Mese: Aprile 2019

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SAY IT AIN’T SO STEPHEN (the last part)

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Planets of the apes

Make love, not war Unlike their chimpanzee cousins, the bonobo apes often resort to sex as a social tool for conflict resolution.

Make love, not war
Unlike their chimpanzee cousins, the bonobo apes often resort to sex as a social tool for conflict resolution.

Humans and chimpanzees share much more than a common ancestor some four million years in the past. They share, in particular, a not infrequent and sometimes decidedly disastrous tendency to solve problems with individuals of the same species—even the same social group—by violent means.
It can be argued that in the long run such bad manners do actually offer some sort of evolutionary advantage. Big strong males scaring rivals off mate more frequently, passing their traits along. Hierarchical order enforced through a blow or two to the head helps keep rules from being broken by rogue individuals. Territory is defended fiercely, which results in better survival chances for the tribe. Et cetera.
It is not widely known, though, that chimpanzees do have very close relatives, one of the two species making the genus Pan (the other one being the chimpanzees themselves). The bonobo—or Pan Paniscus, if you really want to be formal—differs from Pan Troglodytes in a just a few details here and there physically, like relatively longer legs, pink lips, dark face, and parted long hair on its head. It all boils down as something very much like what happens with crocodiles and alligators, which would be basically the same kind of creature to the average beholder.
Physically that is. Now socially is an entirely different pair of shoes.

Make love, not war (2) In a few moments of human history there have been pacifist movements on a global scale. The Hippies of the late 60s are an example. But the Hippy culture also had an important historical role for the subsequent technological computer revolution.

Make love, not war (2)
In a few moments of human history there have been pacifist movements on a global scale. The Hippies of the late 60s are an example. But the Hippy culture also had an important historical role for the subsequent technological computer revolution.

Bonobos have been found to drastically lack the aggressiveness exhibited as a norm by chimpanzees—matter of fact, they seem to spend a lot of their awake time engaged in what could be best described as Peace And Love. Literally, in case you were wondering: sexual activity generally plays a major role in bonobo society, being used as what some scientists perceive as a greeting, a means of forming social bonds, and a means of conflict resolution. (They also do not seem to discriminate in their sexual behavior by sex or age, with the possible exception of abstaining from sexual activity between mothers and their adult sons. Male/male or female/female interaction are quite common.) Their unique approach to life does not end there—according to observations in the wild, when bonobos come upon a new food source or feeding ground, the increased excitement will usually lead to communal sexual activity, presumably decreasing tension and encouraging peaceful feeding. (!)
So there. We have basically the same kind of creature, with the same abilities and capacities yet a totally opposite attitude, which does not appear to be the result of any Ten Commandments brought down from the inexistent mountains in the Congo river. It can be rightly argued that such a peaceful bonobo society anyway has not, technologically and scientifically, done a whole lot—no spaceflight, fire, or advanced agriculture—but then neither have the aggressive chimps, come to that.
So at the very least the remote possibility would seem to exist that an alien society on a nearby world could very well be found to virtually lack the worst hostile impulses that have long plagued our own human societies. They, in a sense, would be the bonobos to our Homo Sapiens. Meaning no wars—and more importantly, no Wellsian invasions of neighboring planets.
Absolute certainty? Of course not. But we can hope, we can hope….
It could be pointed out that at any rate aggressiveness has worked for us humans, helping us fend off all those pesky predators to eventually come to rule the world as the dominant species. And yet even we have slowly begun to understand the perils of our ways. We haven’t always been able to stop the lunacy: right up to 1914 virtually everybody and his kid brother in polite society was fond of explaining why wars had become obsolete and totally absurd in the brave new world we had created by then. Yet we had the horrible and totally unprecedented Great War—and, only a few decades later, an even more devastating one ending in a potentially world-ending scenario.
And still.

[…]
but these NIGHTS!
Heights of the summer’s nights, stars above and stars of Earth besides: O to be dead at last and at long last eternally to know the stars… the stars! How, how, how can they ever be forgotten?
[…]
Rainer Maria Rilke: Duineser Elegien

The Cold War didn’t end in a hot one. And when we stepped onto another world, for the first time ever in history, we did it in peace, with no weapons.
The universe did not come with guarantees. There were no guarantees we could achieve the level of knowledge required to explore the Solar System, to take that small step for a man that became a giant leap for all of humankind. There are no guarantees we have brethren of some kind out there in this vast sea of stars around us; intelligences like ours—or vastly different from ours, conceivably—from which we can learn, and keep going on as a society, a species. As there are no guarantees those intelligences, if found at all, will be as peaceful and friendly as we would like them to be.

There’s just the one way to know—to boldly go where we haven’t gone before. For that to happen, we can’t look at the stars above in abject fear and despair. We’ll have to turn to poet Rainer Maria Rilke for the right emotion to feel when looking up at the night sky, when we contemplate the thought that up there we have before us the greatest adventure ever, a journey that hopefully—no guarantees—will take humankind to heights we ourselves today won’t get to see but can dream about:

March 2019

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SAY IT AIN’T SO, STEPHEN (third part)

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Pride And Punishment

On Easter Island we can see a perfect example of the collapse of an isolated civilization. It was the isolation and over-exploitation of the available natural resources that were considered inexhaustible to trigger it.

Company isn’t just an antidote for boredom—when it comes to cultures, it may mean the difference between stagnation and growth.
Australian aborigines, cut off from contact with other human groups (and the fresh achievements in technology and knowledge they would bring with them), hit a technical peak—and stopped there. Without any new input, any new ideas to add to their own savvy, to crossbreed with their own knowledge to result in a breakthrough conducive to a higher mastery of their environment and resources, they could go no further. Uncorroborated reports point out to some Tasmanian groups even losing the capacity to make fire—which they would thereafter remedy by borrowing it from friendly neighbors—if admittedly this would be an extreme case of technical retrogradation.
Cultural and technological isolation can also, oddly enough, happen by deliberate choice. After developing a very interesting civilization the Chinese during the Qing dynasty in the 15th century pretty much decided what they had achieved so far was good enough for them, and that was it. They from then on stopped virtually all contacts with the outside world (and the new developments in both science and technology) until the outside world then by the late 1800s drastically showed them what they had been missing all along. The consequences are arguably felt even to this day.
Japan was another such case, if here the reaction to Commodore Perry’s forceful opening of the islands to the world was a policy of quickly catching up on what the previously ignored neighbors had to offer, which turned Japan into a world power some decades later.
Contact with other cultures, then, appears to be a sine qua non for any civilization to live long and prosper, to borrow a phrase. Sufficiently interested readers are invited to take a look at I. Shklovskii’s Universe, Life, Intelligence, (Moscow, USSR Academy of Sciences Publisher, 1962)—later developed into Intelligent Life In The Universe, after a collaboration with Carl Sagan—for a number of insights on this issue.
And, once more, science fiction was there first. Aside from all the fast-paced adventures of the space explorers he depicts as stranded on Earth, the premise of Chad Oliver’s The Winds Of Time (1957) is indeed the plight of a lonely civilization looking desperately everywhere else for company. It of course helped that Oliver was an anthropologist himself, a point evident throughout the novel.
So, at the very least, then a case can be made as well for a hypothetical technically advanced alien culture being also self-contained and averse to foreign contacts—which greatly diminishes the chances they need to come all the way to Earth to show what their weaponry can do.
Which, naturally, brings us once again to the issue of which is the more advanced civilization (in what science and/or technological field??) and what exactly can you do when you come to Earth with all guns firing.

Go native or go home

A very overlooked aspect in the collective imagination is that our world may seem more dangerous and threatening to aliens than they are to us.A hydrothermal worm. Credits: Philippe Crassous

Suppose, if you will, you’re parachuting on the Amazon jungle. (Let’s ignore that nasty canopy of treetops where your parachute has every chance to become entangled, and assume you’ll make it to the ground all right.) All through the descent you’re surrounded by the best technology available, from the ingenious device that allows you to slow down what otherwise would be a freefall, to the boots protecting your feet from the rough ground.
And now, having made it to the floor of the jungle, you’re ready to show those tribesmen who’s boss. As soon, that is, as you can wipe all that sweat from your forehead. And fend off those insects flying around you. Oh, yes, also the snakes. Did we mention the insane heat?
Oh, well, at least you can call for reinforcements, in case things get slightly out of hand. Right? Right? “What do you mean, help may take decades to come?” “Er, we mean lightspeed. Like nothing can go faster than that, unless you develop some Star Trek-like warp speed. And even then travelling through interstellar distances will still take some time. Hellooo!”
Meh, forget it—your call for help won’t be answered for several years, and it’ll take twice as long for you to be able to hear the response. That uncooperative limit set by the speed of light, remember.
Supplies, supplies, supplies. You’re using up your bullets on those pesky aborigines like water; better save some for a rainy day. (Rainy day in the jungle, now that you mention it, how about that. Not nice, no sirree.) Food, of course; the local fare is inedible when available at all.
So you can see the problem here. Unless the planet you’re bent on invading is a rather close duplicate of your own, chances are you’ll find the whole enterprise as charming as invading Hell. The local gravity field, for starters: Wells’ Martians had to resort to some serious technical props to move about in a world where they felt three times heavier, and conceivably didn’t have it any easier either when trying to sleep at night (imagine you’re wearing a full-body cast after an accident, say). It could be the other way around—a weaker gravity that initially will make you feel like a star athlete capable of the most astonishing feats until you start losing muscle and bone mass, and become irreversibly unable to set foot on your home world again.
And yes, the environment; temperature and such details. What liquid did you say plays the role of water in your home world? Ammonia? How nice—but no, it isn’t a liquid here; kind of too hot here on Earth for that. You might decide you’ll then forgo taking showers, but how about dying of thirst?
Oh well, is your home “water” instead a silicone fluid? Then I’m afraid this planet is a tad too cold for you—you’d need another one with a hotter mean temperature than a blast furnace.
Invading a planet with a totally alien biochemistry would have one advantage though—the local microbial fauna and flora conceivably wouldn’t be able to eat you alive, like they did Wells’ Martians. Only, of course, that might not be enough of an incentive to travel lightyears away from your home world, fight natives that outnumber you (and might have a trick or two up their technological sleeve) and, if you’re lucky, conquer a world you can’t live in unprotected.
A thought here: Even for a race so addicted to war and conquest as the human race, environment counts. All invasions here have taken place under the same gravity, with a similar atmospheric composition, and with an adequately edible fauna and flora. Also within the same mean temperature range—nobody has rushed to conquer Antarctica, or sent armored divisions to occupy that nicely dry Sahara Desert.
So that would then leave terraforming—or “alienforming,” if you will. You will conquer that alien, uninhabitable world, and then spend conceivably centuries trying to turn it into some place nicer where you can hope the grandkids of your grandkids may one day live. A case can be made for trying that with a world closer to yours though—preferably on your own star system, if you already have that kind of technology at hand.
Unless, of course, those aliens are so incurably aggressive.

(To be continued…)

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SAY IT AIN’T SO, STEPHEN (second part)

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Sweet Home Amazon

Countless Americans were fooled into believing a real Martian invasion of America was taking place on October 30, 1938. The perpetrator of this supposed “hoax” was The War of the Worlds. Performed primarily by Orson Welles — and based on the 1897 H.G. Wells novel of the same name — the show was unprecedented in bringing fictional aliens into american’s homes. Thousands panicked, and police even showed up at the radio studio to shut it down.

For the sake of argument, we’ll freely agree to stipulate there are alien lifeforms out there, (whatever you may mean by that) of an adequately intelligent variety (again, we’ll accept any working definitions), on as many planets around as many stars as you would like to include in this here conversation. We’ll even go ahead and also grant them the capacity to exercise a modicum of control of their environment—i.e., consider them gifted with hands, trunks, tentacles, or whatever suitable piece of anatomy of theirs can be used for similar purposes as our own upper paws.
That, in ultimate analysis, would appear to be the mark of a technology-capable species with a serious chance to become dominant in its world. You need something that can grasp that stone ax (or its equivalent) so you can hit dead that nasty creature trying to eat you before you can even tame fire (or whatever passes for it), don’t you. And how exactly do you plan to build that spaceship to invade Earth if you don’t have a good pair (or dozen pairs) of tentacles?
Since they can be argued to be related, we’ll also from now on loosely regard both science and technology as two sides of the same coin, and accordingly imply either, or both, as convenient. You have roughly the technology that your science allows you to develop; and in turn, your technology allows you to acquire more science (ever heard of the Hadron Collider?)
So there. You have your intelligent, technically savvy, and science-oriented aliens. What of it?
If you feel tempted to occasionally agree with those worried about a potentially hostile, scientifically and technologically more advanced alien civilization, rest assured it is a perfectly natural, and even logical, feeling—it would take more than a moderate dose of narcissism to believe that Earth, and only Earth, is the science and technology leader in the known universe. Our Sun is roughly five billion years old, with the slightly younger Earth boasting tool-using hominids for possibly just three million years—and did we mention the Industrial Revolution, which gave us steam power, mass production, and ultimately, our present fledgling space exploration program, came about a mere three centuries ago?
Meanwhile, the closer stars are to the Milky Way nucleus, the older they are—way older than our comparatively juvenile Sun. It would make sense to consider the possibility they have planets, and civilizations. Cultures which, in accordance with the same basic reasoning, should boast a science and technology arguably surpassing those of Earth by the same margin as, say, modern Western ones outpace the knowledge and technical skills of the last remaining isolated Amazon tribes….
Distance, of course, may play a role here—the Eskimos were never conquered by Chaka Zulu, say. The Australian aborigines don’t seem to have needed to plan in a hurry how to hold off the Roman legions. At least preliminarily, therefore, we’ll consider just the immediate neighborhood of our Solar
System, and hope the nasty guys next galaxy have their hands full with their own neighbors.
At first blush, it would then appear there are three main possibilities
a) We have technologically capable neighbors all right, but they happen to be less advanced than we are. (So we don’t have to worry about them, at least for a good while, depending on how far ahead we are. Whoopee.)
b) Our neighbors, alas, are roughly as science and technically savvy as we ourselves are. (Think, if you will, of a Star Trek-like scenario; everybody with about the same gadgets. Or, given our present capabilities, every other civilization in the area enjoying a Western, middle-class life standard.) We can’t reach them, they can’t reach us. Still acceptable so far, but we can’t rule out the possibility they get ahead of us by some unexpected discovery or two. (Think America in 1945 suddenly coming up with the atomic bomb.)
c) We are the Amazonian tribe in this neighborhood—everybody else and his kid brother is way, but way ahead of us in everything science and technology. (Depressing, scary, and arguably absolutely plausible.) Uh-huh.
And now we feel it is a good time to put something to you here.

Relativity and linearity

The first European explorers of Australia carried with them a number of technological products the likes of which the aborigines had never seen and couldn’t even begin to make sense of. In turn, the explorers were equally baffled by a piece of indigenous technology arising from an empirical if adequate knowledge of aerodynamics they themselves had no clue of—the returning boomerang.
Native American groups like the Innuit could (and did) teach the first visitors from Europe a thing or two about insulation techniques. Maya medicine and calendar were more knowledgeable than those of their eventual conquerors. Interestingly enough, they seem to have never hit on the idea of the wheel, for all that they were of course aware all right of its shape.
At this point, if not earlier, you have conceivably guessed what the underlying issue here is—assessing scientific and technological superiority, or inferiority, is a tricky proposition.
Complicating things even further, the development of science and technology is anything but a linear process.
A given culture may have excellent marks on this area of technology, and that area of knowledge—only to miserably fail to grasp that other science concept that could conceivably give it an edge, and completely skip yet this other technology that you would swear was so vital that everybody should be able to discover it in due time—and thus go from A to C without having a clue B even existed. Again, both the Maya and Inca civilizations went on to achieve impressive heights without even imagining that metallurgy, with all the advantages it implies, was within their reach.
Next, there’s absolutely no guarantee that a scientific or technical development, once discovered or achieved, will go on to become part of that civilization’s capabilities—or even be taken further to a stage where it becomes a distinct advantage.
Though the Chinese invented the rocket as far back as the 10th century, it remained a relatively modest auxiliary weapon that had all but disappeared from battlefields (and from China herself) by the time the Germans at Peenemunde decided to take a different approach to it. The fifth century Greeks were already experimenting with steam machinery—only, unfortunately, they failed miserably to see its possibilities. It’s anybody’s guess what modern history would be like if that incipient technical revolution had taken root.
And in the early 1900s electrical automobiles were thought to be the future, only to be rendered moot by petrol ones—a trend that many try to reverse today. Incidentally, petrol cars used the same combustion engine technology that in turn allowed heavier-than-air flying machines, cutting short the hitherto seemingly unstoppable development of blimps for air transport….
Therefore we can go ahead and postulate the possibility (and plausibility) of an alien culture in possession of some of our technologies, while lacking some others. Like, say, they have space-faring vehicles, but no radio (which

incidentally was the case of Wells’ Martians). Or they developed the laser, but have no hint that computers could be even a possibility. Or…or…
A strong advantage here—an Achilles’ heel there. What side could emerge the winner in a (wildly speculative, we would hope) clash between any one of those myriads of plausible civilizations and ours is left as an exercise for the gentle reader.

(To be continued…)

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SAY IT AIN’T SO, STEPHEN (first part)

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Con questo articolo, suddiviso in quattro puntate per motivi di lettura, inizia la nostra collaborazione con lo scrittore americano Ricardo L. Garcia. Gli episodi di questo saggio usciranno uno per settimana per tutto il mese di aprile e … saranno in inglese!
Cieli sereni

 

“We come from a planet far beyond this galaxy. A planet far more developed than Earth.” To Serve Man (1962)

For most of us, the sight of the skies at night brings a feeling of awe—so many stars, so far away, so full of mystery.
Some will see in them the mark of a Creation with a purpose and a message, a timeless show of power infinite and logical and coherent. Others will instead regard the distant points of light up above and argue how inevitable it was—considering what we have come to know about the laws governing at least this Universe—that they formed out of the Legos of matter and antimatter, energy and dark energy, given enough space-time and a Big Bang or two.
And still some others (hopefully few in number if in the utterly baffling company of minds like Stephen Hawking’s, no less) will look at the stars above in fear, of all feelings.
Not fear that the stars fall down and wreck this green, sweet world of ours—for all that the slightly misnamed “falling stars” (aka meteorites) do deserve some serious attention, viz. Tunguska, 1908—but that strange and powerful civilizations, evolved on planets orbiting those same points of light embellishing the night sky, may make it their next New Year’s resolution to attack and conquer a defenseless Earth.
Anybody else blaming Herbert George Wells please raise your hands.
Let it be entered into evidence that prior to The War Of The Worlds (1897) all imagined aliens (literary or not) were considered benign, when not decidedly saintly and having a soft spot for their laughingly naïve earthly cousins, as in Voltaire’s Micromegas. It was only, alas, after Wells’ tale of bellicose Martians braving a crippling gravity to go on to beat the earthlings with weapons resulting from a vastly superior technology that the idea of conquerors out of space started to draw some attention.

While so far we seem to be living in a safe neighborhood—no signs of civilizations, the nasty kind or else, have been detected from Mercury to the Kuiper Belt apart from our own, which we don’t propose to label here—the sea of stars up above could very well, we are told, be a different story (pun shamelessly intended). Not that long ago, the late world-renowned
astrophysicist Hawking warned us against the perils of advertising our presence here to the universe at large; like, say, insisting on such adolescent behavior as beaming radio messages at star cluster M13 or (the horror!) even irresponsibly inflicting our musical tastes on any entities out there retrieving the records on Voyagers 1 and 2. (What conceivable retaliation could follow listening to Johnny B. Goode is an alarming thought.)
It is, to be sure, a little late for that, and not only because those proofs of our existence have already been sent on their way. Granted, the 1974 message sent from the Arecibo, Puerto Rico, radio telescope (consisting of 1,679 binary digits, approximately 210 bytes, transmitted at a frequency of 2,380 MHz and modulated by shifting the frequency by 10 Hz, with a power of 450 kW, with a total duration of less than three minutes) will merely take some 25,000 years to reach its target, and anyway it was intended more as a technology exercise than a real hello. Voyager 1, more in keeping with certain post office standards for delivery of packages, will instead take some 40,000 years to come within shouting distance of star AC 79 3888.
All of which would seem to suggest we still have some time to prepare ourselves to be gallantly—and inevitably—defeated by that superior alien technology. Except, of course, we may not have that long: Ever since 1920 a lot of our radio, and then later also TV transmissions, passing with relative ease through the ionosphere, conceivably have given us already away decades ago to any alien civilization out there.
So there. What can we possibly do?

(To be continued…)