Alien Scientist 48: Globes and Bagels
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.
When we look at a city map, we tend to assume the Earth is flat, extending infinitely in each direction. That is, we tend to regard the streets going off the edges to the north, south, east and west, as if going to different places in different directions, indefinitely. This is because our planet is so large compared with the size of a city, that the question of where those directions would eventually take us does not arise. But what if we had a city-sized planet - or a planet-sized city?
Let us imagine a hypothetical alien planet covered entirely by a single city. The city-planet has three main streets. The first is the equivalent of our Equator. The second is a great circle at right angles to this, like our lines of longitude 0 degrees plus 180 degrees, that together go right round the circumference of the planet. The third main street is another great circle - like our longitude 90 degrees plus 270 degrees - lying at right angles to both of the other two. This gives us a global city where each main street intersects with the two other main streets twice each.
Although each intersection is right-angled, there are no rectangular blocks: the streets divide the planetary surface into eight curvy triangles. In fact, if you had a 'planetary city map' spread flat, the streets would form a trefoil shape - like a Venn diagram of three intersecting circles (simple, after all, once you grasp it).
Or, we could imagine an alternative alien planet, this time the size of a region or nation, with three main highways and six cities, one at each intersection: the equivalent of four cities along the Equator, and two at the poles.
At the north pole city, the street map shows all roads in four directions heading south. The reverse applies at the south pole: you can choose any direction, as long as it is north. Although this orientation may seem alien, it is not so different from a normal city where all roads head either 'out' or 'in'; from the centre you have no choice but to go 'out'.
And, having a road eventually curve back on itself is really no different from a normal city that has an 'orbital' highway round its circumference, where you know that if you keep going you will come back on yourself. It is just a matter of how we define things: where 'inward', 'outward', 'clockwise' and 'anti-clockwise' are the relevant cardinal directions.
It may seem curious in a way, to our terrestrial minds, that a city with right-angled streets extending to cover a planet should end up with a trefoil shape streetmap, rather than a rectangular grid. But this is not to say it is not possible: it all comes down to the shape of the planet.
Let us imagine an alien planet whose entire surface is covered by a rectangular city grid - like New York's Manhattan. The Manhattan grid has a handful of long main avenues heading north-south, and a multitude of shorter east-west cross streets. Now what if each long avenue and each short cross-street curved back on itself? This could work, if the shape of the planet was not spherical, but toroidal: that is, not like a globe, but more like a doughnut, or bagel.
So let's imagine the central 'north-south' avenue goes round the outside circumference of the bagel and so curves back on itself. Running on either side will be a series of parallel avenues, that also run 'round the hole'. At right angles to these run a series of 'east-west' streets, which run 'into' (and back out) the hole. (Note how our terrestrial language fails to easily describe the directions on a toroidal world - there is no easy way of meaning 'round this way' as opposed to 'round that way').
So here we have a system where every avenue and street curves back on itself; every avenue intersects with every street and vice versa. And this time, all the blocks are four-sided. (This suits an alien civilisation whose uptown residents favour roughly rectangular buildings.) For an extra touch of authenticity, we could add in a Broadway: a route that cuts diagonally across the other streets; it too eventually curves back on itself.
Because the streets - and the subways beneath them - would clearly connect up in a finite, three dimensional way, the inhabitants of this Cosmic Bagel City would not think of their city as flat. But they could be forgiven for believing - like the stereotypical New Yorker - that the world does not go beyond 'Manhattan'.
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Alien Scientist 47: Almost Impossible Alien Creations
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 biologist Steve Jones has described natural selection as a ‘machine that makes almost impossible things.’ Not satisfied with these products of natural selection, we humans have used the power of artificial selection to make even more ‘almost impossible’ things. For thousands of years, we have been modifying animals and plants for our own benefit through artificial selection. Those organisms more favourable to us have been successively bred to be successively yet more favourable, over countless generations.
Fruits that used to be small and bitter are now big and juicy. Skinny gristly quadropeds have become lumbering, swaying meat-mountains on legs. Fierce carnivores have become friendly pets, or functional working companions. Various furry, fluffy, fleecy or feathery creatures have become furrier, fluffier, fleecier or featherier according to our taste for fabrics, as we personally hairless primates use other species for our clothing and furnishing.
If this is what we can achieve, with genetic engineering still in its infancy, what even-more-almost-impossible things might an alien civilisation achieve? Let us imagine a technologically advanced civilisation of aliens for whom artificial selection and genetic engineering have become the natural way of creating new products and technologies organically, creating a fantastic menagerie of artificial
organisms to supply their needs.
First off, let us consider food. We could imagine our aliens breeding curry-flavoured cattle, whose cooked flesh makes an instant beef curry, in a gravy of natural curry sauce. A specially bred species of lemon-chicken would taste of, well, lemon chicken. Sweet and sour prawns would live sweet and sour lives, long before reaching their sweet and sour fate in the kitchen.
One could also imagine alien chickens bred to lay eggs whose yolks and ‘whites’ were like broths and sauces of different alien flavours. And new breeds of brown and yellow and pink cows would naturally dispense chocolate, banana and strawberry flavour milkshakes.
The resourceful aliens would also breed gastronomic creatures for their form, not just their flavour. Alien sushivores could artificially create dedicated new sushi-species, that were naturally rectangular
bite-sized chunks of flesh. And alien noodlevores could genetically engineer different kinds of soba or udon noodle creatures. Diners at noodle restaurants could observe the live noodle-creatures swimming about in tanks, before selecting them for their meal.
There are also many non-food uses of plants and animals. The ideas of self-assembly furniture trees or grow-your-own-house-plants have been suggested elsewhere. Alien biotechnologists could also create different kinds of oysters, producing different varieties of pearls, beads, marbles and ball-bearings. From sponges and loofahs, it would be a short step to engineer various species of household cloths or brushes. Silkworms could branch out to manufacture different kinds of threads, from dental floss to natural ‘nylon’ and carbon-fibres.
The aliens might also genetically modify their own symbionts, like the different kinds of ‘fungi’ that may live on their skin – custom-engineered to create various kinds of protective coatings for different environments, or simply create different decorative patterns, like organic tattoos. Dedicated micro-aliens might go creeping and crawling over their hosts’ skins, hygienically cleaning their pores naturally. And inside their bodies, they could even engineer gut bacteria that could digest foodstuffs otherwise inedible to them, which could be handy for exploring alien territories.
(Of course, it would be no consolation to encounter a fierce, tattooed, hungry alien, that normally could not digest Earthling flesh, but whose guts were stocked with genetically engineered Earthlingivorous bacteria.)
Or – having returned to food – we could imagine more pleasantly that our biotechnically-savvy aliens could make organic versions of things we normally have to create artificially. Imagine the aliens’ finest engineered chocolate-candy-bee, whose finest engineered combs would be chocolate hexagons with centres of praline, nougat and caramel.
With all these almost impossible things, we might get confused as to what is natural and what is artificial. But that is quite normal when considering an alien perspective. Artificial selection only differs from natural selection in that humans take a conscious controlling influence on the selection, in a process that we consider to be apart from nature. To a (naturally) non-anthropocentric alien, all kinds of selection and engineering could just be considered part of the grand workings of a provident – however implausible – Nature.
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Alien Scientist 46: An Alien Kind of Order
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.
Everywhere we look, we see a familiar mixture of order and disorder. At the widest scale, we see a grand order to the cosmos the uniform blackness of space pinpricked by the white lights of the galaxies, so many spiral swirls of suns. But within these galaxies, there is no local regularity: the scatter of individual stars is so ‘random’ that we have to interpret them arbitrarily as unique, odd-shaped constellations.
More locally, the solar system could be seen as an almost proverbial model of order, the planetary spheres spinning in their orbits round the sun like a clockwork machine with perfectly balanced moving parts. But look closer and we become aware of all sorts of sub-planetary debris and wobbly orbits, and violent flares and surface irregularities. The Earth is more or less spherical overall, yet close up it is wrinkly, crinkly and restless, with all those craggy peaks and rocky canyons and the gushing, frothing, roaring, crashing seas. Meanwhile the Moon is covered by roughly circular craters: circular enough to boast some degree of order, but rough enough and so randomly scattered to suggest the Moon is merely passively bearing the imprint of a chaotic universe, rather than being a giver of order to the cosmos.
At a smaller scale, all the rocks and dust of the planets and moons, however irregular, are made up of familiar substances that speak of some sort of chemical order. We also see order in the symmetry of six-sided snowflakes, but disorder in the uniqueness of each particular crystal. And all that chaotic disordered sea water is ultimately made out of H2O, a precisely orderly troika of atoms, multiplied billions of times over.
On Earth at least, we can recognize the complex order of the living world: the complex carbon chemistry of organisms, and the particular order of DNA – the regular double-helix structure of matching pairs of chemical bases, an intricately interwoven order at the microscopic scale.
And all the chemical elements, however different from each other, are made up of the same constituent particles: protons, neutrons and electrons. These in turn are made up of further smaller things like quarks – things that the smaller they get, the less like ‘things’ they appear to be.
We may take it for granted, then, that we find some kind of order in some circumstances, and some kind of disorder in others. But what does this say about the nature of order? What alternatives might there be to the familiar pattern of order and disorder? What if we found order where we normally expect disorder, and disorder where we normally expect order?
Imagine an alien from a hypothetical reach of the universe where there were no galaxies, but in which suns and planets were arranged in regular crystalline structures, like snowflakes, or in long paired chains, like DNA. An alien from such a place might interpret our galaxies not as signifiers of cosmic structure, but as somewhat arbitrary swirls of leftover debris.
Or one could imagine an alien from a ‘solar system’ where the planets were a mixture of Platonic solids – such as cubes and tetrahedra – moving around in polygonal orbits: a different mix of regularities and irregularities from normal.
If these cases seem too far-fetched, let us imagine things at a more tangible planetary scale, where real environments are known to exhibit substantial departures from what we consider as normality.
What if we found a planet or moon whose surface was not made up of roughly round structures such as craters, formed from heaps of irregular shaped rocks, but instead the structures were precisely straight-sided ones – a mix of squares and rectangles and polygons of different shapes and sizes, each made up of regularly shaped and sized ‘building blocks’? Or, instead of having roughly conic volcanoes or roughly pyramidal mountain peaks, what if a planet featured surface eminences that were precisely proportioned cones and regular pyramids and prisms, domes and spires and turrets?
And what if, instead of creatures made up of carbon-based compounds, we found instead a world of complex moving objects whose intricate parts were made up heterogeneously from lattices of iron, sheets of aluminum, strands of copper, tubes of neon…?
In other words, the more ‘alien’ the pattern of order and disorder is – and the less it resembles the natural world – the more it resembles a different but distinctive kind of order and disorder: that of the world of human artifice.
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Alien Scientist 45: Seen Through by Alien Eyes
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.
It would take a bold science fiction writer to invent the X-ray: an invisible ray that can ‘see through’ solid substance, making the normally invisible visible by making the normally visible invisible.
When Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered these mysterious rays in 1895, he didn’t know what they were or even what to call them – he named them ‘X’ rays after the algebraic tradition of ‘X’ representing the unknown. (Had this tradition been further extrapolated, how many more X-phenomena would we have – all sorts of X-particles, X-species, X-planets, X-matter, X-energy…?)
Basically, an X-ray is a kind of electromagnetic radiation that can pass through more materials than light can. This means it can be used to form images of things we can’t normally see. Röntgen discovered that the X-rays could be used to create mysterious ‘shadow-pictures’, most significant, perhaps, being X-ray images of the human body.
While we may now consider X-ray imagery as routine medical technology – along with thermometers and stethoscopes – the phenomenon when first discovered appeared remarkable, even uncomfortable or otherworldly. The X-ray could reveal both the foetus – a human form not normally seen before birth – and the skeleton, a human form not normally seen except after death. (It is reported that one scientist was so spooked by the sight of his own skull that he couldn’t sleep at night). One X-ray pioneer even claimed to have detected the soul.
By allowing others to see inside ourselves, X-rays could also be regarded as an unnerving invasion of privacy. At the very least, they challenged the boundaries and even meaning of privacy, when you could see right through external organs considered private, while revealing internal organs to public view.
Armed with this fantastic X-ray capability, science fiction writers could imagine the invention of ‘X-ray specs’, where people could wear spectacles that ‘see’ everything with X-ray vision – from shimmering skeleton-people to see-through books and less-than-opaque black boxes.
Of course, X-ray specs remain as science fiction, because in order to ‘see’ with X-ray vision, one needs a source of X-rays. We tend to forget that spectacles – and telesopes and other such optical devices – serve us by intervening between our eyes and the object of our attention, but they do not themselves supply the light that is essential for us to see anything in the first place.
Instead of X-ray specs, it might be more plausible to imagine alien creatures with X-ray vision – that is, with eyes that are sensitive to X-rays. We could imagine an X-ray alien evolving in some part of the cosmos where there is a plentiful supply of X-rays – perhaps a world with a local ‘X-ray star’ rather than a light-radiating sun. The alien would have evolved to capture and interpret those X-rays, and in doing so would see everything with X-ray vision.
If we met such a creature, we might be spooked by the idea of an alien being mysteriously able to peer into our insides. But to the alien, there would be nothing particularly mysterious about it. It would regard us with no more sense of mystery than we might regard a semi-transparent jellyfish – discerning a patterned core surrounded by more or less see-through flesh – or for that matter, some simple solid structure like a wire encased in clear plastic, or a model ship in a bottle.
In seeing us as walking talking skeletons, the alien would not think of us as animated cadavers, though it would have an effortless insight into our evolutionary past, as it could discern the family resemblances between the skeletons of ourselves, our pet dogs, birds and goldfish. Meanwhile our skulls, not our faces, would be our primary visual signature.
Thinking of our skulls as our public ‘face’ should not be thought of as unreal or surreal in any way. After all, the X-ray image of the skull is not an indirect reflection or distortion of reality, but is reality as directly detected by someone else – someone who happens to sense radiation from a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum from ourselves.
And, if coming face to face with an X-ray-eyed alien would be spooky to us – who are used to being comfortably opaque – the feeling could be mutual. We could imagine encountering X-ray-eyed alien semi-transparent jellyfish who were comfortably invisible to each other, but spooked by our ability to see their insides with our own exotic ‘light-ray’ eyes.
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Alien Scientist 44: Divining the Sun
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.
If an alien scientist knew the galaxy well enough to find its way to Earth, then the chances are that it would know more about the Sun than any of the locals. Of course, how much the Earthlings knew would depend on who – or what – was being consulted, at what point in history.
Any creature with senses must surely have some sort of visceral awareness of the sun, as a warm, bright presence – or perhaps direction – at least among creatures living at the surface of the Earth. The more visually aware surface dwellers would surely be conscious of the sun as a big glowing ball in the sky whose presence or absence would signify day and night.
Human imagination allows extrapolation beyond these simple experiential truths, to hypothesise (correctly) that the disc that sets in the evening is the same object as the disc that rises again the next morning; and (wrongly) that the sun, along with the moon and stars, follows a track in the sky centred on the Earth. Other human traditions have it that the sun is made of a celestial substance that is different in kind from the matter found in our terrestrial world. The ancient Egyptians went further, believing that the sun was a god, variously ruler of heaven and earth, and identified with the creator of the world.
Modern Earthlings can now agree with alien scientists that the sun is just another star; and that planets – once considered to be ‘wandering stars’ – are in fact satellites of the sun, just like Earth, which is no longer the central focus of the universe. But while we have known the sun’s role as an astronomical object for centuries, it is only relatively recently that we have worked out what the sun is actually made of, and how it works.
For most of history, the sun has just been taken for granted as a sort of big fiery ball. But what do we mean by a fiery ball? Certainly the sun can be regarded as roughly ball-shaped, at least to the extent that it appears as a disc in profile; and to the extent that anything ‘fiery’ could be considered ball-shaped. But when we say fire, what kind of fire? The sun does not burn the way a fire does, by combustion – otherwise, how could it burn for so long, in the vacuum of space? We now know that the sun works by the process of nuclear fusion. If we allow burning to include the nuclear reactions in the sun, then we can allow that the sun does, in a sense, ‘burn’. So we can graciously expand the meaning of ‘burn’ and ‘fire’ to include the sun, and keep with it all the warm, cosy associations of fire found in human traditions, rather than looking at the sun with a new cold gaze as a kind of nuclear-technological apparatus, as if it were invented in the twentieth century.
This brings us to the question of what the sun is made of. The sun is made up almost entirely of two elements – seventy per cent hydrogen, and twenty eight per cent helium. But when we look more closely, we see that these substances are not simply composed of atoms in a conventional sense, but form a plasma, in which protons, neutrons and electrons are flying around as independent agents, not bound together in the form of atoms. Unlike solids, liquids or gases, plasma must be considered as rather alien stuff – that is, unfamiliar to us as a natural state of matter on Earth. From this point of view, our biggest heavenly neighbour is not, in one sense, strictly made up of the same kind of matter as down here on Earth, but features a state of matter only found naturally in the interiors of stars, or as we might say, in the heavens.
Indeed, by its process of nuclear fusion, the sun may be said to create atoms, the heavy elements that our familiar world is made up of. In this sense, the sun is, in a manner of speaking, a creator of the world we know. As an alien scientist might agree with an ancient Egyptian.
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