Alien Scientist 53: Universal Darwinism
Stephen Marshall, a former resident of Tsukuba, has been writing Alien Scientist articles for the Alien Times since 2001. Even though he no longer lives in Tsukuba, he is still a regular contributor to the magazine. Here is his latest intergalactic report.
Every country has its national heroes. Often these are leaders of some kind, who may only have historical or cultural significance within their own land. But some achievements are significant enough to be recognised internationally. Confucius or Shakespeare, for example, are often regarded as expressing things profound and timeless about the human condition, considered to be of universal significance. Of course, it is an anthropocentric leap to equate universal significance with the human condition – as opposed to, say, the cephalopodal condition. And this is to say nothing of the ‘condition’ of any life-forms beyond Earth.
In The Devil’s Chaplain, Richard Dawkins suggests that alien visitors to Earth would not necessarily be interested in Shakespeare, Marx or Freud, as their achievements are relatively parochial and ephemeral (although one can imagine that specialist alien Earthologists or historians of xenoliterature might still have a browse).
Dawkins, however, argues that Charles Darwin’s achievement in formulating the theory of natural selection to explain the evolution of living things should be considered alongside Einstein’s breakthroughs in physics and cosmology, as being of timeless, universal value. Dawkins suggests that aliens should not only recognise the significance of Darwin’s question – about how life evolves – but should also be interested in Darwin’s answer, as being potentially true of all life, anywhere.
Of course, it partly depends on what we mean by life, in the first place. For a start, we assume that life-forms actually have a life – exist for a while and then die. Something simply continuously existing, like a scatter of interplanetary dust, would not count. Something that was more complex and that changed over time, like a planetary atmosphere, would not seem to count either as living or evolving.
Some phenomena that seem to have some life-like quality to them, like fire, may invite us to wonder if they could count as being some sort of alien form of life. A fire, of course, can maintain itself and spread, but does not reproduce itself. Put another way, a fire can be generated spontaneously from something that is not fire. In other words, fire – however otherwise life-like – does not propagate by reproduction in the way organisms do.
By reproduction, we mean creating a new entity that is something like a new copy of itself. This introduces the possibility of iterations of successive generations. This implies something different from metamorphosis, like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, where one entity serially replaces the other, but is really a continuation of the same thing but in a different form.
And crucially, if any individual can reproduce more than one offspring, then this opens the door to variation, and multiplication, and hence diverging lineages.
So, if we imagine a ‘life-form’ as something that lives (generated from one of its kind), reproduces (potentially a multiplicity of different offspring), and dies, then we start to home in on the conditions for competition, differential fitness and differential survival, adaptive radiation, and hence evolution by natural selection.
This is not to say that aliens would evolve exactly like Earthling species. There could be any number of differences in details, and some of these might take us beyond Darwinian evolution.
As Dawkins has pointed out, it is possible that alien life-forms could have different kinds of genetics and embryology that would allow acquired characteristics to be inherited, and therefore to open the door to a kind of Lamarckian evolution.
And, if humans were to create artificial organisms that could reproduce and evolve in some way – whether self-replicating robots or something evolving from ‘spam’ – then those ways of evolving could in principle exist elsewhere, and could have already been exploited ‘naturally’ as a viable form of evolution for organic aliens.
The point is that even if differing in detail, it seems likely that any alien entity that lives (and reproduces and dies) in the way we recognise as life, could be expected to evolve in a way we recognise as evolution. Hence why we should not be surprised to find any alien visitors to have themselves evolved by natural selection, and for them to appreciate Darwinism, whether or not their own biologists had independently discovered their own version.
Hence why Darwin is still celebrated 200 years after his birth, not only as a national hero in his home country, but as a great contributor to our understanding of the human condition – and the condition and evolution of all currently known life.
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Alien Scientist 52: Ever-Speculative Extraterrestrials
Stephen Marshall, a former resident of Tsukuba, has been writing Alien Scientist articles for the Alien Times since 2001. Even though he no longer lives in Tsukuba, he is still a regular contributor to the magazine. Here is his latest intergalactic report.
The existence of aliens is nowadays so often associated with the advent of space travel that we have to remind ourselves that people have imagined the existence of other worlds, populated by extraterrestrial beings, long before humanity ever had the means to get off the Earth's surface.
Since the dawn of humanity, people have associated the heavens with celestial beings of one sort or another – whether deities, angels or some other kinds of spirits. Ancient Greek and Roman writers speculated on the possibility of creatures inhabiting the Moon – and the possibility of humans travelling there. But it was with the astronomical and geographical discoveries of the ‘age of science’ that speculation on this topic really took off.
Copernicus' suggestion that the Earth was not the centre of the Universe naturally prompted speculation that the Earth might not be the only inhabited ‘world’ circling the sun. Meanwhile, Galileo's observations that the sun and planets appeared to have visible imperfections helped promote the idea that the heavens were not a separate celestial region, but were made of the same base kind of matter as down on Earth.
Speculation about other worlds was also spurred by the 'discovery' of the New Worlds of the Americas and the Antipodes – and the discovery of humans living there. Could such locations – at the time assumed to be inaccessible to the known world – harbour inhabitants unrelated to known humanity? If so, might some kind of ‘people’ also exist in other worlds, previously assumed to be uninhabited, such as the Moon?
As the historian David Cressy has pointed out, a succession of speculative books and treatises appeared in this early modern period. These were in part cosmological and part anthropological, such as John Wilkins' magnificently titled The Discovery of a World in the Moone; or, A Discourse Tending to Prove, That 'Tis Probable There May Be Another Habitable World in That Planet (1638).
To many of the writers of this age, the possibility of extraterrestrial life was not merely a biological matter, but a theological one, since the existence of other worlds could alter our perceived special relationship with God. (Christians wondered if the ‘men on the moon’ would have suffered the Fall of Adam, or would be redeemed through the resurrection of Christ).
To these ethereal matters were added speculations about the practical matter of space propulsion. The second-century satirical writer Lucian imagined his heroes ascending to the Moon by means of a whirlwind; or in another case, through flapping of the wings of an eagle and a vulture. One seventeenth century lunar voyage made use of a harness contraption drawn by a flock of migratory geese; another relied on a fiery chariot.
While these means of space travel may seem laughably naïve, they did at least express a degree of physical specificity that allows them to be subject to scientific scrutiny in the first place, rather than using purely magical or supernatural means.
And while these literary treatments of celestial mechanics may be unconvincing, they were not significantly surpassed even into the twentieth century, when space ships would still be imagined propelled by just as incredible forms of mechanical locomotion, or mysterious anti-gravitational forces.
The inhabitants of these extraterrestrial worlds – whether believed to be divinely created, or evolved – were routinely assumed to be sentient and intelligent: in other words, the equivalent of extraterrestrial humans, rather than merely extraterrestrial animals or plants.
The prospect of intelligent extraterrestrials raises the likelihood of the aliens themselves having the intellectual capacity to imagine a plenitude of worlds, rather than the universe being just a faintly-lit, dusty vacuum. It seems as likely that aliens would speculate on other worlds inhabited by other, yet otherworldly aliens, as the prospect of a plenitude of worlds in which each alien race believed itself to be unique.
Of course, we are so accustomed to imagining aliens all over the place that we may need to be reminded that their existence remains as speculative as ever. It remains to be seen by what means we might eventually come to meet any extraterrestrials, if ever. Alien contact could yet be centuries or millennia in the future, before we have the slightest chance of shaking tentacles with an extraterrestrial. By this time, the idea of corporeal astronauts blasting off from the Earth's surface in fossil-propelled rocket-ships may seem almost as quaint as traversing the heavens by means of a flaming chariot – or the wings of a vulture.
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Alien Scientist 51: Google-Brained Aliens
Stephen Marshall, a former resident of Tsukuba, has been writing Alien Scientist articles for the Alien Times since 2001. Even though he no longer lives in Tsukuba, he is still a regular contributor to the magazine. Here is his latest intergalactic report.
In a recent article in The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr asks “Is Google Making us Stupid?”. His point is that the ubiquity of information on the internet, and its instant accessibility through search engines such as Google, could be changing the way we think. Instead of holding information in our heads, we rely on accessing someone else’s data banks. As our environment becomes more information-rich, we are in danger of becoming individually more intellectually impoverished.
The danger that new information technology could make us ‘stupid’ is not, of course, new. As Carr points out, Socrates warned that writing could become a lazy substitute for brainpower, giving people ‘the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom’; and the invention of printing brought further angst that the availability of books would demean scholarship and encourage lazy minds.
Ironically, today’s scholars – trained in harnessing the intellectual power of the written word – are now more likely to be worried that today’s internet generation will have no use for books, but make do with any old soundbite, blog or podcast as sources of knowledge about the world.
The internet does not just impact on the stockpiling of knowledge, but how we access it. We are now used to being able to think of any keyword or phrase and instantly scan the entire world-wide web for its occurrence, in a way that we can’t do for print-bound texts. Even book-reared scholars may begin to miss the facility to skip forward through a printed book to find the next keyword, or leap directly from a citation to the document it refers to. Perhaps inevitably, the format of the information affects how we use it. The medium not only becomes inextricable with the message, but even moulds the brains of those who send and receive it.
Humans are not genetically hard-wired to handle text in the way we are to handle speech. So we have to learn to read and write, in a way that affects how we think. Those who learn writing via ideograms such as kanji characters develop a different way of processing language – manipulating visual stimuli and memory – from those who are brought up with words composed of letters of the alphabet. So it would not be surprising if the Google generation, who learn by pointing and clicking, will think and use information differently from those weaned on turning paper pages.
Indeed, we could imagine some alien species for whom net-linked thinking was their natural intellectual environment. We can imagine an alien species who did not grow up with the alien equivalents of paper and books, but whose intelligence evolved in the context of a complex external ‘information ecosystem.’ Such a species would not be so reliant on having their own on-board repository of knowledge; they would be not so much book-brained as Google-brained organisms.
If such aliens went to explore beyond their own world, they would need to bring a portable supply of information with them – just as human astronauts have to carry their own oxygen, normally freely available as part of the environment, when venturing beyond Earth.
When arriving on Earth, the aliens would naturally seek to plug into the local planetary information ecosystem as soon as possible. And where better to start than an internet café? We can imagine the itinerant alien never so at home once ensconced at the keyboard, earphones on and tentacles discreetly tapping, logging in with an anonymously Earthling-style username and password.
Once online, they might not bother consulting the great reference libraries, whose information is still predominately held in the form of ink-encrusted pulp-sheets. Rather, the world-wide web would be as good a place as any, to make quick gains in terms of finding what was going on.
A few clips of YouTube may well tell them more about human life and culture, in a limited time, than the equivalent time invested in ploughing through the works of Plato or Shakespeare. Famously, the Pioneer spacecraft, in anticipation of possible discovery by extraterrestrials, included Mozart as an interstellar exemplar of human taste in music. But maybe our alien researchers would find Earthlings more typically represented in video-clips of dogs howling and teenagers singing karaoke in their bedrooms.
This does not mean anyone is smarter or more ‘stupid’ for accessing information this way. A Google-brained alien – or human – would naturally make for a good explorer of an unknown terrain, quick-wittedly skipping from one outcrop of knowledge to another, with an intellectual agility that even Socrates might have appreciated.
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Alien Scientist 50: Alien Fossil Possibilities
Stephen Marshall, a former resident of Tsukuba, has been writing Alien Scientist articles for the Alien Times since 2001. Even though he no longer lives in Tsukuba, he is still a regular contributor to the magazine. Here is his latest intergalactic report.
Fossils fascinate us not only because they reach out to us over geological epochs of time, but because they seem to bridge between the living and the non-living worlds.
The term fossil can refer to the actual remains of something once living – like a skeleton or shell – as well as something that has become transformed through mineralisation or petrification. So even simple old bones or tree trunks can make for fascinating fossils. A skeleton is a sort of vestigial organism – definitely dead and yet made of the same physical material that was once part of a living being. Meanwhile, a mineralised carcass or petrified tree has the added twist of having an eerie, uncanny resemblance to a specific living thing, while yet being made of an entirely different substance from a different era. It has the form of life but contains no organic matter – as if a living creature turned to stone.
Fossilised remains can also include indirect traces of living things – such as fossilised animal droppings, known as coprolites, or the fossilised remains of animal constructions, or traces on the ground such as footprints. While perhaps nothing can surpass the special frisson of a directly petrified plant or animal, there is yet something fascinating about fossil footprints. Perhaps it is in their metaphorical resonance: the normal everyday footprint is indelibly associated with the idea of a trace or record, so the fossilised footprint is a doubly resonant imprint.
Fossils can transport us into the exotic worlds of the past – of ancient species and ancient lands that no longer exist. They can bring dinosaurs alive in our imagination, thundering across the plains or stumbling into the swamps and tar-pits of long-lost continents.
A further leap could allow us to imagine discovering the fossilised footprints of alien creatures otherwise unknown to Earth. In a stereotypical scenario, we can imagine a flying saucer coming to visit, and some alien bipeds stepping down and walking around, leaving footprints that could become fossilised.
We could imagine this alien visitation occurring at some revealing time in the distant past. If this were before life as we know it began, the alien footprints would not be accompanied by any other fossilised remains (in fact, this would make us dare to wonder if they might be alien footprints in the first place). Or, we could imagine the visit occurring in a period when Earth was teeming with life, but with no intelligent life-forms around to record the visit (or at least, none that passed down their ancestral memories to us). We could nevertheless envisage the dramatic scenario of dinosaurs chasing aliens – or aliens chasing dinosaurs? – from their lithic footprints… and coprolites.
One could also imagine that the aliens might attempt to leave some deliberate record of their visit to be discovered by later observers. But how could they be sure of leaving a trace to be picked up by hypothetical creatures that might or might not evolve in millions of years’ time? Would they try to safely bury their ‘fossil message’ to preserve it for a sufficiently long period, or try to keep it as visible as long as possible on the surface? This would depend on which life-form would be first to develop palaeontology.
Then again, we could imagine an alien visit some time in the far future, when humanity no longer inhabits the Earth (whether through extinction or emigration). So we could imagine an alien reconnaissance party arriving to look for the fossilised remains of Cenozoic Earthlings. It is fun to imagine them discovering the ruins of our sprawling cities as evidence of intelligent life. Or they might find the petrified remains of tower cranes and industrial plants, all steel trusses and pipes and chimneys, and imagine these as so many Earthling anatomies turned to stone.
Or they could find more direct traces of humans, in the ordered ranks of skeletons laid down in their necropolitan beds, awaiting their fate as geology. And they would be surely delighted to find mountainous pyramids of stone with their carefully mummified occupants equipped for the afterlife. Meanwhile, future alien scholars may engage in a furious debate about whether the anthropomorphic statues scattered around human settlements are the fortuitously fossilised bodies of their inhabitants, or some kind of record left for palaeontologists of the future.
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Alien Scientist 49: Cosmic Crossroads and Carousels
Stephen Marshall, a former resident of Tsukuba, has been writing Alien Scientist articles for the Alien Times since 2001. Even though he no longer lives in Tsukuba, he is still a regular contributor to the magazine. Here is his latest intergalactic report.
Across far-flung corners of their Empire, the Romans built settlements with two perpendicular main streets, the cardo and the decumanus. Where these ran north-south and east-west, the local street plan could assume a cosmic significance, since latter street is aligned with the path of the sun across the sky, while the former is aligned with the axis round which the sun rotates. This implicitly assumes the Earth to be at the centre of the universe, although it does not imply that any particular provincial crossroads is.
The Romans, of course, placed Rome at the centre of the world – all roads led to Rome; and the nearby Mediterranean Sea was conceived as the ‘sea in the middle of the world’. Of course, it is natural to perceive one’s own centrality. European maps of the world typically show Europe in the middle, with the Atlantic to the left, and Pacific to the right. Meanwhile, American maps show America in the middle, with Pacific to left, and Atlantic to right. And in Japan, it is natural to place Japan at the centre. As such, an alien traveller who got lost on Earth could work out where they were in the world, just by looking at the way the world is shown on maps.
Still, all these maps tend to agree that north is at the top. This is partly because many of the first maps to have ‘global reach’ were developed in the northern hemisphere, and partly (it is supposed) because more of the land and human population is in the northern hemisphere. Of course, this is just a local cartographic convention: and an alien cartographer of Earth could easily put south at the top, and north at the base.
That said, the sense of ‘up’ and ‘down’ does have a significance beyond our own planet, since it can be related to the plane of the solar system. That is, the solar system is almost like a rotating disc, a flat plane within which the planets cycle round the Sun.
However, while all citizens of the solar system might agree to put the Sun at the centre, it still doesn’t tell us which way should be ‘up’. Perhaps if the majority of intelligent life in the solar system occupies planetary surfaces that face ‘south’, or if the first comprehensive maps of the solar system were developed not by Earthlings, but by citizens of south-facing planetary surfaces, then the cartographic convention for the whole solar system could reasonably adopt ‘south’ as the ‘top’.
(This of course also depends on whether alien civilisations accord ‘up’ the same significance as we do. Perhaps some downward-gazing or bottom-dwelling alien species might give greater prominence to the part of the map pointing ‘down’, and they might put ‘south’ at the bottom after all.)
In turn, this all assumes that ‘up’ and ‘down’ are meaningful labels for the opposing directions of this plane of reference in the first place. The plane of the solar system is usually depicted by Earthlings as being ‘horizontal’ – that is, as if the planets were rotating round a central axis, like a fairground carousel, where there is a definitely implied sense of ‘up’ and ‘down’.
But we could just as well imagine the plane of the solar system to be aligned ‘vertically’. Rather than a cosmic carousel, the solar system could be thought of as a cosmic Ferris Wheel, where the Sun is the central axle and the Earth and all the planets track vertically ‘upwards’ and round and back ‘below’ the sun again. Unlike on a Ferris Wheel, however, the ‘capsule’ that is Earth does not gradually rotate so as to keep facing one direction, but locally spins round, sometimes facing away from the solar hub of the system, and sometimes towards it. In this case, the cardo is aligned with the axle of the Ferris Wheel, while the decumanus corresponds with the track of the capsule round its circumference.
The disc-like solar system is itself, of course, embedded in a yet larger disc-like structure, the Galaxy that we call the Milky Way. This gives a further ‘plane’ by which we could orient ourselves. From this galactic perspective, the solar system is, after all, just a far-flung province. But, however widely we gaze into the night sky, we can still stand at our local crossroads, and imagine all the stars and galaxies are whirling round us.
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