bank accounts of philosophers, political scientists, biotech entrepreneurs, politicians and would-be prophets. However, biologists know that all this is a parlor game equivalent to determining the number of angels dancing on the top of a pin. The reason for this is simple: there are no genes for virtue, intelligence, happiness or any complex behavioral trait. This becomes obvious by the number of human genes: the final count hovers around 20-25,000, less than twice as many as the number in worms and flies. It’s also obvious by the fact that cloned animals don’t look and act like their prototypes, Cc being the most famous example.

Genes encode catalytic, structural and regulatory proteins and RNAs. They do not encode the nervous system; even less do they encode complex behavior. At the level of the organism, they code for susceptibilities and tendencies — that is, with a few important exceptions, they are probabilistic rather than deterministic. And although many diseases develop from malfunctions of single genes, this does not indicate that single genes are responsible for any complex attribute. Instead they’re the equivalent of screws or belts, whose loss can stop a car but does not make it run.

No reputable biologist suggests that genes are not decisively involved in outcomes. But the constant harping on trait heritability “in spite of environment” is a straw man. Its main prop, the twin studies, is far less robust than commonly presented — especially when we take into account that identical twins often know each other before separation and, even when adopted, are likely to grow up in very similar environments (to say nothing of the data cherry-picking for publication). The nature/nurture debate has been largely resolved by the gene/environment (GxE) interplay model, a non-reductive approximation closer to reality. Genes never work in isolation but as complex, intricately regulated cooperative networks and they are in constant, dynamic dialogue with the environment — from diet to natal language. That is why second-generation immigrants invariably display the body morphology and disease susceptibilities of their adopted culture, although they have inherited the genes of their natal one.

Furthermore, there’s significant redundancy in the genome. Knockouts of even important single genes in model organisms often have practically no phenotype (or a very subtle one) because related genes take up the slack. The “selfish gene” concept as presented by reductionists of all stripes is arrant nonsense. To stay with the car analogy, it’s the equivalent of a single screw rotating in vacuum by itself. It doth not even a cart make, let alone the universe-spanning starship that is our brain/mind.

About half of our genes contribute directly to brain function; the rest do so indirectly, since brain function depends crucially on signal processing and body feedback. This makes the brain/mind a bona fide complex (though knowable) system. This attribute underlines the intrinsic infeasibility of instilling virtue, intelligence or good taste in clothes by changing single genes. If genetic programs were as fixed, simple and one-to-one mapped as reductionists would like, we would have answered most questions about brain function within months after reading the human genome. As a pertinent example, studies indicates that the six extended genomic regions that were defined by SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) analysis to contribute the most to IQ — itself a population-sorting tool rather than a real indicator of intelligence — influence IQ by a paltry 1%.

The attempts to map complex behaviors for the convenience and justification of social policies began as soon as societies stratified. To list a few recent examples, in the last decades we’ve had the false XYY “aggression” connection, the issue of gay men’s hypothalamus size, and the sloppy and dangerous (but incredibly lucrative) generalizations about brain serotonin and “nurturing” genes. Traditional breeding experiments (cattle, horses, cats, dogs, royal families) have an in-built functional test: the progeny selected in this fashion must be robust enough to be born, survive and reproduce. In the cases where these criteria were flouted, we got such results as vision and hearing impairments (Persian and Siamese cats), mental instability (several dog breeds), physical fragility and Alexei Romanov.

I will leave aside the enormous and still largely unmet technical challenge of such implementation, which is light years distant from casual notes that airily prescribe “just add tetracycline to the inducible vector that carries your gene” or “inject artificial chromosomes or siRNAs.” I play with all these beasties in the lab, and can barely get them to behave in homogeneous cell lines. Because most cognitive problems arise not from huge genomic errors but from small shifts in ratios of “wild-type” (non-mutated) proteins which affect brain architecture before or after birth, approximate engineering solutions will be death sentences. Moreover, the proposals usually advocate that such changes be done in somatic cells, not the germline (which would make them permanent). This means intervention during fetal development or even later — a far more difficult undertaking than germline alteration. The individual fine-tuning required for this in turn brings up differential resource access (and no, I don’t believe that nanotech will give us unlimited resources).

Let’s now discuss the improvement touted in “enhancement” of any complex trait. All organisms are jury-rigged across scales: that is, the decisive criterion for an adaptive change (from a hemoglobin variant to a hip-bone angle) is function, rather than elegance. Many details are accidental outcomes of an initial chance configuration — the literally inverted organization of the vertebrate eye is a prime example. Optimality is entirely context-dependent. If an organism or function is perfected for one set of circumstances, it immediately becomes suboptimal for all others. That is the reason why gene alleles for cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia persisted: they conferred heterozygotic resistance to cholera and malaria, respectively. Even if it were possible to instill virtue or musicality (or even the inclination for them), fixing them would decrease individual and collective fitness. Furthermore, the desired state for all complex behaviors is fluid and relative.

The concept that pressing the button of a single gene can change any complex behavior is entirely unsupported by biological evidence at any scale: molecular, cellular, organismic. Because interactions between gene products are complex, dynamic and give rise to pleiotropic effects, such intervention can cause significant harm even if implemented with full knowledge of genomic interactions (which at this point is no even partially available). It is far more feasible to correct an error than to “enhance” an already functioning brain. Furthermore, unlike a car or a computer, brain hardware and software are inextricably intertwined and cannot be decoupled or deactivated during modification.

If such a scenario is optional, it will introduce extreme de facto or de jure inequalities. If it is mandatory, beyond the obvious fact that it will require massive coercion, it will also result in the equivalent of monocultures, which is the surest way to extinction regardless of how resourceful or dominant a species is. And no matter how benevolent the motives of the proponents of such schemes are, all utopian implementations, without exception, degenerate into slaughterhouses and concentration camps.

The proposals to augment “virtue” or “intelligence” fall solidly into the linear progress model advanced by monotheistic religions, which takes for granted that humans are in a fallen state and need to achieve an idealized perfection. For the religiously orthodox, this exemplar is a god; for the transhumanists, it’s often a post-singularity AI. In reality, humans are a work in continuous evolution both biologically and culturally and will almost certainly become extinct if they enter any type of stasis, no matter how “perfect.”

But higher level arguments aside, the foundation stone of all such discussions remains unaltered and unalterable: any proposal to modulate complex traits by changing single genes is like preparing a Mars expedition based on the Ptolemaic view of the universe.

Images: The “in-valid” (non-enhanced) protagonist of GATTACA; M. C. Escher, Drawing Hands; Musical Genes cartoon by Polyp; Rainbow nuzzles her clone Cc (“carbon copy”) at Texas A&M University.