Claire L. Evans is a freelance science writer, science fiction critic, polymath, and musician. She has been writing Universe for five years and still doesn't know how to describe it.
Last week, I wrote a piece for Vice Magazine's Motherboard about an android version of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The story of the android is truly surreal, stranger than even Dick's flipped-out fiction, and I recommend you pop over to Motherboard and mainline it for yourselves. For the piece, I interviewed the lead programmer on the first version of the PKD Android, Dr. Andrew Olney. Aside from bringing science fiction legends back from the dead, Olney is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Memphis and Associate Director of the same university's Institute for Intelligent Systems. He makes intelligent tutoring systems and once hacked a Big Mouth Billy Bass.
I found his interview too interesting not to share in full.
Universe: This project lives in a world between computer science, sculpture, and literature. In terms of the response you've received, has it been understood primarily as an art piece or a feat of engineering?
Olney: I was attracted to the aspects of the project most opposite from what I normally do. I loved the art aspect, the resonance with PKD's written work. To me it was a kinetic interactive sculpture.
Universe: What makes this project fascinating is that PKD was obsessed, himself, with ideas of personhood in an age of androids. I can't help but think of Jack Bohlen, in Martian Time-Slip, servicing the simulacra in his son's school and having schizoid episodes where he believes that every person is secretly a mechanism. This is presented as being patently horrifying; based on your understanding of his work, do you think Dick would have liked the android or been terrified by it?
Olney: I can only speculate, of course. I imagine he would have appreciated the reification on a certain level, say on the nuts and bolts level. To the extent that it fell short of the androids he wrote about, I think he would have been relieved. After all it is not the basic idea of an android that is the most troubling, but rather the idea that an android can be more real, or more human, than a human. Since we no doubt missed the mark there, I doubt the robot itself would have terrified him. But as evidence that a future he wrote about was perhaps more possible than he imagined. Maybe that would make him a bit uneasy.
Universe: Can you tell me a little about the AI?
Olney: The basic AI is somewhat analogue to my reading of Dixie Flatline from Neuromancer. Imagine a giant recorder that pairs every stimulus you receive with every response you make. I had a rough approximation of that via PKD's interviews, letters, etc. With the rest of his writings (books, fiction, etc) I had enough material to make a giant semantic space, basically a vector space that maps words to vector representations. This let me create a giant associative memory of conversational stimulus/response pairs, mediated by the meaning of what was being said to the robot. That was most of the interesting stuff going on with the AI. In addition, I hooked up a chatbot for the goofy dialogue ("What is your name") and used a ranking procedure to decide what response to select. This is a bit of a simplification, but there were about 20 responses generated for every spoken input, and only one was selected. The rest of the robot was sensors (face recognition) and effectors (facial expression, lip sync, audio output) chained together using an expert system in order to drive certain behaviors, like turning the head to make eye contact. I also experimented right before the head was lost on dynamically generating emotional expressions based on the emotional valence of the robot's speech, which actually worked pretty well. We've since used that in other systems in my lab.
Universe: What is your end goal, in developing an AI like this? Are you interested in developing real machine intelligence or is it more about making useful systems to assist people in everyday tasks, like learning?
Olney: That's a great question. My position is that real-world contexts are an endless source of important research questions. AI is way past the point where toy systems can generate interesting questions. It's only by placing your system in the world that you can see where the holes in your theory are. So it's a very symbiotic relationship between science and engineering. On one level, you are establishing the computational specifications for a functional (though not necessarily human) intelligence. What you learn from AI can be taken back to understanding human cognition or animal cognition because it helps shape your questions-it helps you ask better questions about human and animal intelligence. On another level, you are creating intelligent machines that carry out useful tasks in the real world. Something that we do a lot of in my lab is create intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) that tutor students on various topics. This is societally relevant because there are not enough human tutors to meet the need and tutoring is expensive. So creating ITS as a supplement to classroom instruction has a positive social impact and it is a source of important research questions about natural language understanding, natural language generation, motivation, and learning.
Universe: What's your favorite Philip K. Dick novel or story?
Olney:Scanner Darkly is by far my favorite out of what I've read, which is only half a dozen or so. I've read maybe 20 or so short stories, but I suppose my favorite is the Golden Man, which I love for its non-cognitive-evolutionary storyline. Another I like is the Pre-Persons, not because I agree with the position on abortion, but because the story is hilarious.
Is poetry a driving force of Oceanography?
Read Rimbaud!
- Phillipe Diolé
I've written many times, although not recently, about the ocean.
When I first began Universe in 2005, it was practically a ship's log: meandering pieces on narwhal tusks, the accidental poetics of my hero, Rachel Carson, and adolescent screeds on the perils of the Mariana trench. At some point in my career, I ported my energies outward to the cosmos, reasoning, as the ancient alchemists did, that "As Above, So Below."
The movement from the deep to the distant, from sea to space, seemed like a sensible evolution. I saw parallels then, as I do now. They are both cold, forbidding, strange, contain tremulous mysteries, and do not give their secrets readily. Tales of their early exploration contain feats of unspeakable audacity, as well as tragedy. Solitary heroes stand out: Yuri Gagarin in his Vostok spacecraft, Jacques Cousteau developing the Aqua-Lung in order to push deeper underwater, the elite few men and women who have dared venture far above, far below. Listen to a veteran diver discuss the sea and an astronaut space: you'll hear the same hushed tones, the same fearful, learned respect.
After all, what experience does this planet offer us more phenomenologically similar to spacewalking than floating in a deep ocean? Water is the best environment for spacewalk training on Earth; substituting neutral buoyancy for microgravity, NASA Astronauts train at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab in Houston, a giant swimming pool. I've always been delighted by images of this place; if you squint just right, and ignore the scuba divers, it almost looks like outer space is robin's egg blue and dotted with bubbles.
In spite of our egotism, the human organism is delicate. We're only built to tromp around the accommodating portions of the Earth. The moment we're submerged in the ocean, or we ascend too high a peak—to say nothing of outer space—we're out of our league. Yet, in our incorrigible hubris, we've long used technology to wander beyond our territory. Aristotle wrote of diving bells, and (apocryphally) even Alexander the Great explored the deep ocean—in a submarine of white glass, where the fish gathered 'round to pay homage—and returned to pronounce of his experience, "the world is damned and lost." Mercury spacecraft and the early Soviet Vostok capsules may as well have been diving bells; they were so small, it's said that they were worn, not ridden.
"The sea," Captain Nemo pronounces, in one of literature's more glamorous depictions of the deep, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, "does not belong to despots. Upon its surface men can still excercise unjust laws, fight, tear one another to pieces, and can be carried away with terrestrial horrors. But at thirty feet below its level, their reign ceases, their influence is quenched, and their power disappears. Ah! Sir, live—live in the bosom of the waters! There only is independence! There I recognise no masters! There I am free!"
This sentiment, an inverted Overview Effect, sounds familiar. Astronauts consistently speak of the irrelevance of borders, even nations, on a planet viewed from space. It's probably the most consistent revelation of spaceflight, the majestic panorama of a whole planet, seen without its despots and ideologues. The Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov, only the second man in space and the first to be there for more than 24 hours, described the experience of seeing the Earth from space as "a thousand times more beautiful than anything I could have imagined." After orbiting the planet over a dozen times, Titov replied a call from mission control with the elated cry: "I am Eagle! I am Eagle!"
An Eagle, of course, has no masters.
Today, in cramped cockpits and bathyspheres, astronauts and their aquatic counterparts lie contorted in the same metal cabins, surrounded by death, peering from thick windows into empty, hostile landscapes. Cloaked in metal, they transport light where there has never been any—to what James Cameron, after his much-ballyhooed recent dive to the Challenger Deep, called a "barren, desolate lunar plain," or (more viscerally) which William Beebe, passenger in the world's first bathysphere, described as "the black pit-mouth of hell itself."
This "black pit-mouth" is what interests me. Essentially every culture has a mythological history which includes primal undifferentiated formlessness. The abyss, as much topless as it is bottomless. And the abyss, figuratively speaking, is neither distinctly maritime nor interplanetary. Rather, it's a little of both: Tao, the primal ocean upon which Vishnu slumbered, amorphous being, chaos preceding time. Is this because the ancients knew on a symbolic level what our scientists empirically know now: that the abyss—in both worldly forms—is the seat of our lineage? We are, as Carl Sagan said, "made of starstuff." We're also risen from the sea. The salt in our veins is testament.
Beebe, one of the greatest American explorers, in his book Half-Mile Down, a record of his dive to 3,028 feet in 1934, wrote that it seems "a very wonderful thing, to walk about on land today, vitalized by a bit of the ancient seas swirling through our body. It is somehow of a piece with stars and time and space-something to be very quiet and thoughtful about, and proud of." Indeed, while beneath the waters lies a cruel landscape, and while the cosmos is vast and unforgiving, they are both our birthright. Our impulse to travel far below and above our limits is precisely that of children striving to return to the womb, only to discover that birth is as great a nothingness as death.
Between coral/Silent eel/Silver swordfish
I can't really feel or dream down here
In 1977, NASA sent a pair of unmanned probes named Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 into space. Among the infrared spectrometers and radio receivers included on each probe were identical copies of the same non-scientific object: the Voyager Golden Record.
Sheathed in a protective aluminum jacket, the Record is a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images chosen to portray the diversity of life on Earth: bird calls, whale songs, the sounds of surf, wind, and thunder, music from human cultures, and some 55 greetings in a range of languages, alive and dead. Like lonely time capsules, the records, aboard their still-functioning hosts, have long since left our solar system. The official Voyager 2 Twitter reports that the probe is currently at 13 hrs 38 mins 08 secs of light-travel time from Earth, which makes it the farthest man-made object from Earth.
According to the unofficial mythology, the Voyager Golden Record was compiled by two people in love: the astronomer Carl Sagan, and Ann Druyan, the creative director of the project, who he would later marry. Druyan confided on WNYC's Radio Lab program in 2007 that she recorded the sounds of her own body-the electrical impulses of her brain and nervous system, her heartbeats-for the album, which were the sounds of a woman swept away: by a man, by ideas, by the power of sending their love out into eternity, her human pulse synched to the hollow ebbing of a pulsar. Love, golden, close to eternal, flying at impossible speeds through the heavens.
The Golden Record's panoply of information, including those 55 greetings, was intended for an unknowable audience of spacefaring extraterrestrials. Some are personal, like the Swedish greeting: "Greetings from a computer programmer in the little university town of Ithaca on the planet Earth." Others are chatty, almost unserious: somewhat preposterously, one, in Amoy, asks if the aliens are hungry. These recordings ostensibly represent a united voice of mankind addressing the cosmos. Of course, however, each greeting is a world of its own, embodying its own set of cultural and historical attitudes about life in space, time, infinity, and consciousness. The phrasing shifts from one recording to the next, revealing dramatic shifts in perspective. While the Arabic speaker calls extraterrestrials "friends in the stars," the Zulu and Sotho recordings address "great ones." What space is, what it represents, is not a consistent variable.
And neither, of course, are we.
As a species, the messages we've sent into space are piecemeal. For every concerted effort towards reasoned transmission, millions upon millions of radio-hours of information have leaked out into space from our planet haphazardly, beginning with that famous Nazi Olympic broadcast in 1936. Which, as it turns out, may be a better way for an extraterrestrial species to know us.
We're warring, inconsistent. We love, and embarrass ourselves. We create technologies seemingly at random, often beyond our ability to understand, let alone legislate. We live in bodies eminently susceptible to the slightest intrusion. Only a few of us are even fleetingly concerned with the impression we might make on our alien brethren. And yet, flawed, we are, our whole tumultuous history an opaque question mark in the darkness.
Reaching out by virtue of our idle transmissions, waiting.
The Record is a present we gave to ourselves, or rather that Sagan and Druyan gave to the rest of us, an object that delivers the entire emotive impact of the human race in a polished package. According to the Golden Record, we're groovy. We don't murder each other over inconsequential abstractions, or defile our planet for material gain. We're friendly, sending warm "hellos" out into the Universe, playing Bach, playing Chuck Berry to our new friends. It's freshman year of college, a cocktail party exaggeration: an invention designed to impress. But impress who?
It's likely an extraterrestrial intelligence would take the Voyager Golden Record for a piece of space garbage; the obsolescence of records aside, we can hardly assume its alien discoverers would have ears, let alone understand sound waves as information, or carved etchings as meaning. I'm not the first to posit that the Voyager Golden Record, with all its naive bombast, was more an exercise in summing ourselves up to ourselves than it was a pragmatic solution for first contact. Carl Sagan himself called it a "symbolic statement rather than a serious attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life." In compiling the Record, its creators ran a comb over the tangle of ideas, languages, and cultures that make up the human race and parsed it into something cohesive, simple-even neat.
Is it beautiful? Beyond expression. Does it represent the human race and its position in the cosmos? No, of course not. No single such compendium could. Our reality is utterly subjective, our languages merely sandcastles held together by history and mutual consent. When NASA welded plaques depicting a man and a woman onto the Pioneer probes in 1972, conservatives in the United States objected to the nudity in the now-iconic image. We deny and contest our own bodies, the intrinsic animal nature of our personhood. Can we know what we are?
Personally, I'm an animal, but also a space zealot; I believe that a proper understanding of our place in regards to the universe is an elusive, but ultimately transcendent, tool. A clearer sense of our position (simultaneously precious and irrelevant) may be the most powerful aftereffect of the space programs of the late 20th century. Simply the image of the planet in perspective, a marble in the void-or, to quote Sagan again, a "mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam"-has altered global culture in ways we've yet to accurately measure.
The writer Frank White, whose essays on the subject of cosmic scale should be canonical, refers to a shift in perspective called the "Overview Effect." White's estimation, supported by accounts from those in the unique position of having seen the Earth from space, is that such an overview has a penetrating, complex effect. It triggers a singular insight: sudden awareness of life's interconnectedness and the frailty of our planet.
For those of us on the ground, gazing up into space can be a mutable experience. To some, it's a horror of the Lovecraftian variety: a deep abyss, out of which some undefinable and eldritch ancientness threateningly emanates. To others, the blackness of space represents a kind of anattā, direct evidence of the non-self. While the former escape to light-polluted urban centers and live their lives in denial of the vast beyond, the latter meditate under the stars. And yet all of us, no matter our impulses, are at least dimly aware of the significance of our planetary position: we hang suspended in an incomprehensible void.
"I find it somewhat puzzling that when we talk about problems on Earth, such as the so-called 'population problem,' we never include the dimension of our larger environment, i.e., the solar system and beyond. And when we talk about the 'energy problem,' only a few people are willing to even consider the promise of satellites that could beam solar energy to the Earth. We discuss almost every major human problem as if we were confined to one planet, rather than being on 'Spaceship Earth,' which is a part of the solar system, galaxy, and universe."
I made the above video, Greetings from the People of Earth, to be screened at a panel discussion about the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) at the World Science Festival in New York. Aside from serving to remind the audience that American space bureaucracy had once produced an act of remarkably poetic thinking, it was intended to show that the frail human voices strapped to a spaceship aboard the Voyager Golden Record had originated on a spaceship, too: the Earth.
Dr. Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute, who spoke on the World Science Festival panel, often compares the scope of her organization's research to date as being merely one tablespoon of water from the sea. No one would pronounce the ocean devoid of life after inspecting such a small portion; if anything, the ratio inspires hope. My collection of voices from the Voyager Golden Record, juxtaposed with the night skies above their respective nations, is similar: a spoonful of life in the infinite vastness of space. There's still so much left to explore, and one day-perhaps tomorrow, perhaps hundreds of years from now-we might discover a flicker of life, as silvery and pure as a darting fish, in a nearby puddle of the cosmos.
In February of this year, I had the distinct pleasure of being invited to the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, a zygote of an institution nestled between departments at Carnegie Mellon University, to work on a strange collaborative project called a "booksprint." A booksprint, I discovered, is a fairly new practice, derived from the world of open-source software "codesprints." In this version, a group of writers work exhaustively for a week on a shared project, which is then made into a book at the conclusion of their session. In seven days, our group of sprinters turned an idea—"let's write a book about the intersection between art, science, and technology!" —into a 190-page, full-color, nattily-designed compendium of the current moment in art/science affinities.
The book in its developmental stages.
We wrote collaboratively in shared, networked documents, ensuring that the finished book would have no single author. Of course, we all have our specialities: Régine Debatty the international new media blogger was our encyclopedia of projects, Andrea Grover the project leader our thesis synthesizer, Pablo Garcia the image-hounding art history scholar, and, well, you can see my pawprints all over the sections on science fiction, utopian architecture, and visionary philosophy.
We worked passionately, discussed endlessly, enlisted the research assistance of dozens of interns, and the finished project emerged (relatively) without incident. I still can't believe that a group of erstwhile strangers could so swiftly and seamlessly brainstorm, structure, research, and design something of such substance from nothing.
That said, it's been many months since we left Pittsburgh to return to the hectic pace of our normal lives. What was created in a week has taken nearly a year to fine-tune, but I'm immensely proud to announce that we're finally finished. Behold, NA/SA: New Art/Science Affinities, a book about the intersection between art, science, and technology.
The book includes meditations, interviews, diagrams, letters and manifestos on maker culture, hacking, artist research, distributed creativity, and technological and speculative design. Sixty international artists and art collaboratives are featured, including Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Atelier Van Lieshout, Brandon Ballengée, Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.), Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, The Institute for Figuring, Aaron Koblin, Machine Project, Openframeworks, C.E.B. Reas, Philip Ross, Tomás Saraceno, SymbioticA, Jer Thorp, and Marius Watz.
NA/SA was designed as it was written by Jessica Young and Luke Bulman of Thumb Projects. Immeasurable credit is due to them for organizing the endless flow of text into readable, beautiful documents at the end of each workday. Doubtless we would've had an arduous time marshaling our ideas had Thumb not been involved from the get-go.
More about the book and its process at Carnegie Mellon University's Miller Gallery website. New Art/Science Affinitiescan be bought printed on demand at Lulu.com, or you can download a free, full-text PDF of the book right here. I encourage you to browse, study, and print the free PDF, but the tactile book is a joy to hold.
A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece here on Universe exploring the ideas of the futurist Gerard K. O'Neill, who designed far-out but ultimately quite pragmatic environments for human habitation in space in the mid-1970s. In that article, I touched briefly on the notion of the "Overview Effect," a phrase coined by the writer Frank White to describe the profound insight -- characterized by a sudden awareness of life's interconnectedness and the frailty of our planet -- experienced by astronauts gazing down at the Earth from space.
Frank White is the author of The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution, a book that has completely changed the way I think about our planet and its position within the larger systems of the Universe. The book is an amalgam of space history, environmentalist philosophy, and starry-eyed futurism; it weaves White's observations about the nature of systems, the future of space travel, global communications, and cosmic spirituality with interviews with dozens of astronauts from all over the world. In short, it should be mandatory reading for all passengers aboard the Spaceship Earth.
Frank White was gracious enough to lend his time and considerable mind to a battery of questions from Universe, the full transcript of which is below. It's long, but I promise it will blow your mind.
Universe: Following the retirement of the shuttle program this summer, some have labeled this the "end of the space age." Others argue that it's simply the age of human exploration that's over, and that robots are the path forward. How do you respond to these assessments?
Frank White: I would suggest that both assessments are incorrect. Space exploration is a global enterprise with increasing private involvement, and the end of one program for one national space agency is neither the end of the "space age," nor of human exploration.
Media reports have linked the shuttle program with space exploration in a way that obscures some of the more positive aspects of the new US space policy. For example, it encourages more private investment in space at a time when more private companies, like Virgin Galactic, are making those commitments. It also encourages more international cooperation, extends the life of the International Space Station, and sets our sights on Mars, which many space advocates consider the most logical next objective for human exploration.
The dichotomy between human and robotic exploration is also unnecessary. The two complement one another, especially if we want to not only explore but also begin to create human communities off the Earth. It is not an either/or choice.
Universe: The establishment of permanent habitation in space is no longer a question of technical feasibility, but political and social will. There are those who believe humans must explore space to avoid extinction and those who deem it foolish to waste resources on projects distracting us from our responsibilities at home. How do you see the two sides of the argument for and against space settlement?
The key to the question is, "What do we consider our home?"
Frank White: I understand the two sides of the argument, but I consider human evolution to be the imperative behind our expansion into the universe, and I think it will continue. By this, I mean evolution in terms of politics, sociology, economics, and other aspects of human society, not just biology. The key to the question is, "What do we consider our home?" If it is the solar system and beyond, then space settlement is not a distraction. And even if our home is the Earth alone, there are many elements of space exploration and settlement that have already been beneficial to the Earth. For example, most people would agree that the Overview Effect triggered or at least enhanced the environmental impulse. This has proven to be beneficial to the Earth in ways that would have been difficult to predict in advance. The same can be said of how the Overview Effect has influenced our views on war and peace, also to the benefit of the people on Earth.
I find it somewhat puzzling that when we talk about problems on Earth, such as the so-called "population problem," we never include the dimension of our larger environment, i.e., the solar system and beyond. And when we talk about the "energy problem," only a few people are willing to even consider the promise of satellites that could beam solar energy to the Earth. We discuss almost every major human problem as if we were confined to one planet, rather than being on "Spaceship Earth," which is a part of the solar system, galaxy, and universe.
Universe: Are the goals of caring for the biosphere on the one hand, and on the other of establishing artificial ecospheres in space, necessarily mutually exclusive?
Frank White: No...this is a choice as well. In my book, I talk about the Human Space Program as a "central project" for all of humanity. It involves establishing a planetary civilization with a high priority on protecting the biosphere as well as a commitment to exploring the universe as a global (rather than national) enterprise. The Human Space Program could become a unifying force for humanity as we expand beyond Earth. We can create any future that we choose to create as a species. Caring for the biosphere can be in conflict with creating new ecospheres, or the two goals can be in harmony with one another.
Part Two: The Whole Earth Image
Universe: Do you think the Overview Effect might be less potent for a generation of people raised on the "Earthrise" image, which by now has been reduced to a symbol? Would a second generation of voyagers need to travel further afield to experience the same impact as the original Apollo astronauts did -- is it just the shock of the utterly new perspective that jars us, or something essential about seeing the home planet?
Frank White: Here, it depends on what we mean by Overview Effect, i.e., is it a seeing a picture or is it having a direct experience? As my colleague at the Overview Institute, David Beaver, points out, the two are not the same, and we have perhaps been lulled into believing that they are. In my book, I quote one of the astronauts (Alan Shepard) pointing out that he had studied many pictures before he flew, but nothing could have prepared him for what he actually saw. I personally recall the moment when the Apollo 8 crew turned their camera back to show us the Earth, and the impact was tremendous. So pictures and videos did have an enormous impact in the 1960s that perhaps is not the same today. However, I believe that the direct experience and high-quality simulations of it will still be powerful, even for the younger generations who take Apollo missions and Earthrise for granted.
I should also mention something that Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell pointed out to me when I interviewed him for my book: those who are most open to the experience will benefit the most from it.
As it turns out, DNA components have been found on meteorites before, but it's never been entirely clear if the space rocks came to Earth bearing these molecules, or if they were contaminated upon arrival. Furthermore, this recent study of meteorites was the first to discover trace amounts of three molecules -- purine, 2,6-diaminopurine, and 6,8-diaminopurine -- which, as nucleobase analogues, provide us with the first piece of solid evidence that the compounds in the meteorites came from space and not terrestrial contamination.
This news, which propagated wildly through the blogosphere in its own form of directed panspermia, led me to bone up on its potential ramifications: what do DNA-saturated space rocks imply about the inherent properties of life? Do they support the theory of panspermia, or exogenesis?
The idea of panspermia has been around since the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras posited that the universe is made of an infinite number of spermata (seeds), coining the word "panspermia," or "all seeds," in the fifth century B.C. Shortly thereafter, Aristotle debunked Anaxagoras, putting forth a theory of spontaneous generation that held sway for over two thousand years. Since then, the idea has gone rogue, popping in and out of scientific and popular consciousness; it can be found in the writings of Berzelius, Kelvin, von Helmholtz and the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in the early 1900s.
The British astronomer (and science-fiction writer) Sir Fred Hoyle, in cahoots with collaborator Chandra Wickramasinghe, argued that "terrestrial biology is not a closed system." He further maintained that not only is panspermia responsible for the origins of life on Earth, but that life-forms continue to enter the Earth's atmosphere in "genetic storms," and may be the key factors in the genetic novelty necessary for macroevolution. Hoyle was a scientific heretic -- rumor has it he was denied a Nobel prize because of his zeal for spaceborn primeval molecules -- and panspermia, as a theory, has always relied on hard-to-procure evidence of extraterrestrial life to have any real credibility. Both factor into panspermia's sticky dubiousness, and hence a concrete fragment of corroboration, like molecular compounds on meteorites, is a significant boon to this oft-maligned idea.
Of course, the "DNA meteorites" are not a smoking gun. Allow me to emphasize that the discussion I'll endeavor to have from this point forward will not be a rational extrapolation of the evidence at hand. Rather, I'm tugging at a loose, lunatic thread, gently pulling it across the room, seeing how it damages the weave, and ultimately trying to unravel something fundamental about the nature of life.
The question of the origin of life is at the root of considerable human endeavor: scientists work collaboratively over generations in the hope of parsing a concrete answer, theologians draft dogma, and artists celebrate the beautiful implausibility of the problem, honoring it each time they too make something from nothing. Why is panspermia -- the notion that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by meteoroids, asteroids and planetoids -- any stranger than a touch from the Heavens, or a spontaneous spark in the primordial stew? The notion that life on Earth might have emerged, not from some local organic or mystical process, but from elsewhere, remains eccentric, marginal, and near-conspiratorial.
We may have difficulty conceiving of the Earth as anything other than the point of origin for consciousness, the shining beacon of life in a cold, dead universe. We see ourselves as Life, precariously existing on a pale blue dot that floats like a "mote of dust" in an infinite black vastness of Death. It's important to remember, however, that there's a difference between death and the absence of life. The universe is made of rocks, gas, and ample amounts of inert matter, but it isn't dead -- it's simply not alive. Life articulates its absence, which is to say, the universe appears to be dead, but only because it might kill us.
So, while we may imagine that meteors cutting through space*, burdened with genetic code, are arks of capital-L Life in a universe black with death, they are in reality life and death, birth, awareness, the seeds for conscious beings to spring forth and consider the question, the full spectrum of the conceit; the universe is just the substrate.
Perhaps panspermia also irks because life-from-elsewhere offends our human chauvinism. After all, the suggestion that we might exist thanks to an external catalyst reframes the narrative of human evolution, and of future human propagation out into the universe, from something like this:
To something more like this:
This changed narrative that the DNA meteorites imply -- a story in which humanity and all its grand pursuits is simply a waypoint in the journey of intelligence across the cosmos -- doesn't diminish the mystery of life. Rather, it widens the net, blooming the question outwards.
Life still had to emerge from non-life somewhere, sometime. To conceive of that occurrence on the home front is simply to displace the miracle; whether the spark occurred on Earth or not is immaterial. If anything, it's a bigger, better mystery -- one which is best appreciated if we think of if not as members of the human race, or even as denizens of the terrestrial biosphere, but as representatives of a vaster lineage: the living.
After federal and state financial cutbacks forced the institute's shiny new Allen Telescope Array (ATA) into indefinite hibernation earlier this year, comsically-minded geeks all over the globe donated money in droves, bringing the search for extraterrestrial life back from oblivion. Over $200,000 in donations from thousands of fans -- including Contact's own Jodie Foster, science-fiction writer Larry Niven, and Apollo 8 Astronaut Bill Anders -- will get science operations up and running as soon as September, although they're far from being out of the woods.
It's a rare story of success for SETI. As seekers of little green men, they won't quite be mainstream until the human race evolves a little, and -- perhaps accordingly -- they've been besieged by obstacles practically since day one. Still, the fight's not over yet, so keep donating to SETI, and let's keep those metallic ears pinned to the hum of the Universe while we still can.
In the mid-1970s, the U.S. State Department prohibited the internal use of the term "space colony," due to the global bad reputation of colonialism. Instead, the government opted for "space settlement." Of course, as Stewart Brand pointed out at the time, the last thing you do in space is settle. Quite the opposite! Making the decision to explore space -- and live there -- is just about the most unsettled act a human can commit.
There have always been two camps on this issue. First, the unsettled, like Brand: the science-fiction aficionados, capitalists, rocketry geeks, macrocosmic thinkers, and Whole Earthers for whom space travel represents a profound philosophical commitment to the outward longevity and dissemination of the species. For these, the jump from Gaia to Cosma is logical. Second, the settled: politicians and pragmatists who see the very idea as a folly, particularly considering that we, as a species, seem incapable of tending to our home planet. Let the universe come when it is ready, this latter group proposes (still a third is unaware of the question).
Where do I stand? Somewhere in between. Of course, I dream of seeing, from a distant planet, three moons rise over the horizon at night. Of course, my pace quickens at the thought of a radical change in vantage -- the Earth a blue marble at my feet. And yet I believe our patronage of the Earth, and the cultures which populate it, is lacking. I'm not entirely sure we can have nice things.
Perhaps, however, like a child entrusted with a family heirloom, our nice things might change us. Much has been written about the "overview effect," the altered perspective induced by perceiving the Earth as a whole. Astronauts return changed, with a sudden, universal insight: the Earth is a tiny system, impossibly fragile in the void of night. To wit, the first image of the Earth from space -- "Earhrise," taken in 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission -- is often credited with kickstarting the environmentalist movement of the 1970s.
If this image alone can wield such power, imagine seeing it each morning out your window. Yes, living in space. Why not? The provocative futurist Gerard O'Neill, whose book The High Frontier serves as the catalyst for this particular rant, suggested massive colonies of human habitation in space -- self-sustaining environments capable of hosting hundreds of thousands of people. These colonies, housed in massive spinning wheels called O'Neill cylinders, would float in space at Lagrangian points, points of stable gravitational equilibrium located along the path of the moon's orbit. O'Neill's surreal habitats were seriously considered in the 1970s -- he held a ten-week study of space habitats at NASA Ames in '75 and testified before the Senate subcommittee on Space Science and Applications in '76 -- largely because of his emphasis on the colonies' ability to gather direct solar power and shoot it down to Earth.
After the energy crisis of that decade waned, so did big-money interest in O'Neill's ideas, leaving those he inspired -- Stewart Brand, science writers, astronauts, and future members of the L5 society -- to champion the cause largely as a philosophical idea. One can see why. Space colonies, O'Neill argued, could single-handedly solve the world's biggest problems "without recourse to repression:" no more pollution, overpopulation, or global warming when most of the human race lives in space!
Short of migrating the race to cosmic Bernal spheres, however, might a newly concerted effort into space, at this particular crisis point in time, force us to reevaluate our stewardship of the Earth? In attempting to replicate habitable environments in space, might Homo Spaciens be a gentler sort, more aware of the delicate tensile webs that keep our terrestrial ecosystems functional?
Possibly. But beyond our relationship to the home planet, we haven't yet discussed the ramifications of long-term space habitation on human culture. Carl Sagan, in the excellent Creative Quarterly tome "Space Colonies," makes a brief but excellent point: with room to breathe, space cities could provide an environment for human affinity groups to "develop alternative cultural, social, political, economic, and technological lifestyles." Not just an overview effect, but an effect of cultural mutation! This is something that science fiction has been dabbling in for decades; without the planet-imposed constraints of national boundaries, how might human beings fragment into groups? Conceivably, along religious, cultural, subcultural, or aesthetic lines; religious zealots in the United States already speak of themselves as a "Christian Nation." Why not a Christian planet?
Or, on a lighter note, space colonies for goths, Valley girls, cyberpunks, men? Periods of expansion into new territory have always triggered periods of synchronous intellectual fermentation. Then, cultural metamorphosis. The New World made Americans out of British people, after all. And, like high tea in the Wild West, doubtless even our most engrained cultural rituals would eventually seem absurd and useless when ported into space. They'd promptly be replaced with new ideas, new possibilities.
Then again, we already live in space, so perhaps all we need is renewed awareness of our position in the void. Writes Frank White, incidentally the man who coined the term "overview effect:"
"In asking the question of whether people living in space will think or act differently from those living on Earth, we must first begin with a definition of what we mean by "living in space." The truth is that we are all living in space right now. The Earth is in space, it has always been in space, and it will always be in space. When we talk about "going into space," or "living in space," we are really talking about leaving the Earth and seeing the universe from a different point of view, a non-terrestrial one.
Those who leave the Earth and live in space habitats, on planetary surfaces, or in generational starships will not be different from those who remain on Earth because they are living in space, but more likely because they will be far more aware of that fact!"
Mushrooms and their mycelium are quiet allies that are essential for our healthy existence. They are enigmatic, have a sense of humor, and socially as well as spiritually, bond together all that admire them. They have much to teach us.
-Paul Stamets
If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self a part of nature's larger whole.
-Terrence McKenna
A few weeks ago, I was sitting at my kitchen table, having coffee, when I suddenly noticed a new development in my bonsai plant. At the foot of the pygmy pine was sprouting, of all things, a mushroom. The physical recoil this realization triggered in me is beyond description. I nearly spilled my drink in my impulse to first spring away -- then draw towards -- this fungus. How had this happened? My god, how do mushrooms work?
As it turns out, the soil of my potted bonsai was rich with mycelium. Mycelium is the fungal "root," if you will, the vegetative body of the organism, which can net, spread, propagate, and convey nutrients over great distances, eventually sprouting fruiting bodies -- mushrooms. This meant that no matter how many little brown mushrooms I plucked out of my houseplant, more popped into place. Thus began my journey into mycophilia.
Being a fickle bedroom hobbyist, I sacrificed the bonsai, relinquishing 1,000 years of Japanese history to my fungal visitor. After all, what is more ancient, more venerable, than a mushroom? Fungi were the first organisms to come to land, and survived the cataclysmic asteroid impacts of geological history -- visitors to our planet 420 million years ago would have encountered a landscape dominated by 30-foot-tall prototaxites, fungal pillars dwarfing the surrounding landscape. And, lest you think this kind of cyclopean 'shroom has gone the way of the dinosaurs, the largest known organism on our planet today is a 2,400-year old, 2,200 acre honey mushroom mycelium in Eastern Oregon.
Furthermore, we're more closely related to these behemoths than you might imagine: even though the animal kingdom branched off from its fungal counterpart some 600 million years ago, we still share over half our DNA with fungi. Historically, culturally, and biologically, we are incredibly close to mushrooms. That closeness can be exploited to our benefit: many powerful antibiotics against bacteria come from fungi, while anti-fungal antibiotics tend to harm us, precisely because of our intimately interlinked relationship with mushrooms. Some scientists posit reorganizing traditional biological classification to include a animalia-fungi superkingdom called "Opisthokontum."
Far-out scholar Terrence McKenna, in his book Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, took this connection further, arguing that the so-called missing link between our ancestors and language-using, symbol-toting Homo Sapiens (or Homo Spiritualis, as he puts it) is not an evolutionary phase but an interaction with entheogens -- namely, "magic" mushrooms. McKenna argued that early man, foraging for food in the African grasslands, would have inevitably consumed varieties of fungal hallucinogen, triggering the semiotically complex transcendence (and the various perceptual advantages) of the psychedelic experience. It's this psychosymbiotic mingling with the "vegetable mind" of the natural world that triggered those things which separate us from the animals: use of symbols, language, ritual, and abstract representation. Over centuries, this experience would have been ritualized, this dip into the howling Tao codified; what remains today are merely symbols, hidden in plain sight in many of the religious traditions of the world. This theory, now dubbed the "Stoned Ape Theory of Human Evolution," is fascinating -- and I whole-heartedly recommend McKenna's book, which is essentially a natural history of the human relationship to drugs -- but I will move on before my more rationally-minded readers start frothing at the mouth.
American mycologist Paul Stamets, in his 2008 Ted Talk, Six Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World, argues that the structure of mycelium is a neuromicrological network with universal properties. In the image below, I've placed an electron micrograph of fungal mycelium next to an image of dark matter. Beneath that, a visualization of the network structure of the Internet by Hal Burch and Bill Cheswick, courtesy of Lumeta Corporation.
Can you tell the difference?
Stamets, who calls mycelium "Earth's Natural Internet," puts it this way:
I believe the invention of the computer Internet is an inevitable consequence of a previously proven biologically successful model. The earth invented the computer internet for its own benefit, and we, now, being the top organism on this planet, [are] trying to allocate resources in order to protect the biosphere.
Going way out, dark matter conforms to the same mycelial archetype. I believe matter begets life, life becomes single cells, single cells become strings, strings become chains, chains network. And this is the paradigm that we see throughout the universe.
Stamets, being a mycologist, understands the fundamental structure of information, of the physical universe itself, as adhering to a "mycelial archetype." To him, everything is mushroom -- while McKenna, his visionary counterpart, reads the history of human culture through a mycophilic lens. Of course, both men experimented extensively with the mental states associated with ritualized consumption of a certain variety of mushroom, but this shouldn't lessen the impact of their profound, macrocosmic reading of the humble fungus (although it's interesting to think of mushrooms as doing their own psychedelic PR).
Mycelium, an intertwined network of cells permeating virtually all land masses of Earth, is not something to take lightly. It literally engulfs the soil beneath us in a sentient web, rising up beneath our footsteps, hungry for nutrients. There is something beautiful and horrifying, ancient and keenly technological about these organisms, a complexity it may take a psychedelically-informed, non-institutional mind to fully appreciate.
"All things move and nothing remains still" -- Heraclitus
The history of astronomy can be read as a story of better and better vision. Over the centuries, we have supplemented our vision with technology that allows us to see further and more clearly; while Ancient astronomers, who relied only on their naked eyes to perceive the universe, managed to make star catalogues and predict comets, Galileo, pressing his to a telescope, saw all the way to the moons of Jupiter.
Optical telescopes and the human eye are fundamentally limited; early astronomers were forced to gaze into telescopes for hours on end, waiting for moments of visual stillness long enough to allow them to quickly sketch drawings of the features they were simultaneously trying to understand. Between a telescope (incidentally, "telescope" is Greek for "far-seeing") and the celestial bodies beyond, the Earth's atmosphere itself is in turbulence, the optical refractive index bleary -- which presented early astronomers with a view of the universe that was blurred, twinkling, always in flux. This is because the sky is not transparent. Thermal currents passing through the Earth's atmosphere cause air density (and hence the refractive index of air) to vary, to warble like a desert mirage. Light does not pass through this unaffected. Quite the opposite, in fact -- thermal currents are like thousands of lenses floating around in the air. We call this phenomenon "astronomical seeing," and it's why stars sparkle, why even the moon seems to be swimming in water when peered at through an optical telescope.
It wasn't long before Galileo and his fellows had seen as far as their technology -- and their vision -- could reach. In the years to follow, new far-seeing tools popped up as needed: X-ray telescopes, gamma ray telescopes, high-energy particle telescopes, even telescopes floating in space. As time progressed and our science grew more refined, we tried wavelengths previously unnoticed; we paid attention to new qualities; when we thought we'd seen it all, we looked again, our vision evolving beyond biology as we began to "see" with technology.
The inevitable result was that though the physical universe never changed, we did, because we looked differently.
This different-looking triggered perhaps the most important conceptual leap in the science of the 20th century: the realization that there is more to reality to what can be seen. The years between 1880 and 1930* saw massive upheavals in the way science was conducted -- during this period, we moved from the strict empiricism of Newton to the reliance on unobservable and theoretical constructs that dominates the discipline today. We began to peer into previously unseen worlds; we parsed the structure of the atom and discovered elementary particles. Once we were there, our physics no longer had bearing. We needed to invent and codify new ways of seeing, ways not dictated by observable phenomena; and so our understanding of time and space gave way to general and special relativity, quantum mechanics, and alternative geometries. The intellectual legacy of this radical change -- and its relevance to my point here -- is in the primacy it lends to subjectivity, to not only the instruments of seeing, but those who peer into them.
Astronomy, too, zygoted in the early 20th century. Photography solved the problem of hand-drawing findings between patches of blurry sky. Infrared, radio, X-ray, and finally gamma-ray astronomy came to prominence, filling our coffers with surreal images of a previously invisible world. We used spectroscopy to study stars; our sun was found to be part of a galaxy, and the existence of other galaxies was settled by the great Edwin Hubble, who identified many others, rapidly receding from our own, at impossibly large distances. We created the model of the Big Bang. We stumbled upon cosmic microwave background radiation. All of a sudden, the story of the universe as we knew it vaulted out of the visual world and into a rich and million years-long narrative of unseen forces and galaxies so distant they bordered on theoretical abstractions. Like science itself, visual perception of the cosmos evolved from the physical to the theoretical; when we speak of "seeing" astronomical images, we're talking about a highly mediated experience, captured by mechanical sensing devices, where invisible qualities are color-coded into something the human eye can register as information.
The eye is almost universally a symbol of intellectual perception; in Taoism, in Shinto, in the Bhagavad Gītā, the eyes are the sun and moon. Is it any wonder that the ancients conflated astronomy and astrology? That those who look out at the universe have so often been mystics, seekers, and seers? We speak of "visionaries" in all fields as people who are capable of seeing furthest -- beyond the blurred intermediary of the physical world and straight to the heavens.
Optical, radio, X-ray, and WMAP all-sky images. Images via online sources, animated GIF by yours truly.
*As an interdisciplinary aside: this period was simultaneous with the rise of modernism and abstraction in the arts. Could this movement from the pragmatic and visible to the invisible and conceptual be attributed to a common zeitgeist? Could it be that the early 20th century saw an unprecedented amount of cross-pollination between the arts and sciences, leading to a moment of cultural fertility?
Claire L. Evans is a freelance science writer, science fiction critic, polymath, and musician. She has been writing Universe for five years and still doesn't know how to describe it.
