Let’s talk about aliens. I don’t mean people coming across the borders of whatever your country happens to be (although I did giggle a decade ago when I was given an official “alien number” by the powers that be back then – though I always regretted bypassing the “alien with extraordinary ability” status that the O1 visa gives you), I mean living creatures from beyond planet earth (it’s also interesting to consider the possibility that the seeds for life on earth may also have come from elsewhere).
It’s one of my favourite topics to consider, which is why I like to follow a lot of the remarkable things we are learning about our neighbouring planets (and other bodies like moons, asteroids, comets, and, yes minor planets like our old friend Pluto), and of course the ever-increasing variety of extra-solar planets (the ones we are discovering orbiting other stars). Overall, it gives one the sense that it is overwhelmingly likely that we are not alone (to use the tired old phrase), which to me is tremendously exciting.
I think we’ll find lots of compelling evidence that there’s lots of simple life on other bodies relatively soon, and I think that when people on the street hear of this, they’ll find it interesting enough. But I suspect that this will completely different to an announcement that we’ve made contact with a species that has (what we recognize as) intelligence and consciousness – that talks back to us! Such an announcement would transform our species psychologically, I think. Or would it? Maybe the world of television and movie entertainment is so powerful now in its influence on society that many people will simply shrug and carry on with whatever they are doing, effectively saying “what took you so long?” (either to the newcomers, or to the people who detect the signals). I hope we are not as jaded and non-reflective as all that, but you never know. Either way, our writers, scientists, poets, and philosophers will hopefully step up to the plate and do their job to remind us why such a thing would be wonderful. (Actually I hope they do it even if we just find a few bacteria here and there, for I find it hard to figure out where to draw the bright line between one sort of extra-terrestrial life and another.)
Well, anyway, there’s a bit of television and other video to add fuel to your own thoughts and discussions about these matters. Tonight, the History Channel series “The Universe” continues, this time discussing extra terrestrial life. I’ve no idea what it will be like, but the synopsis looks interesting:
In a galaxy filled with a billion stars, in a universe filled with a hundred billion galaxies–are we alone? SETI–the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence–is a privately funded project using radio telescopes and optical telescopes to scan the stars for signals. NASA is planning missions to Mars, Jupiter’s sixth moon, Europa, and Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, to look for primitive, microbial life in ice concentrations. Whether we discover primitive or intelligent life, how will that knowledge impact humankind’s view of itself? Cutting-edge computer graphics are used to bring the universe down to earth to show what life would be like on other planets, and to imagine what kind of life forms might evolve in alien atmospheres.
Also, I learned (from his blog) that Phil Plait is featured (with biologist Lynn Rothschild) on a television show “Cosmos: A Beginner’s Guide” (in the UK) discussing the nature of aliens in popular movies. A big chunk of it is on YouTube, and so you can watch it immediately. It’s nice, since a major aspect of the discussion is how those aliens (the most famous being the alien from Alien – the dentist’s dream/nightmare above right (click for larger view)) are very much inspired by the remarkable animal life we have right here on earth – right down to the famous “acid-for-blood” aspects, and so forth. This is fun (and interesting) stuff. Click below to watch.
Yeah, after all these years, the aliens of Alien are still very much among my favourite movie or TV aliens. What are yours?
Enjoy.
-cvj
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I was wondering if the word, “alien,” has become synonymous with malevolence?
I like both versions of, “The Thing,” although I prefer Howard Hawkes’ dialogue laden offering to John Carpenter’s gore-fest.
I’m surprised no one mentioned, “The Thing.” As a movie, I prefer the old Howard Hawkes’ version, but the groundbreaking special effects of John Carpenter’s movie cannot be denied.
As an aside, has the word, “alien,” taken on a meaning synonymous with malevolence?
Ok, that’s another way to look at it. Fair point, I’d say.
Cheers,
-cvj
Clifford (as Devil’s Advocate) said, about Organians:
“… If they were so far ahead of us on the evolutionary scale …
why were they made so intensely in pain …[by Human-Klingon conflict]… ?
I’d say this was a bit contradictory.
I don’t get terribly upset when two different cultures of single-celled organisms are duking it out near me in a petri dish. …”.
Maybe it’s really not contradictory:
Maybe the higher you are on the evolutionary scale
the more detailed is your understanding of all of nature
so the more you care about what is going on at all levels, including lower ones.
(cf. “He marks the sparrows fall.”)
Tony Smith
Sorry, the pH of sea water is 8. This blogger software puts up a picture of me wearing my sunglasses if I close a bracket after the symbol 8. 😉
My favourite aliens are the bacteria which come from outer space in the film The Andromeda Strain. The plot sounds really cheesy, but it isn’t that bad. These bacteria have somehow got into outer space (probably aboard a lump of rock blasted off a planet with weak gravity at escape velocity during the cratering process of a major meteorite impact), and there in space they have evolved a strain which has great radiation resistance (in fact it uses the energy from cosmic radiation to help it live).
This appealed to me when as a kid I first saw the film, a year after Chernobyl; when we’d all been taught about radiation in biology and the fact that the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans
Then it gets back to earth, where it has a terrible fondness for people’s blood. The bacteria finally get killed by rain washing them into the oceans, where the alkalinity of sea water (pH 8) which they can’t survive.
Hmmm, let me play Devil’s Advocate here and quibble with the writers, or with Spock’s assessment: If they were so far ahead of us on the evolutionary scale (whatever that means – discuss), and so beyond our petty day to day existence, why were they made so intensely in pain in this way? I’d say this was a bit contradictory. I don’t get terribly upset when two different cultures of single-celled organisms are duking it out near me in a petri dish. Certainly not so upset as to stoop down to the bacteria and have a chat with them about their primitive ways.
No, I’d say that Spock was wrong in that one. They’re not that far ahead of us, really. They may have done a cool thing getting rid of their bodies, but they need more work on other areas in order to be more totally removed from humans, I’d say.
Cheers,
-cvj
How about the Organians, from the Original Star Trek episode Errand of Mercy ?
When they ended a Klingon-Federation War, saying to Kirk and Kor the Klingon
“… Your emotions are most discordant. We do not wish to seem inhospitable, but, gentlemen, you must leave … The mere presence of beings like yourselves is intensely painful to us …
We have developed beyond the need for physical bodies. What you see is mere appearance for your sake. …”
Spock said about them
“… Fascinating. Pure energy, pure thought, totally incorporeal …
I should say the Organians are as far above us on the evolutionary scale as we are above the amoeba. …”.
Tony Smith
Ever had any strange dreams while out on your mountain hikes? Perhap strange images of animals, whose eyes catch your attention.
Who knows, maybe this is one way of disquising any contact? Interesting story line possibly?:) Just a thought.
If there was any contact, one would think that it would be very difficult for any mind to accept what it is seeing. So it behooves the mind to supplant alternatives with which one could cope and accept?
I have always been partial to tales of distributed intelligence or even life, especially on large scales, as in Hoyle’s The Black Cloud.
Evolution is a working model for adaptable populations. (Btw, heritable “adaptable populations” would be one practical definition of “life” whether seen as an ongoing process or more myopically as its localized parts of individual organisms.) Large-scale complexity isn’t guaranteed, and indeed most successful individuals are single-cell creatures.
I doubt large-scale processes would work. They would be unlikely to exist in the first place, but above all they would be unlikely to adapt and survive.
About scaling… I would guess that if the creature is carbon-and-water-based life, arising through the standard biology branches we know: chemistry, water solvent, RNA, DNA, single cells, multi-cells, animals… (see de Duve, Christian 1995, _Vital Dust_, Basic Books, for a great explanation of our life processes on Earth), then creatures of different sizes will follow something like Kleiber’s equation:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000381E9-208F-1C75-9B81809EC588EF21
where the metabolic rate is equal to the mass of the animal to the 3/4 power.
But if the life arose based on a different polymer chain and solvent .. or neither, like the particular dusty plasma configuration above, then it won’t be easily recognizable by us (and the the search for it correspondingly harder). See our cosmicvariance discussion), and the discussion by Robert Bradbury here:
http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/05/24/further-away-from-the-lamp-post/#comment-27279
about the Matrioshka_Brain idea, for example.
Another interesting question is whether dna and polypetide chains of amino acids are the only way to achieve life. What about some other alternative biochemistry/molecular biology? can’t think of one. Silicon instead of carbon is the usual suggestion. As mentioned, some alien life could be so alien that we might not even recognise it as life nor might it recognise us.
Yvette, I like to speculate about the other scale too….. really *huge* life-forms. What if some of the cool things we are looking at in Hubble pictures are actually giant living organisms, several times the size of our solar system, where the timescales for their typical life processes are so much larger than ours that we don’t even conceive of them as alive. (Perhaps some of the dust structures Amara referred to in that paper are examples of the underlying mechanisms needed….)
I had an excellent conversation over dinner with a visiting postdoc (Oliver Rosten) about this some time ago. We agreed that there might be limitations on how large such an organism can be (for a given amount of complexity) since it needs time to develop (but see below) and the universe has a finite lifetime.
Well, we got to arguing about the “time to develop” aspect, which came down to wondering about how an organism can get to be in the first place. Is evolution the only model for complex life? In other words, do we always need something complex to arise by evolving over many generations (so we need reproduction, sexual or otherwise), or can something complex enough “spontaneously” come to life, perhaps by some type of phase transition that we’ve yet to characterize. The latter would be nice (and could allow for really huge creatures), and interesting, but evolution seems to be the only working model we have for complex life (in which case we can almost certainly rule out complex living creatures the size of several solar systems)…. would be nice to think of other models besides evolution (staying away from invisible Creators that live outside the system, obviously), and find demonstrable examples. This then leads to the usual late night discussions about what life actually is….
Discuss.
-cvj
@Yvette;
In one of the Dr Who episodes from last season, they borrowed (er, stole?) A.C. Clarke’s sun-dwelling plasma creature. I immediately thought of that when I saw that episode.
@Amara;
Truth is often stranger than fiction, eh? I like the ‘out of the box’ thinking that the ‘exobiologists’ are doing.
Ok, on the odd aliens front of things…
~ One thing I’ve never understood was how people immediately think aliens will be about the same size as us (ie perhaps a little shorter a la ET, but still capable of using our doorways etc). I understand the alternatives aren’t that great for movie-making but this is rather prevalent in sci-fi as well, and this annoyed me even as a little kid because we’ve had everything from squirrels to dinosaurs just on our own little planet. (My sister is in grad school for evolutionary biology, and we spent many happy childhood hours concluding that we’d never actually see visiting aliens because you’d need a microscope.)
~ Arthur C. Clarke was a master at making up exotic alien life forms. My favorite was how creatures could live in the outer layers of the Sun, as all you need is localized energy and information passed on to later generations. So he had these cool plasma-creatures which he described in fascinating detail… he also had gaseous life-forms that lived on Jupiter, but I can’t remember the details exactly.
Here’s my vote for the most bizarre (and interesting!) speculations for alien life: life in dusty plasma.
This recent press release, describes a dusty plasma scenario that contains all of the features that one would normally attribute to organic life. It’s not a crank paper; the leading author is a reputable, well-established, Russian plasma physicist: V N Tsytovich, who is working in a reputable, well-established, dusty plasma group at MPE in Garching, Germany.
From the paper:
————
“From plasma crystals and helical structures towards inorganic living matter”
by V N Tsytovich, G E Morfill, V E Fortov, N G Gusein-Zade, B A Klumov and S V Vladimirov
Abstract. Complex plasmas may naturally self-organize themselves into stable interacting helical structures that exhibit features normally attributed to organic living matter. The self-organization is based on non-trivial physical mechanisms of plasma interactions involving over-screening of plasma polarization. As a result, each helical string composed of solid microparticles is topologically and dynamically controlled by plasma fluxes leading to particle charging and over-screening, the latter providing attraction even among helical strings of the same charge sign. These interacting complex structures exhibit thermodynamic and evolutionary features thought to be peculiar only to living matter such as bifurcations that serve as ‘memory marks’, self-duplication, metabolic rates in a thermodynamically open system, and non-Hamiltonian dynamics. We examine the salient features of this new complex ‘state of soft matter’ in light of the autonomy, evolution, progenity and autopoiesis principles used to define life. It is concluded that complex self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter that may exist in space provided certain conditions allow them to evolve naturally.
—————
Does life as we usually think, need to be limited to condensed phases, and to linear polymers in solvents? This work would suggest not.
A little brain expansion for your day…
Hi Astrogeek,
Of course, I know this. Let me point out that I was (following the piece from the show) talking specifically about Hollywood Aliens. Indeed, even a very slight glance at other genres (e.g. science fiction writing, but not only there) will open up a vast and nuanced landscape of wonderfully imagined creatures and worlds. I think in the remarks above people were mainly restricting themselves to tv and movies, as per the post.
It is a good point to bring up, though, so thanks. No harm in widening the parameters and talking about other genres of course… lots to discuss there!
-cvj
@Amara Wow! That’s really cool! Think of your salad biting back!
@Clifford I think in general that SciFi authors have done a better job of imagining alien life, intelligent or not, and what it might look like than Hollywood has done. Not for a lack of imagination on Hollywood’s part, but because it’s a lot easier to pay an actor to be a humanoid alien than it is to spend all that time and money on special effects.
I remember loving James White’s Sector General series of books, and some of the weird aliens that he wrote about, and many more that he hinted at (I also loved his novel All Judgement Fled), and Brenda Pearce’s novellette Crazy Oil that was published in Analog in 1975, about a planet with huge oil deposits that the humans were tapping, before they realized that the oil was alive and fighting back.
Agh! Wow…It’ll take me a very long time to look at an aubergine in a “normal” way again….
-cvj
This is a pretty cool alien too. 🙂
My favourite Aliens would have to be the “Borg Collective” from Star Trek. I kind of envisioned humanity ending up like them (though not in such a grim sense) even before i saw Star Trek. They might have been conceptualised by the authors to highlight aspects of our own society, but as far as “sentient” life is concerned, we are only limited by our own imagination cultivated thanks to our limited experiences here on Earth.
Heh. I am an alien twice removed, courtesy of ITAR, the International Trade and Arms Regulations that must be followed for all people who work on NASA projects. Because I am a foreigner working for a foreign agent (funded by the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Institutes of Astrophysics). It doesn’t matter that one of my two passports is from the country (USA) that issues the ITAR. Despite the extra paperwork, I do like being an alien^2.
My favorite alien is one from my imagination. The species is the aguanis, and made in the following way. Geysers from the south polar region of Enceladus were sending the most robust of that microcosm–the organic molecules and domatolites –into space, which were picked up by the in-situ detectors on the tourist spacelines passing through the region. Coincidently, the bacteria embedded in the domatolites were ideally suited for the synthetic biology experiments that were heating up on Earth (true in reality: check out Craig Venter’s work). Once the minimum ghost cel (Venter’s work) was established, iguana genes were added incrementally to the DNA to synthesize a medium-sized reptile, the aguani, making it well-suited to the Saturn environment. A modification of its two front claws gave it fingers and enabled the aguani to hold tools; rear feet with toes allowed it to balance its bulk better. Intelligence enhancements from the transhumanists of the time (who supported increasing the intelligence of their pets) led to a six-fold acceleration of normal aguani intelligence development. Posthumans and aguanis and a plethora of other synthia in the next thousands of years soon lived side-by-side. I wrote this up in a story-essay that will be published next year in a collection of essays, but I don’t know how much I can say publicly about this book yet. Speculative essays based on fact, but the speculations should be really wild.. much more than mine.
For aliens discovered outside of our solar system, don’t forget our discussion on cosmicvariance.
I’ll agree with you that it is intriguing to speculate about life forms that bear very little resemblance to us at all. It’s one of my favourite pastimes, in fact. Who knows what we might be missing?
-cvj
@Yvette; I think the aliens from Contact are also a good choice, again because they are not like us. I think we presume too much to think that they would be.
There was some speculation announced at the EuroPlanet conference regarding those anomalous readings from the Viking probes on Mars, speculation that a microbal life form using H2O2 could account for some of the readings they got. Sheer speculation, I might add, but good ‘out of the box’ thinking.
@cjv; I get a real kick out of the science howlers in most SciFi, but I still love it. I think the CE is good SciFi simply because it doesn’t look like us, or anything that we’re familiar with as far as a life form.
My favorite aliens were the ones from Contact. I blame this completely on Carl Sagan’s invention of a heroine like Ellie Arroway, who was my de facto scientist role model during my teenage years. 🙂
As for finding aliens someday, I dunno but I personally think that it’s such a logical step to make that I will really not be all that surprised to turn on the TV someday and see we’ve found them. Just seems like it would be infinitely more difficult to explain no life than the other way around… but then, that might be the Ellie Arroway influence again…
We are always told that aliens, being the product of a different evolutionary process, would be utterly unlike us. But how unlike can they be? They have to move, have senses, etc. And some life forms are just not good at becoming intelligent. Slugs and cockroaches have been around for a long time, and never [thank god!] found it useful to become intelligent. Does anyone know of any good informed speculation about this?
Some things will be lovely and friendly (at least not nasty) too, I expect!
Re: The Crystalline Entity…. I fall about laughing at that episode because I can’t get it out my head that they are chasing after a stick of broccoli.. but then I’m a big silly person sometimes….. Good choice though.
Cheers,
-cvj
The aliens of “Alien ” are my favourites too. I saw “Alien” it in 1979 in the cinema when I was about 16 (giving my age away here:)) and it scared the bejeesuz out of me. To see it for the first time on a big screen it had a lot of impact, and all the sets and technology and the alien itself looked totally convincing (no cgi back then). The sets create an unsettling atmosphere even before the alien ever appears. Perfect score by the late/great Jerry Goldsmith too. Still one of my fav movies. I think other lifeforms if they exist somewhere might actually be as unpleasant and dangerous as this film suggests.
One of the interesting themes in the film is the way all the awesome technology and science that is portrayed just fails and can’t cope when confronted with this devastating force of nature: the surgical-medical lab technology can’t cut it of his face, they can’t get a weapon to kill the next version, the android malfunctions and goes psychotic–a really good subplot that adds to the terrifying mess they are in–and finally the Manhattan-sized mining starship blows up in a kind of supernova. Its a theme that continues also in the subsequent films. So yes, I think some things out there really might be quite nasty and might be best left alone.
My favorite alien is the “Crystalline Entity” from STNG, simply because it is so not like life here.