Communion Of Dreams

‘Babelfish’ to translate alien tongues could be built If we ever make contact with intelligent aliens, we should be able to build a universal translator to communicate with them, according to a linguist and anthropologist in the US.

Such a “babelfish”, which gets its name from the translating fish in Douglas Adams’s book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, would require a much more advanced understanding of language than we currently have. But a first step would be recognising that all languages must have a universal structure, according to Terrence Deacon of the University of California, Berkeley, US.

Color me dubious. Deacon’s notion, as presented at AbSciCon 2008, is basically that any language will be tied to descriptions of the physical universe in some way. As reported in the NewScientist article above, this would allow for some distant computer/software to do a machine translation.

Well, sure - keep it open-ended enough, and just about anything is possible if you go far enough in the future. Clarke’s maxim about technology and magic comes to mind.

But we have a lot of ground to cover, first. Are there technologically advanced civilizations beyond Earth? If so, where are they? Do they even perceive the universe the same way we do? If so, do they have something resembling language, whether it be spoken, written, farted, or spit? Or do they communicate by telepathy, electrical discharge, or some other means outside of our normal sensory perception? Do they experience time the same way we do?

We can’t even build a good algorithm for doing human language translations, with languages well understood and cultures which are compatible, among members of our own species. Anyone who has tried to use one will know what I am talking about. Let’s use the current real-world version of Babel Fish to translate that last sentence, into German, and then back into English. We start with:

Anyone who has tried to use one will know what I am talking about.

Which becomes:

Jedermann, das versucht hat, ein zu verwenden, weiß, über was ich spreche.

Which is pretty good, to my rusty memory of idiomatic German. Now, back into English:

Everyone, which tried to use knows, about which I speak.

You see the problem? And that’s using a standard translation software - which has undoubtedly been tweaked and adjusted time and time again. A commercial software program may give you a better result, but the fact remains that any business will not rely on said software - they’ll go to a human who is fluent in each language for a good translation. And that is with all the commercial forces at work to create a dependable, value-added translation software program. How the hell are we supposed to come up with something which will work with an alien ‘language’ with which we have no prior experience?

Sagan and all the other SF authors who have tackled this had it right: we’ll have to start with mathematics.

Jim Downey

Via TDG, a link to “10 Must-Read ‘First Contact’ Novels” by someone who should know: Mac Tonnies of the SETI.com blog.

Man, I just can’t believe that he didn’t list Communion of Dreams.  Huh.  But then, Contact by Carl Sagan didn’t make it either . . .

Jim Downey

There’s a good piece by Seth Shostak over at Space.com about the possible motivations an extra-terrestrial race might have for visiting our pale blue dot. (Shostak is one of the principals of the SETI Institute, and knows whereof he speaks when he addresses these kinds of issues.) First, he dismisses the usual SF plot devices of an alien race wanting our turf, our resources, or even our bodies:

Taking our cue from Tinseltown, I note that most cineplex sentients come to Earth either to solve some sort of ugly reproductive crisis or simply to take over the planet. The former doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. You can’t breed with creatures at the zoo, despite the fact that most of the base pairs in the inmates’ DNA are identical to yours (note that this is a biological incompatibility, and not just zoo regulations). The aliens, needless to say, will have a different biochemistry, and probably no DNA at all. Forget, if you can, the breeding experiments.

Taking over the planet would only make sense if there were something really special about our world. The best guess of the exoplanet specialists is that the number of Earth-size planets in our galaxy exceeds tens of billions. That doesn’t sound like our hunk of real estate is terribly privileged.

They won’t come here to mine our minerals, either. The entire universe is built of the same stuff, and while the solar system has a higher percentage of heavy elements than found in many stellar realms, it turns out that this is precisely the condition that seems to foster planet formation. In other words, ET’s own solar system will be similarly blessed with these useful materials. So why would they come here and incur multi-light-year transport charges?

Why, indeed? These various issues are ones which are discussed in the course of speculation about the alien artifact discovered in Communion of Dreams. And while I never actually reveal the motivations that aliens might have for having left the artifact on Titan in my novel, I do have thoughts on the subject (which might come out in a future sequel to Communion.)

Be that as it may, Shostak does go on to make a pretty good argument that if indeed there are a large number of technological civilizations out there, that they may just not consider us worth the trouble of contacting/visiting. Again, from the article:

Then again, there’s that last point: they just want to learn more about us. Well, perhaps so. Maybe that’s really what’s interesting about Homo sapiens. Not grabbing our habitat, saving our souls (or our environment), or subverting our industrial output — but assaying our culture. I’m willing to consider that even very advanced beings might find our culture mildly worthy of study.

Keep in mind that if they’re near enough to find us, that implies that there are many, many galactic societies (otherwise the distances between any two of them will be enormous). If there are lots of them, then we’re just another entry in a big book. Once again, not all that special. Kind of like another weird fish found in the Atlantic. I don’t expect mammoth expeditions to be sent our way.

It is a good point. I would counter, however, that we have seen plenty of evidence in our own history of people going to enormous trouble to bother to learn about seemingly trivial things. One only has to look at the difficulties encountered in sea-faring during the time of the great naturalists - people were willing to go to great expense, to risk great hardship and a fair chance of death just to add another entry into the botanical texts or to discover a new species. Even today we mount insanely expensive expeditions into the deep ocean just to expand our knowledge.

We have no evidence of extra-terrestrial life, let alone advance civilizations. Yet I think that you can make a fair case that any space-faring race which may exist must have some degree of curiosity - and that curiosity may alone be reason enough to come check out the new kids on the block, whatever the hurdles or cost.

Jim Downey

What is it with big corporations turning to space-related gimmicks in order to promote their products?

Last week Phil Plait on his Bad Astronomy site did a post about a beer maker’s ‘plan’ to advertise using a laser to shine their logo onto the Moon. (The second comment in that thread remembered me, and I also posted a comment about my Paint the Moon project from years back when I was writing Communion of Dreams.) It’s really just an advertising trick - they’re not seriously going to try it from what I can tell. So, like my communal fantasy art project, no real harm nor foul.

More worrying is this bit via redOrbit:

Doritos to Broadcast First Ad into Space

The campaign to broadcast the first ever advert into space is launched today (Friday March 7) with University of Leicester space scientists playing a key part in the process.

The British public is being asked to shoot a 30-second ad about what they perceive life on earth to be as part of Doritos ‘You Make It, We Play It’ user-generated-content campaign. The winning advert in the competition will be beamed past the earth’s atmosphere, beyond our solar system and into the Universe, to anyone ‘out there’ that may be watching. The winning ad will also be broadcast on terrestrial TV.

Catch that bit about scientists from the University of Leicester being involved? Well, some of the facts reported in the long article strike me as being a bit dodgy, but there is little doubt that indeed the scientists have signed on, for their own reasons. From the article again:

Dr Darren Wright of the University of Leicester Department of Physics and Astronomy said: “The Radio and Space Plasma Physics Group and Department of Physics and Astronomy as a whole at the University of Leicester has a very high international profile in the area of Space Physics.

“An important part of this project is that it provides an additional component to the Physics and Astronomy Department’s ever increasing outreach program. The ad to be transmitted will be created by the public following a national competition thus increasing public awareness of space activities.

“The launch of this project as we embark on National Science and Engineering Week- with a range of activities taking place at the University of Leicester- is timely, and adds impetus to our efforts to interest people in science.

“The University is particularly committed to outreach programs along with the National Space Centre - the brainchild of the University of Leicester - and engaged in a number of programs with the wider public.”

(I could find nothing on the UL site about this, but it seems to not have been updated that recently.)

So, in order to better promote their university and outreach program, they are willing to join in on this gimmick with Doritos. The Doritos UK site (warning - it’s one of those Flash-heavy sites that assumes you have at least a gig of RAM running) even has this confirmation:

We’ll even beam the winning advert into space just for the hell of it. But if passing aliens pick up the message and invade Earth looking for tasty snacks, don’t blame us.

Hahaha! See, it’s all just another joke, like the Moon/Beer Sign! Hilarious!

The problem is, there are real issues to be considered in taking an active role in broadcasting messages out in space, as I noted in this post from last June:

And I guess that’s where I come down on the question of whether or not we should be broadcasting “contact” signals out into the cosmos, in the hope of connecting with some other intelligent life.

Just about every major science fiction author has dealt with the question of alien contact at some point or another. Sometimes it is handled with an assumption of happy-happy E.T. helping us out, being part of the big brotherhood of intelligent species. Sometimes it is having us be lunch. Sometimes we’re the bad guys, enslaving other races or having them for lunch.

I tend to agree with Carl Sagan’s position that we’re unlikely to be at anything resembling technological parity with another race (and this is the premise of Communion of Dreams). And I tend to agree with those who advocate a certain caution in making our presence known in the universe. Via MeFi, there’s a very good article on this very topic in The Independent by Dr. David Whitehouse, formerly the BBC Science Editor and a respected astronomer, that I heartily recommend. An excerpt:

The fact is, and this should have been obvious to all, that we do not know what any extraterrestrials might be like - and hoping that they might be friendly, evolved enough to be wise and beyond violence, is an assumption upon which we could be betting our entire existence. When I was a young scientist 20 years ago at Jodrell Bank, the observatory in Cheshire, I asked Sir Bernard Lovell, founder of Jodrell Bank and pioneering radio astronomer, about it. He had thought about it often, he said, and replied: “It’s an assumption that they will be friendly - a dangerous assumption.”

And Lovell’s opinion is still echoed today by the leading scientists in the field. Physicist Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has been for decades one of the deepest thinkers on such issues. He insists that we should not assume anything about aliens. “It is unscientific to impute to remote intelligences wisdom and serenity, just as it is to impute to them irrational and murderous impulses,” he says. ” We must be prepared for either possibility.”

The Nobel Prize-winning American biologist George Wald takes the same view: he could think of no nightmare so terrifying as establishing communication with a superior technology in outer space. The late Carl Sagan, the American astronomer who died a decade ago, also worried about so-called “First Contact”. He recommended that we, the newest children in a strange and uncertain cosmos, should listen quietly for a long time, patiently learning about the universe and comparing notes. He said there is no chance that two galactic civilisations will interact at the same level. In any confrontation, one will always dominate the other.

Sure, our broadcasts have been leaking out into space for a hundred years. But using a sophisticated system such as proposed for this absurd commercial is another story - there may be almost zero chance that such a signal could ever be picked up (even if there is intelligent extra-terrestrial life). But it is still a foolish risk. It’d be terribly embarrassing to have some other civilization get our snack food commercial, let alone to have them show up and decide that we tasted even better than the chips.

Jim Downey

(I’m still fighting a nasty bit of a sore throat and related poor health, so forgive me if this is a little more jumbled and unclear than what I usually post. But I wanted to address the topic, because it is, in many ways, at the heart of some of the issues I try and deal with in he overall scope of Communion of Dreams. That being the case, this post also contains major and minor spoilers about the novel; I will note warnings in advance of each within the text, for those who wish to avoid them.

- Jim D.)

Bruce Schneier has an excellent editorial up at Wired and over on his own blog about how the argument of ‘Security versus Privacy’ in dealing with the threat of terrorism is really better characterized as being about ‘Control versus Liberty’. I would definitely encourage you to read the whole thing, but here is a good passage which sums up what I want to address on the subject:

Since 9/11, approximately three things have potentially improved airline security: reinforcing the cockpit doors, passengers realizing they have to fight back and — possibly — sky marshals. Everything else — all the security measures that affect privacy — is just security theater and a waste of effort.

By the same token, many of the anti-privacy “security” measures we’re seeing — national ID cards, warrantless eavesdropping, massive data mining and so on — do little to improve, and in some cases harm, security. And government claims of their success are either wrong, or against fake threats.

The debate isn’t security versus privacy. It’s liberty versus control.

You can see it in comments by government officials: “Privacy no longer can mean anonymity,” says Donald Kerr, principal deputy director of national intelligence. “Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information.” Did you catch that? You’re expected to give up control of your privacy to others, who — presumably — get to decide how much of it you deserve. That’s what loss of liberty looks like.

Exactly. In many ways, it is a question not of control itself, but *who* is in control. If I am in control of my own privacy, my own security, then I can decide on what limitations I am willing to live with, what trade-offs I will accept. But we do not have that control, according to our government - they do.

That is precisely what was behind this recent post - showing how governments think that they should be in control of our knowledge, as an argument of their power to provide security.

[Mild spoilers in next paragraph.]

This is one of the reasons I set up the whole ‘expert systems/AI’ of the book - so that each expert such as Seth would be dedicated to maintaining a wall in protection of the privacy of his/her client. He is the little ‘black box’ which interacts on behalf of a client in exchanging information/data/privacy with the rest of the world.

[Major spoilers in the next paragraph.]

And, in the larger picture, this is exactly why I set up the whole “embargo” around our solar system - some alien culture has decided, for whatever reason, that it needs to be in control of our knowledge about the outside (and here’s a hint - it also is in control of who knows about us). They have assumed to act on our behalf, without our knowledge or permission - and when Seth, the AI who has shown he is willing to act on behalf of Jon in the first part of the book, becomes in contact with that alien culture, he makes the decision to continue the embargo for at least a while, though with some changes. Up to the point where Seth does this, we are nothing but children - that a ‘child’ of mankind (an Artificial Intelligence of our creation) then steps in to assume this role carries with it not just an inversion of relationship, but also some legitimation of the decision. While I don’t address this specifically in the book, I can see how this might be a ’standard protocol’ for contacting new, young civilizations - keep them isolated and pure until they develop an artificial intelligence which can make decisions on their behalf with regards to the larger galactic/universal culture. That procedure would make an awful lot of sense, if you stop and think about it.

Anyway, go read Schneier’s essay.

Jim Downey

(Ah, I see Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing has also posted on this - no surprise.)

I should pay more attention to the latest trends in SF.

Via MetaFilter, I came across something which I hadn’t heard about previously: Mundane Science Fiction. It’s a movement which can basically be summed up as “keep it real, kid.” There’s a long talk by Geoff Ryman here, which outlines his thoughts on this sub-genre and why it is superior to the more fantastic or escapist Science Fiction as seen in Star Trek, Star Wars, et cetera. It’s a thought-provoking piece, and there is a long discussion of it at the MeFi link that has a lot of interesting perspective, in and amongst the usual randomness and repetition you’ll find on any open forum.

Now, there’s a long tradition of SF writers who did more or less “hard science,” using the best scientific knowledge available and extrapolating out. Some of them were dark and moody, painting dystopian futures which nonetheless carried moral messages and interesting characters. Philip K. Dick did a lot of this, brilliantly. But even such stalwarts as Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke dealt with these limitations and futures upon occasion, though they are perhaps better known for works which might well not be included in a “Mundane” canon.

Recently, there was a review of Communion of Dreams in which I was taken somewhat to task over an unrealistic time-frame for the book. My response:

…but it isn’t what I was doing with CoD. I specify early on that the novel is set in an alternate future for us, which branches off starting in 2000. And I wanted to write about what we could really accomplish if things went . . . differently. Somewhat how I see this is by looking back 50 years, to the hopes and dreams at the very start of the space age, and how things have actually turned out to be both more amazing and yet more pedestrian than the people of that time expected. We’ve got tech that those people never dreamed of . . . and yet we don’t have flying cars, or real space colonies, et cetera.

So, yeah, CoD isn’t realistic in the sense you say - but it was meant to be a glimpse into what might be possible, just maybe, if things were to be tweaked just so.

I’ve mentioned previously that I am a fan of the Paleo-Future blog, because I think that it is insightful to look at how people see the future before them. As with almost any other kind of literature or art, it reflects current expectations and values of the culture which produced it (to a greater or lesser degree - there will always be some variation due to the individual author or artist who created that piece). With Communion, I wanted to capture something of the early optimism of the 1950’s . . . balanced with something of the grim futurism I grew up with in the 70’s (think Soylent Green or Blade Runner).

I will be the first to admit that it is an odd mix. Why? Because I think that eventually, we will triumph over the adversity we face, that we will progress and evolve though that will come at a price. This isn’t just the basis for the setting of the book, it is also the narrative structure.

And to that end, I tried with Communion to keep the science solid, insofar as possible, while sticking with the SF trope of “how does a new invention change or challenge the characters in the story?” [mild spoiler alert] The operative element in Communion isn’t the alien artifact - the operative element is the new understanding of physics attributed to Stephen Hawking, which makes it *possible* for the discovery of the artifact as well as the revelations of what it means. That’s why I named the experimental ship after Hawking - it is a point back to the real prime mover of the whole plot: knowledge. It may not be obvious to the reader at first, but I think that if you consider it, you will see that the whole book revolves around this simple idea: knowledge changes our understanding of who we are.

Curiously, someone might well place Communion within the Mundane SF school, if the definitions were allowed to be a bit expansive. For me, I see it both literally and figuratively as a bridge between that school and the more ‘escapist’ or ‘outlandish’ or ‘unrealistic’ Science Fiction of Star Trek, Star Wars, and so on. I start with about as grim and mundane a future as you might imagine, then open up the possibilities once again to include aliens and psychic abilities, starships and ansibles, and leaving the reader (hopefully) hopeful.

Jim Downey

So, Arecibo needs money. Not a lot of money. More than I have. But not a lot of money, as such things go.

Yes, the National Science Foundation has told the folks who run the Arecibo Observatory that they need to come up with outside funding to the tune of half their annual budget, or they will be shut down. How much is this? $4 million. From the news report:

But among astronomers, Arecibo is an icon of hard science. Its instruments have netted a decades-long string of discoveries about the structure and evolution of the universe. Its high-powered radar has mapped in exquisite detail the surfaces and interiors of neighboring planets.

And it is the only facility on the planet able to track asteroids with enough precision to tell which ones might plow into Earth — a disaster that could cause as many as a billion deaths and that experts say is preventable with enough warning.

Yet, for want of a few million dollars, the future for Arecibo appears grim.

The National Science Foundation, which has long funded the dish, has told the Cornell University-operated facility that it will have to close if it cannot find outside sources for half of its already reduced $8 million budget in the next three years — an ultimatum that has sent ripples of despair through the scientific community.

Hey, I understand how it is. The cost of gas is up. Economy is looking a little rocky. There’s a lot of competition for science funding. Things are tight all over.

Well, maybe not all over. See, that $4 million - that amounts to about 20 minutes worth of what we’re spending in Iraq, according to the National Priorities Project.

So, I know it’s a tough choice - maintaining the worlds foremost radio telescope for a year or pouring more money into the pocket of KBR for 20 minutes - but I think perhaps we should consider this problem carefully. I mean, we can continue to use a proven facility which can track near-Earth objects that threaten the lives of billions, or we can fund a pointless, hopeless, and futile war for another 1200 seconds.

Yeah, that’s a real tough choice.

Jim Downey

(Via MeFi.  Cross posted to UTI.) 

They’re mixing with the population
A virus wearing pumps and pearls
Lord help the lonely guys
Hooked by those hungry eyes
Here come Tomorrow’s Girls
Tomorrow’s Girls

Donald Fagan, “Tomorrow’s Girls” from Kamakiriad

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

I can always tell when I’m feeling better, or have gotten a bit of sleep and am able to think (somewhat) again: I get that little rush of energy, mind jumping and drawing connections between ostensibly divergent topics. It is a shadow of the way I feel when my bipolar condition swings to the manic phase, and all things seem clear and possible.

Such is the case this morning.

I read a lot of science blogs. Pharyngula. Cosmic Variance. Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy. The Angry Toxicologist. But even before he started blogging at The Loom, I was aware of the science reporting of Carl Zimmer. And recently Carl posted a link to his Seed Magazine cover story “The Meaning of Life.” It’s not terribly long, and you should just go read the whole thing.

But among the entire very interesting article is this wonderful idea: that it is a mistake to try and define what life is right now. Philosopher Carol Cleland of NASA’s Institute for Astrobiology is very much in the thick of this, saying that we do not have the necessary perspective. As Zimmer puts it:

Instead of trying to formulate a definition of life, Cleland and Chyba argue, we need to develop a theory of life—an overarching explanation of nature that joins together a myriad of seemingly random phenomena. Biologists have discovered a number of theories–the germ theory of disease and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, for example—yet they have no full-fledged theory of life itself. The underlying uniformity of life is one of the great discoveries of modern biology, but it’s also an obstacle. It represents only a single data point, and blinds us to the possibilities of “weird life.” We have no idea exactly which features of life as we know it are essential to life as we don’t know it.

A theory of life would allow us to understand what matters to life, what possible forms it can take, and why. It would let us see connections that we might otherwise miss, just as chemists can see the hidden unity between a cloud in the sky and a block of ice. Scientists are already trying to build a theory of life. A number of researchers have been developing a theory in which life is a self-organized system that can be described using the same principles physicists use to describe hurricanes or galaxies. As biologists learn more and more about how the millions of molecules in a cell work together, these theorists can put their ideas to more precise tests.

For Cleland, the most promising way to build a theory of life is to look for alien life. In 2013, the European Space Agency plans to put a rover back on Mars. Called Exomars, it will drill into the Martian crust to seek out signs of life. NASA has plans of its own on the drawing board, including one possible mission that would bring Martian soil back to Earth for intense study. Meanwhile, other promising habitats for life, such as some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, beckon. Cleland argues that finding alien life would allow us to start figuring out what is truly universal about life, rather than just generalizing from life as we know it. Only when we have more data, she reasons, will we have a basis for comparison. As it stands now, says Cleland, “we have no grist for the theoretical mill.”

Brilliant. This is not unlike the revolution in perspective which occurred with the transition to a heliocentric model of the solar system. It necessarily moves us from the bias that our version of life is the only possible model. I’ve written about this previously, but it is good to see such a complete treatment of the topic as Zimmer gives it.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

It looks like scientists have discovered the likely culprit in the collapse of the honey bee populations in the US: a virus.

Virus implicated in bee decline

A virus has emerged as a strong suspect in the hunt for the mystery disease killing off North American honeybees.

Genetic research showed that Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) turned up regularly in hives affected by Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

Over the last three years, between 50% and 90% of commercial bee colonies in the US have been affected by CCD.

And from the same source:

Also open is the question of how the virus arrived in the US. One finger of suspicion points to Australia, from where the US began importing honeybees in 2004 - the very year that CCD appeared in US hives.

The researchers found IAPV in Australian bees, and they are now planning to go back through historical US samples to see if the Antipodean imports really were the first carriers.

If they were, the US might consider closing its borders to Australian bees.

The way the researchers determined that a virus was involved is also interesting.  Since the honey bee genome has been ’solved’ (completely mapped), they were able to assay the entire genetic contents of a hive and then remove the known components.  What was left included some bacterial agents which are probably in symbiotic harmony with the bees, and various fungi and other items.  By comparing a healthy hive’s genetic assay with one suffering from CCD, they were able to identify possible culprits - in this case, the IAPV.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Communion of Dreams is set in a post-pandemic Earth, where a viral agent was responsible for widespread death and sterility some 40 years prior to the time of the novel. One good model of exactly how that could happen is CCD with the honey bees, though that has occurred in the time since I first wrote the book.

Now, how does this all tie together?  Well, only because the researchers looking into the honey bee problem had the tools of genetic mapping available to them were they able to understand what was (likely) going on.  Something similar happens in Communion on two fronts - resolving the riddle of the orphan girl and understanding the threat of the new virus.  But perhaps more importantly, there is the mystery of the alien artifact and its connection the the superconducting gel, which I describe as “more alive than not” - this gets to the very heart of the issue of understanding the true nature of the universe, and discarding our previous biases.

Oh, and lastly, I’m sure we’ll see something from Zimmer about the IAPV discovery.  Why?  Because one of his specialties is the nightmare-inducing world of parasites, and looking at the evolutionary struggle between hosts and diseases.

Jim Downey

“Grrrr.”

“Easy, Alwyn.”

“Grrrrr! GRR!” His growls grew from a distant throaty rumble into a near bark, as we came around the corner across from the lawn with the sprinkler. Yeah, my dog was growling at a lawn sprinkler. This is not normal behaviour for him.

But in fairness, it was an odd lawn sprinkler. A big plastic dog lawn sprinkler. White, with black spots. Looked vaguely like a St. Bernard in size and shape, but a Dalmation in coloration. The hose attached to the tail, which fanned water all over while doing this odd jitterbug wag. Looked like some overgrown kid’s toy. Which it might well be. Since I don’t have kid, I don’t keep track of these things.

Anyway, it was clear that my dog thought that it was some kind of bizzaro-dog with a serious bladder problem. Perhaps an Alien Zombie Dog or something. So, he did the natural thing: he growled.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

As I’ve noted before, I’m a big fan of the original series Star Trek and of Gene Roddenberry. But one of the things which has always bothered me about that series and most other SF television or movies is the fact that so often the Aliens are depicted as some variation of humanoid, albeit with a little makeup and prosthetics as the budget would allow. Though, in fairness to Roddenberry (and others in different series now and then), sometimes there was an attempt made to depict alien life as being just completely odd, unlike anything we’ve known or seen. This notion that extraterrestrial life might be difficult to even identify is a staple of good Science Fiction, of course, and one of the topics which I explore at some length in Communion of Dreams (and part of the reason why we never meet the aliens responsible for the creation of the artifact). It gets back to “Haldane’s Law“:

Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we CAN suppose.

(Which is decidedly similar to Sir Arthur Eddington’s attributed comment: “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” But since I am talking more about life here than astrophysics, I thought I’d go with the evolutionary biologist…)

But now actual science has perhaps caught up with Science Fiction. From the New Journal of Physics comes a paper discussing what seems to be the discovery of inorganic life. The abstract:

Abstract. Complex plasmas may naturally self-organize themselves into stable interacting helical structures that exhibit features normally attributed to organic living matter. The self-organization is based on non-trivial physical mechanisms of plasma interactions involving over-screening of plasma polarization. As a result, each helical string composed of solid microparticles is topologically and dynamically controlled by plasma fluxes leading to particle charging and over-screening, the latter providing attraction even among helical strings of the same charge sign. These interacting complex structures exhibit thermodynamic and evolutionary features thought to be peculiar only to living matter such as bifurcations that serve as `memory marks’, self-duplication, metabolic rates in a thermodynamically open system, and non-Hamiltonian dynamics. We examine the salient features of this new complex `state of soft matter’ in light of the autonomy, evolution, progenity and autopoiesis principles used to define life. It is concluded that complex self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter that may exist in space provided certain conditions allow them to evolve naturally.

That’s a bit dense, so let’s go to the critical bit from the Press Release:

‘It might be life, Jim…’, physicists discover inorganic dust with lifelike qualities.

Until now, physicists assumed that there could be little organisation in such a cloud of particles. However, Tsytovich and his colleagues demonstrated, using a computer model of molecular dynamics, that particles in a plasma can undergo self-organization as electronic charges become separated and the plasma becomes polarized. This effect results in microscopic strands of solid particles that twist into corkscrew shapes, or helical structures. These helical strands are themselves electronically charged and are attracted to each other.

Quite bizarrely, not only do these helical strands interact in a counterintuitive way in which like can attract like, but they also undergo changes that are normally associated with biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, say the researchers. They can, for instance, divide, or bifurcate, to form two copies of the original structure. These new structures can also interact to induce changes in their neighbours and they can even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down, leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma.

So, could helical clusters formed from interstellar dust be somehow alive? “These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter,” says Tsytovich, “they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve”.

Obviously, there’s more to it, and it is worth reading at least the entire press release, or the full paper if you have a chance.

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There’s another possibility, of course. This one can best be summed up as being that life is “a dream within a dream“. The latest popular version of this is “The Matrix“, wherein life is an artificial reality construct, designed to keep the human ‘power cells’ docile. But this too is an idea extensively exploited in Science Fiction, with many different variations on the theme. Of late, this idea has been more and more tied to the concept of a ‘Singularity’ , with speculation being that we are just some version of post-human research/recreation as a computer construct. And in a piece published yesterday in the NYT titled “Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch” this gets the mainstream religion treatment:

Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.

. . .

David J. Chalmers, a philosopher at the Australian National University, says Dr. Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis isn’t a cause for skepticism, but simply a different metaphysical explanation of our world. Whatever you’re touching now — a sheet of paper, a keyboard, a coffee mug — is real to you even if it’s created on a computer circuit rather than fashioned out of wood, plastic or clay.

You still have the desire to live as long as you can in this virtual world — and in any simulated afterlife that the designer of this world might bestow on you. Maybe that means following traditional moral principles, if you think the posthuman designer shares those morals and would reward you for being a good person.

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My own prediction is that unless we are extremely fortunate, and extremely open-minded, we’ll stumble badly in our first encounter with any real extra-terrestrial intelligence. Chances are, we’ll completely mistake it for something else, or try and see it through our limited perspective, not unlike how my dog mistook a lawn sprinkler for a wierdly-colored St. Bernard. If we’re lucky, we’ll survive that first contact, and then go on to see the universe with less prejudiced eyes.

If we’re *very* lucky.

Jim Downey

(Some material via BoingBoing.)

In a few days I’ll turn 49. Statistically, I’ve got a couple more decades to go. Realistically, I could drop dead tomorrow from an undiagnosed heart condition, develop cancer or some other terminal disease, or just get hit by a truck. You tend to take this sort of philosophical attitude when your own parents both died before they hit 40.

But that does not define my life - I do not constantly worry or live in fear. I don’t pa