Science fiction has a problem: everyone looks the same. I know there are a few series that have aliens that look unimaginably different from human beings. But those are the exception, not the rule. Most major sci-fi series – Star Wars, Babylon 5, Mass Effect, Star Trek, Farscape, Stargate – have alien species that are hominid.

Consider the above image. Of the twenty visible species, only five are visibly not hominid. That’s right, I count the prawn, xenomorph, predator, Cthulhu and A.L.F. as being hominid. I grant that it’s a bit of a stretch. A more conservative evaluation would be that only two of the twenty are truly hominid. The others, which we’ll call pseudo-hominids, still share the following with humans: bipedal locomotion; bilateral symmetry; a morphology of head, trunk, two arms, and two legs; upright posture; and forward-facing, stereoscopic eyes. I grant they don’t look precisely human, but the similarities are too striking to be swept into the nearest black hole.

Even the most strident supporter of parallel evolution would laugh in the face of anyone who claimed that the most intelligent species on nearly every planet in the universe just happened to evolve the exact same physiology. In series like Star Trek and Mass Effect, where interspecies relationships are possible, this cross-species compatibility is made even more preposterous. We all suspend our scientific disbelief to enjoy the story and the characters. No one believes for a second that the first species we meet in the cosmos is going to look just like us save for some pointy ears and a bowl haircut.

But what if many species in the universe do look like humans? How in Carl Sagan’s cosmos could we explain parallel evolution of that magnitude? Star Trek: The Next Generation, manages to give a scientifically plausible answer to the question of hominid and biologically compatible alien species in an episode entitled “The Chase.” Which lead me to develop the Hominid Panspermia Theory of Science Fiction Aliens.

My guess is that the writers of ST:TNG didn’t intend to plug a genre-spanning plot hole in “The Chase” given that it is, on its own, a pretty goofy episode. But, intentional or not, they gave me enough fuel to come up with a theory that would explain away a lot of sci-fi alien species similarity without resorting to a “that’s just how it is” answer. That said, I’m going to ignore the plot and jump right to the meaty conclusion. At the end of a string of clues, the crew of the Enterprise, along with a begrudging team of Klingons, Cardassians, and Romulans, activate a message from a past species. Star Trek lore is mixed as to what the nature of this species actually is, so I’m going to leverage some creative license and summarize it as I see fit. In short, an ancient hominid species sends a message to all future hominid species. That message is as follows:

Intelligent life evolved in the universe – once. The First Intelligent Species became spacefaring but, unlike the adventures depicted in most science fiction, they found an uninhabited universe. Non-intelligent species were too rudimentary or too far away to be detected. Thus, as both a memorial to themselves and to enliven the universe, the First Intelligent Species seeded the necessary DNA for the eventual evolution of intelligent life in the primordial oceans of every planet that could support life. The First Intelligent Species did not only design the DNA to evolve intelligently, but to parallel their own evolution. An application of the idea that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” on the scale of life itself. Our corner of the universe thereby became the home of Vulcans, Romulans, Cardassians, Humans, Betazoids, and other hominid species which are all decedents of the First Intelligent Species. Therefore, in the eyes of the universe, the many hominid species are closely related despite their disparate home planets.

The Hominid Panspermia Theory, as I call it, explains a lot. Why are most hominid species variations only cosmetic and cultural? Because their genetics are designed to prevent significant deviation from the First Intelligent Species’ mold. How can species interbreed? They share a distant ancestor the way lions and tigers do. How are there so many species at nearly the same level of technological development? Life was seeded on many planets at approximately the same time. These nagging, infuriating questions that take me out of the story can be set aside because I have a plausible scientific explanation. The Hominid Panspermia Theory also titillates my need to believe we are neither the only nor the first intelligent species in the universe.

The Hominid Panspermia Theory also helps explain how there are so many bizarre life-forms throughout the universe without invoking near-deity races like the Q. One could argue that in the time that it took the seeded planets to evolve spacefaring hominid species, many other forms of life, intelligent and otherwise, evolved as well. The result is a near-universe that is largely populated by hominid alien species and a far-universe populated by inconceivably strange alien species. Furthermore, unintentional forward-contamination from the First Intelligent Species would have allowed unguided panspermia to trigger life in unexpected and unanticipated ways. Thus, many alien first contacts with Humanity were with hominid aliens. As exploration continued outward from the seeded galaxies, stranger and more truly alien species were encountered.

Finally, the Hominid Panspermia Theory still requires abiogenesis at some point and allows for multiple occurrences. That is, human beings could theoretically be the First Intelligent Species. Or among some of the only life in the universe. You don’t have to presume humanity is the product of some previous species to believe the Hominid Panspermia Theory is a scientific possibility, nor does Hominid Panspermia Theory fall prey to the “well who seeded the seeders?” reductio.

I apply the Hominid Panspermia Theory theory to pretty much every sci-fi series I encounter that involves multiple alien species that are hominid. For series in which the species are distinctly hominid but not mammalian, such as Mass Effect, I just modify the theory so that the First Intelligent Species was arbitrarily dumping seed genetic code into every splash of primordial soup they could find with no intent to reproduce themselves and/or that their explorations recklessly forward-contaminated the universe. Life with a very similar genetic base still gets scattered about, but less planning leads to much less parallel evolution.

Thanks to the Hominid Panspermia Theory of Science Fiction Aliens, my neurotic need to explain the similarity among spacefaring species is sated and I can go back to enjoying the photon blasts and spaceship explosions.

Bonus Points: Can anyone name all the aliens in the picture? I only managed fourteen out of twenty.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Image of diverse aliens via alien species wiki. Image of ancient hominid via memory alpha.

What accounts for this ten-centrism? My first thought is an old joke. You’ve probably heard it: There are ten 10 kinds of people, those who get binary numbers, and those who don’t. Part of what I like about this joke is that it captures a bit of the arbitrariness of our penchant for counting in tens rather than twos. There is, on the other hand, the non-arbitrariness of how many bony appendages jut out of our pentadactyl palms. But, a list of the “Two things you need to know today” doesn’t seem to do justice to the complexity of modern life. So herewith is my list of the Ten Reasons We Are Seeing An Excess of Lists of Ten Things We Should Know:

1. We don’t have time to read anymore. Knowing we are going to get just ten things to process is comforting in its promise not to drain our attention from facebook and twitter.

2. Ten is close to the approximate size of our working memory. The size of our working memory, the amount of stuff we can recall from lists of things to which we’ve been recently exposed, is about seven (at least for numbers). I seem to recall there being a “plus or minus 2” factor here, in which case the upper limit for most of us mortals is nine items.

3. Since writers can’t make a living any more, we are sliding into an era of bullet point-ism. Anyone who has had a teacher who cares about writing has been warned by this teacher that making lists of bullet points in our essays is no substitute for actual writing in which thoughts are carefully connected to one another with transition sentences. This takes far too much time to work in any feasible business model for writers today (I’m trying not to use the word “nowadays” because the very same teacher who warned me not to write in bullet points also told me that this word was to be avoided). For one thing, they have to compete with bloggers like me who write for basically nothing. Ergo, the era of the articles of “ten things you should know,” which are typically not much more than bullet points.

4. In many cases, there’s more than ten things that you should know, or fewer than ten things that you should know. But, like “decades,” “centuries,” and other arbitrary anchors in the otherwise continuous flux of events and time, the writer doesn’t have to justify ten, because that’s what every other writer is chunking things we should know into.

5. It’s a way for pentadactyl animals to feel superior to unidactyl animals. No doubt if the planet were run by one-fingered/toed creatures, we would live in a George-Bush-like world of black and white. Downside: it takes longer to read “Top Ten” lists than “Top Two” lists. Over evolutionary timescales, this problem could result in unidactylism eventually reigning supreme.

6. At this point in the list, with four more to go, we enter the fat and boring midsection of the list of top ten things you should know about lists of ten things. It’s basically not remembered, so there’s really no point in putting anything here. Ditto for 7, and 8.

9. Because of the well documented recency effect, it’s time to start having content in our list of ten things again. I recall reading an apropos adage in a publication like Business Week that was like a pina colada to my information overloaded brain: “the value added is the information removed.” When it comes to digits, it seems that “the functionality added is the digits removed” – at least if our evolutionary history is any kind of guide. Our Devonian (350 million years ago) ancestors had 6-8 digits. In going down to five, and therefore lists of ten points, we’ve gone from fairly low achieving vertebrates to the spectacular successes of most subsequent animals by reducing our digits to what’s really needed.

10. If we’ve maintained our concentration to this point in the list, we will be rewarded with a bit of humorous fluff that helps bind some of our anxiety about the essential meaninglessness of our lives, and — especially — our time spent on reading yet another list of ten things we should know.

Image: Logo of a home and garden show in Australia. Correction: “didactylism” in #5 changed to unidactylism – thanks to @Matt for pointing out the miscount!

Let’s clear some things up first. Storm has a biological sex. I have no idea what it is, but chances are that Storm is biologically male or female, as those are pretty common ways for people to be. Of course, intersex – that is, ambiguous genitalia and/or blended sexual maturation – is a real, though minor, possibility. And that’d be just fine too.

But you and I don’t know for sure. Storm’s parents feel that our society’s obsession with the need to know what sex a person is biologically (and how that jives with that person’s gender presentation) is an invasion of privacy. Second, gender is, almost by definition, impossible to keep secret. Gender is what we present to the world. Thus, if I can’t tell what gender a person is, that doesn’t mean that person’s gender is secret, it just means I don’t have a mental category for what I’m seeing. Gender presentation can be obvious, ambiguous, over-the-top, cliché or mundane, but it’s never hidden.

So it’s not that Storm doesn’t have a sex or gender that is getting attention, but that Storm’s parents don’t seem eager to make Storm’s gender presentation obvious, nor to confirm that their baby’s gender presentation matches their baby’s biological sex. Ok, so where do aliens come into play?

The discomfort around not knowing Storm’s gender arises in part because gender is how we humanize someone.  In Star Trek: The Next Generation, those who view Data as a mere robot refer to him as “it” until they have an epiphany and recognize Data as a person, at which point Data becomes a “he.” Gendering Data is the way he is acknowledged a subject instead of an object. We do this to babies as well. What’s the first thing we say when a person is born? “It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy!” I love how that sentence is one of the only ones in the English language in which it is ok to refer to a human being as an “it.” Saying “It’s a boy” or “It’s a girl” metaphorically transforms the generic baby in the womb into a specific, individual human in the outside world. Gendering is also the way we include the new human baby as “one of us.” Beyond the exception of newborns, to refer to a person as an “it” carries the connotation of that person being inhuman or alien thing. So when we can’t refer to a baby as he or she, we get anxious.

Those anxieties around gender manifest in our portrayal of aliens. The best examples of genderless monsters are invading evil aliens. The scarier and more killable the alien is supposed to be, the more ungendered the alien species is. Friendly, or at least pitiable species, like E.T., the Prawn (from District 9) and even the lovable monotone elcor in Mass Effect are all ostensibly gendered (i.e. male-ish). Alternatively, the unstoppable world destroyers in films like Independence Day, War of the Worlds, and The Thing? All sexless, genderless Horsealiens of the Apocalypse. There are notable exceptions (the critters in Flight of the Navigator are neuter and good, the xenomorphs in Alien are sexed and evil). These exceptions show how we can sometimes decouple our need for gender certainty from our normative good/evil and human/thing judgments about an individual.

Storm’s humanity isn’t really in question, but not knowing it forces our brain to struggle for a handhold. Given that genderless non-human persons (e.g. A.I.) may one day be a big part of our world, we need to figure out a way to deal with an ungendered individual. Suggestions?

And the fun doesn’t stop with organic entities. Androids, cyborgs, and robots make gender all the stranger. Why is Data fully functional? Isn’t it curious that, of all the characters in Ghost in the Shell the two most heavily cyberized characters, Motoko and Batou, are hyper-feminine and hyper-masculine respectively? And, my favorite: as a robot Bender has no gender, so if Bender bends his gender, what gender does Bender bend?

Sci-fi sex is fun to talk about, of course, but how can all of that help us understand the actual future of humanity? Simply put: we imagine what we hope to see. So the question is: what is it we imagine and hope for? An utter free-for-all of alien-cyborg-A.I. bacchanalia? I don’t think so. Instead, sci-fi is teaching the diversity of our own human sexuality back to us.

Science fiction allows for universes in which we can more easily accept alien forms of gender expression and sexual desire. For example, Ruby Rhod from The Fifth Element is perfectly and outrageously androgynous. In a normal action flick, I suspect Rhod would be a controversial and possibly distracting figure. In science fiction, however, Rhod is just another character caught up in the chaos. Sci-fi lets us explore sexuality free of the cultural and social baggage it carries in the here and now.

A big part of removing this baggage is breaking assumptions by destabilizing what we presume are the foundations of gender and sexuality. For example,  recently the merry old internet produced hipster Mass Effect. One image caught my eye: “I only play as FemShep.” I myself am an avowed Mass Effect fanboy and a vocal defender of playing as a female version of Commander Shepard. Jennifer Hale is just a better voice actor. But I didn’t know that when I started Mass Effect for the first time. I simply thought a female Shepard would be more interesting. Why?

FemShep is a more interesting character because she plays like a he. In his analysis of “FemShep’s Popularity in Mass Effect” James Bishop makes the case clear:

People play as the female version precisely because Commander Shepard is male in all other ways. The lines, the character animations and various other tidbits are male-oriented in a way that makes FemShep more than your stereotypical RPG female protagonist. For one, she wears practical armor. Well, mostly, but it is science fiction after all; we can accept floating visors and the like.

There it is again: sci-fi lets us accept floating visors, so it lets us accept a “male-oriented” female protagonist. The fictional universe provides a buffer for ideas about sex and gender that would normally make us uncomfortable. In fact, FemShep is so engaging because expectations and assumptions of sex and gender are constantly confronted by the character’s actual actions and abilities.

A key measure of social progress is how accepting we are of different permutations of sexuality. Sexuality can get extremely complex. For those who think it’s only male or female, gay or straight, think again. Consider the following possible variables:

Male or Female (biological sex)

Homo or Hetero (sexual preference)

Cis or Trans (gender presentation)

Asexual or Hypersexual (libido level)

Mono or Poly (relationship structure)

Each of these variables is not an either/or situation, but sits on a spectrum. So, if asked to self-identify, the question is not “are you asexual or hypersexual” but, “on a scale of one to ten, one being no sex drive, ten being perpetual, overwhelming sex drive, how would you rate your libido?” And a number in one variable might have no bearing on another. A binary is just not enough – there is a reason the rainbow is representative of the queer community.

Furthermore, some of the categories don’t necessarily refer to one thing. For example, the “homo” or “hetero” category uses the terms in their original root-form: are you attracted to a person similar or different than you? In human context, similar or  different could refer to biological sex, gender presentation, race, religion, age, ability, education, or any number of things. Get into sci-fi, and similar and different may refer to species, organic/inorganic, body shape or any number of infinite variables. We may be attracted to some aspects of a person that are the same as us (e.g. biological sex, education and religion) and prefer some aspects be different (e.g. race and gender presentation). In short, we all have some homosexual and some heterosexual tendencies.

The point is that sci-fi lets us see those variables of attraction and sexuality in action. Even better, sci-fi video games let us experience those variables for ourselves. In the case of my FemShep (pictured, right), I ended up romantic with Liara in ME1 and with Thane in ME2. To say I was attracted to a reptilian male alien assassin is bizarre, I admit. But that’s what makes sci-fi so wonderful. By playing Mass Effect as FemShep, I was able to understand and empathize with a form of sexual attraction I would never personally have.

And that understanding is what science fiction is telling us about the future of sexuality. All of the variables and spectrums and complexities and similarities and differences can be distilled down to one simple equation: consenting persons love one another for different reasons and in different ways. It also puts our own concepts of “different” into perspective. If you’re ok with a human loving a robot, why wouldn’t you be ok with a human loving another human? Sci-fi teaches us that the type of persons involved is irrelevant, so long as they are capable of consent and willingly enter into the relationship.

So the next time you find yourself laughing at Fry’s perpetual struggles to woo Leela or feel confused by whatever your romantic inclinations will be in Mass Effect 3, just remember: that’s science fiction expanding your sexual horizons.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog and on facebook and twitter.

Image of hipster femshep via fuckyeahhipstereffect

A couple days ago, Fox News broke a story with the unbelievable headline, “Exclusive: NASA Scientist Claims Evidence of Alien Life on Meteorite.” The claims are obvious bunk, but if you don’t believe me, here is PZ Myers with an entertaining demolition of the paper and its credibility. Myers’ main argument is that if the paper was real, it would probably have shown up in Nature or Science, been better written and argued, and received more than a blurb on Fox News’ website. Discover’s own Bad Astronomer Phil Plait has a wonderful summary of other opinions, and gives an excellent conclusion of how a real scientist thinks about an astounding announcement in a field that isn’t his own. Myers’ and Plait’s respective posts are exemplary demonstrations of scientific skepticism.

True to form, Plait ends with this interesting little notation:

As a scientist and a skeptic I have to leave some room, no matter how small, for the idea that this might be correct.

Though the announcement that alien bacteria was found on a meteor is almost certainly false, eventually a scientist may in fact discover real evidence of alien life. I grant Myers’ point about a prestigious journal publishing the direct evidence would probably be the first place we would hear about such a discovery.

But then that evidence would be challenged by every reputable scientist breathing. There is a simple rule in science: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I thank Bill Nye for teaching me that little tidbit when I was a youngster. It has done me well. But if the evidence is legit, other scientists will analyze, test, and, ultimately, verify the evidence. There would be proof that Earth wasn’t the only place in the universe where life came to be. Which begs the question: How would the evidence of extraterrestrial life be broken to the public? How would the President react? The pope? How would you react?

How would the real discovery of alien life happen? Let’s do a thought experiment.

My suspicion is that even if the alleged discovery of meteor bacteria had been published in Nature by respected and trusted scientists, it would be met with almost an equal degree of skepticism. Imagine your friend emailing you a link to the Nature article saying that a meteor contained evidence of bacteria from outer space. Your reaction wouldn’t be to sit down, head in hands, overwhelmed by the colossal existential weight of the discovery that Earth is not the sole originator of life. You probably wouldn’t even read the article. Life would carry on as usual. Why? Because you would expect the results to be an error, or a misrepresentation, or contamination of the sample. Except, this time, you would be wrong.

The important point here is that a raised eyebrow and dismissal is the appropriate reaction to the claim that extraterrestrial life has been proven to exist. Because it is among the most extraordinary claims a person can make. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary scrutiny.

If the evidence was legit, it wouldn’t just go away. It would invite and demand further scrutiny. Over the next few years, scientific journals would publish responses and further verifications. Corroborative evidence would begin to emerge, counter-theories and more plausible terrestrial-bound explanations would be published. The counter-theories and explanations would fail to explain the evidence and be rejected. You might see an article in a respected news paper or your favorite science magazine (ahem) that summarizes the current theories and scientific debates surrounding the alleged evidence of extraterrestrial life. Despite all attempts to remain objective, the articles would have an undercurrent of electric excitement.

Yet the veracity of the evidence would remain in question. Most of us would still believe, in the back of our collective mind, that Earth is life’s only home.

And then, one day, maybe a decade after the initial discovery, after years of research and verification and testing and challenges and re-testing and debate and consideration, after more scrutiny and attempts at falsification than any single set of observable phenomena has ever faced, a press conference would be announced. Every major scientific organization from around the globe would be represented in some form. Every major media outlet would be present. World leaders would be either in the audience or preparing to address their respective nations. The original team that published the initial data would be seated on the dais. Their team leader would take her place at the podium, and make the announcement:

“Based on the evidence discovered by our team over a decade ago, thousands of researchers and scientists from around the world have come to a conclusion. Of the hundreds of hypotheses posited to explain the data, only one is supported: We are not alone. The origins of the bacterium on the meteor are extraterrestrial.”

On that day, and that day alone, will anyone truly believe it. There have been three great traumas to the psyche: the Copernican, the Darwinian, and the Freudian. I suspect the remaining trauma is that of the Alien. I cannot begin to guess how humanity will cope with that knowledge.

I admit, I might be fantasizing that any scientific announcement could garner that much attention. Then again, the discovery of alien life isn’t just an issue for science, but for humanity. Whatever the magnitude of the discovery’s final announcement, do not pretend we will believe it when we first hear it. I certainly won’t.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog and on twitter.

Awesome image of our pale blue dot by FlyingSinger via Flickr Creative Commons

Humans and dolphins are inventing a common language together. This is big news!

In all the hoopla over the world ending due to being asteroid-smashed, man becoming immortal thanks to the singularity in 2045, and Watson the trivia-machine winning Jeopardy! the story of budding interspecies communication got under-reported. Denise Herzing and her team with the Wild Dolphin project has begun developing a language to allow humans and dolphins to communicate. If successful, the ability to communicate with dolphins would fundamentally change animal intelligence research, animal rights arguments, and our ability to talk to aliens.

Herzing and her team faced two huge problems when it came to talking to dolphins. The first problem is that the current state of animal language research creates an asymmetrical relationship between humans and the animals with whom they wish to communicate. The second problem is that (save for parrots) animal vocal cords cannot replicate human speech, and visa versa.

Most, if not nearly all, animal language research involves either studying how animals communicate with one another, or teaching them a human language to see if they can communicate with us. There is a problem with both methods–humans don’t learn much (if any) animal language in the process. Think of it this way: how many commands does the smartest dog you’ve met know? Some border collies, like Chaser, can learn upwards of 1000 words. Now how many words do you know in dog? Or parrot? How about gorilla or whale? Know any corvid? I bet you can at least read cuttlefish patterns, right? No? Of course, I’m being facetious, but with a purpose: up to this point, humans have always attempted to understand animal language by teaching animals how to talk to humans. The glaring flaw in this process of teaching animals to use human language is that it is nary impossible to prove the animal is using language, not merely playing a very complex game of repeater.

There is a second, equally interesting problem. Think about your favorite science fiction series populated by aliens (for me, that’s a toss up between Star Trek and Mass Effect). At some point in that series, an alien has introduced itself as having a very un-alien name, like “Grunt.” The reason? “My real name is unpronounceable by humans.” That is rarely an actual problem, because as it always works out the other alien species (why do we refer to aliens as “races” btw?) can pronounce our human words. One of the only films I can think of that doesn’t have this common sci-fi fallacy is District 9. Humans and prawn seem to be able to understand the other’s language in a rudimentary way, despite neither species being even remotely able to reproduce the other’s sounds. Cetaceans pose the same problem: humans cannot whistle, squeak, chortle, or pop the way a beluga or bottle-nose can. Further, the higher squeals of some dolphins and the low rumbles of some whales are beyond the human auditory spectrum. Dolphins can’t say a word in human languages and we certainly can’t do more than parody the spectrum of cetacean sounds.

Which presents quite a question: How in the heck did Herzing figure out a way to both not teach the dolphins an anthropocentric language and ensure the language was speakable by both species?

Herzing’s team developed a communication system with a sprig of technology and a heaping helping of ingenuity:

Herzing created an open-ended framework for communication, using sounds, symbols and props to interact with the dolphins. The goal was to create a shared, primitive language that would allow dolphins and humans to ask for props, such as balls or scarves.

Divers demonstrated the system by pressing keys on a large submerged keyboard. Other humans would throw them the corresponding prop. In addition to being labeled with a symbol, each key was paired with a whistle that dolphins could mimic. A dolphin could ask for a toy either by pushing the key with her nose, or whistling.

Herzing’s study is the first of its kind. No one has tried to establish two-way communication in the wild.

Amazing! Herzing’s method is effectively the same as that used in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The keyboard allows for dolphins to teach humans as much as the humans teach the dolphins. Furthermore, the matched whistle will allow for a more natural integration of communication into the dolphin’s speech. Given the early stages of the project, it seems to have tremendous potential already.

Yet Wired found it necessary to frame Herzing’s breakthrough within the search for extra terrestrial intelligence. As an analogy, I totally understand the reference to aliens. That’s why I used the examples I did above. What is frustrating is that the article seems to see Herzing’s research only as important when in the light of alien communication. No disrespect to NASA (pace the Bad Astronomer), but I’d rather we dumped the funds from our space exploration and focused instead on the oceans of Earth. We’ve got enough aliens and unexplored frontier right here on two-thirds of our pale blue dot.

Thankfully, the flow of information among SETI scientists and marine biologists is two-way. Information theorists like Laurence Doyle (mentioned in the side bar of the Wired article) has used techniques for signal-searching developed with SETI to determine that whales and dolphins use grammar and syntax in their communication. The consequences for genuine communication between a new species is enormous. It would dramatically improve animal intelligence research, as well as make a real case that non-human persons should have limited rights. Success with the dolphins might enable researchers to devise forms of communication with a whole host of other intelligent animals. And, in the far flung future, we might get ourselves a universal translator.

I’m at least hoping for a collar like Dug’s in Up!

Image of impressive dolphins by justthatgoodguyjim via Flickr Creative Commons

The movie, if you haven’t seen it, is about a group of aliens who arrive on a mysterious mother ship hovering above South Africa. Eventually the authorities send an expedition up to find out what’s going on and discover a bunch of starving aliens. They are settled in a South African township called District 9, directly below the mother ship (a squatter camp in the township of Soweto, called Chiawelo, was used for the shooting). Much of the story revolves around the forced relocation of the aliens from District 9 to District 10. Besides being confined to the township and being forcibly relocated, they suffer various other kinds of oppression very reminiscent of the ways blacks were treated during the time of apartheid. Interestingly, in this case, South Africans of all colors are united in their hatred and mistreatment of the aliens, derogatively called “Prawns” (not least because they look like supersized bipedal version of king prawns, a delicious crustacean that is often on the menu at nicer restaurants in South Africa).

In the events of the real District 6 in Cape Town, a thriving community of 60,000 people of various races were forcibly relocated over the course of two decades, starting in the late 1960s. The entire district was then bulldozed for subsequent redevelopment that is stalled to this day. The relocation sparked large protests and great bitterness. The District 6 Museum goes through this history as a reminder of a key historical event during the painful times of apartheid.

Science fiction is rare in South Africa, as Deirdre Byrne wrote in an analysis back in 2004. As District 9 demonstrates, the themes of South African sci-fi are often abstracted versions of the country’s racial tensions and disparities in access to resources. For example, Michael Cope’s book Spiral of Fire, is about a novelist writing a science-fiction story. The story within the story is about an anthropologist who comes to another planet to study a particular sect in the southern area of the planet. Here the anthropologist finds a culture that seems the polar opposite of South Africa in many ways—for example, it is completely egalitarian.

The rarity of science fiction has led me to wonder whether sci-fi is a privileged genre that can only thrive in wealthy countries. Or is it more basic than that? Most people here lack access—or even exposure—to technology, particularly in rural areas. Indeed, they often struggle to rise above the level of subsistence (many of the residents Chiawelo, where District 9 was filmed, were too poor to get transportation and a ticket to see the film). And yet I’m writing this in one of the more remote parts of the country, a small village near Coffee Bay in the Eastern Cape, via an Internet connection through their excellent cellular phone network. The gap between rich and poor in this part of Africa is larger than nearly anywhere else. There is a good technical infrastructure, but outside of the cell network, it is mostly confined to the wealthier areas of the country. The “digital divide” that people in developed countries worry about is therefore significantly worse here. Crossing it may also be part of the solution, of course, and perhaps then sci-fi can become a playground for South Africans to explore their fears and hopes regarding emerging technology as it is elsewhere.

Reference: Science Fiction in South Africa, by Deirdre C. Byrne. PMLA, Vol. 119, No. 3, Special Topic: Science Fiction and Literary Studies: The Next Millennium (May, 2004), pp. 522-525

Photo: Flickr / Big Bambooly

Independence Day has one of my most favorite hero duos of all time: Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum. Brawn and brains, flyboy and nerd, working together to take out the baddies. It all comes down to one flash of insight on behalf of a drunk Goldblum after being chastised by his father. Cliché eureka! moments like Goldblum’s realization that he can give the mothership a “cold” are great until you realize one thing: if Goldblum hadn’t been as smart as he was, the movie would have ended much differently. No one in the film was even close to figuring out how to defeat the aliens. Will Smith was in a distant second place and he had only discovered that they are vulnerable to face punches. The hillbilly who flew his jet fighter into the alien destruct-o-beam doesn’t count, because he needed a force-field-free spaceship for his trick to work. If Jeff Goldblum hadn’t been a super-genius, humanity would have been annihilated.

Every apocalyptic film seems to trade on the idea that there will be some lone super-genius to figure out the problem. In The Day The Earth Stood Still (both versions) Professor Barnhardt manages to convince Klaatu to give humanity a second look. Cleese’s version of the character had a particularly moving “this is our moment” speech. Though it’s eventually the love between a mother and child that triggers Klaatu’s mercy, Barnhardt is the one who opens Klaatu to the possibility. Over and over we see the lone super-genius helping to save the world.

Shouldn’t we want, oh, I don’t know, at least more than one super-genius per global catastrophe? I’d like to think so. And where might we get some more geniuses? you may ask. We make them.

In his essay, “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis”, philosopher David Chalmers notes that there is a very real chance that if machines become self-aware and start improving themselves, we’re going to have a problem (*cough* Skynet *cough* Liquid T-1000 *cough, cough*). One of his potential solutions is to enhance ourselves to keep up:

This might be done genetically, pharmacologically, surgically, or even educationally. It might be done through implantation of new computational mechanisms in the brain, either replacing or extending existing brain mechanisms. Or it might be done simply by embedding the brain in an ever more sophisticated environment, producing an “extended mind” whose capacities far exceed that of an unextended brain.

Does any of that sound familiar? Perhaps a little film called Gattaca may ring some bells? Chalmers is arguing enhancement may be necessary to prevent extinction. Why not extrapolate that logic to other existential risks. Alien invasion? Superhumans would probably put up a better fight. Skynet goes live? An army of hackers with a collective IQ of 200+ and neuro-integrated interfaces would clean that up in a jiffy. But what about our current problems? Although heavy-handed, the message in both versions of The Day the Earth Stood Still is that humanity’s greatest existential threat is itself. War, suffering, poverty, and environmental destruction all seem like problems that would merit allowing our best and brightest to become even better and brighter for the sake of everyone.

A common fear is that the super-intelligent would just step on us normals, creating second-class citizens. Enhancement doesn’t just mean the ability to do complex equations and create new molecular compounds; raw intellectual horsepower is just one among many possibilities. We know that some people have moral problems caused by damage to specific parts of their brain. As neuroscience progresses, there is a very real possibility we’ll be able to improve those specific parts of the moral brain. I don’t mean we’d have a society of lock-step rule followers, but instead people who were genuinely better at being moral than most of us. Can you imagine a world where politicians had improved ethical scruples? Or, to put it simply, where the most brilliant minds were also the most caring?

Which brings me back to Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day. Not only does he come up with the solution, but he selflessly gets in the nuke-strapped UFO with Will Smith to fly into the middle of the enemy mothership. Same for professor Barnhardt, who is as good at moral philosophy as it seems he is math, attempting to show Klaatu the best of our species.

In science fiction, when humanity is faced with existential crises, we turn to great minds attached to great hearts. While we aren’t under alien attack or facing sentient machines, our world has its own share of problems. Human cognitive enhancement might just be the solution from which all other solutions are born; or maybe it brings too many risks of its own.

ID4 Promotional Image via Wikipedia under fair use

The full audio of the event can be streamed or downloaded from here.

We all pitched in to comment on the clip featuring Keanu Reeves learning kung fu through an apparently painful download in The Matrix. The panel consensus: if something like a neuroprosthetic arm for everyone is in the near future, downloading skills a la The Matrix is at the far end of the far future. Reasoning: there are hundreds of thousands of sensory and movement neural channels being activated while learning of kung fu (not even counting vision, which has a million channels per eye). To train the brain via download, we’d either need to excite those channels in just the same way artificially — at roughly normal speed — or figure out how to directly modify the many millions to billions of neurons in the brain that are changed while learning kung fu. Either option presents technical challenges we are far from overcoming.

I picked the Minority Report clip, which featured robotic spiders artfully killing any last doubts you might have had of having privacy in the future. In this clip, some police come to an apartment complex that they are searching for a person in, and release a platoon of nimble robot spiders. These spiders spread out and crawl up people to scan their retinas to identify each person in the building. They sense in the infrared (which is why Tom Cruise hides in a tub of cold water) to detect the warmth of live bodies to be scanned. One of the brilliant aspects of the way it’s shot, as a pan over top the exposed rooms of a floor of the building, is how it shows just how “normalized” the loss of privacy has become in the future, with one couple in the midst of a fight hardly pausing their exchange of blows to let the scan happen before starting to whale at each other again. It’s as natural as selling a row of pumpkins on FarmVille and losing your privacy through Facebook application data misuse.

There’s a few things I love about this segment of the film. The first is that, like most good sci-fi, it simultaneously makes you say “oh wow that’s cool,” while terrifying the crap out of you that this may be the endpoint of all the privacy failures we are being subjected to. Sci-fi as incubator of dreams and place to work out our anxieties about technology.  On a professional level, I also liked how center stage was not a humanoid robot for once, but rather a non-human biologically-inspired robot. I appreciate that story-tellers need robots that people can relate to, but the disconnect between what actually goes on in robotics (where humanoid robotics is a tiny fraction of research effort) and what’s always in the movies is sometimes jarring. Not only did Minority Report show a biologically-inspired robot, it showed them in exactly the context in which they make a lot of sense: solving problems that conventional machines and robots don’t do well, such as high agility motion that needs large amounts of sensory intelligence. Animals are fantastically agile. But agility requires a lot of flexibility in the way a body can move, and with that flexibility comes the great challenge of how to control all that movement for stable motion, and how to acquire enough sensory information to guide the body in a highly nimble way. It’s a fantastically complicated problem, and understanding how it works is precisely what motivates some of us who do research in this area.

I also liked how the makers of the movie went to the trouble to seek out a colleague who studies jumping spiders, Damian Elias at UC Berkeley, to get good sound of the spiders scampering around.

It’s interesting, as Sean Carroll noted for a similar panel he was part of  at Comic Con, how much demand there is for this kind of discussion. With the blogosphere and traditional media saturation of science and tech news, maybe this all portends the dawning of a new age of sci-fi for viewers who will be a lot more sophisticated in the kinds of stories that will get them intrigued.

“Why should I care?” you might ask, gesturing with your cigarette holder and adjusting your pashmina scarf. You should care because either we are going to find aliens on an earth-like planet, like Gliese 581g, or they’ll find us first—and soon. We’ve got time, but not much, before we’ll be looking at some living something from another world.

Well why should aliens have rights? Because, as I’ve argued before, they have personhood. (Quick refresher: personhood is the idea that rights stem from aspects of an entity’s mind. For example, a sentient creature has the right not to suffer, and a self-aware creature has the right to self-determine. It doesn’t matter if the mind is in a robo-power suit, an ethereal protoplasm, distributed among a living swarm, or at the center of a writhing mass of tentacles. If a sentient, rational, and moral mind is present, it has personhood.)

If an alien can suffer, can reason, and can tell right from wrong, then it has rights and responsibilities. But what are they?

A Bill of Rights for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Draft)

I imagine the preamble would be pretty simple and to the point. Our goal is to outline what is protected (intelligent aliens) and what isn’t (probes, asteroids, King Ghidorah). Remember all those episodes of Star Trek where the Prime Directive gets the Enterprise crew in trouble because the non-warp civilization has no idea how to deal with aliens? Think of these rights as the Prime Directive in reverse—a list of rights to protect peaceful space explorers.

Preamble: The People of Earth recognize that any Extraterrestrial Intelligence that is sentient, conscious, autonomous, and recognizes other persons shall be protected by the rights articulated herein. The rights articulated remain in effect while the visiting Extraterrestrial Intelligence is within the scope of direct, immediate human interaction and does not present a clear and present danger to the People of Earth.

The main goal here is to prevent us from accidentally triggering an intergalactic war because we’re too jumpy. As Stephen Hawking pointed out, a superior species should have no trouble wiping us out if they wanted. It’s even more unlikely that aggressive intentions will be hidden or sneaky; even Independence Day only took 24 hours to go from first contact to Armageddon. If aliens don’t come out guns a-blazing, we should probably give them benefit of the doubt. Furthermore, peaceful aliens with personhood (like A.L.F.) would be protected while those without (the Blob), would not be. Pretty good so far! I’m a regular founding father.

On to the articles of rights. What are we trying to do with these articles? Protect the aliens from us. The same way the Bill of Rights is supposed to protect citizens from the government, we should be protecting aliens from humanity. Let’s take a shot.

Article I. The People of Earth shall, in a manner prescribed by national and international law, form a delegation of representatives appropriate to the Extraterrestrial Intelligence. This delegation will be entrusted with ensuring adherence to the values and articles within this document.

Just who, precisely, is going to interact with the aliens is quite important. My hope is that it isn’t a bunch of politicians, but actually some real scientists, philosophers, and the odd polymath (cough Jeff Goldblum cough) to round things out. Alright, now on to making sure we don’t mistreat our guests.

Article II. The People of Earth shall make no act of aggression, pre-emptive or otherwise, towards an Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Article III. The People of Earth shall not unjustly imprison, restrain, or delay the movement of any Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Article IV. The People of Earth shall observe the same standards of ethics—including dignity, autonomy, and informed consent—regarding any potential scientific or medical interaction with the Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Whew! No being mean, no prisoners, and no evil experiments – I just made a whole lot of science fiction stories very boring. In all honesty, my suspension of disbelief is most rattled by films where one of these three articles is violated. I just can’t imagine someone thinking it would be a good idea to imprison, shoot at, or dissect a strange, advanced, alien species. But it’s better safe than sorry.

Back to the task at hand. What we need to round things out is some sort of catch-all article, like the 10th Article of the Bill of Rights, to end this little list. Ah, got it:

Article V. The People of Earth shall act as to best preserve a peaceful relationship with the Extraterrestrial Intelligence while working to preserve mutual cultures and identities.

Boom! There it is folks, a Bill of Rights for our first visitors.  Any loopholes? As always, I’m sure the lovely commenters will provide fine fodder for thought.

In 2004 the European Space Agency probe Mars Express detected the presence of methane in the atmosphere of Mars. Methane can be produced geologically (and Mars is not short on volcanoes), or biologically. (Though media reports of that observation got a bit out of hand.) Either way, this is an important observation and research on the source of this methane is still ongoing.

The existence of methane is ambiguous: Though methane is produced biologically, as I wrote above, it’s also produced geologically (and, in fact, the methane detected on Mars tends to be both localized and emanating from some of the more volcanic regions). It can also be delivered by comets. Given its ubiquity, methane may raise hopes, but in the end turn out to be a poor biomarker. Detecting life elsewhere will require multiple lines of evidence.

That’s where chemicals like hydrogen sulfide and methyl mercaptan (or methanethiol) come in. It was reported recently  that the Curiosity Mars Rover will carry a Tunable Laser Spectrometer—an instrument that can detect gases like hydrogen sulfide and methyl mercaptan. Like methane, these chemicals can be created as metabolic byproducts, but like methane hydrogen sulfide is often associated with geological activity. Methyl mercaptan is more likely to be of a biological origin—the chemical is produced by the kind of microorganisms that live within the human digestive track. To be specific, it’s one of the gases that gives human flatulence and halitosis their (ahem) aromatic qualities.

In summary one of the instruments on the Curiosity rover is, functionally, a Martian breathalyzer. Am I the only person who finds it comical that our grand, age-old quest to determine “Are we alone?” may find resolution with the bacterialogical equivalent of a “BRAAAAAAAAAAAP”?

Until recently the detection methods astronomers used for finding extrasolar planets has had a distinct bias–the planets we’ve found tend to be large, Jupiter-like, and close to their parent stars. Now the Kepler spacecraft has just begun its search for extrasolar Earths and, in a very short time, has already found over 700 candidate stars that could have Earth-sized planets. As followup studies examine these candidate stars further, is it only a matter of time until another “Earth” is detected? Certainly, but we may have to sift through a lot of near-misses first.

New Scientist has a interesting article on whether or not there is a Moore’s Law for Science, using the extrasolar planet hunt as backdrop for examining whether or not previous rates of scientific discovery can be used as predictors of future performance. The article says:

Their calculations suggest there is a 50 per cent chance that the first habitable exo-Earth will be found by May 2011, a 75 per cent chance it will be found by 2020, and a 95 per cent chance it will be found by 2264.

Is there a 75% chance we’ll find an Earth-sized planet by 2020? Almost certainly, given the performance of the Kepler spacecraft and the fact that astronomers have found a planet only 1.5 times larger already. A habitable exo-Earth? Not so fast.

Enter CO2. Earth-sized planets that are situated in the habitable zones, or Goldilocks zones, of their parent stars are too small and too warm to hold onto the two most common gases: hydrogen and helium. Terrestrial planet atmospheres, at least the ones with which we are familiar, are formed initially from the volatile compounds commonly found in, and delivered by, ices from comets: in particular water (H2O), ammonia (NH3), methane (CH4), and carbon dioxide (CO2). At a molecular level, CO2 is, by far, the most massive of those four compounds.

So, like dry ice (also CO2) fog at a Halloween party, CO2 sinks to the bottom of a planet’s atmosphere, displacing other gases that can eventually escape into space. When we look at our neighbors, both Venus and Mars have atmospheres composed mostly of CO2. Venus is so hot that the molecules of most gases easily reach escape velocity. (Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that traps the radiant heat from the sun efficiently, driving the temperature of Venus to approximately 860 degrees Fahrenheit planetwide.) Although Mars is far colder, it has only 37% of Earth’s gravity; it’s so small that the molecules of most gases escape, just as on bigger, hotter Venus.

Earth, too, likely had an atmosphere composed chiefly of CO2 in its youth, and if it still had that atmosphere, it would be too hot for life. Earth was “lucky”, though: in its infancy Earth was struck by a Mars-sized object and stripped of its Venus-like atmosphere. What are the odds that events like this are common throughout the galaxy?

So we’re not necessarily on the brink of finding Caprica, Minbar, Risa or, luckily, Skaro. Even though our detection methods are likely to turn up numerous Earth-sized planets in the very near future, they’re unlikley to be Earth-like. Yes, it’s only a matter of time until we find the first exo-Earth, but given the relative abundances and properties of the most common gases that form terrestrial planet atmospheres, we may run across a lot of extrasolar Venuses first.

Take Titan, for example. Two weeks ago, I wrote that observations of Titan from Cassini have been interpreted by some as possible signs of life, in particular:

Now it turns out that computer simulations based upon Cassini observations, simulations which hint at depletions of various chemical species at Titan’s surface may again hint at the possibility of life on Titan. The results are very preliminary, but fascinating nevertheless.

It’s highly unlikely that we’ll ever be able to make a positive determination if there’s life on Titan based upon Cassini data alone. Cassini is, after all, an orbiter, and its observations of Titan’s surface come from hundreds, even thousands, of kilometers away–limited to those that can be attained during flybys. To ascertain the presence of life, we’ll need what scientists in the field of remote sensing call “ground truth”–we’ll have to wait until we are able to send a followup probe to the surface of Titan. Perhaps we’ll send a probe to Titan similar to Tiny–the Titan rover who has guest-starred in episodes of this season’s Eureka.

Even then it could turn out that, unless NASA’s version of Tiny returns samples to Earth for human examination, the results could remain ambiguous and leave scientists scratching their heads. That is what’s happening with Mars.

Titan hides its secrets beneath a thick photochemical haze, but when it comes to planets that jealously guard their secrets, Mars is the champion. The Great Galactic Ghoul of Mars destroys our spacecraft. Mars throws us curve balls; Mars lies to us. Mars even laughs at the spacecraft it does allow to explore it.

When the twin Viking probes landed on Mars in 1976, each carried three experiments designed to detect microbes in the Martian regolith (though the term “soil” is often used, we can’t really call it soil until we verify the presence of organics). Two of three Viking experiments produced negative results. The Viking Labeled Release (or LR) Experiment was a different matter, and seemed to indicate that there was life in the Martian regolith. Some scientists maintain to this day that the Viking LR experiment yielded a definite “Yes!” on the question of “Does Mars support life?”

In 2004 the European Space Agency probe Mars Express detected the presence of methane in the atmosphere of Mars. Methane can be produced geologically (and Mars is not short on volcanoes), or biologically. (Though media reports of that observation got a bit out of hand.) Either way, this is an important observation and research on the source of this methane is still ongoing.

Recent Earth-based experiments and observations by the Mars Phoenix lander serve only to muddy the waters still further, and reveal how Martian soil could be teeming with life that went undetected by Viking (and, interestingly, in experiments subsequent to the Viking mission, some bacteria in Earth soil also went undetected by Viking).

Size comparison between NASA’s Curiosity Rover and one of the Mars Exploration Rovers.

In November 2011, NASA will launch the Mars Science Laboratory rover, known as Curiosity–its Martian version of Eureka’s Tiny (though not nearly as intimidating). By far the largest Mars rover to date, Curiosity is the size of a Cooper Mini.  After a nine-month cruise, it will arrive at the Red Planet in August 2012. Rest assured that Curiosity will answer many of our existing questions about previous science results, and the potential existence of life on Mars. Rest assured that it will raise more questions.  If Curiosity gets past the Ghoul, it’ll be interesting to see if previous signatures detected by our probes did prove to be life.  It’ll also be interesting to see what tricks Mars has up its sleeve this time.

Below are short excerpts of the guest scientists’ responses, with links to the full versions:

Ken Caldeira: “…If you could directly produce chemical fuel from sunlight and do it affordably, that could really be a game changer…”

Jack Horner: “…If we want to see an animal like a velociraptor, we will be able to create one by genetic engineering. It might even be possible to make something that looks like a T. rex…”

Oliver Sacks: “…We thought that every part of the brain was predetermined genetically, and that was that. Now we know that enormous changes of function are possible…”

Sylvia Earle: “…We’ve explored only about 5 percent of the ocean. For us to have better maps of the moon, Mars, and Jupiter than of our own ocean floor is baffling…”

Rodney Brooks: “…The arguments we have about drugs and sports are minuscule compared with what’s coming, such as ‘What is the definition of human?’ We have the Paralympics now, but we’ll have the Augmented Olympics in the future…”

Debra Fischer: “…Every year since 1995, we have discovered more extrasolar planets than the year before. A parallel thing could happen with extraterrestrial life: After we find one example, we’ll hone our strategies to be smarter and more efficient…”

Tachi Yamada: “…I don’t believe just because you’re poor, you shouldn’t have access to lifesaving technology…”

Neil Turok: “…The science has reached the point where questions that used to be just philosophy could be observationally testable in 10 or 20 years…”

Ian Wilmut: “…We should be able to control degenerative disorders like Parkinson’s and heart disease…”

Sherry Turkle: “…Sometimes a citizenry should not ‘be good.’ You have to leave room for real dissent…”

Brian Greene: “…We may establish that there is not a unique universe—that ours is just one of many in a grand multiverse. That would be one of the most profound revolutions in thinking we have ever sustained…”

Similar to the polar emissions from a neutron star, seen as a pulsar if the observer is within the cone traced out by the polar streams, gamma ray emissions from a GRB are very directional as well as intense. If a GRB went off anywhere within our galaxy, yes the entire galaxy, and Earth was in line with one of the two polar beams, all life on Earth would be extinct within hours. In his book “Death from the Skies,” fellow Discover blogger Phil Plait has a great description of what life on Earth would be like in its last minutes, and my co-author Ges Seger and I examined this phenomena in this short story.  Now before you lie awake at night worrying, here’s a podcast describing why we should be safe from GRBs.

GRBs were first discovered in 1967 by the Cold-War-era Vela satellites–satellites designed to detect the gamma ray pulses emitted by nuclear weapons tests. When the Velas began sensing gamma ray pulses that weren’t coming from Earth, the initial reaction was that those darned Rooskies were testing nukes beyond the moon. Cooler heads prevailed, and GRBs were observed to be occurring isotropically–or equally likely in any direction. Numerous hypotheses were advanced to explain them before science settled on the current models.

Some of these hypotheses are less mainstream, but more fun, than others. One of my favorite “must read” online columns is Gregg Easterbrook’s “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” on ESPN. TMQ is a nerd-friendly analysis of the past week in the NFL, sprinkled with asides on politics, science, and science fiction. Mr. Easterbrook maintains that GRBs may, in fact be muzzle flashes from distant alien doomsday weapons:

Bummer Cosmic Thought: Recently, astronomers glimpsed the most distant gamma-ray burst ever observed–so far away it may have occurred only about a billion years after the universe formed. If gamma-ray bursts are caused by dying super-massive stars, as some cosmologists think, this is the oldest (or youngest, from the perspective of the cosmos) such death so far observed. But as TMQ cautions about gamma-ray bursts, don’t assume they must be natural. Maybe they are the muzzle flashes of doomsday weapons. Maybe what GRB 080913 tells us is that shockingly soon after life began, so did the horror of combat.

This is a fun notion to mull over, but unlikely nevertheless. It’s inconceivable that any civilization could generate artificially the colossal energies associated with GRBs. Moreover, if GRBs were, in fact, telltale signs of distant alien warfare, astronomers would observe energy bursts anisotropically, or coming from a preferred direction in space…

…which is exactly what has been happening recently. In Antarctica, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory is designed to detect the ever-elusive neutrino–subatomic particles emitted from cataclysmic astrophysical phenomena like supernovae and GRBs. Although, for this experiment, they are considered “noise”, IceCube can also detect cosmic rays. Not only has IceCube been detecting an over-abundance of cosmic rays, lately, they have been observed anisotropically–coming from a preferred direction. Now THAT is the kind of observation that would hint at being muzzle flashes from distant alien warfare.

Realistically, the IceCube observations are certainly naturally occurring, and it’s only a matter of time until astronomers identify a source. The observations do raise an interesting point, though. Current SETI research is based largely upon the notion that the first signals we detect from an alien civilization will be radio signals–from an intentional attempt at contact or a byproduct of their internal communications like our radio and television. Weaponry almost certainly would emit far more detectable energy into space, though it may be more narrowly focused.

If we do detect alien intelligence, it may be more likely due to a BANG, not a whisper. Wouldn’t it be wonderfully ironic if the Vela satellites, designed to detect nuclear tests, discovered GRBs, and a detector like IceCube, designed to detect neutrinos from astrophysical events, initiated First Contact?

Once or twice before I’ve made a case for diversity as a hallmark of good science fiction. Regardless of one’s present political affiliations, we like our sci-fi casts to be a plurality of uncanny and unfamiliar characters. The future of our species is, in part, dependent upon how well we get along with other forms of sentient life. So which stellar explorers would earn the stamp of approval from the Rainbow Coalition of the 24½th Century? After weeding out (most) all-human crews (sorry BSG!) and some of the less well-known teams (sorry Bucky O’Hare!), I’ve come up with a top five list. We’ve got genetic mutants, alcoholic robots, holograms, bisexual aliens, snarky A.I., clones, cryonauts, cyborgs, and every variant of human being imaginable. Did I leave anyone out?

5. The Space Shuttle Discovery Crew Mission STS-116 (pictured above)

The only all-human (and real) crew on my list, the STS-116 mission broke all sorts of records, with two African-Americans, two women, two European Space Agency astronauts, and a Jewish-Korean American pilot. Normally I am loath to describe any group of people by their various identities, instead of their individual personalities and achievements, but in light of the homogeneous nature of the earlier space program and much of sci-fi, the fact that a crew this diverse already exists is wonderful. STS-116 is both an excellent sign we’re moving in the right direction and a perfect first entry for this list.

4. Red Dwarf

A British comedy, Red Dwarf is about the misadventures of the remaining crew from the titular mining ship. Due to a radiation leak and an serendipitous bit of stasis, David Lister was awoken after 3 million years to discover he was the last person alive in the whole universe.

The least diverse of the top five, the crew of the Red Dwarf is comprised of David Lister, the last (and most disgusting) human in the universe; Arnold Rimmer, a hologram of his former-self; Kryten, an anal-retentive, know-it-all android; Cat, a humanoid descendent of Lister’s cat, has fangs, narcissism, and style like no one else; and finally, Holly. Sometimes male, sometimes female, always maintaining a stiff-upper lip, Holly is an A.I. that keeps things ostensibly running on the derelict ship. For a show that pretty much just has these five cast members, Red Dwarf makes the most of its motley crew.

3. Star Trek

The various and varied crews of the USS Enterprise and its sister ships in Star Fleet are too numerous to list, but the first crew set a new precedent for television. Kirk’s crew, first introduced to Americans in 1966, had Uhura, Sulu, and Checkov on the main bridge, with Spock, an alien, as the first officer. Sadly, the original Star Trek is still a high-water mark for diversity on television, matched only by its successors, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space 9 and Voyager.

Complementing the already ethnically diverse humans, notable crew members from each series include: Worf, the first Klingon in Star Fleet; Data, the first sentient android; Odo, a changeling; and Seven of Nine, a de-assimilated borg. In addition to these prominent non-humans, many members of each crew are at least partially cybernetic (Picard has an artificial heart, Jordi’s trademark Chevy-grill visor), and, like Spock, many are half-human, half-alien. Roddenberry’s commitment to unique cultures for each alien, as well as his preservation of many human ethnic traditions deep into the future, created a universe that set the gold standard for how a human future in space might be.

2. Futurama

Futurama is that perfect blend of homage, pastiche, and parody. Gene Roddenberry’s future was a believable utopia; Matt Groening and David X. Cohen’s future is a believable madhouse. The Planet Express crew does the Star Trek: Next Generation Crew a step better, having not just a robot (Bender) and an alien (Zoidberg), but also a cryonaut (Fry), a mutant (Leela), and a clone (Hubert Farnsworth). Throw in the recurring cast members of Lt. Kif Kroker, Lrrrr of Omicron Persei 8, Robot Nixon, celebrity heads in jars, and Nibbler and, well, it’s hard to get more diverse than that.

But they do. This season, the entire crew switched bodies and Bender bent his sexuality (again). That nearly every member of Planet Express has made out with or been to the “Lovenaisium” with another species, a robot, and/or changed genders is, I believe, a unique achievement.

1. Mass Effect

Mass Effect may be the most important new sci-fi story out there. Cliff Bleszinski calls it the “Star Wars for the next generation,” and I’m inclined to agree. In the universe of Mass Effect, humans have only recently become an interstellar species. Not only are we relative newcomers to the intergalactic community, we don’t even have a seat on the Council, which governs the dozens of races present in Mass Effect‘s universe. Unlike Red Dwarf, Star Trek, and Futurama, Mass Effect’s entire narrative puts humans in the position of the minority. By the end of Mass Effect 2, Commander Shepard’s crew on the Normandy consists of fifteen characters, the majority of which are non-human.

If you play Mass Effect as a female Shepard (as you should), your crew by the last mission has eight female members and seven male members. Among the humans, one is a clone (Miranda), one is telekinetic (Jack), one is a cyborg (Shepard), and the pilot (Joker) is crippled by a disease. All the non-human crew mates (there are eight) are either a unique alien race (among nineteen options) or are synthetic life, including EDI (the ship A.I.) and Legion, a member of the Geth (a collective robotic species). Among the various species, skin color and body type are only the beginnings of their differences. Sexuality, gender representation, gender hierarchy, immuno-response, diet, life-span, intelligence, thought patterns, aggression, empathy, and genetic variety all differ from species to species. These fundamental biological differences are reflected in the total culture of each species as well as within the individuals on the crew of the Normandy, creating a staggering potpourri of characters that populate the universe of Mass Effect.

As with all video games, the sense of immersion is even more intense than on a television series, which in turn makes the feeling of unity and loyalty to the crew unparalleled. The resulting effect is that you, the human, come to implicitly trust, care for, and even mourn beings that repulsed, angered, or horrified you. At the beginning of Mass Effect, you are a member of humanity. By the end of the second game, you are a citizen and hero of Council space, and see yourself linked to not merely your crew members, but the species and cultures they represent.

Like Futurama, Mass Effect is a work in progress. As the series both continue, expect more new and strange permutations to push the boundaries of whom we consider “one of us.”

Image of STS-116 crew via Wikipedia, Red Dwarf crew via Topless Robot, Futurama crew via Wired, and Mass Effect via the Mass Effect Wiki and my Photoshop skillz.

These artificial intelligences, not likely to have had the “nostalgia module” installed, may quickly flee the home planet like a teenager trying to pretend it isn’t related to its parents. If nothing else, they will likely need to do this to find further resources such as materials and energy. Where would they want to go? Shostak speculates they may go to places where large amounts of energy can be obtained, such as near large stars or black holes.

Stephen Hawking imagines aliens covering stars with mirrors
to generate enough power for worm holes

Stephen Hawking has suggested one reason to go to high-energy regions would be to make worm holes through space-time to travel vast distances quickly. These areas are not hospitable to life as we know it, and so are not currently the target of SETI’s telescopes searching for signals of such life.

In the same article, Shostak also makes the argument that since biological intelligence is a short stepping stone to artificial intelligence, “the majority of the intelligence in the universe could well be artificial intelligence.” There’s clearly a missing premise here, which is that biological intelligence means an intelligence that invents radio or TV, or more broadly speaking, technology. But this is clearly false. From cuttlefish to corvids, the scientific evidence for high levels of intelligence in non-human animals is rapidly accumulating. At the moment, it’s not even clear that the invention of technology will be good for us as a species: an analysis of nine planetary boundaries within which human life can flourish shows that we are now transgressing three of these. Given that life has flourished for billions of years, for this to happen with just a few thousand years of agriculture and a few hundred years of industrialization shows that the step from advanced technology to artificially intelligent descendants roaming the galaxies is not one to be taken for granted.

In any event, given we can’t look everywhere, should thoughts about AI inform where we look? I don’t think so. First, based on our very limited experience, only Homo sapiens, just one of tens of millions of species of life on Earth, have developed technology. Were it not for our species, it’s unclear whether technology would ever have come about on Earth. Second, it’s far from obvious that our species will have the maturity to survive the power of our achievements for more than a blink of evolutionary time–the development of AI that leaves this planet, or at the very least serious efforts toward space colonies, is probably our best hope for long term survival–but we may not get there. Perhaps the situation is no different for other forms of life that have developed technology. They will have all emerged from a Darwinian primordial soup, a soup where certain vicious and short-sighted traits will have been essential to survival. Third, it would probably be both more successful and more scientifically useful to adjust our search strategy to improve the chances for finding extraterrestrial life, rather than intelligence.

My personal favorite for such a tweak to our search strategy is to look for places that have the hallmarks of increasing entropy. All forms of life take in energy that has some degree of entropy and re-emits it with increased entropy, such as heat. For our biosphere, we absorb sunlight and reflect heat, which appears as a “red edge” in the spectrum of reflected energy. The same, incidentally, seems likely to be true of artificial intelligence: it will require energy such as electric power, which will be radiated at higher entropy, such as the heat of integrated circuits. Sean Carroll has written an excellent explanation of the red edge in one of his postings over at Cosmic Variance. If we build better red edge detectors, we will both improve our chances of finding the much more common non-technologically savvy forms of life in the universe, and as an added side benefit, we might just detect the much rarer roaming AIs out there — although, as Hawking suggests, we may want to avoid hailing them down for coffee.

Image from Stephen Hawking’s Universe, “Fear the Aliens”

Despite years of searching, Klingons and Asgard, Daleks and Vorlons are still firmly entrenched within the realm of science fiction — for not only do we know of no intelligent life in our galaxy outside of that on Earth, we know of no life period. Finding even a microbe would be huge. (The find would be huge, the microbe would be small — hence the “micro” portion of the word. We have no expectation of finding gargantuan Martian astronaut-sucking amoebae, as in Angry Red Planet.)

While we may have to look to the stars for signs of intelligence, the search for life is a somewhat different — though obviously related — matter and we  shouldn’t forget that there are many potential abodes of life within our own Solar System. Surprisingly many are in the outer solar system, and receive only a faint glimmer of Sol’s life-giving radiation. Given the diversity of extremophile organisms discovered in the depths of Earth’s oceans (like the tube worms at right) — as well as  other places that would initially seem counter-intuitive — organisms that live their entire lives never seeing a single photon from the Sun, it appears that the presence of liquid water is much more of a requirement for life than is sunlight.

Planetary scientists now have strong evidence to support the presence of oceans of liquid water under the icy crusts of outer Solar System moons like Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede orbiting Jupiter, as well as Saturn’s Titan. For large Jovian moons, subsurface oceans seen to be the rule, rather than the exception.

Cross Section of Titan. Image credit: NASA

Titan, in particular, raises eyebrows. The moon is slightly larger than Mercury, and the instant Gerard Kuiper confirmed that this moon had a methane-rich atmosphere back in 1944, Titan became a leading candidate for harboring life within the Solar System.

In his 1944 paper, Kuiper wrote that the spectrometry from his telescopic observations suggested that Titan was orange (8th paragraph). So there was an expectation of “oranginess” when the twin Voyager spacecraft flew past in 1981. The observations of Voyager allowed scientists to determine 1) the depth of Titan’s atmosphere; and related to that 2) Titan was slightly smaller than Ganymede, because Titan’s atmospheric depth had been underestimated; and 3) a temperature/pressure profile for Titan’s atmosphere.

Scientists determined that the temperature at the surface of Titan was a chilly 94 Kelvins (about -280 Fahrenheit). Well, so much for life on Titan. Life is based upon chemical processes and, in general, chemical processes proceed faster at higher temperatures. Not only was 94 Kelvins too low a temperature for life-sustaining processes as we know them, most chemicals (chiefly water) important to life as we know it are frozen at that temperature.

So under the category of “potential abodes of life,” Titan was relegated to the category of “also ran.” Titan was referred to as similar to a “pre-biotic” (pre-life) Earth, or like the “Early Earth in a deep freeze.” Even bolder claims were made that Titan may have its day as a habitable abode in a few billion years when our Sun swells to become a red giant.

Enter Cassini/Huygens. Since arriving at the Saturn system in July 2004, the Cassini and Huygens spacecraft have been imaging, sniffing, and landing on Titan, rewriting the textbook on this moon in the process (and I did a podcast on this very subject for “365 Days of Astronomy” last November 12th). In fact, this past  June 21st, Cassini had its closest flyby of the moon Titan that it will have during the entire mission.

Now it turns out that computer simulations based upon Cassini observations, simulations which hint at depletions of various chemical species at Titan’s surface may again hint at the possibility of life on Titan. The results are very preliminary, but fascinating nevertheless.

In the past six years we’ve still learned enough about Titan not to rule out the presence of life. In addition to that subsurface ocean previously mentioned, there appears to be cryovolcanism on Titan’s surface – in one instance Cassini may have imaged an actual eruption. If Titan’s surface rocks are composed of ice, and magma is melted rock, and hydrocarbons like ethane and methane are common on Titan, then it’s not too big of a stretch to imagine that magma chambers in Titan’s subsurface could be life-sustaining cauldrons of hydrocarbon-laced water. Microbes surviving in a magma chamber on a moon of Saturn is a concept that would have been the purview of science fiction only a few years ago, now it’s a real consideration.

Life on Titan? I guarantee that we’ve not heard the last on this subject.

The exhibit is broken down into four areas:

ALIEN FICTION

The alien fiction section was small, and had a collection of movie props, videos, and sections devoted to Roswell and the Alien Autopsy video.  Interestingly the content in the Roswell section was donated by the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, NM, so I felt it was slightly skewed in favor of the object that crashed at Roswell being of an extraterrestrial nature, while the content provided for the Alien Autopsy video practically screamed “THIS WAS A HOAX!”

ALIEN SCIENCE

What might aliens look like?  Where might we find them? Are alien life forms most likely to be (from our viewpoint) extremophiles?  While astronomers and planetary scientists often make the claim that “we study other worlds to learn more about Earth,” this section emphasizes the reverse:  What have we learned about our planet, its life, and the Solar System to further help us find life “out there.”  There are exhibits that describe potential abodes of life in the Solar System, extremophile life, even bizarre Earth creatures that simply look alien. Of the four sections, this is the least speculative, most grounded in science. Later one of the docents told me that, surprisingly, this section is overwhelmingly the most popular with kids.

ALIEN WORLDS

To me this section was, by far, the most interesting of the exhibit. This section details the hypothetical worlds Aurelia and Blue Moon: the worlds and their ecosystems.  Aurelia is a hypothetical planet that is tidally locked to a red dwarf; Blue Moon is an Earth-sized moon orbiting a jovian gas giant planet. These planets and their creatures were designed by scientists who study extremophile life forms, planetary scientists, and scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations. In fact, the creatures inhabiting both of these worlds are very reminiscent of those from Wayne Barlowe’s Expedition. It was also in this section that I was “adopted” by a very nice docent named Ann who personally showed me the aspects of various exhibits that she found most interesting.

Thor! Buddy! Tell me if you’ve heard this one. An Asgard walks into a bar, and the bartender says, “Why the long face?”

ALIEN COMMUNICATION

What is the like likelihood of there being other civilizations out there? If they are out there, how would we communicate? That’s the theme in the final section of the exhibit.

Hey I recognize that! The Drake Equation.

After examining all the bizarre earthly “alien” life forms in “ALIEN SCIENCE”, and after being transported to both Aurelia and Blue Moon in “ALIEN WORLDS,” I found this last section relatively anticlimatic, and probably the least interesting of the four sections. There was, however, a fun little alien gift shop immediately beyond. I like little shops.

Yes, I realize that I should have visited/posted before San Diego Comic-Con, when so many more people — the kind who are likely to enjoy this kind of thing — could have stopped in. Still, the San Diego Air and Space Museum will be hosting the Science of Aliens from now until the end of the year.

The con’s website bills it as:

A “con” unlike any you’ve ever attended. Scientists, celebrities and sci-fi writers in a mind-meld of entertainment and scientific exploration. Panels, presentations, and face-time with some of your favorite researchers. If you only attend one ‘con’ this year, SETIcon should be it!

While the guest list includes myself as well as my good buddy and fellow Discover blogger Phil Plait, aka the Bad Astronomer, we are mere bugs in comparison to some of the heavy hitters who will be in attendance–names in the field such as Frank Drake, Seth Shostak, Jill Tarter, and others (including non-planet hunting physicist/Discover blogger Sean Carroll).

SETICon is being held at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara August 13th through the 15th.

[MINOR SPOILER ALERT]

Wow.  Bleak.  Maybe I shouldn’t have watched all five episodes in one afternoon, but I haven’t been this depressed since Dark Knight.  What happened to the randy, swashbuckling Captain Jack that we loved?

On the SciNoFi front though, Torchwood gives us the opportunity to revisit the topic of eyeball spy cameras, last seen in an episode of Dollhouse this spring.  As Stephen noted in a post at that time, scientists have been working on plugging directly into the brain (in cats at least) to locate and interpret visual processing activity.

Interestingly, the Torchwood contact lenses appeared to be a much more basic technology: essentially small video cameras that could transmit images back to a laptop and also display text messages to the wearer.

Given how far we have to go in understanding the brain, a contact lens camera is probably a more straightforward and only marginally more detectable solution for this kind of surveillance.  Eyeball sized cameras are already commercially available.

My heroes are in a first-contact situation, meeting an alien face-to-face for the first time. How could my heroes and the alien learn to communicate with each other?
Both knowingly and unwittingly, humans have been broadcasting their presence to the Universe since the 1920s—when coherent transmissions in the radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum became widespread. Our radio and television broadcasts do not stop at the edge of Earth’s atmosphere; rather they propagate into space at the speed of light. While these signals attenuate with distance, they are detectable nevertheless: NASA still regularly communicates with the twin Voyager spacecraft despite the fact that they are over 100 times further from the Sun than Earth and that each of which transmit data to Earth with less power than a common household light bulb. This means that an alien civilization as far away as 58 light-years could potentially be trying to make sense of “Lucy, you’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do!” (There are 105 G-type stars—ones like our own lovable Sol—within this I Love Lucy-sphere.)

Thirty-five years ago humans make the first and only significant attempt to say “Hello” to extraterrestrial civilizations. On November 16, 1974 the newly remodeled Arecibo radio telescope beamed a message into space. The signal was beamed into space only once, and it was aimed in the direction of the globular cluster M13, a collection of hundreds of thousands of stars 25,000 light-years away in the constellation Hercules. Because of proper motion, M13 will no longer be in position to receive that message 25,000 years from now, but another star system might.

The Arecibo message was beamed into space less because it was a legitimate attempt to make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, and more as a test of new capabilities of the telescope. The message was 1679 bits of binary information. Presumably any alien species capable of telecommunication would figure out that 1679 is the product of 73 and 23, both of which are prime numbers, hinting at the intended interpretation of the broadcast: that it is actually is a matrix with 73 rows and 23 columns. One assumption behind the message is that any alien race receiving it will orient the matrix vertically instead of horizontally (23 by 73), which produces gibberish—or at least that they’ll examine both representations before giving up on it.

Contained in the Arecibo transmission are representations of the numbers one through ten in binary; the atomic numbers of the elements that form organic compounds which, in turn, form human beings; formulae of a few basic organic compounds; and graphical representations of a human, the Solar System, and the Arecibo antenna. All of the depictions were crude, at best. Even the binary digits one through ten were represented in such a way as to be non-obvious even to human beings familiar with binary. If an alien race actually receives that transmission, it will be easy to determine that it is of intelligent origin (omitting the obligatory gag about Earth not having intelligent life), but challenging to determine the actual intent of the message. The Arecibo message was unique: Although our radio and TV broadcasts “leak” into space, nobody is actively broadcasting signals with the idea of contacting extraterrestrial civilizations. Today we simply listen.

What if somebody responded?
What if one day aliens received a signal that we had transmitted into space, intentionally or otherwise? What if they decided to invite themselves over for a visit? What if they decided not to land on the front lawn of the White House, instead landing on the front lawn of your house? Assuming that the aliens did not know your language, how would you attempt communication? Should you attempt communication?

In movies and on television first contact scenarios often seem so… easy. That’s usually, at least in part, because the heroes in science fiction stories have access to some device that functions as a universal translator—that translates between most known (and previously unknown) languages. Even if the translator is of biological origin like a fish (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) or a colony of bacteria (Farscape), it’s still a device—a plot device that we generally accept in sci-fi like FTL travel or artificial gravity. It makes sense from a storytelling standpoint.

In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard must learn to communicate with the captain of an alien vessel who speaks entirely in cultural references. While this can be compelling for a lone episode, in series like Star Trek or Stargate it would be dramatically unfulfilling if we had to wait, week after week, while our heroes attempt to communicate with yet another new alien race.

It’s an obvious understatement to say that language is complex—what is startling is how difficult it is to convey even the most basic of concepts to somebody with no known reference points. Everything that you say is fraught with assumptions. Imagine that you walk up to a random stranger on a street corner and say, “Hello. How are you?” What assumption could lie behind such an innocuous greeting? Perhaps it’s more obvious if we rephrase the question. If you walked up to the very same person and said, “Guten Tag. Wie geht’s?” You have made the obvious assumption that the person speaks German which may or may not be a good one. The assumption that other humans with whom we’d like to communicate have shared experiences is a good one. With an alien race, it is not an assumption you can make.

It gets worse. Most language has cultural colloquialisms that make accurate translation even more difficult. Even though a universal translator might function well on a word-by-word basis, it’s still doubtful that meaningful dialogue between humans and alien races would rapidly ensue when we consider even the most common cultural influences upon language. For example if somebody who spoke German as a native language spoke into a universal translator and said, “Er is sehr blau” in reference to your mutual friend, you may think that your friend is feeling depressed—the literal translation is “He is very blue.” You wouldn’t figure out, other than perhaps by visual observation, that your mutual friend is drunk, which was the actual implication of the statement in German. “Blue” means depressed in English, inebriated in German, and in neither case would the connotation of that sentence be, “He is reflecting short-wavelength visible light.”

When the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft were launched in 1972 and 1973, they carried human greetings to any alien civilization who may find the craft one day. Each craft carries a plaque that has diagrams of, among other things, a human male and female, the Solar System, and the spacecraft’s origin. The man has his hand raised in what is supposed to be a friendly gesture, but even this has a cultural bias. It could equally be interpreted as hostile: “You want a piece of this? Come to my planet and I’m going to slap you senseless.” In fact, one argument against affixing the plaques to the Pioneer spacecraft was that it sends the very clear message, “Here are the directions to the restaurant, and here’s what’s on the menu.”

Which brings us back to the spacecraft sitting in your front yard, and the alien beings who have exited the craft and who are now standing before you. If Earth’s history can be used as a template, first-contact scenarios between cultures possessing drastically different levels of technology often end badly for those in the low-tech population. It would, however, probably be reasonable to assume that if the aliens wanted you for dinner, you’d already be in their oven. Or on their plate. Or in their equivalent of a stomach. If they wanted you as slave labor, given the proximity, it’s probably too late for you on that score as well. Nevertheless, the first goal in any such encounter should be, first and foremost, your survival. It might be a good assumption that the aliens are on a heightened state of alert—that they are wary of what you may do simply out of a fear response. Waving “Hello” like the man on the Pioneer plaque is perhaps not a wise move. Slowly turning your hands so that your open palms face the aliens might be a better choice. Presumably if the aliens can get all the way to Earth from their home, they are intelligent enough to look beyond any cultural insult this gesture may cause, and recognize that what you mean is that you are not carrying a weapon. Making all motions and gestures slow and deliberate would not be a bad idea.

If the aliens did, in fact, wish to achieve any meaningful dialogue, the goal in any interplanetary communications, then, would be to find a common ground with a minimum of assumptions and colloquialisms. Whether or not this is an attainable goal is another question. If the situation were reversed, and it was human beings who had just landed at an alien being’s home, presumably we would have done our homework first—doing either remote or in situ observations to smooth over a first-contact scenario. They may have also have experience, having done this once or twice before. So the best communication strategy might simply be to let the culture with the highest level of technology take the lead while the low-tech participants concentrate on staying alive. In the end, it’s probably best to let the alien initiate communication, even if it is simply, “Take me to your leader.”

What is the most likely form an alien would take?
Life’s architecture is difficult to predict because it depends on many factors involving the interaction of the environment and life through evolution and natural selection. We can, however, make some generalizations based on the vast number of morphological forms that life takes on earth.

Life on earth ranges from microscopic spheres and rods to macroscopic creatures exhibiting wide variations in their morphologies (e.g., spiders to humans). Nevertheless, nearly all life (everything except sponges) exhibits symmetry—either bilateral or radial symmetry. In bilateral symmetry (also called plane symmetry), only one plane, called the sagittal plane, will divide an organism into roughly mirror image halves. An organism with radial symmetry has no left or right sides, only a top and a bottom (dorsal and ventral surface). An alien life form, therefore, would most likely be symmetrical. The type of symmetry would be influenced on the environment in which it lived. From our basic knowledge of survival of macroscopic organisms whether they be aquatic or terrestrial it seems that bilateral symmetry dominates.

The possession of other specific attributes (e.g., ability to hear, see, smell, move, etc.) depends on the environment and competition for resources for survival. For example, when we think of “seeing,” we think of “eyes” first. But if we think of the function (sensing specific wavelengths of light) rather than the specific physical attribute, it opens a plethora of ways in which we can imagine “seeing,” ranging from the photosensors for phototaxis in bacteria to the compound eyes of some insects. The uses to which life puts its sensory perception mechanism of light ranges from finding food to escaping from predators. It would seem logical that an alien would have some type of light sensory perception mechanism if it lived on the surface of a planet. What the physical make-up and appearance of that light sensory perception mechanism would be is difficult to define. The perception of light is not just limited to the type of perception just described, that is, “seeing”, but also to perception by photopigments (e.g., chlorophylls) used for capturing light energy to produce cellular energy for use by the organism (i.e., photosynthesis).

Following this line of logic, the form that an alien would take is the form that makes it survive and reproduce best in its environment. If I had to make a guess it would be that it would have symmetry (probably bilateral symmetry), capable of light perception, and probably motile (increases chances of finding nutrients and escaping predators). To say anything more specific would require knowing the planetary environment in which it lived.

What about the form of an intelligent alien, specifically? Would it even need to have a solid form?
First, what is intelligence? As defined by H. J. Jerison, intelligence is the behavioral consequence of the total neural-information processing capacity in representative adults of a species, adjusted for the capacity to control routine bodily functions. This can be related to encephalization. Encephalization is defined as the amount of brain mass exceeding that related to an animal’s total body mass. Quantifying encephalization has been argued to be directly related to that animal’s level of intelligence. Brain-to-body mass ratio (also known as the encephalization quotient, or EQ) is a rough estimate of the possible intelligence of an organism, and is defined as the ratio of the actual brain mass to the expected brain mass of a typical organism that size. On average, the larger an organism is, the more brain mass is required for basic survival tasks, such as breathing and thermoregulation. Therefore, the larger the brain relative to the body, the more brain mass should be available for more complex cognitive tasks. It has been shown that dolphins, which have the highest brain-to-body mass ratio of all cetaceans, are able to communicate with each other and are thought to be intelligent to some degree. Humans have a higher brain-to-body mass ratio than dolphins.

To this day there is no broadly definition of “life”. The Darwinian, or genetic, definition of life is the most accepted today. It holds that life is self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing evolution by natural selection. Applying this definition to life suggests that it would be a solid form.

Moderator Faith Salie introduced the panelists: Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University; Michael Hogan, also known as Colonel Saul Tigh; Hod Lipson, director of the Computational Synthesis group at Cornell University; Mary McDonnell, a.k.a. President Laura Roslin; and Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading in England.

Salie asked each panelist to define what a cyborg is. Everyone had different answers: Warwick said it’s something that is part human, Lipson said it’s a moving target or a physical device that takes on biological life, and Bostrom said it’s the essence of human intelligence.

When asked about what research the stars had to do prior to playing their role, Hogan said researching how to be a robot for the part was more about understanding mental illness. “I had irritable shell shock, chronic pain, and was not well–off balance. Lots of people in the world are in chronic pain,” he said.

McDonnell weighed in after experiencing the world of cybernetics for herself through her role in the show: “If we can find a way to use parts of the brain that are dormant, more creative, and less fearful—I would like to be more efficient, more active..”

Warwick, whose research, as well as Lipson’s, served as inspiration for the show, explained how he was creating a biological brain in a petri dish. By applying an external voltage to the dish, he was able to create brain activity. Lipson had a different approach: He tried to breed the robots instead of designing them from scratch. When he showed a short video clip of it, Salie remarked, “It looks like a drunk starfish.”

Warwick said the robots developed in the military right now are designed to destroy humans. “We are now pushing things to act quite negatively towards humans,” he says.

The thought of upgrading our brain is appealing for a number of reasons—or, at least, Warwick thought so, since he had a chip surgically implanted in his brain to link him directly to the Internet. One thing he experienced was the touch of a robot picking up something. “It felt like a hand applying force,” he said. He even had a special necklace made for his wife that was hooked up to his brain, and it lit up to show his mood.

And Bostrom left us with something interesting to chew on: When robot AI reaches the complexity of the human brain, robots should be treated the same as humans, whether or they are based carbon or silicon atoms.

Image: Flickr /Courtesy of the World Science Festival

Meta-conspiracy: Does the government want you to believe in UFO’s? [via Futurismic]

Real-life Terminator robots here, here and here.  [via Technovelgy]

Video of low-altitude flight over the lunar surface by the Japanese KAGUYA explorer [via Pink Tentacle]

Recently released scenes of the upcoming remake of V combine two of our favorite things: creepy aliens and Party of Five! [via thrfeed]

Would/will we recognize an alien transmission right away? Is there a chance we could miss such a transmission, or they ours?

We will recognize the sorts of electromagnetic signals for which we have built good matched filters: nanosecond optical laser pulses, narrowband radio continuous wave or pulsed signals. If signals are of some other type (e.g., a modulation scheme with higher dimensionality, or something other than electromagnetic waves) then we will not detect them, except by serendipity as we build new instruments to study our universe in different ways, or by using increasing computational power to look for more complex types of electromagnetic signals.

If signals are transmitted via a technology that we haven’t yet invented, we will miss them until we manage to invent the appropriate technology (remember that we are a very young technology (~100 years) in a very old galaxy (~10 billion years). I suspect we have a lot more to learn.

We could also miss signals in time. If technological civilizations and their signals are short lived, we might be searching for exactly the right thing, but long after the signals have come and gone. Likewise, if we do not manage to continue as a technological civilization for a very long time, then any transmission project that we might decide to embark on would have little likelihood of being detected by anyone else.

I continually tell groups containing grad students and post-docs (who touch more data than the rest of us) to resist the temptation to edit out anomalies until they have first satisfied themselves that it isn’t a real effect, perhaps the artifact of someone else’s astroengineering or signaling project—but in truth, it’s very hard to train someone to be a Jocelyn Bell [who discovered pulsars as a post-doc].

There’s no way to estimate what we might be missing.

Will we understand alien communication, and vice versa?

People argue that mathematics is essential for a technology that can create and operate some sort of transmitter. Therefore a language based on mathematics should be mutually understandable, and in 1960 Hans Feudenthal created such a language he called Lincos (for “lingua cosmica”). Another suggestion is a language based on the period table of elements that are (we think) the same throughout the universe; this idea has been pursued by Carl L. Devito. If the signal is electromagnetic, the wavelength of the transmitted signal serves as a common unit of measurement between sender and receiver; you might describe yourself as being N wavelengths tall. Of course it is hard for us to think in any way except the way we do—it might be that another intelligent species with the capability of manipulating its environment to create a transmitter that we can detect could still perceive their environment in such a different way that it might be impossible to find a common ground for describing the same thing. But all of this is a problem that I’d like to have, and I don’t doubt that there would be many other individuals around the globe just as eager to help unravel any information from a detected signal. An old Southern cookbook starts a recipe by saying, “To cook a possum, you must first catch a possum.”

That’s my personal approach to SETI—it’s the detection of a signal that we must work on first. Even if there were no information encoded within a detected signal, or even if we can never decode it, the detection of a signal answers the old important question “Are we alone?” Even a cosmic dial tone tells us something else implicitly: It tells us that there’s a high probability that we can have a long technological future, because technologies must, on average, be long lived. Otherwise we would never overlap in time with another technological civilization, and the detection would not have occurred.

Philip Morrison used to put this most poetically—he called SETI “the archaeology of the future.” Because of the finite speed of light, a detected electromagnetic signal will give us information about their past, but it will tell us about our future.

Alas, the year 2001 has come and gone without moon bases, or privately operated orbital shuttles, but we’re getting there — the International Space Station may not have a Hilton, or rotate to provide artificial gravity, but at least it did just get its last major array of solar panels in place. And although PanAm Airways doesn’t exist any more, let alone the Orion III Space Clipper, private spaceflight did take a step forward recently with successful test flights of WhiteKnight Two, the launch vehicle for Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo private suborbital spacecraft.

2001: A Space Odyssey‘s influence on later science fiction is impossible to underestimate, and the balletic spacecraft scenes set to sweeping classical music, the tarantula-soft tones of HAL 9000, and the ultimate alien artifact, the Monolith, have all become enduring cultural icons in their own right. Still, for those barbarians who find the measured pace of the masterpiece a little slow, check out this awesome one minute version of the movie. In Lego.

In many previous “Made For 3D” efforts, this has resulted in a lot of gratuitous and self-conscious “Look Ma – Depth!” activity, with characters carefully moving to face the screen so they can throw an object or thrust a hand at the audience. Mercifully, there’s only one or two such incidents in MvA. For most of the movie, the 3D is in the service of the storytelling, not the other way around. In particular, the 3D is often used as way to easily establish scale—handy in a movie where giant alien robots square off against puny (and not so puny) Earthlings. The movie also has a lushness about its virtual sets, something which I think Dreamwork’s rival, Pixar, has had an edge on, at least until now.

The movie itself merrily rolls along, drawing energetic inspiration from the classic science fiction B-movies of the 1950′s. The lead character in MvA is Susan Murphy (voiced by Reese Witherspoon), a bride-to-be who is struck by a meteor on her wedding day and transformed in the 49 foot, 11 inch-tall Ginormica. She is rounded up and kept in a secret government facility along with fellow monsters, B.O.B. (a gelatious blob voiced by Seth Rogan), Dr. Cockroach (a mad scientist who hybridized himself with a cockroach, played by Hugh Laurie), The Missing Link (a Creature From the Black Lagoon type, voiced by Will Arnett), and Insectosaurus (a giant bug that makes Susan look tiny, but doesn’t really do much in the talking department.) Things perk up for the monster crew when the military finds itself powerless to stop a rampaging alien robot. There’s an off-the-rack message thing of “be true to yourself” in here with Susan’s character arc, but it’s never allowed to bog down the adventure or the humor, which has enough slapstick to keep small children happy, while being laden with enough sly movie references to keep adults engaged.

Alien landscapes

Science fiction magazine

Seventies Japan

[via Pink Tentacle]

The movie centers on the dynamic between Klaatu (Reeves) and an astrobiologist (Connelly) who helps him escape the clutches of the U.S. government. Reeves is perfectly cast as the dispassionate and alien Klaatu, and Connelly makes a believable scientist. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the science and the science speak, and that the director didn’t feel it necessary to have the scientists constantly explaining every little bit of jargon to some audience surrogate, which tends to ruin the suspension of disbelief. Even if an audience doesn’t understand every word, they will pick up the ring of authenticity from such exchanges, which inevitably carries more dramatic weight than a group of scientists pausing in mid-conversation to explain to each other what a hyperbola is. Any essential upshot that the audience needs to know can then usually be conversationally conveyed in plain English, which is a language scientists have also been known to use.

But the character that steals the show is Gort, the robot enforcer that accompanies Klaatu. Gort has been updated well, and even when standing stock still conveys an impression of barely restrained violence that not even the original exuded. His menace is palpable through the screen: this is a Gort with personality. (John Cleese also has a great cameo as a nobel prize winner.)

Some critics of this movie have been unfavorably comparing it with the original, which they have retroactively elevated to the ranks of a great philosophical think piece. I’m a fan of the original too, but it’s not without glaring plot holes; its all-knowing Klaatu makes many absurd mistakes simply for the sake of appearing alien or advancing the story. The new version is much more internally consistent (and in fact may have spent a little too long establishing some things, for example, where the aliens got the DNA to build Klaatu’s human body.) I really enjoyed this movie, and appreciated that it didn’t try to paint a simplistic view of human nature. Human nature is complicated, and can’t be reduced to a single essence of “good” versus “bad.” For example, government officials are suspicious to the point of paranoia when Klaatu arrives, but as the movie shows, is it really paranoia if the aliens are actually drawing up plans to squish you out of existence? I also liked that, unlike the original, the new Klaatu isn’t held up as being beyond reproach, and that Cleese’s Nobel Laureate was allowed to draw him into a substantive debate, rather than the humbled acquiescence that marked that character’s response to Klaatu in the original.

This is an intelligent and well-made reimagining of a classic that has managed to keep some of the best stuff of the original (Don’t make Gort mad!), while losing elements that not even the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia can excuse. (I’m an incredibly powerful alien who understands human society well enough to go undercover in a nice boarding house, but I’ll give a bunch of huge flawless diamonds to this kid so we can go to the movies!)