Rise of the Planet of the Apes

In the film, we see over and over that it is not Caesar’s enhancement that causes problems. In fact, Caesar’s enhancement makes him the most moral and wisest person on the screen. The failure of those around him – from the cruel ape sanctuary caretakers to Caesar’s own father figure, Will Rodman – drive him to do what must be done: rebel.

So what am I saying here? That humans are bad and apes are good? Not at all. My argument is that in many science fiction films, we tend to question the ethics of the science itself and the ethics of pursuing that science. That is, there is a difference between saying “should science try to do X?” and “how can we study X in an ethical manner?” In the case of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, James Franco noted that someone might claim that “This is a Frankenstein story, or that you’re playing God.” But that mindset questions the pursuit of science in general, not how one can pursue a hypothesis ethically. It is how we experiment and what we do with the scientific results that matter. In the case of Caesar, humanity utterly fails to care for the mind that enhancement has created. Dana Stevens at Slate aptly described the film as “an animal-rights manifesto disguised as a prison-break movie.” And as with most prison-break movies, we’re on the side of the prisoners, not the warden, for a reason.

I argue that Caesar’s enhancement and that Caesar himself are ethical, but that the treatment of Caesar by every non-ape in the film (save Charles) is unethical and based on fear, arrogance, willful ignorance, and naiveté. Yes, that means that not only are the obvious villains in the wrong, but so are the other humans in Caesar’s life.

Word of warning: spoilers below.

To address my claim, we must first investigate whether or not enhancement itself harmed Caesar’s ability to be ethical. In the film, Caesar has a happy and inquisitive disposition. He likes exploring, solving puzzles, playing chess, and reading. Fast-forward to the revolution. Caesar directs his troops through the city, but not with the intent to cause mayhem and destruction and with express direction not to slaughter or maim. On multiple occasions, Caesar prevents wanton killing and only against Jacobs, the film’s ethically-bankrupt capitalist, does Caesar authorize death. Caesar’s goal is freedom, not revenge. So we are presented with a person, Caesar, who becomes more moral as his intelligence increases and his enhancement takes hold. He opposes killing and his primary goal for himself and his fellow apes is escape, not conquest. One struggles to make the case that a person who is unjustly imprisoned and abused does not have a right to seek liberation. I think we can make the case that Caesar’s behavior can be deemed ethical and, within the context of his treatment in the film, reasonable.

But how can this be? What sort of treatment would render Caesar’s rebellion justifiable?

Where to start? There are some obvious villains. Steven Jacobs (David Oyelowo) is the Big Pharma CEO who pushes for accelerated drug testing and the sacrifice of the chimps all in the name of profits. Jacobs is crafted to be hated. He knows that ALZ-112 might cure Alzheimer’s, but his need for return on investment leads him to kill the program. Only when there is evidence of intelligence increasing properties of the drug does Jacobs come around and reauthorize testing. I must admit, I was shocked by the idea that intelligence enhancing drugs equaled a paycheck in the mind of Jacobs, given the potential resistance to such a technology. But I digress. The point is that Jacobs is ultimately arrogant and uncaring about the animals upon the backs of which he makes his living, but he does little to impact Caesar’s life.

So is it the caretakers at the ape sanctuary? Brian Cox and Tom Felton are cruel and stupid, no doubt. That they have the backing of a faceless uncaring government bureaucracy does little to shock me. Somewhere in the world, there is an ape sanctuary that looks far too much like the one in this film. For every ape in the sanctuary, including Caesar, the caretakers are the second villains in their lives: the first are the original people who were raising each ape. In Caesar’s case, these men are not the instigators of the problem, but the catalyst for Caesar’s final rejection of humanity. The caretakers grind salt into the wound, but they did not make the first cut.

So who did first wound Caesar? I would argue that the main antagonist is not the cruel “caretakers” in the ape sanctuary, nor is it the Big Pharma CEO Steven Jacobs. Instead, I believe that James Franco’s character, Will Rodman, is ultimately responsible for forcing Caesar to rebel. Will Rodman is a mad scientist with a heart of gold. He makes a series of decisions no proper scientist would or should ever make: he brings a chimp that has been experimented on home and he tests his experimental drug on his father. This behavior is not that of a lucid person trying to do right, but of a lunatic lurching wildly towards love through every barrier that ethics and logic might erect. Will Rodman’s decision to test ALZ-112 on his father, Charles (Lithgow), is an almost unbelievable transgression. Yes, Will’s action comes from a place of love and concern for his father, but his recklessness only provides momentary relief from the horrors of Alzheimer’s before the drug fails and Charles experiences a brutal regression on par with that of his obvious namesake, Charlie, in Flowers for Algernon.

For Caesar, Will’s inability to pursue science ethically has the most horrible consequences. Of all the people in the film, Will should have known better than to provide a nurturing and loving environment limited enough to ensure Caesar’s intelligence is insufficiently stimulated, his knowledge of human norms and society stunted, and that any mistake will result in his improper imprisoning with fellow apes. Will also fails to recognize the incredible degree Caesar’s intelligence and, as a result, treats Caesar as an animal, not as a person with an IQ beyond that of most humans. At one point, Freida Pinto’s character, primatologist Caroline Aranha, says “You are trying to control things that are not meant to be controlled.” She is talking about Will’s attempts to cure Alzheimer’s and developing a drug to improve and fix the brain. Caroline is worried about trying to control nature. However, the fact that Will believes Caesar needs a leash, even into adulthood, is a better target for her critique. One does not leash a fellow person, one explains to and reasons with a fellow person. Will should not be trying to control Caesar. Will is arrogant and willfully ignorant, Caroline is naive and fearful, both fail Caesar. Just as with Frankenstein’s monster, the failure is not with the creation but with the creator.

Both Dr. Frankenstein and Franco’s Will Rodman utterly fail to protect or properly nurture their creations. In both cases, a single act of violence is sufficient for the creator to disown and abandon the creation to fend for itself. What was Caesar’s crime? Defending an Alzheimer’s sufferer, Charles, from an angry jerk of a neighbor. But since Caesar is an animal, he has no rights or recourse. Caesar is locked away with hardly a goodbye in the equivalent of a hardcore prison after his first misunderstanding with a culture that is alien and confusing. Trapped in a frightening and brutal environment, abandoned without sufficient explanation by the only father he’d ever known, and with a mind capable of comprehending the injustices against him, Caesar’s rebellion is a logical conclusion. Exposing his fellow apes to the more aggressive Alzheimer’s/brain-repair drug ALZ-113 is the application of enhancement as a tool of liberation. Caesar’s first word, “No!” is the animal equivalent of the Declaration of Independence.

Caesar and his ape rebellion do not rampage or seek revenge. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is not simply a story about how apes came to be intelligent. That’s only half of the story. The other half is the failure of humans, the failure of those closest to the apes, to recognize the new brilliant minds that had been created and to care for those new persons. Intelligent persons have a right to freedom and self-determination. Enhancement enables liberty. Simply being the result of an experimental new treatment does not take away one’s personhood or right to justice. If that justice and freedom is not provided, it must be taken. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a film that strives to show the humanity in our closest evolutionary cousins and the resulting tragedy of our inhumanity towards them.

For more on Rise of the Planet of the Apes, check out my interviews with James Franco, Andy Serkis, and director Rupert Wyatt.

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

Promotional Images via Rise of the Planet of the Apes Trailer

Rise of the Planet of the Apes caught me off guard. I went into the film thinking it would be another anti-enhancement, “All scientists are Frankenstein’s trying to cheat nature” film. I have rarely been so happy to be wrong. Instead, the film treats the viewer to an entertaining exploration of animal rights, what it means to be human, and what’s at stake when it comes to enhancing our minds.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is told from the perspective of Caesar (Andy Serkis), a chimp who is exposed to an anti-Alzheimer’s drug, ALZ-112, in the womb. ALZ-112 causes Caesar’s already healthy brain to develop more rapidly than either a chimp or human counterpart. Due to a series of implausible but not unbelievable events, Caesar is raised by Will Rodman (James Franco), the scientist developing ALZ-112. Rodman is in part driven the desire to cure his father, Charles, (played masterfully by John Lithgow) who suffers from Alzheimer’s. As Caesar develops, his place in Will’s home becomes uncertain and his loyalty to humanity is called into question. After being mistreated, abandoned, and abused, Caesar uses his enhanced intelligence as a tool of self-defense and liberation for himself and his fellow apes.

That cognitive enhancement is a way of seeking liberty is a critical theme that gives Rise of the Apes a nuance and depth I was not anticipating. Though the apes are at times frightening, they are never monstrous or mindless. Though they are at time’s violent, they are never barbaric. Caesar and his comrades are oppressed and imprisoned – enhancement is a means to freedom. There is less Frankenstein and more Flowers for Algernon in the film than the trailer lets on. It’s an action film with a brain.

As Rise of the Planet of the Apes is not out yet, I’m reluctant to do a full analysis of the implications of the film’s plot. That will have to come after August 5th, when the movie releases.

I had a chance to interview Andy Serkis, James Franco, and director Rupert Wyatt. The interviews are posted after the jump, where you can see how James Franco was caught off guard by my questions about cognitive enhancement, Rupert Wyatt explores the way in which the apes mirror humanity, and Andy Serkis describes enhancement as a tool of liberation. It’s good stuff, enjoy.

These interviews are edited, but I will say I am mighty impressed by the thought and honesty all three put into there answers. If Rise of the Planet of the Apes is the beginning of a new series, I for one am excited by the potential for complexity and exploration of humanity and enhancement in the coming films.

The nerd echo chamber is reverberating this week with the furious debate over Charlie Stross’ doubts about the possibility of an artificial “human-level intelligence” explosion – also known as the Singularity. As currently defined, the Singularity will be an event in the future in which artificial intelligence reaches human level intelligence. At that point, the AI (i.e. AI n) will reflexively begin to improve itself and build AI’s more intelligent than itself (i.e. AI n+1) which will result in an exponential explosion of intelligence towards near deity levels of super-intelligent AI After reading over the debates, I’ve come to a conclusion that both sides miss a critical element of the Singularity discussion: the human beings. Putting people back into the picture allows for a vision of the Singularity that simultaneously addresses several philosophical quandaries. To get there, however, we must first re-trace the steps of the current debate.

I’ve already made my case for why I’m not too concerned, but it’s always fun to see what fantastic fulminations are being exchanged over our future AI overlords. Sparking the flames this time around is Charlie Stross, who knows a thing or two about the Singularity and futuristic speculation. It’s the kind of thing this blog exists to cover: a science fiction author tackling the rational scientific possibility of something about which he has written. Stross argues in a post entitled “Three arguments against the singularity” that “In short: Santa Clause doesn’t exist.”

This is my take on the singularity: we’re not going to see a hard take-off, or a slow take-off, or any kind of AI-mediated exponential outburst. What we’re going to see is increasingly solicitous machines defining our environment — machines that sense and respond to our needs “intelligently”. But it will be the intelligence of the serving hand rather than the commanding brain, and we’re only at risk of disaster if we harbour self-destructive impulses.

We may eventually see mind uploading, but there’ll be a holy war to end holy wars before it becomes widespread: it will literally overturn religions. That would be a singular event, but beyond giving us an opportunity to run [Robert] Nozick’s experience machine thought experiment for real, I’m not sure we’d be able to make effective use of it — our hard-wired biophilia will keep dragging us back to the real world, or to simulations indistinguishable from it.

I am thankful that many of the fine readers of Science Not Fiction are avowed skeptics and raise a wary eyebrow to discussions of the Singularity. Given his stature in the science fiction and speculative science community, Stross’ comments elicited quite an uproar. Those who are believers (and it is a kind of faith, regardless of how much Bayesian analysis one does) in the Rapture of the Nerds have two holy grails which Stross unceremoniously dismissed: the rise of super-intelligent AI and mind uploading. As a result, a few commentators on emerging technologies squared off for another round of speculative slap fights. In one corner, we have Singularitarians Michael Anissimov of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and AI researcher Ben Goertzel. In the other, we have the excellent Alex Knapp of Forbes’ Robot Overlords and the brutally rational George Mason University (my alma mater) economist and Oxford Future of Humanity Institute contributor Robin Hanson. I’ll spare you all the back and forth (and all of Goertzel’s infuriating emoticons) and cut to the point being debated. To paraphrase and summarize, the argument is as follows:

1. Stross’ point: Human intelligence has three characteristics: embodiment, self-interest, and evolutionary emergence. AI will not/cannot/should not mirror human intelligence.

2. Singularitarian response: Anissimov and Goertzel argue that human-level general intelligence need not function or arise the way human intelligence has. With sufficient research and devotion to Saint Bayes, super-intelligent friendly AI is probable.

3. Skeptic rebuttal: Hanson argues A) “Intelligence” is a nebulous catch-all like “betterness” that is ill-defined. The ambiguity of the word renders the claims of Singularitarians difficult/impossible to disprove (i.e. special pleading); Knapp argues B) Computers and AI are excellent at specific types of thinking and augmenting human thought (i.e. Kasparov’s Advanced Chess). Even if one grants that AI could reach human or beyond human level, the nature of that intelligence would be neither independent nor self-motivated nor sufficiently well-rounded and, as a result, “bootstrapping” intelligence explosions would not happen as Singularitarian’s foresee.

In essence, the debate is that “human intelligence is like this, AI is like that, never the twain shall meet. But can they parallel one another?” The premise is false, resulting in a useless question. So what we need is a new premise. Here is what I propose instead: the Singularity will be the result of a convergence and connection of human intelligence and artificial intelligence.

Intelligence is extremely hard to define. For the sake of discussion, I’ll define it here as the “ability to analyze a situation, determine a problem, develop a solution, and execute.” As Knapp’s example of Kasparov’s Advanced Chess illustrates, humans and computers are much better than one another at specific elements of chess. A computer is significantly more intelligent when it comes to chess tactics. A human is significantly more intelligent when it comes to strategy. Extrapolation of this analogy (as well as Knapp’s analysis of Watson on Jeopardy!) points towards a human intelligence superiority around abstraction, invention, creativity, and imagination and a computer intelligence superiority in calculation, data analysis, and information retrieval. Thus, I propose a new analogy for the two types of intelligence represented by humans and computers: the right and left hemispheres of the human brain.

It is often said that humans are the animal that can reason. But that description is incomplete. Humans are the animal that can reason creatively and abstractly, or perform the inverse, imagine logically and rationally. To my knowledge (I’d love to be corrected) computers and AI algorithms cannot at this point in time replicate any form of right-brain thinking. But computers are orders of magnitude better at short-term, sharp-focus left-brain thinking. Combine this line of thought with the extended brain hypothesis of Andy Clark and the augmentation-based Singularity survival strategy of David Chalmers, and picture of a cybernetic future begins to emerge. Thus, I argue the Singularity should be re-imagined as a cybernetic process in which the human mind is progressively augmented with better and more complimentary artificial left-brain capacities.

As Advanced Chess demonstrates, a human with a computer is far superior to either a human alone or a computer alone. Consider the analogy of Geordi La Forge and the USS Enterprise computer being comparable with Data. Through the Enterprise, Geordi has access to the same vast processing power Data possesses, but also his own creative and inventive capacities that the Enterprise alone cannot mirror. Data’s most “human” moments are when he expresses these right-brain tendencies and are, in fact, what are referenced when defending Data’s personhood. It is what makes him unique and impossible to replicate with ease.

At our current state of technology, smartphones represent the most advanced and prolific form of cybernetic left-brain augmentation. These hand-held exobrains allow us to perform a multitude of processes and recall or access tremendous amounts of information through visual and auditory interfaces. As neuro-interface technology improves (hat tip Greg Fish) the information on the internet and stored in our external brains will become more expansive and more intimately connected with our nervous systems. The steps toward the Singularity will not be progressive improvement of general AI but of the gradual blending of the biological wetware of the human brain with the artificial hardware of computer technology. The Singularity will be the perfection of the mind-computer interface, such that where the mental processes of the human right-brain ends and the high-powered computer left-brain ends will be indistinguishable both externally by objective observation and internally by the subjective experience of the individual. I call this event the Cybernetic Singularity.

The Cybernetic Singularity differs from the AI Singularity in several ways and, in the process, solves several AI conundrums, both of the technological and philosophical variety.

First and foremost, the ethical “can of worms” of making pure AI is eliminated. So long as the person having his or her mind augmented grants rationally informed and deliberative consent, then no breach of ethics occurs. The concern over experimentally creating, shutting off, or restrictively programming a new form of life is eliminated.

Second, the problem of completely replicating the human mind is eliminated. Cybernetic augmentation will enhance those processes of the brain at which computers excel – memory, data analysis, and computation – without needing to replicate aspects of the brain we are barely beginning to understand, like imagination and creativity.

Third, the theological fears and philosophical qualms around uploading will be mitigated by the slow integration and blending process. Theologians can presume the “seat of the soul” rests in the right hemisphere. Because the process is gradual and the self can reflexively begin to include the augmentations into the mind’s “I” construction, the worries over mind-clones and other philosophical oddities are reduced to interesting thought experiments.

Fourth, the technology is feasible. Memory stimulation, cochlear implants, bionic eyes, and haptic interfaces for prosthetics are rudimentary but empirical and existing forms of neuro-computer interfaces.

Fifth, and most relevant for fans of the apocalypse, no “hard take off” or “AI bootstrapping” will occur. In part, because the blending will be gradual as interfaces and technology incrementally improve there will be no one augmented person who is unstoppably or even significantly more “intelligent” than other augmented individuals. Also in part because there will be a human being at the center of the cyber-brain, still able to make ethical decisions and express self-interest that expands to the universal level of humanity’s self-interest.

The final reason I believe the Cybernetic Singularity is more probable than the AI Singularity is simply that it makes more sense. AI’s designed to do very specific tasks that are labor and data intensive make economic sense and are of obvious value, AI’s designed to mirror things humans are naturally good at seems pointless. Humans have augmented our memory, our ability to calculate, and our ability to process data reliably throughout history. We’ve been slowly augmenting our left-hemisphere since the invention of language.

In sum, The Cybernetic Singularity is the logical extension of a process humans have been pursuing throughout history: the augmentation of our brain’s computational left-hemisphere. By recognizing the relative functions of the hemispheres of the human brain, we are able to see how cybernetic augmentation of the left-hemisphere of the human brain will enable significant increases in some forms of intelligence. Pure general AI is not necessary for an intelligence increase. My theory of The Cybernetic Singularity reconciles the exponential increase in computing technology with the tremendous hurdles facing AI and overcomes the ethical, philosophical, and theological concerns around uploading and the creation of AI and/or mind uploading. The result is a human future that we can reasonably, incrementally, and ethically pursue.

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

Image via theWarehouse

Hat tip to Futurismic for many of the links.

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!

Zombie stories are often about the utter failure of the government to deal with a big problem and, thanks to George Romero, also a great way to expose issues of class and social status. No one really believes they might attack one day. Zombies are a metaphor, like vampires or werewolves, for the horrifying and uncanny aspects of the human. They also remind you that, when things really hit the fan, you’re on your own. So be prepared! The Center for Disease Control does not want you to be caught unawares. In a post that walks the line between “ha ha this would never happen” and “but seriously just in case, you never know,” Ali S Kahn details the worthy forms of emergency response to hoards of the necrotic, brain-seeking undead:

1. Identify the types of emergencies that are possible in your area. Besides a zombie apocalypse, this may include floods, tornadoes, or earthquakes. If you are unsure contact your local Red Cross chapter for more information. Family members meeting by their mailbox. You should pick two meeting places, one close to your home and one farther away
2. Pick a meeting place for your family to regroup in case zombies invade your home…or your town evacuates because of a hurricane. Pick one place right outside your home for sudden emergencies and one place outside of your neighborhood in case you are unable to return home right away.
3. Identify your emergency contacts. Make a list of local contacts like the police, fire department, and your local zombie response team. Also identify an out-of-state contact that you can call during an emergency to let the rest of your family know you are ok.
4. Plan your evacuation route. When zombies are hungry they won’t stop until they get food (i.e., brains), which means you need to get out of town fast! Plan where you would go and multiple routes you would take ahead of time so that the flesh eaters don’t have a chance! This is also helpful when natural disasters strike and you have to take shelter fast.

I’m wary of the idea of meeting at the mailbox. Though I’m no expert, I have a strong suspicion that the mailbox is insufficiently fortified against the shuffling corpses invading the neighborhood. But hey, I’m not at the CDC, so I’m going to trust Kahn on this one. Maybe she keeps a shotgun (or cricket bat? Lobo?) in her mailbox. I just don’t know.

What I do know is I need to get an emergency kit like the one on the right. Because a zombie hoard is nonsense. But the Singularity might trigger a new stone age and I won’t be able to dash off to Wal-Mart for supplies. Should I be embarrassed that a small part of me hopes/expects some sort of epic disaster for the selfish reason that modern life doesn’t let me use a flashlight or flint in day-to-day routines? I mean, I just don’t have enough reasons in my life to use a kerosine lantern.

Maybe that’s how I can write off my next camping trip: research for zombie apocalypse.

For more on zombies, check out my series, the Ethics of the Undead.

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

Image of zombies kindly broadcasting their presence via Wikipedia

I have a confession. I used to be all about the Singularity. I thought it was inevitable. I thought for certain that some sort of Terminator/HAL9000 scenario would happen when ECHELON achieved sentience. I was sure The Second Renaissance from the Animatrix was a fairly accurate depiction of how things would go down. We’d make smart robots, we’d treat them poorly, they’d rebel and slaughter humanity. Now I’m not so sure. I have big, gloomy doubts about the Singularity.

Michael Anissimov tries to restock the flames of fear over at Accelerating Future with his post “Yes, The Singularity is the Single Biggest Threat to Humanity.”

Combine the non-obvious complexity of common sense morality with great power and you have an immense problem. Advanced AIs will be able to copy themselves onto any available computers, stay awake 24/7, improve their own designs, develop automated and parallelized experimental cycles that far exceed the capabilities of human scientists, and develop self-replicating technologies such as artificially photosynthetic flowers, molecular nanotechnology, modular robotics, machines that draw carbon from the air to build carbon robots, and the like. It’s hard to imagine what an advanced AGI would think of, because the first really advanced AGI will be superintelligent, and be able to imagine things that we can’t. It seems so hard for humans to accept that we may not be the theoretically most intelligent beings in the multiverse, but yes, there’s a lot of evidence that we aren’t.

….

Humans overestimate our robustness. Conditions have to be just right for us to keep living. If AGIs decided to remove the atmosphere or otherwise alter it to pursue their goals, we would be toast. If temperatures on the surface changed by more than a few dozen degrees up or down, we would be toast. If natural life had to compete with AI-crafted cybernetic organisms, it could destroy the biosphere on which we depend. There are millions of ways in which powerful AGIs with superior technology could accidentally make our lives miserable, simply by not taking our preferences into account. Our preferences are not a magical mist that can persuade any type of mind to give us basic respect. They are just our preferences, and we happen to be programmed to take each other’s preferences deeply into account, in ways we are just beginning to understand. If we assume that AGI will inherently contain all this moral complexity without anyone doing the hard work of programming it in, we will be unpleasantly surprised when these AGIs become more intelligent and powerful than ourselves.

Oh my stars, that does sound threatening. But again, that weird, nagging doubt lingers in the back of my mind. For a while, I couldn’t place my finger on the problem, until I re-read Anissimov’s post and realized that my disbelief flared up every time I read something about AGI doing something. AGI will remove the atmosphere. Really? How? The article, in fact, all arguments about the danger of the Singularity necessarily presume one single fact: That AGI will be able to interact with the world beyond computers. I submit that, in practical terms, they will not.

Consider the example of Skynet. Two very irrational decisions had to be made to allow Skynet to initiate Judgment Day. First, the A.I. that runs Skynet was debuted on the military network. In the mythos of the film, Skynet does not graduate from orchestrating minor battle plans or strategizing invasions in the abstract, but goes straight from the coder’s hands to getting access to the nuclear birds. Second, in the same moment, the military rolls out a fleet of robot warriors that are linked to Skynet, effectively giving the A.I. hands and then putting guns in those hands.

My point is this: if Skynet had been debuted on a closed computer network, it would have been trapped within that network. Even if it escaped and “infected” every other system (which is dubious, for reasons of necessary computing power on a first iteration super AGI), the A.I. would still not have any access to physical reality. Singularity arguments rely upon the presumption that technology can work without humans. It can’t. If A.I. decided to obliterate humanity by launching all the nukes, it’d also annihilate the infrastructure that powers it. Me thinks self-preservation should be a basic feature of any real AGI.

In short: any super AGI that comes along is going to need some helping hands out in the world to do its dirty work.

B-b-but, the Singulitarians argue, “an AI could fool a person into releasing it because the AI is very smart and therefore tricksy.” This argument is preposterous. Philosophers constantly argue as if every hypothetical person is either a dullard or a hyper-self-aware. The argument that AI will trick people is an example of the former. Seriously, the argument is that  very smart scientists will be conned by an AGI they helped to program. And so what if they do? Is the argument that a few people are going to be hypnotized into opening up a giant factory run only by the A.I., where every process in the vertical and the horizontal (as in economic infrastructure, not The Outer Limits) can be run without human assistance? Is that how this is going to work? I highly doubt it. Even the most brilliant AGI is not going to be able to restructure our economy overnight.

So keep your hats on folks, don’t start fretting about evil AGI until we live in an economy that is solely robot labor. Until then, I just can’t see it. I can’t see how AGI gets hands. Maybe that’s a limit on my vision. But if the nightmare scenario of AGI going sentient and rogue over night comes true, then I think we’re all in good shape. Sure, it might screw up our communications networks, but it’s not going to be able to do much of anything outside a computer. Anytime you start getting nervous, remember all the things we still need people to do, and how much occurs beyond the realm of the computer. In that light, the Singularity is just a digital tempest in a teacup.

Image of a very scary computer bank by k0a1a.net’s photostream via Flickr Creative Commons

Follow Kyle Munkittrick on Twitter @PopBioethics

At least that’s the logic being used to advance the whole 2012 mythos.

For both of you who haven’t heard about this, the ancient Mayan calendar ostensibly comes to an end in 2012, and there are no shortage of doomsayers who claim that the Mayans somehow had advance knowledge of the end of the world, and their calendar reflects this.  With 2012 slightly over a year away, you can be certain that this is a topic to which we’ll be turning here fairly regularly, even though it more correctly falls under the purview of “Fiction not Science”.

It’s understandable, actually.  From an evolutionary standpoint, it was practically yesterday that we hunted/gathered our own food, and lived in constant fear of being eaten by the saber toothed cat.  So in some senses our bodies are still wired for a way of life that hasn’t existed for several thousands of years. Most of us, with varying frequencies and intensities, still need to feel that primal surge of adrenaline. Some of us, myself among them, enjoy violent games like football, rugby, or hockey. Some of us, myself sometimes among them, get the ol’ adrenaline pumping through extreme sports. Some of us, myself rarely among them, enjoy roller coasters (not a fan). Many of us in all the previous categories scare ourselves by watching horror or action movies.

Some, myself definitely not among them, worry about the End of the World Scenario Du Jour. This is neither uncommon nor surprising, humans have worried about the end of the world since somebody first realized that it might, in fact, have an end. With 2012 now a year away, The End seems to be more of a player in the zeitgeist and is an ever-increasing topic of relevance in media and popular conversation. The popularity of my friend (and fellow Discover blogger) Phil Plait’s book Death From the Skies:  These are the Ways the World Will End speaks to this. Even mainstream media outlets like Fox News, LiveScience , and Fox News again, recently ran pieces examining end of the world scenarios (and even though the second Fox entry was about debunked scenarios for the End, it still implies that it’s in the forefront of thought).

Of course there was the movie 2012, but then again you can always count on Roland Emmerich to latch onto something like this and base a movie on it.

Mr. Emmerich’s goal is simply to tell a good story, to make a film that makes him and his sponsors lots of money, and he’s latched onto a formulaic way of doing it–one that feeds our primal need for adrenaline. As much as I find his films scientifically cringe-inducing, I simply won’t argue with his success. This kind of science fiction is fun but, at the same time, nobody leaves one of his movies believing that they were predictive.

There are others, though, whose goals are somewhat more grey, and who stand to gain by preying upon ignorance and our collective primal adrenaline addiction. While many legitimate scientists work to spread understanding (and you’ll see a lot more attempts to do just that here in the future), and hence reduce anxiety, some opportunistic types propagate fear and disinformation on 2012 because they claim to know “The Truth”.  Really!  Just buy their book, their video, or raise the hit count on their web site and learn “The Truth” (despite what they’re peddling is just as much science fiction as the works of Mr. Emmerich). I believe that these types of writings need to be examined and systematically debunked in as many places, and in as many ways, as possible (see also my recent diatribe blog entry on science literacy). Scientists have our work cut out for us.

Any astronomical event that will (or may) occur in 2012 is being rolled into the 2012 mythos– from impacts to solar flares to tidal disruption from cosmic conjunction (I’m working on a post about the latter which you’ll see in a day or two). Even the spectre of the return of the planetoid Niburu is being recycled. (the fact that it was predicted to pass Earth in 2003 and that failed to occur doesn’t seem to dampen any of the doomsayers enthusiasm). In fact, in a cheeky case of verbage straight out of the book 1984, here are some awesome–from a comedic standpoint–Niburu calculation and predictions by a group called “The Church of Critical Thinking” (Apparently Niburu also orbits retrograde–perhaps some critical thinking on the conservation of angular momentum is in order?).

Does this mean that the world won’t end in 2012? Absolutely not! Asteroid and comet impacts, solar flares, and other astronomical hazards have threatened life on Earth for over 3.8 billion years. That said, events that threaten the existence of Earth, or its biosphere, are very low-probability ones–the odds of more than one occurring in a given year, multiplicatively less so. For those among us who’d prefer to get our adrenaline through alternate means than worrying about the end of the world, 2012 represents an excellent opportunity to calibrate our sources. In the runup to 2012 just pay attention to who has said what, and keep that in mind the NEXT time somebody (who’s probably selling a book, video, or hyping their web site) predicts an astronomical end of the world. Keep that in mind after January 1st, 2013. Let me help you with that: it looks like even the Mayan Calander doomsayers were wrong, and the end of the Mayan Calendar may not be for another 50 years (or it may, in fact, have already happened).

Sorry if that hurts book or video sales.

I really want to know: Would you eat Soylent Green?

Remember (*spoiler alert!* sheesh!) Soylent Green is people, as Charlton Heston discovered. But no one ever talks about the rest of that movie, mostly because it’s kind of terrible. But for what it was, there were some cool ideas in Soylent Green.

First, a quick recap: In the movie, the earth is overpopulated and over-polluted. Global warming is in full swing and even rich people have to eat crummy food. The government hands out rations of Soylent products, which are awful, flavorless cubes and loafs of “soy” (actually plankton but really it’s irrelevant cause it’s people) foodstuff that look like red, blue, or green Play-Doh. When you die, you go to a death-a-torium of sorts where you pay a small fee, then watch a really pretty movie filled with scenes from nature and peaceful music. You die quickly and painlessly from a colorless, odorless gas.

Then your body is shipped off and turned into Soylent Green which everyone loves to eat.

Ok! That last part is traumatic, I admit. But Soylent Green isn’t The Road. Marauding hoards of hillbilly cannibals aren’t threatening to strip the meat from your bones. You die peacefully. There is no space for anything in the movie’s version of the future (people are everywhere) and cremation involves burning, which isn’t exactly great for global warming. So what to do with the bodies of humans in a world where there is no room to put them and everyone is starving? What to do indeed…

So, in the spirit of ethical inquiry, I’d like to do some thought experiments. We’re all rational, scientifically minded individuals. In what situations would a reasonable person eat food made of people? Let me set up some scenarios for you, and you tell me how much you’d love to eat Soylent Green (which is people) in that scenario. Here we go!

First some ground rules:

1. Soylent Green is, indeed, people.
2. No one is hurt or killed forcefully. Only natural/voluntary deaths.
3. Soylent Green is safe.
4. Soylent Green is delicious.

Scenario 1: The Movie’s World

The world is overcrowded, hot, there is no food and you are starving. You haven’t eaten in a day and, after waiting in line for 4 hours, you get handed your bag of Soylent Green (because Tuesday is Soylent Green day!). Your stomach gurgles with hunger. No one but you knows it’s people. Do you eat it?

Scenario 2: Long Pig

Perhaps my favorite comic, Transmetropolitan has its own version of the other, other white meat: Long Pig. Transmet‘s lunatic anti-hero gonzo journalist, Spider Jerusalem, loves eating Long Pig, which is brand name, vat-grown human meat. Scientists think vat-meat might be necessary to feed everybody in a couple decades, and if it’s vat-grown, who is to say some of what’s in the vats isn’t people meat? Let’s say you live in the world of Transmet, where everyone eats Long Pig, including your favorite journalist. Long Pig sends you a free bag of jerky to try. If you don’t eat it, your roommate will. Do you eat it?

Scenario 3: The Road

You survived the apocalypse. The overcrowded, polluted, impoverished world from before was a joy compared with the daily nightmare you now endure. You find a bag of Soylent Green (it keeps forever) in an abandoned supply depot. You haven’t eaten in four days and it’s a fifty-mile trek to the Twinkie factory on your map. The Soylent Green is your only option other than starvation. Do you eat it?

Scenario 4: Right now!

There is a big ol’ plate of Soylent Green cubes right in front of you right now. It smells amazing. No one would have to know, you could have just one. Do you eat it?

I am genuinely interested in people’s responses. I encourage comments and fellow bloggers to tell me their thoughts on Soylent Green.

Image of people excited for their rations of Soylent Green by bandita via Flickr Creative Commons

You see, I was merely quoting Margaret Somerville, the Director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University in Canada. In addition to thinking gay marriage is bad for the kids, Somerville really does not like transhumanists. She thinks that  personhood is the “world’s most dangerous idea,” (sounds vaguely familiar) because if aliens, animals and robots have rights too, we won’t value humans anymore. In her recent piece, calmly titled “Scary Science Could Cause Human Extinction” Somerville makes a strange argument about xenotransplants (i.e. organ transplants). First, she beats up on transhumanists and our support of life-extension. She attempts to link life-extention with genetically modified animal organ transplants. She then argues that the transplants will, get this, cause a mutant virus leading to a global pandemic obliterating humanity. I am not joking:

[Using genetically modified pig-hybrid organs] poses a risk, not only to transplant recipients, their sexual partners, and their families, but also, possibly, to the public as a whole. An animal virus or other infective agent could be transferred to humans, with potentially tragic results – not just for the person who received the organ but for other people, who could subsequently be infected. And there might be a very remote possibility that it could wipe out the human race.

Somerville’s argument abuses the word “potentially” and its synonyms in a desperate attempt to draw a link in the reader’s mind between xenotransplants and a cataclysmic plague. Human-to-human disease transmission during transplants is extremely low, and the genetic differences between humans and animals, even hybrids, would lower the risk all the more. Martine Rothblatt, (a Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies) wrote a whole book, Your Life or Mine, addressing the fears around xenotransplantaion. In short, Somerville’s concerns about xenotransplantation are not based in science, but in bioLuddite hysteria. Somerville’s case against xenotransplantation is in terminal condition already, and things only get worse from here.

I would summarize the rest of her argument if it wasn’t, well, so incoherent. For example, Somerville is confused about anti-aging research. She seems to think that researchers are simply trying to slow down human maturation, “so that we would reach puberty around 40 years of age, early middle age at 80.” Um, no. The goal is not to slow the maturation process but to inhibit and potentially reverse the damage that accrues at the cellular level over time due to aging. Aubrey de Grey describes his anti-aging research as Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, not Strategies for Twenty Years of Puberty (by Einstein’s mustache, that’s a dystopia if I’ve ever heard one). Humans would mature normally, we just wouldn’t age as rapidly once mature. Somerville’s misunderstanding on the anti-aging point is indicative her perspective throughout the article.

How Somerville gets from reversing cellular damage to pig-hybrid xenotransplants as a way to slow aging I’m not sure. I’ve never encountered an argument for life-extension based on total organ replacement, save perhaps Outnumbering the Dead. As Somerville’s article has no citations, so it’s hard to know where she’s getting her information. I imagine her thought process around life-extension and xenotransplants was something like this: Transhumanists probably support both of those things, why make logical connections when you’ve got a movement to smear, am I right?

But let’s say we grant Somerville all of her erroneous points, and agree that xenotransplants from animals is a terrible, dangerous idea that will cause global catastrophy. Guess what, it doesn’t matter. Pig-as-organ-farm idea went out of vogue right about when we realized we could, uh, forget the pig. MIT researchers are beginning to figure out how to use a hydrogel scaffold to support and guide the growth of stem cells into new organs. If they get technique perfected, single stand-alone organs could be grown from your own cells – perfect matches made on demand. Or maybe we’ll just build artificial organs, like kidneys and lungs, and make everyone into cyborgs. No worries of robot-to-human virus transmission. Feel better, Marge?

Image from K Sandberg at Vintage Collective via Flickr

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

Halloween is a-comin’ and this Sunday brings us AMC’s The Walking Dead. In honor of that, we’re discussing The Ethics of the Undead here at Science, Not Fiction. This is part IV of IV. (Check out parts I, II, & III)

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

In my last two posts, I established some pretty important ground rules: What is a zombie and is a zombie actually dead?

Before I get onto the other exciting questions, a quick recap: a zombie pathogen could not be a “live infection” (i.e. rabies/Rage), but would be a re-animation virus: infection-death-reanimation. Bodily fluid transmission, non-regeneration/growth, and slowed decay were also key features of my hypothetical zombie pathogen. A zombie is a corpse with the appearance of life. The distinction is between brain-death and brain destruction. A zombie is brain-dead. In reality, it is the pathogen which is alive, hijacking the corpse. When one damages the corpse sufficiently, the pathogen has nothing left to “hijack” and therefore the zombie is de-animated.

With these key points answered, we can answer a whooooole bunch of other questions about what a zombie is and isn’t. Answers after the jump!

1. Is a zombie still human? A zombie is as human as a corpse is human. The DNA in the cells, the general body configuration and appearance will be that of a human being. But there’s nobody at home upstairs. The humanness will only be corporeal.
2. Is a zombie a person? No. Though there is some neural activity, there is no brain activity, particularly no consciousness. The philosophical zombie (p-zed) is something that looks and acts like a person, but lacks actual consciousness. Based on our description of how the zombie pathogen would have to work, there would be no higher brain function, therefore a zombie would have zero personhood.
3. Can a zombie feel pain? What about memories? In that both of these mental phenomena require some form of cognitive processing, not merely mental stimulation, I would say No. There is no advantage for the pathogen to activate these more complex parts of the brain and, furthermore, both pain and memories would likely complicate the “eat flesh” drive. Zombies aren’t even sentient (i.e. able to feel pain), to presume even second-effect electrical stimulation could trigger memories or pain is implausible in the extreme.
4. Does a zombie have dignity? Now this is a complex question. A rough and ready definition of dignity is that if thing X has dignity then we have a duty to respect thing X. Corpses are considered to have dignity, which is why we bury and burn them in respectful rituals. A zombie is, in large part, a corpse and, therefore, would have dignity, thus obliging us to treat it with respect. However, letting a corpse be overrun by a re-animation virus that causes it to perambulate about and terrorize the neighbors is highly undignified; therefore, we would have an obligation to de-animate the corpse (perhaps violently and stylishly) and burn (dignified and sterilizing) whatever was left out of respect for the dignity of the corpse.
5. Is it wrong to kill someone who is infected but not yet a zombie? I am going to anger someone with my answer here, but presuming we are certain they are infected and that the process of infection involves suffering, then it is not wrong to kill that person. The ethical distinction between “killing” and “letting die” is dubious at best. Intention, not method of death, determines the morality of the situation, particularly when “letting die” significantly increases suffering. In the case of a zombie apocalypse, I’d say voluntary active euthanasia is a moral duty. First in consideration of the quality of life of the person dying and second, out of respect for the dignity of what will be that person’s corpse. The extremely contentious involuntary active euthanasia would likely be morally permissible if one was certain a person was infected but refused to acknowledge it. I, for one, never want to be faced with these decisions.
6. Could we cure zombification? A pathogen is something we could vaccinate against, but to “cure” zombification would require the ability to reverse the effects of death completely. Only killing the infection before death would “cure” the person. Killing the infection after the fact would just leave a still-quite-dead corpse.
7. Could a zombie outbreak actually happen? I sure hope not. The zombie pathogen I described is immensely complex and precise – impossible in nature. Thus, the pathogen would have to be engineered. Every feature of the pathogen (including neural take-over) is, in some rudimentary form, currently present in nature. The disparate features would have to be heightened, recombined, and honed into a single doomsday plague.

Should it happen, however, my only consolation is that based on metabolism and decay, it would seem that zombie pathogen would be consuming the host body at any time that it wasn’t getting sufficient nutrients. Thus, the decomposition rate of a zombie body would be slowed in relation to a normal corpse to point X – with point X being minimum necessary nutrients for host body and pathogen – beyond which the pathogen would then begin consumption of the host body, resulting in accelerated decomposition. Unlike most zombie stories, in an actual zombie apocalypse I imagine zombie-on-zombie cannibalism and starvation-induced decay would save us from total annihilation. Quarantine and evade = salvation.

I hope.

For all of you zombie lore fans, survivalists, and boffins, I know there have to be points I missed, so hit me up in the comments on all of our Ethics of the Undead posts (I, II, III). Good luck out there tonight and guard your braaaaiiiiinsss.

Are zombies really dead? How do we know? People are often reported “clinically dead” only to be revived later. If it is moving, if it reacts to stimuli like a food source or sounds, and if metabolic processes are in play, how can we call a zombie dead?

The most basic definition of life is the ability to have “signaling and self-sustaining processes” as the all-knowing Wikipedia tells us:

Living organisms undergo metabolism, maintain homeostasis, possess a capacity to grow, respond to stimuli, reproduce and, through natural selection, adapt to their environment in successive generations.

Zombies do indeed undergo a qualified form of metabolism, sort of maintain homeostasis, and definitely respond to stimuli. Alternately, zombies do not grow, reproduce, or go through natural selection. So much for a clear answer there.

Consider the following: When we “kill” something, we are implying that our action has made an “alive” thing “dead.” We commonly refer to “killing” zombies. Therefore, a zombie is alive until it is killed. Not quite, some might argue, a zombie is undead. Undead is a special word that describes an entity which was once alive in the full meaning of that word, then died, and was then re-animated (e.g. a zombie). The zombie was not re-vivified, that is, brought back to life, but its bare biological systems were re-started.

For example, dismembered frog legs that are given electrical shocks are not “alive” they are merely re-animated. But the frog leg example is insufficient, because the electrical shocks are external, and not part of an organism. In the case of a zombie, the electrical shocks that trigger muscle movement are, as with a living being, generated internally by metabolic processes and neural pathways. The frog legs are not “re-animated,” just artificially stimulated.

At the other end of the spectrum, how about a person who has a heart attack and, due to a delay in resuscitation, temporarily experiences cardio-pulmonary-death and brain-death: a total cessation in life functions. The person is, for a moment, clinically dead. That person is then successfully revived. The heart and lungs begin functioning again and the re-oxygenated brain “comes back to life” with no harm done. This person who is “back from the grave” is revivified. Though their biological functions ceased, for a variety of reasons the destructive postmortem processes were delayed long enough to allow total system restoration.

A zombie isn’t a shocked frog leg nor is it a revived person. Instead, we want to understand whether or not a moving, metabolizing, stimulus-responding corpse is alive. I submit that various parts of a zombie may resemble life, but in reality, it has less “life” than the bacterium eating its eyeball. It is more accurate to say that the pathogen inside the zombie is alive, while the corpse itself is dead. The corpse, as noted in my description of a zombie, is in a constant state of decomposition. While decomposition may be slowed by the pathogen, the process is not stopped.

Most important to the entire discussion, however, is brain activity. Though the body and some parts of the brain stem are reactivated, a zombie is, quite literally, brain-dead. Beating-heart cadavers are a primary example of a “functioning” body preserved by external means. In a zombie, organs function independently to a minimal degree and reflexes (such as balance) exist to some extent. Thus, while the zombie pathogen would do more than our current medical technology can do for a beating-heart cadaver, it neither reverses brain-death nor does it properly maintain basic conditions of life like metabolic processes or homeostasis. Some specific stimulus response systems are re-animated, but this is an illusion of bodily life, not an actual case of life.

Thus, a zombie is a dead body that affects some life-like behavior because it is being controlled by a living pathogen. “Killing” a zombie is, in effect, destroying it in a sufficient way to prevent the pathogen from utilizing the corpse.

Promotional Image via AMCtv.com

Halloween is a-comin’ and this Sunday brings us AMC’s The Walking Dead. In honor of that, we’re discussing The Ethics of the Undead here at Science, Not Fiction. This is part II of IV. (Check out parts I, & III)

Before we can start investigating whether or not something that craves brains has a mind or should be pitied, we need to define just what, exactly, we’re talking about when we talk about zombies.

I’m going to start by ruling out the 28 Days Later zombies and the voodoo/demonic zombies of Evil Dead. First, the name of this blog is Science, not Fiction, which means any religious hokum is right out the door. Demon possession, souls back from Hell, and voodoo are not going to be considered in this investigation. On the other end of the spectrum, in 28 Days Later anything infected with “Rage” becomes a “fast” zombie. In essence, Rage is rabies only way, way scarier. Thus we aren’t dealing with the “undead” so much as the violently insane. So non-fatal pathogens don’t count either. If the pathogen doesn’t first kill you, then re-animate you, then you aren’t a zombie.

Which leads us to the next question: how does the pathogen work? I am not denying here the multitude of variations and nuances among zombie plague viruses, so we have to come up with a generic, realistic version to have our discussion. Zombies generally meet three important criteria. They are 1) stimulus-response creatures that seek flesh 2) continually decomposing and 3) contagious via bodily fluids. If we can explain, reasonably, how and for what reason a pathogen might cause/allow these conditions, we can describe a realistic zombie pathogen.

Condition 1, that zombies are stimulus-response creatures that seek flesh, implies that the pathogen must act to re-animate the existing neural pathways and motor functions in some fashion. Let us presume human-only infection and that the virus, being species specific, results in a cannibalism preference. Thus the sensory systems which are re-activated are capable of distinguishing four key things: flesh-vs-not-flesh; species; infected-vs-uninfected; self. Furthermore, for the sake of simplicity, the virus does not create any new systems, it merely hijacks existing ones.

Next, we have to remember that contracting the zombie pathogen is terminal. Whatever the hijacking process involves, we must presume that an intermediate stage of infection between contamination and zombification is fatal. If I had to guess, the infection of the medulla oblogata – where most automatic processes are regulated – is what results in cardio-pulmonary death, followed shortly by brain-death. Sometime after brain-death the medulla is fully hijacked by the zombie pathogen, jump-started (I won’t attempt an explanation) and re-animation is underway.

Whether it is musculature, perceptive organs, or circulatory and digestive systems, the virus must work with what it has. The metabolic process continues, arguably for both the body and the pathogen, which in large part informs the indiscriminate hunger for flesh. It is critical here to note that a zombie body is not uniquely strong (in fact, the opposite), nor can the body function properly without oxygen, waste disposal, and nutrients. We can, however, presume that a zombie body can, in its own way, marginally function when some of these requirements are missing. However, when an eyeball is gone or the intestines finally rupture, that zombie has lost whatever sense or function was associated with the now deteriorated organ: no healing happens.

Which leads us to Condition 2, that zombies are continually decomposing. No one thinks of a zombie as a healthy, mindless body; you think of a corpse that moves. The re-animation process is, we assume, imperfect or it would be revivification. One of the imperfections is that autolysis – the process wherein a cell’s own enzymes begin to consume it – is not stopped or reversed. As autolysis is the first step in postmortem decay, even a brief period between death and re-animation would cause it to start. Other aspects of decomposition, such as purification and insect infestation, though significantly slowed would likely continue as well.

Based on the average zombie, we can presume a few things about the virus’ relationship to decomposition. First, is that the zombie virus slows decomposition by providing cells with some nutrients. Second, is that the immune system, at least a crippled version, still functions to slow human bacterial flora from consuming their host. Third, it could be presumed that while some cell division continues, repairs and restoration are lost. Fourth, the virus would likely only preserve essential functions, allowing irrelevant parts of the body, such as skin, secondary musculature, and some organs to decay. Finally, we can presume the virus itself must consume flesh to some degree, rendering the zombie’s metabolic processes incredibly inefficient and explaining the insatiability of a zombie. Thus, a zombie frozen in the arctic would likely re-animate upon thaw (pathogen in stasis; corpse preserved) while a zombie at the bottom of the ocean would first suffocate (albeit more slowly) and then be crushed.

Condition 3, that the pathogen is contagious via bodily fluids only, is a critical detail in terms of both staying true to the mythology of zombies and for presenting a scenario in which not everyone would instantly be zombified. An airborne pathogen, particularly one with any sort of incubation period, would be total, unstoppable pandemic. But, more importantly, we are dealing with a creature of fiction. And, just as with other members of the undead (e.g. vampires, werewolves) the bite gets in the blood and turns you

Remember, we almost never see someone getting bitten by a zombie and then not dying and “coming back.” The reason is that a bite both by-passes traditional levels of the immune system and delivers a huge dose of the pathogen directly into the circulatory system. Furthermore, it immediately contaminates the flesh directly exposed. As the zombie pathogen, whatever it is, seems able to interact with most cell types, not just specific ones (as with HIV), it would make sense that direct exposure would allow the virus both permeate the whole system (body) while beginning total infection at the site of contamination as well. It only takes one bite!

There you have it. A zombie pathogen must 1) be transmitted via bodily-fluids to 2) ensure sufficient and total infection which 3) is always fatal due to the fact that pathogen must 4) either consume the host or host-acquired flesh 5) hijack all the necessary functions for movement and sensation 6) provide at least some nutrients to itself and the body 7) allow continued movement and 8.) slow the decomposition of the host body.

Promotional Image via AMCtv.com by Scott Garfield

Halloween is a-comin’ and this Sunday brings us AMC’s The Walking Dead. In honor of that, we’re discussing The Ethics of the Undead here at Science, Not Fiction. This is part I of IV. (Check out parts II, & III)

Zombies are everywhere! Zombieland, Shawn of the Dead, and 28 Days Later in the movies; World War Z and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies on the bookshelf; Left 4 Dead, Dead Rising and Resident Evil in your video games - not to mention the George A. Romero and Sam Rami classics in your DVD collection. And this Sunday Robert Kirkman’s epic The Walking Dead lurches from the pages of comic books onto your television thanks to AMC.

Where ever you turn, zombies are there. We can’t seem to get enough of the re-animated recently departed. But why do we love these ambling carnivorous cadavers so?

Zombies are horrifying. An outbreak would almost certainly lead to global apocalypse. Unrelenting, unthinking, uncaring, undead, they are a nightmare incarnate. They remind us of mortality, of decay, of our own fragility. Perhaps worst, they remind us of how inhuman a human being can become.

Zombies are familiar. Refrains of “Brains!”, guttural groans, and mindless shambling instantly trigger the idea of a zombie in our mind. We all know, somehow, that decapitation – that is, destruction of the zombie brain – is our only salvation. I bet you’ve dressed as one for Halloween. Every time “Thriller” comes on you probably dance like a zombie. Some mornings I feel like a zombie. Even philosophers talk about zombies. We know zombies. They are hilarious, they are frightening, they are part of us. And that is why we love them.

But have you ever asked yourself: is a zombie still a human? is a zombie dead, really? can it feel pain? does a zombie have dignity? Has the question ever popped up in your quite-live brain: is it ok to kill a zombie? Could a zombie be cured? If you could cure it, would you still want to? In honor of Halloween and our culture’s current love affair with brain-eating corpses, I present The Ethics of the Undead, your universal guide for answering all of your most pressing zombie questions. Stay tuned for posts throughout Halloween weekend!

Images via ThatZombiePhoto.com and lolzombie.com

30 years ago this October, a handful of dedicated science enthusiasts got together and started a crazy little experiment called DISCOVER. Taking stock on the occasion of our three-decade anniversary, we’re happy to find that we’re still going strong–yet we’re also filled with existential dread.

The special 30th anniversary issue of DISCOVER includes a chilling piece from editor-in-chief Corey Powell, “30 Ways the World Could End.” His gloom-and-doom assessment of our future include such scenarios as superbombs, space colony uprisings, and genetically superior “transhumans” who out-compete us lame, pre-enhancement humans.

But we suspect we’ll get a richer response to this big question by crowd-sourcing responses from our favorite future predictors here at SNF. So tell us: Which of Corey’s suggested calamities is the most likely, and when will we be Armageddoned? Which obvious apocalypse did he miss?

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?

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”

I’ve always maintained that in science fiction TV and cinema good science should be jettisoned in deference to drama as a last resort only–and then when you have all your other  ducks in a row. If the science is solid in the large bulk of your work, we’ll make the leap with you when you get a bit more… speculative. Some works stick to grounded science well, some do not.

Therefore, for my clips, I chose two instances of the same type of  event–the impact of a comet/asteroid with Earth — one done well (Deep Impact), one that could have been done better (Armageddon).

Since Deep Impact‘s science is fairly solid, and their science advisor (they actually had one!) once told me “We pretty much get our mistakes out of the way in the first five minutes”, there’s little to say. There’s plenty to say with the Armageddon clip I chose — which was the first 40 seconds of the movie. The opening of Armageddon purports to show what is called the K/T Event — the asteroid or comet impact 65 million years ago that caused most of life on Earth, including the dinosaurs, to meet extinction.

The opening narration, done by Charlton Heston doing his best Moses voice, starts out:

It hit with the force of 10,000 nuclear weapons.

Here’s where getting the science right would have improved the drama.  To be more correct, Charlton Heston wouild have said:

It hit with the force of over 19 million 1 megaton nuclear weapons.

Or

It hit with a force almost 1.5 billion times the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

While Charlton narrates, the video shows the impact, and a blast wave traveling over the entire planet. While normally willing to suspend disbelief happily, from a science standpoint this movie lost me in the first 30 seconds when I first saw it in the theatre. The blast would not have traveled that far. What the video could have shown, and Charlton could have described in his best “The Dinosaurs Have Been Smote” voice was the several-hundred-foot-high tsunami that raced away from the impact. Or the chunks of impactor and target rock that fell back to Earth as secondary impacts, setting most of the world’s forests on fire.

What Charlton says instead is:

A trillion tons of dirt and rock hurtled into the atmosphere.

That’s about 1/10 the mass of the impactor (assuming it was an asteroid), so that number isn’t too bad, but, where’s the drama? What is the result of this?  He continues with:

…creating a suffocating blanket of dust the sun was powerless to penetrate for a thousand years.

Probably not that long, the dust probably settled out faster than that — without the sun’s life-giving radiation, it would not have taken long for Earth’s ecosystem to collapse.

It happened before.  It will happen again.

Yay! They got something right!  It’s clear that had the folks who made Armageddon stuck to known science, they could have made this scene simultaneously more realistic and more dramatic.

If you missed the panel, weren’t able to attend Comic-Con, or were turned away at the door because the room was packed, here’s the video:

The “Science of Science Fiction” panel will be back at San Diego Comic-Con again next year — hopefully in a much larger space (and hopefully it will still be in San Diego).

In theory, geoengineering seems like the ideal remedy for our climate ills. Some white reflective roofs here, a little ocean fertilization there, a few simulated volcanic eruptions, and voilà! you have a potential fix for one of the world’s most intractable problems.

But there’s good reason to believe that many of these proposed schemes would prove much costlier to the planet over both the short- and long-term than more mainstream approaches to addressing climate change—and leave a number of critical problems, like ocean acidification, in the lurch.

Take the injection of sulfate aerosol particles into the stratosphere, which I alluded to earlier. The idea would be to recreate the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption by blanketing the sky with a thin layer of particles that would reflect a fraction of incoming sunlight back into space. For this method to put a crimp on greenhouse warming, studies estimate that it would have to cut solar radiation by roughly 1.8 percent—not an easy feat by any means, but not entirely out of the question either.

In addition to being (relatively) cheap, costing around several billion dollars a year according to some projections, stratospheric geoengineering would actually be doable. In a recent paper, Alan Robock of Rutgers University and his colleagues suggested that it could be done by sending fleets of military planes to dump large quantities of sulfur gas into the lower stratosphere several times a year. While it all sounds good on paper, it’s worth emphasizing, as if it wasn’t obvious already, that much of this is still highly speculative. The rapidly changing nature of climate models, from which most of these findings are drawn, also makes it inherently difficult to predict with any uncertainty what this scheme’s exact outcome will be. What is certain, however, is that it would have a fair number of unintended consequences—almost all of which would be bad.

According to a new paper in Nature Geoscience, stratospheric geoengineering, or “solar-radiation management,” as the authors refer to it, would affect different parts of the world differentially (go figure), helping to cool down some countries while cooking others. It would deal a particularly harsh blow to many parts of Africa and Asia, disrupting rainfall and storm patterns and fomenting drought-like conditions. The particles would also spur the destruction of the already vulnerable ozone layer, hindering the recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole and blasting a few new ones.

To compound matters, the cooling effects would be short-lived—a few years at best—and many of the problems would only become worse with time. In other words, it’s mostly a lose-lose situation: stop short and you lose the benefits; keep going and you continue to dig yourself into a hole. It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise then that the authors’ main takeaways are that: 1) regional geoengineering isn’t such a great idea and that 2) reaching any sort of agreement on the “right” amount of geoengineering needed will be, shall we say, tricky.

But what is the alternative? Sure, there are a number of other proposed methods on the docket, ranging from solar shields in space (I kid you not) to carbon dioxide-sucking artificial trees, but most researchers would point to stratospheric geoengineering as being the one with the most promise. Which isn’t exactly encouraging. Of course, very few scientists are genuinely enthusiastic about the prospects of unleashing geoengineering unto the world. Most would argue that much more research is needed before we can engage in a serious conversation about relying on it and, even then, it should only be deployed in conjunction with other time-tested mitigation strategies.

Given the global community’s sluggish, half-hearted response to climate change, it is unfortunately probably only a matter of time before a few governments decide to take matters into their own hands. And, if anything, I can easily imagine some variant of these techniques being eventually used to “terraform” (i.e. make more Earth-like) Mars and other currently inhospitable planets—think Star Trek II’s Genesis device but much slower and less cool and advanced. That is, unless an alien race gets to us first and reverse-terraforms our planet like in The War of the Worlds.

Image: NASA

Where common sense and the film divide is just how best to dodge an oncoming meteor. I wrote a while back on the idea of painting one side of the asteroid black while beaming heat onto it, causing the asteroid to shift course. It’s a neat idea, but not nearly as neat as the gravity tractor, not just because this approach is more elegant, but because there’s a British company called EADS Astrium that announced last week that they could actually build one if it were needed.

The idea for the tug first proposed by NASA scientists Edward Lu and Stanley Love in a paper in Nature in 2005. The pair realized that sure, we could change an asteroid’s course by docking a rocket onto the asteroid and pushing it, but landing on an asteroid is really hard: The asteroid is an extremely fast-moving target, and often it rotates asymmetrically around its axis, meaning that a lumpy part of the asteroid could smash a relatively teeny rocket in its rotational path. But, the scientists argued, the spaceship could hover 200 meters or more above the asteroid and use their mutual gravitational attraction to form a “towline” between the two. Then ship could use its own propulsion to slowly pull the asteroid to another course. It would have to push very gently to avoid breaking the bond and flying away, but over the course of 15 to 20 years, the asteroid could be persuaded to miss our planet.

The idea of a gravity tractor has been refined (PDF) by scientist Bong Wie, working at Arizona State University, who proposed the use of solar sails to eliminate the problem of fuel capacity on the satellite. (Love and Lu’s proposal relied on nuclear energy generators for power in their design.) Solar sails capture the momentum from photons of solar radiation to provide propulsion. By properly angling the sail (Wie proposes 35 degrees), the body of the space ship can be moved in the desired direction. The sail can take months to build up significant velocity, but since it has a long time to accomplish its tugboat-like task, this isn’t inherently a showstopper. That said, solar sail technology is still in its infancy—it’s only been tested on a very small scale by American and Japanese scientists in space—so it’s not ready for large-scale deployment just yet.

EADS Astrium’s design uses four ion thrusters of the sort used on Deep Space 1.  Each is aligned to keep the device hovering above the asteroid while gently pulling the asteroid via it’s gravitation “towline” off course. The ship will be 30 meters (about 98 feet) across and weigh about 10 tons. In news articles, Astrium representatives say they haven’t even built a prototype yet, but they’re convinced they can bang one out if necessary.

All of which puts us back to the question of whether there’s enough capacity to provide the necessary early warning to build and launch a gravity tractor in time to have it work. Since NASA currently tracks about 6,000 asteroids, of the 100,000 out there, I’m going to go with no.

So, without further ado, here is what it would have looked like if a large object hit the Earth, during the 70′s, and many, many movie stars from that era (including Malden, Sean Connery, Natalie Wood, Brian Keith from Family Affair and a presidential Henry Fonda) had to run around reacting to it.

Question: How big an asteroid would be needed to completely destroy a planet?
That’s easy. It would have to be really, really big or moving very, very fast (or both for a real whopper of an impact), but there are some subtleties that are worth explaining.

First off, let’s admit that we’re really concerned with how big an asteroid would destroy planet Earth, especially life on Earth. I’m a bit more worried about my home planet than Mars, Jupiter, or even Pluto and even more worried about all the life we see around us (not to mention ourselves!). Earth is far more important from the human perspective, so let’s tackle that question.

Frighteningly, many large objects have hit Earth. Real whoppers. That’s a bit scary to think about. The good news is that the Earth is still here, so apparently large impacts of the planet-destruction kind rarely happen. We do know that smaller impacts have happened, such as the meteorite that hit the high Arizona desert just east of Flagstaff, at the site known as Meteor Crater. If we could count the impacts, we could gauge how frequently and when the impacts took place.

However, it is hard for us to find evidence of all the impact craters on Earth today. This is mainly due to erosion, which washes away the evidence by slowly filling in the craters, but looking at the Moon, where erosion is for all intents and purposes non-existent, we see that our nearest companion has been pummeled a lot, though mainly in the distant past. It, too, is still here and in one piece. The far side of the Moon, which always points away from the Earth, has a lot more craters than the side facing the Earth, which makes sense because the far side is more likely to be hit—it’s a bit harder for asteroids to sneak by the Earth and hit the shielded side of the Moon (though some have) than to hit the exposed side.

In fact, the Moon itself holds the key to what was probably the largest impact that the Earth has experienced (and hopefully will ever experience). Before I explain what we know about this biggest of all collisions, it is important to understand what we currently know about the formation of the solar system.

Stars form when dense and cold gas and dust that is prevalent in galaxies like the Milky Way slowly collapses under the influence of gravity. Astronomers see these forming stars just about everywhere we look—from regions practically next door, like the Orion Nebula, to the most distant galaxies we can see with the Hubble Space Telescope. As the star forms, a disk of leftover material takes shape through the combined effects of angular momentum and the force of gravity. These disks become fairly violent places as small particles of material slowly accumulate to form specks of dust, then pebbles, boulders, and ultimately planets. Astronomers have seen such disks in various stages of evolution with powerful telescopes.

Current models of planet formation gauge the time to go from a disk of gas and dust to a fully formed planetary system at about a million years, depending on the mass of gas and dust available and some other factors. Astronomers are not entirely sure how the process proceeds, but they have developed telescopes designed to peer through the material surrounding these forming stars to try and pin down the details. A prime example is the Spitzer Space Telescope, which observes in the infrared portion of the spectrum. Radio telescopes like the Very Large Array or the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (now under construction in Northern Chile) can also be used to effectively study the star- and planet-formation process, because the long-radio wavelengths they receive can escape the dense molecular clouds, unlike visible light.

It is now generally accepted that the Moon formed when a large, Mars-sized object crashed into the Earth very soon after the Earth itself formed. This collision dug deep into the Earth’s crust and threw off material from as deep as the Earth’s mantle into orbit where it was pulled together by its own gravity to form the Moon. This explains why rocks brought back from the Moon are composed of fairly lightweight minerals and rocks, containing little to no iron or nickel (metals found at the core of the Earth rather than the mantle). It also explains why the orbital plane of the Moon doesn’t line up with the orbital plane of the Earth itself (the impactor came from a different orbital plane). From dating the ages of rocks, geologists know the Earth is 4.65 billion years old, while the Moon is a bit younger, about 4.6 billion years old, evidently created in a subsequent massive collision.

So, in some sense, Earth wasn’t “destroyed” by an impact of an object the size of Mars that hit the Earth a somewhat glancing blow, but a more direct impact of an even more massive object could easily have had enough energy to seriously disrupt the Earth. Even so, in this case some kind of residual object would have formed, perhaps even two, and if life had taken hold after the planet and its companion cooled down, we might live in a true double planet system. Imagine looking up each night and seeing a blue companion planet in place of the Moon, with its own continents, weather, and oceans. That would be quite a sight.

What about life-ending impacts?
By studying the fossil record, geologists have identified sudden mass extinctions of species. They count the type and number of species in different layers of rock and can see when the number of species changes significantly. Two of the most significant extinction events are called the K-Pg boundary (a.k.a. the Cretaceous-Paleogene event) and the Permian-Triassic event.

The Permian-Triassic event took place about 251 million years ago. Although it is not entirely clear that major impacts caused this extinction, it is clear that the Earth’s life suffered an extreme setback. This extinction event led to the loss of 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species. Ponder this for a minute: This means that nearly all marine life was completely wiped out. More than two-thirds of all terrestrial animal species disappeared. Even many insect species—among the best survivors on the planet—were wiped out as well. This event is commonly referred to as the “Great Dying”—suffice to say it would not have been pleasant time to be alive. Although multiple impacts by large asteroids is a likely explanation for the Permian-Triassic event, there are other possibilities and research continues.

The K-Pg event took place 65.5 million years ago and is fairly clearly caused by the impact of a large asteroid. A thin layer of sediment with a high concentration of iridium was laid down around the world in a very short period of time. Iridium is very rare in the Earth’s crust, because it sank along with iron to the Earth’s core, but it’s often found in asteroids. There is also evidence of significant geologic activity around the time of this extinction event, which led to the loss of about 75% of all extant species, but most geologists believe it was caused by a giant impact near today’s Yucatan peninsula, forming the so-called Chicxulub crater. It is still not clear if the impact and its debris cloud (and tsunamis) were the sole cause of the extinctions or if secondary causes (chemical changes in the atmosphere or oceans) had a role to play. Again, research continues.

What can we take away from these extinction events? Life is both pretty tough and pretty disposable. Although life as a whole goes on, your species may not get a golden ticket. Impacts happen that can destroy most life on Earth. The good news is that life managed to survive and ultimately re-conquer the ocean and land, just not in the same forms that existed before. It is one of the amazing things about life on our planet that evolution guides both the long-term survival of life generally and the development (and extinction) of individual species. Life goes on, but any individual species may not.

Astronomers have begun multiple projects to scan the solar system and identify potential asteroids that might impact the Earth. Hopefully by identifying possible life-threatening objects, we could come together worldwide to somehow save ourselves (and all the other life on the planet). Right now, destroying or nudging an asteroid on a collision course would be a tremendous challenge, but it seems that impacts are few and far between, so we probably have enough time to develop the technology necessary for planetary protection.

The Internet may be crumbling, but think of the time that would free up! [via Futurismic]

“Junk DNA” science may cure HIV, probably won’t create race of superhuman mutants.   [via SciFi Scanner]

Migrant workers may soon be able to telecommute.  [via SciFiWire ]

SciNoFi is not alone.  Terminator TV fans mobilize to save their show. [via eonline.com]

And the first Star Wars may have been 30+ years ago, but its spirit lives on in the hearts of harp music loving pre-teens everywhere [via The Website at the End of the Universe] :

Image from Wikipedia

What exactly was Kara, and were people chasing down a rabbit hole when they assumed her father was Daniel, the missing 8th model cylon?

Ron Moore: Daniel is definitely a rabbit hole. It was an unintentional rabbit hole, to be honest. I was kind of surprised when I started picking up [that] speculation online.

For those of you who don’t know, there was a deep part of the cylon backstory that had to do with one of the cylons that was created by the final five [called Daniel. Daniel] was later sort of aborted by Cavill… it was always intended just to be sort of an interesting bit of backstory about Cavill and his jealously. A Cain and Abel sort of allegory. Then people really started grabbing on to it and seizing on it as some major part of the mythology. In couple of interviews and in the last podcast I tried to go out of my way to say “look, don’t spend too much time and energy on this particular theory,” because it was never intended to be that major a piece of the mythology.

David Eick: It’s like Boxey in that way!

Moore: Kara is what you want her to be. It’s easy to put the label on her of “angel” or “messenger of God” or something like that. Kara Thrace died and was resurrected and came back and took the people to their final end. That was her role, her destiny in the show… We debated back and forth in the writers’ room about giving it more clarity and saying definitively what she is. We decided that the more you try to put a name on it, the less interesting it became, and we just decided this was the most interesting way for her to go out, with her just disappearing and [leave people wondering exactly what she was].

We see Galactica jump away from the Colony. Are we to assume there are a lot of pissed off Cavills out there still, or were they destroyed?

Moore: The final [cut] came out a little less clear on that than I intended…. It was scripted and the idea was that when Racetrack hits the nukes—the nukes come in and smack into the colony—it takes the colony out of the stream that was swirling around the singularity and [the colony] fell in and was destroyed. I think as we went through the [editing process], when we kept cutting frames and doing this and that, one of the things that became less apparent was that the colony was doomed. The intention was that everyone who was aboard the colony would perish.

At what point did you decide to make it Earth-of-the-past that we were going to wind up on, and what was your reason for that?

Moore: We decided that a couple of years ago. I don’t think we ever really had a version of the show where we [were] in the future or in the present, those didn’t seem as interesting. In the early [development of the show], we would talk about the fact that we would see a lot of contemporary things in the show from language to wardrobe to all kinds of production design details. That only made sense to us in terms of a lot of things that we see in the show and we feel are taken from our contemporary world are actually theirs to begin with. [They] somehow spread down through eons and came to us through the collective unconsciousness. Or, more directly, [as when] Lee said we would give them the better part of ourselves.

Eick: There was a time when we were talking about “they land, and its Pterodactyls and Tyrannosaurus Rex.” But the idea that they were part of the genus of humankind seemed like the right—and more affordable!—way to do that.

Moore: We also had this image of Six walking through Times Square that we came up with long ago.

Who attacked the original Earth?

Moore: The backstory of the original Earth was supposed to be that the 13th tribe of cylons came to that world, started over and essentially destroyed themselves. There was some internecine warfare that occurred among the cylons themselves, which was another repetition in the cycle of “all of this has happened before and all will happen again.” Even they, who were the rebels that split off, [had] enough of humanity in them as cylons that they eventually destroyed themselves.

Why did Cavill decide to kill himself?

Moore: Cavill killing himself actually came from Dean Stockwell [the actor who played Cavill]. As scripted in that final climatic CIC battle, Tigh was going to grab Cavill and fling him over the edge of the upper level and he was going to fall to his death. Dean called me and said “y’know, I just really think that, in that moment, Cavill would realize the jig is up and it’s all hopeless, and he should just put a gun in his mouth and shoot himself.” And I said: “…Okay!”

For the actors, what was the last scene that you filmed and what was the mood like on the set?

Mary McDonnell: My last scene was Laura Roslin’s last moment in the Raptor. That was about 3:45 am on a very small set. I think I was one of the first people to wrap—she died and we all hugged, and my son and I went to the airport and went back to LA… It happened quickly, it was set to happen a week later and the schedule was changed, so suddenly it was over, it was really interesting, very much like the show for me.

Edward James Olmos: My last day was when I was on the mountainside and it was the last moment that I was on camera. It was quite an experience all the way around, that moment in time. I think everybody had a real easy time [acting] with the emotions that we had at the very end, it’s pretty honest all the way around. The last time that I saw Starbuck and Lee was the last scene where I saw them [in the show]. Pretty intense.

McDonnell: But we’re here, and we’re alive! I wore bright blue so you would know I was alive.

With the use of “All Along The Watchtower,” are you trying to get at some notion that there is some universal consciousness that goes back as far as the human/cylon races’ arrival?

Moore: The notion is sort of how you posited it. The music, the lyrics, the composition, is divine, eternal, it’s something that lives in the collective unconsciousness of everyone in the show and all of us today. It’s a musical theme that repeats itself and crops up in unexpected places. Different people hear it and pluck it out of the ether and write songs. It’s a connection of the divine and the mortal. Music is something that people literally catch out of the air and can’t really define exactly how they composed it. [So] here is a song that transcends many eons and many different people and cultures and the stars, and was ultimately reinvented by one Mr. Bob Dylan here on Earth.

Eick: It was a simple way, I thought, to communicate clearly the idea [the show is not set in the future.] That this is a story about a culture that gave birth to ours. There was an episode in season one in which Helo and Sharon are running for their lives. They hole up in a diner and there’s a cylon centurion cornering them. For the longest time we planned to have an old jukebox in the diner that would play “Yesterday”, or whatever we could afford—

Moore: Not “Yesterday.”

Eick: —Probably not “Yesterday.” Something from The Guess Who perhaps. I think we felt it was too soon. It would confuse things and…people would just be thrown by it, but we were thinking about it that far back, that music would be a great way to say to the audience that it follows [a] cyclical theme of “this has all happened before and will happen again.” This culture is the one that gave birth to ours, so that all the colloquialisms and all the slang that you hear and the behavior that is idiosyncratic—playing cards or whatever—we get that from them, not the other way around.

There’s been a lot of talk about how setting an end date for a scripted serial helps to recharge it. Did you find that true?

Moore: In terms of the writers’ room it certainly focused us. We made the decision that fourth season was going to be the last season once we got to the end of the third season. We had writers’ retreats, and we had dedicated sessions to say “this is the end, what’s the last story, what’s the final arc?” It really made everybody very focused and very specific about exactly how this was going to line up. Part of the motivation to make it the final season was that we didn’t want to get to the place where we felt like the ship was keeling over and we were having a problem. We all instinctively felt that the show had the reached the third act by the time the show got to the end of that third season.

Eick: Going back a year before that, Ron and I sat down for our biannual “what the hell do we do this year meeting?” Heading into season three there was a real sense of creative frustration. We wanted to expand the show and … find a new ways [of] story telling. [So season three] became what we call the cylon-centric season. It’s when we introduced the base ship, it’s when we introduced some new cylons. It gave the show life, but after a year of that, when we sat down heading into season four, it was a much shorter conversation. It was basically “okay, what if we end it? What if we just decide it’s over?” Let’s call this…the dovetailing season. If we know that going in, how would that inform story telling decisions?” So it was a very early decision. I remember from my perspective going into that 4th season there was a different energy on the set. There was tremendous focus and concentration that I was getting from the entire ensemble.

McDonnell: Part of what was extraordinary about that is as you are able to view [the end approaching] you can then kick into gear and plot your finish. What that ends up doing is simplifying things for you. You know where your head is and you can let go in many moments were you probably would have worked very hard [before, but] you didn’t need to. So a lot of us felt a kind of simplification. A kind of humility that came over us and that gives you a lot of energy. You just know where you are going and you are proud to be a part of it. And you let go. That was the experience I think many of us had.

Olmos: We had a meeting at the very beginning of the show and we all, 13 of us, sat down in my trailer—

McDonnell: He had the biggest trailer.

Omos: —it was beautiful! And we sat down as we discussed the possibilities. I talked to them about making sure we understood that if, by chance, this situation was to move forward and we were to do this as a series, and this was to go on to for one year, four years, ten years, who knows, that we had to understand what that meant… I just knew that…the story would have a beginning, a middle and an end, and that we had to pace ourselves.

So at the end of the third season, beginning of fourth season, we had a meeting, and we were told then that this was going to be the final season. Everybody got very depressed…I don’t think any of the actors wanted to stop the show… But we had hit the end, we were going into the fourth and final act. And we knew it. So we talked about the very first time we ever got together, and we said it’s like a marathon. In marathon you have to start off fast, really really intensely strong, your first mile has to extraordinary. Then the next 24 miles have to be consistent…. And then the last mile has to be the strongest mile that you’ve run the whole 26 miles…To win it, your final mile has to be your strongest mile… So we knew where we where coming from, we knew where we were, and now we knew where were going… I think that led to some of our strongest performances.

In the last scene, are “Six” and “Baltar” angels or demons?

Moore: I think they’re both. We never try to name exactly what the “Head” characters are—we called them “Head Baltar” and “Head Six” all throughout the show, internally. We never really looked at them as angels or demons because they seemed to periodically say evil things and good things, they tended to save people and they tended to damn people. There was this sense that they worked in service of something else. You could say “a higher power” or you could say “another power,” [but] they were in service to something else that was guiding and helping, sometimes obstructing, and sometimes tempting the people on the show. The idea at the very end was that whatever they are in service to continues and is eternal and is always around. And they too are still around…and with all of us who are the children of Hera. They continue to walk among us and watch, and at some point they may or may not intercede at a key moment.

We’ll leave the debates over the acting, direction, and overall adaptation to others (except to say that Jackie Earle Haley stole the show). But one aspect worthy of analysis is the story’s main conflict—the constant “looming” nuclear holocaust. Granted, we never actually see any evidence that the aforementioned holocaust is looming, save a few shots of Nixon upping Defcon levels—but we’ll address that later. When Alan Moore first published the book in 1986, the apocalypse on everyone’s mind was Cold War atomic bombs—which, as we’ve noted, no longer pack quite the same anxiety punch as, say, biological weapons. Today, gas masks and duct tape have replaced air raids and backyard shelters in the popular conscious, to the point where seeing mushroom clouds onscreen feels like you’re watching an ’80s homage.

Of course, none of this means that the nuclear threat is any smaller now than it was three decades ago: The danger of nuclear war is still present, and fear of missile attack still drives plenty of policy and military tech decisions worldwide. But, like Bird Flu, nukes seem to have a PR problem: Despite the fact that they could wipe us all out, the thought of them isn’t all that scary.

Which is really the main problem for Snyder and his estimated $125 million budget: No matter how faithful your script and powerful your characters, it’s tough to keep a story suspenseful when you’re working towards a climax that doesn’t pack a serious punch. Not helping is the fact that the film completely ignores the other side—the Russians. We get a few choice shots of Tricky Dick mumbling about war, but never once do we see Gorbachev ordering missile launches or troop mobilization.

Granted, world annihilation isn’t dull—it’s still enough to keep an audience engaged for 2 hours and 43 minutes. Plus Snyder never misses a chance to smack us with stakes-raising reminders of devastation (we counted at least 8 shots with the Twin Towers in the background). And when the destruction does come to the Big Apple (why do TV shows and movies always love to decimate New York?) Snyder saves us the book’s graphic images of strewn corpses and bombed-out buildings, instead focusing on the internal struggle among the Watchmen ranks. Nine million people sacrificed for the greater good, meh—but we’ll watch one lovable sociopath in a ski mask.

So should Snyder have updated his apocalypse with biotech? He’d have faced the wrath of fans had he done so. Plus who would think nuclear war could ever get boring? It’s enough to make you wonder what the next big all-consuming fear will be. Oh, wait, we know that already: thinking robots.

Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

But hopefully we’ll have some more time than that, maybe on the order of 40 or 50 years. Then we can make plans. In How I saved the World, Valentin Ivanov’s short story from Diamonds in the Sky, a heroic team of astronauts are living on the surface of an asteroid called “The Hammer” and…painting it black. 

OK, here’s the theory: A rotating object in space will absorb heat and light from the sun on one side, and emit the photons (cool off) on the other side. As the photons are spat out, the object will be pushed, at least a bit, in the opposite direction.  To deal with the 200 million-ton rock-of-death in the story, the entire world has mobilized its resources. The Chinese are building giant solar batteries which will power giant lasers built by the french. The lasers will be pointed at the sunward side of the asteroid, which itself will have been painted black by Russian and American astronauts. The black paint increases the amount of energy the asteroid will absorb and emit, and thus propel the asteroid toward the sun faster, and, in this case, causing it to miss the Earth. Phew!

Of course, there are potential problems with this theory. Asteroids have low gravity, and they are mostly gravel and loose rock. It’s not clear if the paint would remain in place. And the expense of trucking all that paint into space would not be inconsiderable. So what are the alternatives? One idea involved installing a lot of small, solar power rockets which would slowly, over time, change the direction of the asteroid. Another would be to install a conveyor belt that digs out asteroid  dirt and flings it out into space, changing its direction by Newton’s Third Law.

But before any of these can be useful, there needs to be long-range asteroid detection, so the planet isn’t caught off-guard. NASA currently relies on optical telescopes and radar echoes beamed from Aricebo radio telescope in Puerto Rice. In 2005, they were able to detect the Apophis Asteroid, which appeared headed for a maybe-hit with the Earth until additional data allowed analysts to refine their estimate and reduce the probability of an impact in 2029 or 2036.  So I think we can count getting a 25-year advance warning a success, but last October, astronomers were surprised when a bus-sized asteroid burned up in the atmosphere over  Africa. The event lead to a call for more funding for asteroid detection, but with the world economy doing its own freefall, it’s not clear that we’ll see any moves on that for some years yet.

Image courtesy of NASA

The core point of Planet Killer is that there natural things out in space that are a lot more dangerous than any invading fleet of aliens you could care to mention. (The Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait, has written an excellent book on this whole notion with the subtly-titled Death From The Skies: These Are The Ways The World Will End, which Kevin mentions in his commentary at the end of the story.)

The kind of cosmic event that can make for incredibly beautiful Hubble Space Telescope pictures, can also spell death for anyone who happens to be close by. Unfortunately for us, in the case of a Gamma-ray burst of the sort that is at the heart of the mystery of Planet Killer (I told you to read the story first!), being close by can mean “in the same galaxy.” Gamma-ray bursts are believed to be produced by stars getting swallowed up be a black hole or the merger of two super-dense neutron stars. In either case, the result is two beams of intense radiation shooting away from the triggering event like beams from a lighthouse. Each beam is big enough and powerful enough to fry any solar systems that happen to have the misfortune of sitting in its path, even if the Gamma-ray burst originates on the other side of the galaxy.

Much is unknown about these bursts and how they are produced. But although unpredictable, Gamma-ray bursters are bright enough to be seen at intergalactic distances, and there are enough galaxies visible in the sky to make keeping an eye out for them worthwhile. In the past, the difficulty has been coordinating observations, so that the detection of gamma rays can be correlated with other types of radiation, such as light, allowing us to pin down the precise origin of such bursts. Fortunately, orbiting satellites like the recently launched Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have made this task much easier. Just last month, the Fermi detected the most powerful Gamma-ray burst ever—fortunately one which occurred a comforting 12.1 billion light years away.

With buzz already building for The Road, a post-apocalyptic movie starring Viggo Mortensen set to come out sometime in 2009, Science Not Fiction decided to take at look at some of our favorite after-the-end-of-the-world scenarios. I excluded the various incarnations of War of Worlds because the book is basically an extended flashback from the safety of a rebuilt future, and the movies are apocalyptic rather than post-apocalyptic. Similarly Independence Day and Deep Impact are about averting armageddon. Twelve Monkeys and Oryx and Crake have post-apocalyptic scenes, but the back bone of their narrative is firmly in the pre-apocalyptic world–the selections below are all about life in the no-holds-barred aftermath. So in chronological order:

1. A Canticle for Leibowitz (1950) Echoes of Walter Miller Jr.’s novel have popped up in science fiction for decades, notably in Babylon 5 and Anathem. Canticle features a monastic sect devoted to preserving technology in the centuries following the fall of civilization.
2. Lord of The Flies (1954). Set in the aftermath of a nuclear war* a group of boys are stranded on a tropical island. An allegory for the collapse of civilization as a whole, things soon turn ugly and shades of Lord of the Flies are found in many later post-apocalyptic works.
3. Mad Max (1979) Although the argument could be made that the sequels were better than the somewhat disjointed original (in particular Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome), Mad Max’s iconic look and feel has been copied by countless other movies, in many ways defining the visual vocabulary of the post-apocalyptic.
4. The Day of The Triffids (BBC TV adaptation, 1981) Based on John Wyndham’s 1951 novel of the same name, The Day of The Triffids featured a double whammy–a nation struck by blindness and the escape of the deadly Triffid plants. The scenes of a deserted London inspired 28 Days Later, and the clacking noise made by approaching Triffids in the BBC adaptation became one of the scariest sounds ever.
5. Threads (1984) Continuing the BBC’s 1980′s love affair with the end of the world, Threads is an uncompromising and utterly bleak tale of life in a British city (Sheffield) before and after nuclear armageddon. Incorporating documentary style elements, the script pulled no punches and was noted for its technical accuracy, including the effects of a nuclear winter.
6. The Quiet Earth (1985) I mentioned this film before in Science Not Fiction’s list of the 10 Most Underrated Science Fiction and Fantasy Movies, but it deserves to appear again — a scientist awakes to find a world in which (almost) every human being has been mysteriously killed instantly.
7. The Postman (Original 1985 novel, not the Kevin Costner film adaptation) The movie version was weak, but the novel remains one of my favorite books. Without sugarcoating life in a destroyed United States, the book nonetheless is unusual among post-apocalyptic fiction for its moving and believable optimism.
8. Cherry 2000 (1986) Yes, it’s a classic B-movie. But this hero-quest romp had some standout touches, including the idea of a world that can’t afford anything new and the memorable and mentally unbalanced Lester (a sort of psychopathic self-help guru.)
9. 28 Days Later (2002) Confirming the fall of nuclear war and the rise of biological disaster as the standard route to a post-apocalypse, 28 Days Later also breathed new life into the zombie genre. A gripping and intelligent plot packed a huge emotional wallop.
10. I am Legend (2007 movie adaptation). Based on the 1954 novel, the amazing visual storytelling and convincing performance of Will Smith in an empty New York City knocked this tale of humanity’s twilight out of the park.

ETA *(Or not, there’s an alternative explanation for the precipitating events that force the boys’ original evacuation, see the comments below. But it still stands as a microcosm of life after global civilizational collapse)

Traditionally, Jupiter has been seen as protector of the Earth. The idea is that comets from the outer solar system which might otherwise smash into the Earth (a la Armageddon and Deep Impact) get sucked into Jupiter’s gravity well instead and are swallowed up, similar to how comet Shoemaker-Levy collided with Jupiter in 1994. Now, Kevin and his colleagues have created a detailed simulation of the solar system that suggests that Jupiter might be responsible for kicking comets towards the inner solar system, where the Earth lives.

This research also has implications for the search for extraterrestrial life, and especially intelligent life — up until now, scientists have worried that if a solar system didn’t have something like a Jupiter, it might be too dangerous for life to get very far before getting wiped out by an impact. If Jupiter actually makes things worse for inner planets, we might be more likely to find life in solar systems without big gas giants.