Alien Scientist 25: An Alien Society Analogue
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 science fiction stories, aliens usually fill a variety of roles recognisable to humans. First, there are the kinds of alien who are analogues of ourselves - alien 'people' to do business with, make war or peace, dine or have experimental sex with. Then there are the scary alien monsters, analogous to predatory animals (like alien equivalents of lions or dinosaurs) or small nasty pestilent things (like alien worms or microbes). Other alien creatures might turn out to be analogous to pets that keep us company, or farmyard animals that we keep in order to eat. Finally, there may be particularly incomprehensible, unrecognisable life-forms seemingly put there to puzzle or disgust us and our scientific wisdom.
If Earth itself contained only non-human animals of those types - that we recognised as predators or prey, pets or pests, or specimens from science school - then we might be limited in imagining what an 'alien society', analogous to ours, might be like. We might simply fill the void with dreary humanoids and their quotidian quasi-terrestrial civilisations.
However, Earth biology has provided us with at least one class of creature that is both a bit like our own society and yet a bit alien: the social insects, and in particular, the bees.
A bee is recognisably a life-form; a creature with some anatomical affinity with us, but not too much: having a head with some kind of eyes, but really funky insect eyes, some kind of limbs, but a different number doing different things, and so on. A bee even looks as if it might be sentient and intelligent, or at least forms part of a social entity that appears so.
Most of all, bees seem to 'do' stuff that we recognise, including cleaning the house, going to work, fetching supplies and feeding the brood. They have a 'system' to maintain; an economy to run. They huddle and do little dances. They make stuff - honey, wax and royal jelly. They create a remarkably rational-looking architecture, as if possessing the otherworldly know-how of an alien civilisation.
In other words, beehive society is potentially a good analogue for what an alien society might be: it is sufficiently 'alien' in terms of its specific physical characteristics, and yet it is recognisably, analogously, a society.
Bees also suit this analogous role as they are neither our predators nor our prey; they are not considered pests, nor are they really pets. Sure, we have a working relationship with bees, but they don't really work with us or for us, in the way that beasts of burden or working dogs do, directly acting to our commands. (Whoever commanded a bee?) No, we just tend to build them hives and extract honey for rent, without them ever expressly doing our bidding or giving their consent.
So we do have a rapport with them, but it's not a direct one-society-to-another reciprocity. And this is exactly the kind of semi-skewed relationship we might expect if we encountered a society of extra-terrestrial aliens. In other words, first contact with an alien society might not be as familiar as bowing or shaking hands with a bunch of conveniently upright, appropriately limbed bipeds; or at the other extreme, as odd as an audience with a vat of self-aware vapours.
Rather, making contact with an alien civilisation might be like encountering a society of human-sized bees. We can imagine going up into their hive like entering the trapdoor a giant spaceship, with black-and-yellow uniformed guards with their stings at the ready, and treated to the science-fiction spectacle of flying round the interior of a shimmering skyscraper city of cells and galleries, before zooming in on the everyday realities of hive life.
We might then have a frisson of disapproval (albeit perhaps an inappropriately anthropocentric one) at their seemingly politically incorrect authoritarian regime; the impersonal production-line rearing of their young; the oppressive gender roles - either because the females do all the chores, or because the males are even more prisoners of society, fed and groomed like concubines in a harem, their only fate as sex slaves to the monarch and death.
So we might be welcomed as alien guests of honour, feted with alien dance performances and dining on alien royal jelly. Or we might be treated strictly as equals, and commandeered into their society, for better or worse. Or treated like intruders, stung, smothered in propolis and unceremoniously fed to the larvae.
In other words, we can't necessarily guess what analogues our alien counterparts will see in us.
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Alien Scientist 26: The Conquest Of Life On Earth
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 his book Nature: An Economic History, Geerat Vermeij applies economic concepts - such as competition for resources, functional specialisation and economies of scale - to the natural world. The book has been described as 'Economics, as if written by intelligent aliens', perhaps because the human world is treated impartially alongside the rest of the ecosystem. (In fact, due to the authoritative treatment of marine snails, the book might be especially appreciated by intelligent alien molluscan Earthologists).
In generalising across widely differing life-forms, the book, as well as reinforcing the idea that homo sapiens is 'just another animal', invites one to wonder if the phenomena described might hold true for life on other worlds. In other words, if on Earth it was possible that a combination of originally inorganic substances could somehow organise themselves into a system of living things - that eat, compete or otherwise interact with each other in the whole runaway roadshow we call life - then why should the same not happen elsewhere in the universe?
After all, Earth must originally have seemed a rather hot, toxic place for life to start. But eventually, somehow, life got a foothold, expanded to occupy sea, land and the air, and went on to conquer most of the Earth's surface, occupying almost every conceivable space and crevice on what was once a naked mineral satellite. As life developed, the planet grew itself its own ecosystem. So what we call our environment - forests, marshes and seashores - is significantly organic: not just a physical stage-set framing the action, but part of the action itself.
Life's conquest of Earth has been so successful because it has found ways of adapting to diverse circumstances. Species have morphed, mutated and experimented with themselves until they would eventually fit a diversity of niches all over the planet. Where light has been abundant, we have evolved eyes. Where the atmosphere has been right, we have evolved wings. Where enemies abound, we have evolved camouflages and poisons. In all cases, these features have evolved independently many times and in many places. If this is so on Earth, there seems no reason why it should not happen elsewhere. The universe should be teeming with eyes and wings, mimics and stings.
All this evolutionary innovation is spurred by competition. Everywhere individuals, species and businesses are trying to out-compete each other. In open competition, the strong will take over, absorb or eat the weak. Successful species unleashed into a new environment may wipe out the native species. But strength and success are always relative, and dependent on the context. Sometimes it is the big beasts that are wiped out, while the smaller creatures live on. Big companies often swallow smaller ones; but sometimes they crash spectacularly, and the little ones pick over their remains.
If the dinosaurs had not been wiped out, perhaps the first Earthlings on the moon would have had scaly tails and toothy beaks. Instead, the mammals prevailed and flourished; now humans are seemingly in charge of much of the planet, with ambitions for colonising others. But if a more successful life form comes along - an intelligent mollusc, perhaps, or a disarmingly friendly computer virus - then the humans may yet be overtaken. The history of the next millennium could yet be typed by geeks with tentacles.
In fact, there seem to be some typical patterns in the conquests of life. Species that evolve in large abundant continental areas tend to have a competitive advantage over species native to smaller, more sparsely resourced areas. So when continental species are introduced to islands or other relatively isolated habitats, they often quickly take over. This biological fitness for conquest is perhaps echoed in the human world of technological supremacy. History shows that the peoples with superior technology - whatever their culture or morals - tend to prevail over those with simpler kit.
This does not make comfortable reading for Earthlings in the face of an alien invasion. For a start, the chances are that the aliens - in order to have made it here - will have the better technology. And since Earth so far has been completely isolated from any extraterrestrial competition - from any teeming galactic 'continents' of competitive civilisations - then the chances are that the aliens will be better at taking over new habitats than we are at defending them.
In this case, we should hope that the aliens are not interested in Earth as a new home, or as a biotic filling station on some inter-galactic highway. In the circumstances, our military technology may be useless. Instead, we might have to hope that our alien visitors are Earthophiles, interested in ecotourism rather than exploitation. In which case, a book about our planet written as if by - or for - intelligent aliens might be our best hope.
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Alien Scientist 27: Alien Nature Of Life
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.
Encountering life beyond Earth must rank as one of the most momentous out-of-this-world discoveries imaginable. Quite apart from raising questions about the particulars of alien life-forms, such a discovery could pose - or answer - questions on the nature of life itself. This goes far beyond the familiar territory of 'what might aliens look like' to more challenging questions such as what is life in the first place, and what - if anything - separates the animate from the inanimate?
We may tend to think of life as being, at least potentially, universal. That is, in principle there is no particular reason why life should only occur on planet Earth, any more than we should believe that the sky is the limit of the laws of physics or chemistry. It is not just science fiction, but science itself, that speculates on the possibility or probability of extraterrestrial life, a probability that has surely increased with the discovery of extrasolar planets.
We can get a feel for the extent of biological possibility from considering the similarities and differences between life-forms on Earth. Extraterrestrial life, we may assume, may have some general characteristics of the kind shared by life on Earth - such as metabolism, reproduction, predation and so on - but not necessarily the particular characteristics of specific species, such as number of legs, or number of sexes. Overall, one could imagine alien life-forms that are not animals, not plants, nor fungi, bacteria or viruses, but are things at least as different from any of these as those are from each other.
The perception of what is recognised as a life-form must be partly dependent on what varieties of life exist in a particular world, and how different they are from non-living things. An alien society consisting only of animal-like creatures, on encountering Earth, might find it hard to believe that plants - strangely passive, brainless fixtures - were 'alive' in any meaningful sense, and not just part of the scenery, like rocks and waterfalls.
Similarly, we might ourselves find, on encountering some other world, a kind of biota that changed our own perception of life, by filling in some of the spectrum of possibility between life and non-life. Perhaps in some alien world, there is some kind of mineral kingdom, populated by crystalline life-forms, who are accorded living status just as surely as any virus or fungus. Their appearance as intermediate forms between what Earthlings recognise as organic or inorganic would help to bridge between previously distinct categories of animate and inanimate, just as the knowledge of monkeys helps bridge mentally between mice and men.
And imagining a most finely graduated spectrum between animate and inanimate, it might be difficult to recognise 'life' as a definitive, exclusive state after all.
On the one hand, this would accord with a philosophy that there is a degree of 'life' or 'spirit' in all things, whether rocks or clouds, forests or fruit-bats. This perspective accords, indeed, with some human belief systems, although it has not (yet) been assimilated by science.
On the other hand, if there is really no definite separation between the living and the non-living; if the transition between the animate and inanimate is so subtle or spurious that any dividing line is effectively arbitrary, or even illusory, then this removes any special status being accorded to the living - an anti-mystical position that surely accords with scientific tradition.
Perhaps the whole of nature is just one big mechanism after all. Perhaps biology is no less 'mechanical' than physics: the electric pulses in brains and muscles obeying orderly laws just like planets orbiting the sun, or electrons orbiting the nucleus. After all, it is the same physics and chemistry in living bodies as in inanimate matter. Our bodies are made up of elements like calcium and carbon, zinc and iron, which are the same whether in one context viewed as cosmic dust, or in another, lunch.
In other words, we are made of the same stuff as everything else: there is no separate 'vital' substance in our bodies; no special ingredient, not found in the periodic table, that separates the living from the non living matter.
So, just as science has convinced us that the Earth and the rest of the universe are made of the same stuff, and that humans and animals are of the same stock; perhaps we can regard all matter similarly, without the illusion of a privileged status for living matter.
And so, while 'life' may be universal, the perception of life as a special state may conceivably be a limited anthropocentric perspective - perhaps paradoxically a delusion of the more self-aware animate objects.
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Alien Scientist 28: Alien Matters Of Mind
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.
Sentient Earthlings are in the habit of distinguishing the duality of mind and body. But while we are used to our bodies being made of ordinary matter - our tears just like the salty seas, the twinkle in our eyes just recycled starlight - we are less used to thinking of our minds in terms of physics and chemistry. Is a mind indeed something made of matter (like a brain), a real but possibly mysterious presence (like a kind of force or energy); or is the mind itself just an illusion?
If the mind doesn't physically exist, if consciousness is just an illusion, then surely our view of ourselves as sentient beings would be altered. We would find ourselves in a rather mechanistic existence where we were not much more than robots - cogs and circuits, actions and reactions - with the mental machinations just part of the built-in software, that happens to work better if we believe we have minds of our own.
Nevertheless, our perception of consciousness - and the belief that we do have a mind that we can 'make up' or 'change' - is probably too useful to discard altogether. In theory, a philosopher might insist 'I don't have a mind, I am just a bundle of molecules that thinks it thinks'. But in practice it is handy to assume that philosophers do have thinking minds, just as we tend to assume for ourselves. It is rather like all those useful working assumptions - that the Earth is flat, the sea is level, or time flows constantly everywhere - that have proved handy for most practical purposes for most of the history of humanity.
With the assumption that we do have minds, we are accustomed to believing that the mind, if it has any physical presence, is located somewhere inside our bodies - most often, literally inside our heads.
When I look, things appear in front of me, as if my mind is right there behind my eyes, with a great ringside view of the action. My mind's cosy image of being snugly situated inside my head is reinforced by having nice stereo sound coming in directly from left and right via the ears.
This perception makes one feel as if one's mind is like being on the command deck of a starship, surveying and sensing outer space from a comfortable interior environment. The difference is that a starship commander is also able to see the physical contents of this interior world: herself or himself, the rocket-thrust controls and the office furniture. However, our minds cannot see the inside of our own heads. From our mind's point of view, our bodies are 'out there' - out in space with the asteroids, not inside the ship.
Now I can survey the physical landscape out there, and recognise in it things identifiable as 'you' and 'me' and 'my office furniture'; but this is not necessarily a universally occurring state of mind.
Imagine somewhere there is a just-coalesced alien consciousness, newly formed from galactic-mind-matter. It finds itself gazing out across the universe as if through an out-of-focus telescope. At first it perceives only blurry incoherent images, but cannot yet really 'see' or make sense of anything. It doesn't yet know what it is looking at; it only gradually learns to divide up the universe into 'me' and 'not-me'.
What counts as being 'me' is not so much what is physically connected to the rest of me (a circular argument) but is effectively those parts of 'what's out there' that are directly controlled by my thoughts alone. If I can waggle a toe or tentacle just by thinking, then it's mine.
(This basic distinction between what is me and not-me is, of course, one of the first crucial hypotheses we test when first entering the world.)
This still assumes a one-to-one relationship between a mind and a body. But there could be more curious kinds of alien consciousness. Imagine, for example, a planetoid life-form which has a single brain at its core, but multiple personalities... or the reverse, a single intelligence distributed through a series of physical objects. These ideas are perhaps not so alien if we consider them not as analogues of humans as individual creatures, but as analogues of human societies.
An alien mind analogous to a human society might well appear to have a collective will, certain moods and behaviours, acting as a single being. But even if some alien higher level mind existed - made up of our minds - we couldn't be sure if it was aware of us, if it was self-aware, or what it was thinking...
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Alien Scientist 29: Anthropocentric Games
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.
Faced with the prospect that we are 'just' animals, we humans seem to console ourselves with the belief that we are yet superior to other species, usually because of our intelligence. This apparent anthropo-chauvinism means that we still set ourselves above all our terrestrial relatives, and can only imagine alien life-forms as our potential equals in the universe, with whom we might discuss the finer points of particle physics or inter-galactic politics.
Certainly, intelligence is important - to us - and we are especially good at 'human-like' intelligence. But to use intelligence to claim our superiority over all other species would, to an impartial observer, surely seem self-serving - and self-deluding.
It would be as if the Swiss - who are, say, the world's finest watch-makers - were to claim that watch-making was the ultimate indicator of a nation's superiority. Or, as if the Scots claimed that the ultimate indicator was making the finest Scotch whisky (when Scotch is by definition only made in Scotland). Humanity's claims for the supremacy of intelligence - and, in particular, human-like intelligence - would seem just as suspicious, to an impartial observer - such as an alien member of an Inter-Galactic Species Supremacy Claims Committee. It is true that intelligence has certain qualities that seem to indicate the superiority of a species - but only because that superiority is defined from an anthropocentric perspective.
For a start, we tend to think that our intelligence makes us somehow nobler than 'brute animals'. But if an artificial intelligence ever surpassed our own, one can imagine we would simply redefine intelligence as 'human-like' intelligence, somehow nobler than the intelligence of 'brute machines.'
We also value our intelligence because it comes with a sense of self-awareness that makes us feel superior to our pea-brained and no-brained comrades. However, it would be difficult to prove that we have a richer self-awareness than a butterfly (tasting everything it touches with its feet) or a bat (who might dream in sonar). Similarly, we may think that our ability to play space invaders or trace our family tree gives us a superior quality of life to other creatures. But who is to argue with the happiness of the proverbial pig in pigshit, or the satisfaction of a spider catching a fly?
Perhaps a spider gets no satisfaction, as such, from catching a fly, because it simply acts instinctively: it does not have that special feeling of fore-thought, effort and reward that a satisfied human fly-catcher would have. But to judge a spider's quality of life according to what makes us tick is precisely the issue. We cannot say we are superior to spiders because we build world-wide webs, rather than just fly-catching ones. After all, it is only humans' complicated social life, lurid imagination and restless inventiveness that makes building a global web of human communication either desirable or possible. But our crazy brainy preoccupations might be regarded by other animals - or aliens - as self-indulgent party tricks, no more impressive than a peacocks' tail feather display, or a mooning baboon.
Since we can’t easily compare the superiority of being a mooning baboon or human, it might be that we have to judge the success of species by our reproductive success. Like GDP as a measure of a nation's success, this may be crude, and miss some of the subtleties important to particular individuals, but it is one criterion that can be compared across a diversity of cases. So, while other species may care nothing of humanity's successes in the sciences and (so-called) humanities, they may have grudging respect for humans' swarming population, and our colonisation of every corner of the Earth, that would make a rat or cockroach proud. But they don't necessarily respect the means by which we have done it (via big brains, boats, book-keeping, etc.), any more than we respect the reproductive ingenuity of rabbits or carrots. So, if we limit ourselves to reproduction - a game that all living things play - we are reduced to fighting for evidence of success alongside any other species, in a game we won’t necessarily win.
All that said, it may be unnecessarily human-like to even care about other species' points of view. In the end, we are the only species properly capable of grudging respect or chauvinism; or properly conscious of the struggle for life, and our place in it. It is only we who make this a 'game': the other species may be hardly more aware of their participation than the pixels in a space invaders game. So we shouldn't worry that we are somehow cheating the other species by claiming superiority through intelligence; we are only deluding ourselves that we are meaningfully 'winning' a game - that of being successful humans - that no one else is attempting to play. In the end, imagining that others are playing our game is no more than a harmless fantasy for lonely sentients in an otherwise dark, unconscious cosmos.
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