On the technology website Ars Technica last week, Jonah Lehrer argued that taking a sneaky peep at the end of a novel to see how the plot works out needn’t necessarily spoil a good read.
For myself, I quite like surprises, in fiction at least, so for the foreseeable future I’ll be taking my revelations, denouements, and tricks-of-the-tale in the order the author intended.
Real life’s different though, and I do for the most part like to see what’s coming. And, for sure, there are any number of would-be oracles, specialists, think-tanks, and other miscellaneous pundits ready to enlighten me.
But therein lies a problem. When the brain gets too much information from too many sources it doesn’t cope so well. And given that this is all important stuff we need to have an opinion on: over-population, global warming, peak oil, mass epidemics, starvation, save the panda – asteroid strikes; what’s needed is someone to critically scan, boil down, and filter the myriad forecasts and predictions into a digestible round-up.
Enter Jon Turney’s latest book, The Rough Guide to The Future
‘Rough’ is a curious term to describe a guide that in style, by my reckoning, is both scholarly and popular; but, as Turney says, it’s really more of a recognition that no study about everything can ever be complete.
All the same, Rough Guide to the Future is as comprehensive an analysis of forecast data and topical opinion that you’re likely to find, and one I heartily recommend.
I should also say that I read the Guide, in a fitting juxtaposition of futurity with the primal, on my smartphone whilst halfway up a mountain in a tent. And while I’m sure there’s virtue in that, I’m missing the pencil scrawl and Post-its I’d ordinarily now be pawing over for a review. Kindle highlights and notes just don’t do it for me.
Here goes anyhow.
Jon Turney (Photo:Tim Jones)
In terms of the certainty of its themes and predictions, the Guide follows a sort of three part soft-hard-soft progression. Kicking off with a more philosophical discussion around types of futurity and the methods of futurology, there follows a middle section on relatively near-reach developments on issues we really need to sort this century – so a focus on the 50-100 year time scale. With more speculative and far-reaching ideas boxed off in the later chapters, it’s an effective mix that majors on practical concerns but with plenty of material to keep budding futurists, sci-fi enthusiasts, and philosophy types on board.
Chapters combine quotations, literature survey, case studies, a Prediction File, and a Further Exploration section (references to futurist texts, various government, NGO and think-tank reports, plus a good dose of science fiction). The Guide is packed with helpful hyperlinks.
The Predictions Files capture the diverse views of fifty invited commentators asked for their highest hope, greatest fear, and best bet for the future. Turney’s own replies give something of the flavour:
Highest Hope:“We navigate through the eye of the needle of the middle decades of the century well enough to allow the bottom billion a real chance of a humane life.”
Worst Fear:“The environmental calamity so many informed scientists predict gathers pace faster than our efforts to forestall it.”
Best Bet:“Crises, muddling through and continuing vast inequalities are the order of the day. In spite of that, it remains, technologically and culturally, the most fascinating of times to be alive.”
Scanning the whole set is a roller-coaster ride between optimism and pessimism. From Anne Skare Nielsen’s High Hope along the lines of the world being what we make it:
“That the majority of the world’s inhabitants will come to the sensible conclusion that if we keep on asking others to change, nothing grand will ever happen. That we – as Buddhists say – have to be the change we want to see in other people. We should stop instructing and start constructing. I hope that we can let go of our need to control, learn to “listen louder” and co-create better solutions that will bring out the best in people”
to the sombre hopelessness of Sohail Inayatullah’s Greatest Fear:
“Endless fear, endless poverty, endless loss of spirit, continued nationalism, crisis after crisis with the inability to see the links, deeper causes, or pattern of crises.”
I touched on ideas from the first part of the book, related to time perception and the nature of past and future in my last blog post, so won’t expand further here.
The ‘hard’ ground at the core of the Guide comprises discrete chapters on what Turney calls Global Basics: energy, climate, water, food, health, biodiversity, war, and disasters. These are preceded and supported by generic discussions on science futures and population, and followed by material covering softer issues (but not as speculative as those in later chapters) around life, societal values, economic models and sustainability, and global cooperation – the logic being these topics overlay or integrate with the Global Basics. In the chapter Life, Society and Values, I particularly liked the description of Futurelabs’ 3-Worlds exercise, that considers how the world might look were we to adopt or migrate to different sets of dominant social values.
I’m not about to trot through each and every Global Basic here, but it’s impossible to write, or write-up, a guide to the future without mentioning energy and climate change.
Unfortunately, the problems associated with climate change come in two flavours neither of which, as a species, we’ve met before on any scale or have a record of resolving: (a) their impact is global and therefore shared, and (b) they operate over multi-generational timescales. The challenge is well summed up in former Shell chairman Ron Oxburgh’s Worst Fear:
“That each country acts in its own perceived short term interests in the belief that this will maintain or raise its economic competitiveness; that emissions will continue to rise, and wealthy nations will use their wealth and technology to achieve a degree of short-term adaptation to a rapidly deteriorating climate, allowing the developing world to take its chances.”
If there’s one common message from the whole guide, but particularly the Global Basics discussion, for me it’s the need not to see our scientific, technical, societal, and political futures in isolation. It’s easy to retreat to a technical focus, but some thought leaders are striving for the bigger picture – as challenging a task as that might be. This quote from Tim Jackson of the UK’s Sustainable Development Commission stuck with me:
“the reason why nobody asks the difficult questions that we are asking here is because nobody really has any answers to them”
A somewhat depressing prospect given that the difficult questions are also the important ones. For me, the apparent absence of any roadmap to transition from what we appear to be in – a treadmill of unsustainable, consumer-driven growth, is deeply worrying. Few believe this is the century mankind will ramp up to some Utopian ideal, but it will be a poor show if we can’t make substantive corrections to the inequalities in health, wealth and opportunity that characterise today’s (in)humanity.
Incidentally, another message I gleaned from the Guide is that forecasts are, or should be, constantly revised – and some, like the impact of birth rate on future population, are sensitive to small changes. Likewise the need to question received truths and revisit sources.
Moving to more speculative territory in the last third of the Guide, I should mention how through his many references Turney pays tribute to science fiction. Since the 19th century, science fiction writers have painted imaginative alternative futures built around surreal technologies, alien life, and revolutionary social orders; and the fiction of the past has often become the fact of the future.
I’ve never been a science fiction nut, but remember as a teenager lapping up futurist works like Arthur C Clarke’s Profiles of the Future and Report on Planet 3, then in the 90’s Francis Kinsman’s Millenium 2000, and most recently Damien Broderick’s Year Million collection. Now, thanks to the Guide, I’ve rediscovered the works of H.G.Wells and W.Olaf Stapledon – who both convince me how few ideas are truly new.
There’s discussion around life extension, cryogenic preservation, and transhumanism – including the increasingly ubiquitous concept of The Singularity, a condition some think will arise, even within the next 50 years, whereby technology and artificial intelligence will run exponentially away from us, designing and building ever superior versions of itself – even attaining its own form of consciousness. My take from the Guide on this? The jury is still well and truly out.
The good news is that through improved nutrition and medicine many more people will be living very much longer (but not necessarily at their leisure). And through genetic upgrades, we’ll be enhancing our physical performance, visual range, and cognitive abilities. A brave new world made real.
Then there’s the prospect for life on other worlds, the concept of deep time, and the ultimate fate of life, the universe, and everything; which, cheerfully, boils down to the heat death of the universe in some tens of trillions of years: a concept clarified not as some giant toasting (although the Earth does get one of those along the way), but the end of heat, energy, and everything from the potato chip to the proton.
So sitting in my tent having completed the Guide, from the seemingly overwhelming challenges of Global Basics to the end of the universe, I ask myself the obvious question: “Does it really, cosmically speaking, matter if I don’t get up and go to work?….”.
At which point I remind myself I’ve two more weeks of holiday to go, and keep on smiling.
After all, there’s still time to put things right. And the end of the future is a long way off.
You’re a young 33, with an already impressive scientific career under your belt, and – although you only suspect it – a spectacular future ahead of you. Within 10 years, you’ll be elected President of the Royal Society.
But in November 1811, you’ve got something else on your mind.
How exactly would Humphry Davy (he of Davy Lamp fame among many other achievements) impress the first true love of his life – the beautiful widow and heiress Jane Apreece ?
Well, as it turned out……with more science of course. And unlikely as it might seem, with quotes from the book whose spine forms the header of this very blog: Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia. (Erasmus was Charles Darwin’s grandfather….how many times)
Over to you, Humph….
‘There is a law of sensation which may be called the law of continuity & contrast of which you may read in Darwin’s Zoonomia [sic]. An example is – look long on a spot of pink, & close your eyes, the impression will continue for some time & will then be succeeded by a green light. For some days after I quitted you I had the pink light in my eyes & the rosy feelings in my heart, but now the green hue & feelings – not of jealousy – but of regret are come.’
Smooth, or what?
I’m not the first to spot Davy’s creative application of ground-breaking ideas in colour perception; the above passage is from Richard Holmes’s award-winning Age of Wonder. But what’s it all about? Let’s start with Zoonomia.
Erasmus describes his experiments on colour and the eye in Volume I, Section III: Motions of the Retina; and Section XI: Ocular Spectra.
In his letter to Jane Apreece, Davy is referring to this experiment (Warning for the unfamiliar: f = s):
Zoonomia Vol1 Section III, p.20
Later, Erasmus restates the experiment and proposes a mechanism for the observed effect:
Darwin’s experiments covered a range of colour and contrast effects. Here in his ‘tadpole’ experiment he interprets the bright after-image we see after staring at a dark object, explained again in terms of conditioning and sensitivity of the retina.
Erasmus’s ‘tadpole’ (a little smudged after 200 years)
The drawings in Zoonomia are individually hand drawn and hand coloured. In this passage, Erasmus encourages his readers to partake of some drawing-room diversion using silks of many colours:
Erasmus encourages his readers to lay down silksReaders are encourgaged to lay down coloured silks
All exciting stuff, not least for Erasmus, who betrays his giddiness in this chuckling wind up to his analysis, where he curries favour with the incumbent president of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks.
“I was surprised, and agreeably amused, with the following experiment. I covered a paper about four inches square with yellow, and with a pen filled with a blue colour wrote upon the middle of it the word BANKS in capitals, and sitting with my back to the sun, fixed my eyes for a minute exactly on the centre of the letter N in the middle of the word;after closing my eyes, and shading them somewhat with my hand, the word was dinstinctly seen in the spectrum in yellow letters on a blue field; and then, on opening my eyes on a yellowish wall at twenty feet distance, the magnified name of BANKS appeared written on the wall in golden characters.” [Banks was elected President of the Royal Society in 1778].
Erasmus saw Banks’s name in large golden letters on his garden wall
Did Erasmus get it right with all that stuff about flexing of the antagonist fibres and analogy to the muscles? Well, he wasn’t a million miles away from the truth. Indeed, it looks like yet another case of Erasmus Darwin not getting the credit he deserves for being ahead of the game.
Here’s a modern popular version of the tadpole ‘trick’ (Credit: from here)
The idea is you stare at the bulb for 20 or 30 seconds then look at the white space to the right of it. The popular description of the effect is in terms of the retina cells stimulated by the light portions of the image being desensitized more than those which respond to the dark part of the image – so that the least depleted cells react more strongly when the eye switches to the more uniform all-white image next to the bulb.
Davy Lamp (Wiki Commons)
The modern authors note also that the size of the afterimage varies directly with the distance of the surface on which it is viewed: a manifestation of Emmert’s Law. This is consistent with Erasmus’s report of the name BANKS writ large on his garden wall.
Likewise, the modern interpretation of colour afterimages is popularly framed in terms of how ‘fatigued’ cells respond to light (See how fatigued’ aligns with Erasmus’s muscular references). Erasmus didn’t know we have two types of light-sensitive cells in the eye: cones (that broadly speaking detect colour) and rods (that are more sensitive to absolute brightness), and that the cones themselves are sub-divided to be maximally sensitive to red , blue and green (RGB).
But he did understand the concept of complementary colours, and recognised that whatever part of the retina detects the colour red becomes fatigued through over-exposure; he’d got the principle that green appears againt white as a kind of negative red ).
If we dig a little deeper we find the brain-proper conspires with the retina to consider what we see in terms of black-white, red-green, and blue-yellow opponencies. And the corresponding three sets of retinal cells operate in a pretty arithmetical fashion: the electrical impulse sent to the brain by the red-green cells is proportional to the net red-green exposure to light that the cell has experienced in recent time; likewise the blue-yellow sensitive cells.
That’s all clear then.
What bugs me a wee bit is that in my research for this post I never once saw a reference to Erasmus Darwin. Rather, the standard historical reference seems to be the German psychologist Ewald Hering (1834-1919), who is credited with the first observations of the phenomenon.
Hold the horses – it’s Valentines Day
Ok, we got a bit lost in the science there. And I got a bit hot under the collar; eh-hem. So, the real question is: did Davy’s colourful overtures hit the mark? Well, sort of. Humphry Davy and Jane Apreece married the following year in 1812. The bad news is it didn’t really work out longterm.
All the same, Davy shone ever bright in his science. Already famous for discovering a whole range of new chemical elements, including via separation by electrolysis potassium and sodium, and chlorine gas; he went on to discover elemental iodine and, for good measure, invented the Davy Lamp – thereby saving who knows how many thousands of lives in the mining indistry. In 1820, when Banks’s death ended his 40+ year run at the head of the Royal Society, Davy was elected President.
All of which doubtless kept a bit of colour in his cheeks.
Shop-front in Penzance where Davy served his early apprenticeship (Tks S.Klinge)
Sources
Darwin, Erasmus. Zoonomia Vol 1 Pub. J.Johnson 1796 (photos are from author’s copy)
Holmes, Richard. Age of Wonder. Pub. Harper Press (the softback is out for about £7 now – buy it!)
As promised, here is science communicator Jonathan Chase’s impromptu Astrobiology Rap performed at last week’s Royal Society discussion meeting on ‘The detection of extra-terrestrial life and the consequences for science and society‘. (Write-up of the event is here).
“Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars.”
Those words were spoken by a fictitious news reporter in Orsen Welles’s 1938 radio play ‘The War of the Worlds’ – a broadcast that probably did more than any other event in the 20th century to embed the prospect of extra-terrestrial life in the popular imagination.
Orson Welles presents ‘War of the Worlds’ on October 30th 1938
Listeners to Welles’s play are said to have run screaming into the streets, taking the Martian invasion for real. Yet that reaction, said Professor Albert Harrison from the University of California, Davis, has been overplayed and, in fact, many listeners followed much more rational courses of action. Harrison’s comments are consistent with the Royal Society’s intent that this meeting explore beyond the bounds of natural science – to consider the social, cultural, and political impacts of the search and possible discovery of extra-terrestrial life.
The Royal Society (Photo: Tim Jones)
It’s tricky to focus down 16 speakers and 14 hours of discussions, but for me everything feeds into three questions:
Is there life beyond the earth?
Is there intelligent life beyond the earth?
How might human beings react to the discovery of extra-terrestrial life?
(o.k., there’s also a significant ‘sub-plot’ around the possibility that life evolved on earth in several independent forms – more of which later.)
Echoing an early speaker, I’ll say up front that there is presently no evidence for the existence of extra-terrestrial life, intelligent or otherwise. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t out there. Sorry if that ruined the sense of chair-gripping suspense I’ve been building.
Lord Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society (photo:Sven Klinge)
Is there life beyond the earth?
Where life?
Strangely perhaps, the search for ET begins on Earth, in so far as understanding how terrestrial life came to exist and evolve tells us what to expect elsewhere.
But beyond the Earth, researchers are looking in two places :
(a) planets in our own solar system
(b) planets in orbit around other stars in our galaxy
Why life?
With evidence that physics and chemistry are uniform across the universe, the argument is that if we find life in one location, then why not in another. It’s quite convincing if said quickly.
But conscious human life appears only at the end of a road full of hurdles, and we really need to understand how challenging each stage of the process is before raising expectations of a repeat performance. When Pascale Ehrenfreund described the ubiquity of carbonaceous compounds in the universe, she did so against a history starting at the big bang, moving through the formation of chemical compounds, then on to DNA, and finally to life. The sequence goes something like:
1. The universe came into existence at the Big Bang (including time and space, energy and matter)
2. Matter condensed into galaxies of gas and stars, and elements and chemicals were produced
3. Chemicals became arranged so they were able to self-replicate and behave as ‘life’ (RNA>DNA>cell formation, or alternative chemical arrangements that fulfill the same function)
4. Simple life evolved into more complex forms through Darwinian natural selection
5. Complex life forms evolved intelligence
6. Intelligent life forms became self-aware (consciousness)
My critique of these is that (2) and (4) are uncontroversial: we directly observe elements and chemicals, including organic molecules in deep space; and stage (4) is simply the fact of Darwinian evolution. (5) – intelligence – could be considered an extension of evolution; but, for me, (6) – consciousness – is a separate deal. That’s not because I think consciousness requires supernatural intervention to make it happen, but more to highlight how little understood is the process by which matter gets to understand and act upon itself. If we’re so smart, where’s the AI – right?
Jumping back to (1) – the big bang – as the mechanism for the formation of our universe in isolation, that too is uncontroversial for many scientists. Yet, speculative concepts like the multiverse have bearing on discussions about the probability of life forming. This meeting avoided getting too far side-tracked into cosmological fundamentals and the more adventurous areas of scientific speculation. Indeed, I thought Paul Davies, author of the The Mind of God and The Goldilocks Enigma – works that major in this territory – showed great restraint.
On what life actually is, I found it hard to pin down a universally shared definition, but most include the ability to self-replicate and to behave autonomously. Other qualifying features might include complexity, the ability to grow and develop, and the presence of a nutrient-fed metabolism. I also liked Baruch Blumberg’s reference to a test that involves comparing the behaviour of live and dead chickens thrown into the air.
Astrobiology in a new Age of Wonder
Professor Steven Rose (photo:Sven Klinge)
For Blumberg, astrobiology and the search for ET represents a new Age of Wonder – driven by the Joseph Banks spirit found in Richard Holmes’s book of the same name, but enhanced through startling advances in technology. Astrobiologists are asking themselves if the commonality of biologies discovered across the globe in Banks’s time will now be reproduced at the universal scale.
The planets in our own solar system can be reached by physical probes, but so-called exoplanets orbiting distant stars (but still in our galaxy) must be detected and analysed remotely with instruments like the Kepler space telescope. This is an area where progress
Professor Charles Cockell “Biofilms not biospheres” (photo:Sven Klinge)
has been extremely rapid and rewarding since the first Jupiter type gas giant planets were discovered 15 years ago. Researchers already analysing ‘super earths’ (x10 earth mass), said Michel Mayor, were on the brink of accessing planets equivalent in size and position to Earth. Still unresolvable as discs, exoplanets are detected from the way they change the apparent brightness and quality of light from the star-planet system. When a planet passes in front, it blocks out some light, and the reduction is measured by what is effectively a giant light-meter – like Kepler. Some new instruments in the pipeline, such as Plato scheduled for 2018, will open up more than half the sky for exoplanet analysis, further increasing the chances of discovering life.
But the little things can impress most, and one of the highlights for me was Malcolm Fridlund’s slide showing a very subtle dip in a star’s brightness curve, corresponding not to a reduction due to shadowing, but to the loss of reflected light from the planet itself as it passed behind the star. That somehow brought home the sensitivity of the technique.
Dr Malcolm Fridlund (photo:Sven Klinge)
Professor Baruch Blumberg (photo:Sven Klinge)
Analysing the wavelength of light from these systems reveals chemicals in the exoplanet’s atmosphere that we can compare with chemicals that are associated with life in our own biosphere (or biofilm as Cockell would have it). For example, ozone, oxygen, methane, and water may indicate plant life. And as Pascale Ehrenfreund explained, the starting materials for carbon based life are common throughout the universe: including long carbon chains, fullerenes and PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons).
While there’s been a push to see earth sized planets – because we know they work I guess – larger planets are not ruled out, although it was suggested plate tectonics might limit development on larger rocky worlds. We know life can be surprisingly tough though, like the Earth-bound extremophile group chemolithotrophs, described by Charles Cockell, that can survive high temperatures, pressures, and strong saline solutions – extracting energy directly from rocks by oxidising iron.
Professor Pascale Ehrenfreund (photo:Sven Klinge)
So it was a little disappointing after all that to learn from Simon Conway Morris that conditions on Jupiter’s moon Europa may be too saline for life. Maybe I’ve watched the movie 2010 too often, but I had Europa pegged as a top contender (according to Chris McKay, Saturn’s largest moon Enceladus is now a more likely prospect).
But Morris’s main aim was to demonstrate the ubiquity of evolutionary convergence, with reference to basic life forms that had shown a tendency to independently converge on improved or even optimal designs through natural selection. This begs the question why, if life once started has little problem developing and converging across a range of environments, is the universe not teaming with life and its tell-tale transmissions (an example of the Fermi Paradox discussed later). Simon Conway Morris’s explanation is that basic life is indeed a (one off?) fluke.
Dr Catherine Cesarsky and Prof. Colin Pillinger (photo: Sven Klinge)
Chris McKay’s ‘Second Genesis’ went some way to soften the prospect of life as a total fluke, his thesis being that we might find an independently developed tree of life in our own solar system. Just finding life or its artifacts in the rocks of, say, Mars won’t do though, as we know there’s been a historic transfer of rocks (below sterilisation temperatures) between the Earth and Mars caused by ejection of material by asteroid strikes.
Professor Simon Conway Morris (photo:Sven Klinge)
Dr Christopher McKay (photo:Sven Klinge)
Indeed – we may ourselves be Martians ! (A number of Martian meteorites have been found on earth, identified by analysing the composition of trapped gas bubbles and comparing it to samples analysed on Mars. A meteorite was found on Mars by Viking, but not from Earth – although such material is almost certainly there.)
Rather, life derived from a true second genesis would have to demonstrate features in its underlying structure, or building blocks, that must have arisen independently from our own tree of life, and will certainly not be part of it.
Is there intelligent life beyond the earth?
The second day’s discussions, chaired by Jocelyn Bell-Burnell and Martin Rees, focused on the search for intelligent extra-terrestrial life, or SETI, and how human beings might react to its discovery.
Maybe it’s a little unfair to suggest anyone working in this field is an inherent optimist, but I suspect such a condition is helpful.
At the start of this post, I listed the various stages or hurdles that must be jumped on the way to life. But for Christian de Duve, opening the session, the appearance of life on Earth is simply the inevitable outcome of a chemical process; such that if the same chemistry occurs elsewhere – the same sort of life will appear.
Professor Christian de Duve (photo: Sven Klinge)
De Duve’s thesis of life as a cosmic imperative does rely on the same physical as well as chemical conditions being reproduced, but for me he didn’t adequately address the qualitative difference between the reaction of a homogenous mix of chemicals, and more complex processes such as the formation of self-reproducing entities like cells (via RNA and DNA). Assumptions around the inevitability of the switch from chemistry to ‘life chemistry’ are troubling. But maybe I just need to read De Duve’s book.
The Shadow Biosphere
Dr Paul Davies. “Eerie Silence” (photo: Tim Jones, Darkroommatter.com)
Following Chris McKay’s discussion around a ‘Second Genesis’ in our solar system, Paul Davies followed similar motives with his concept of a more Earthbound ‘Shadow Biosphere’. Davies’s research, described in his forthcoming book, The Eerie Silence, may be terrestrial, but can inform the off-world search. The Shadow Biosphere, if it exists says Davies, will comprise unconventional (and unrecognised) life forms that have appeared and developed independently.
The lifeforms may have died out and be detectable only via ancient biomarkers, or they could be “under our noses” in the form of the largely overlooked extremophiles – those bugs that thrive variously in hot, high-pressure, salty and radiated environments. Davies described ongoing research at the hot pools of Mono Lake, California, where the search is on for arsensic-based micro-organisms, where arsenic may have replaced the phosphorous found in the tree of life we already know. Shadow organisms can thus look quite ordinary (whatever that means for an extremophile) but betray themselves by subtle but fundamental differences in their basic composition – such as inclusion of arsenic, or structure – such as the ‘handedness’ of their DNA. As with Second Genesis, the work has obvious implications for our view on the specialness of life-forming processes.
And while fishing around in hot pools might lack the superficial glamour of exoplanet and space research, the results could be of equal or greater significance. Also, with potential Martian finds arguably compromised by the possibility of inter-planetary material exchanges, the discovery of alternative trees of life on Earth might provide a more robust argument for the prevalence of life in the greater universe.
Is there anybody…..out there!
The attraction of SETI, officially celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, speaks for itself. Discovering the extra-terrestrial lettuce would be nice, but we’d all rather have the salad recipe beamed in from Vega.
Director of the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, Frank Drake, has been on the case from the start, and with Director of the Center for SETI Research, Jill Tarter, has been listening for radio, and more recently laser, broadcasts since the 1960s.
To help understand what he was up against odds-wise in the search, Drake proposed his now famous equation to calculate the number of civilisations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible:
The Drake Equation (source: Wikipedia)
Scaled up calculations suggest there are likely to be ten to the power 20 Earth-like planets in the observable universe, suggesting that if the road to intelligent life is ubiquitous and mechanical (which is not a given), the outlook for detection looks positive.
However, the Fermi Paradox, based on an observation by Enrico Fermi that we don’t see any evidence of life, because it either isn’t there or habitually destroys itself, runs counter to this enthusiasm. And as Paul Davies commented, the odds represented in the Drake equation terms (for and against life) stack up exponentially. Bottom line, I think these sorts of consideration should cause us to revisit any intuitive sense we might have for the inevitability of life – especially those of us from the Sagan “billions” generation.
Dr Frank Drake (photo: Tim Jones)
Dr Jill Tarter (photo:Sven Klinge)
Apart from radio waves and laser beams, aliens might give themselves away in other ways associated with their use of advanced technologies. One such technology is the Dyson Sphere. Proposed by Freeman Dyson, the sphere would be built by advanced civilisations to completely encapsulate their star, and thereby capture or control its energy more efficiently. Such spheres would glow in the infra-red, and serious Earth-based studies have been made to look for them. I’ve previously referenced science fiction author Stephen Baxter’s use of the Dyson Sphere in his novel Time Ships (in this blog post).
Understandably perhaps, the SETI camp don’t appear to dwell on factors that might dampen enthusiasm for the cause. For example, it was pointed out that the intensity of our own incidental and accidental radio emissions into space has decreased over the years with improved efficiency and new modes of non-radiative information transfer – like fibre optics. So maybe the aliens don’t glow as brightly as we’d like. Also, any laser communications we might detect would necessarily have to be altruistically targeted by the senders with the specific purpose of communicating with alien life. Maybe they’re doing that. It’s not that I’m being negative on any of this, but rather that, all in all, I walked away from this session as unsure as I was when when it started as to how much of a long shot SETI really is.
How might human beings react to the discovery of extra-terrestrial life?
References to the likely social, cultural and political impacts of the discovery of, or contact with, extra-terrestrial life were variously touched upon by earlier speakers. In this session, I hoped we’d come to some sort of focus, and discuss scenario-based questions such as: “What would happen if Hitler’s 1936 Olympics speech was broadcast back at us?” – as happened in the film Contact. That didn’t happen, with anthropologist Kathryn Denning seeming to actively discourage the consideration of specific scenarios. I took the point that we can’t fully prepare, but still found the approach over-conservative. Anyhow, we were told there are several groups now looking into ‘post-detection issues’, and I look forward to seeing their findings.
Dr Kathryn Denning (photo:Sven Klinge)
Professor Albert Harrison (photo:Sven Klinge)
Albert Harrison’s aforementioned analysis of Orson Welles’s War of The Worlds broadcast was entertaining, and made me realise the importance of that event as a social experiment – however unintended (how many points do we have on this particular graph?). On a related topic, I was surprised at the level of disagreement amongst the academics on the question of whether aliens would be benevolent or malevolent.
Professor Ted Peters (photo:Sven Klinge)
Ted Peters presented research results on how various religious groups and atheists thought a discovery of ET would impact them personally and their ( if appropriate) religious creed.
I’m oversimplifying, but in summary: theists generally felt they could individually accommodate ET, but their orthodoxy less so; those from more deist or spiritual religions – like Buddism (which I hardly consider a religion in the same vein as the others) had few if any problems – personally or as a group. In general, it seemed to be ‘the other guy’ and his religion that would have the problem, not the person asked. Ho hum…
Interestingly, the atheists felt religious people would have more of a problem than the religious themselves reported, and related to that in questions, Paul Davies suggested the results were more suggestive of religious people not knowing enough about their own religion.
Professor Ivan Almar (photo:Sven Klinge)
The event wound up with presentations from Hungarian Academy of Science speaker Ivan Almar, and Marian Othman from the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs. Almar’s subject matter – scales – was for me a little dry and mechanical for a closing session, but prompted a lively Q&A around issues such as the representation of high-impact/low-probability events, and the use and mis-use of scale data by different groups (e.g. experts, the media).
Othman’s presentation was more of an insight into the workings of the UN committee structure, illustrated through its handling of the topic of Near Earth Objects. Her sharing of the various procedures, political considerations, and protocols provided something of a pro-forma for dealing with issues of extra-terrestrial life.
Dr Mazlan Othman (photo:Sven Klinge)
All in all, the session was notable for the way audience delegates, the critical mass of which I suspect hailed from the more natural scientist end of the spectrum (physicists, astrobiologists), engaged in discussions that necessarily fringed on speculation. Scientists rightly don’t like to speak on topics where they lack either expertise, complete data, or both of those; but the judicial placement of appropriate disclaimers led to a lively debate.
I’d like to end this post with a noble declaration to the effect that the real take-away from the meeting was that the search for ET is as much about the search for an understanding of ourselves as anything else. And while I think that’s probably true, the real thrill for me was to spend two days mixing it with a bunch of bright folk who, in these days of market focused short-termism, are still able to pursue such a worthy vision. I had great fun.
EXTRAS!
1. Listen to Jonathan Chase and his Astrobiology Rap !
Jonathan Chase provides some light entertainment
2. Hear the Mercury Theatres’s War of the Worlds radio play here.
3. Hear my interview with astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell here (in spite of the background noise, I think this is a great interview):
The sun is shining, the outside doors are open, and from the window of the Royal Society library I can see the tops of trees along the Mall.
Michael Lemonick is introduced by the Royal Society's Felicity Henderson (photo, thanks Sven Klinge)
Today, at this first in a season of lunchtime talks at the RS, I’m learning from Michael Lemonick some things I never knew about William and Caroline Herschel.
You can hear the audio and video (slides) yourself on the RS podcast page. Lemonick’s book ‘The Georgian Star’ is published by W.W.Norton.Co. In the meantime, this short commentary.
Michael Lemonick at the Royal Society (photo, thanks Sven Klinge)
Sir William Herschel is best known as the discoverer of Uranus, a planet that did indeed in the days of William’s sponsor George III go by the popular name of George or ‘Georgium Sidus’ to be precise. But discovering light blue planets that spin at a funny angle is only part of William’s and his sister Caroline’s story.
Having moved to London from Germany, William Herschel the music teacher was enthralled by the stars he saw overhead whilst travelling between clients. Disappointed with the telescopes of the day, he started to build a whole series of his own that would culminate in a 4ft mirrored, 40 ft long giant sponsored by the King himself.
William Herschel (photo WikiCommons)
Joined by his sister in Bath, both Herschel’s were professional astronomers in the pay of the King, making Caroline the first ever professional female astronomer (he on £200pa, she as ‘assistant’ on £50pa).
Between them they discovered 3000 galaxies, and Caroline alone identified 8 comets. Uranus was mistakenly declared a comet on its discovery in 1781. Impressively, the Herschel star charts were still in practical use into the 1950s and 60s.
Caroline Herschel
The Herschel’s were amongst the first astronomers to take an interest in the structure and evolution of the universe, rather than following the more practical motivations of the time – like enabling better navigation at sea. William tried to measure stellar distance by the parallax method, but failed due to equipment sensitivity. He was more successful at plotting out the shape of our galaxy – the Milky Way.
Herschel's plot of our galaxy (image WikiCommons)
William Herschel is in some ways the father of infra-red astronomy, having discovered the infra-red region of the spectrum from its warming effect on bottles of liquid; he called them ‘calorific rays’. As Lemonick pointed out, there seems some injustice in the naming of the James Webb space telescope due to launch in 2013, which will work predominantly in the IR spectral range (there is a William Herschel telescope already on the Canary Islands) .
And lastly – I never knew this. It was the common belief of the time, shared by Herschel, that all the planets were inhabited, with the sun just another planet – albeit a particularly bright golden one.
The logic extended to a belief that the luminescent surface of the sun was the visible top side of clouds and, charmingly, that sunspots were holes in the cloud through which – presumably with a powerful enough telescope – one could view ‘sun people’. Those were the days…..
Two real hoo-hahs have gone down in the world of UK science this week. At the British Association Festival of Science in Liverpool, the Director of Education at the Royal Society, Rev.Prof.Michael Reiss, appeared to support at least some discussion of creationism in school science classes. At the same festival, embryologist and TV science star Robert Winston stirred up journalists and festies alike with further criticism of what he sees as the irresponsible behaviour of the super-atheist clan (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens et al). This post relates to the Reiss storm; here is a podcast featuring Reiss that accompanied his entry on the Guardian Science Blog on 11th September, and Reiss’s pre-presentation press brief from the BA.
Compatible?
Reiss’s comments are surprising and, given his position and the ammunition he is handing to less moderate interests, politically puzzling. The arguments for and against debate of non-scientific, non-evidence-based, and logic-deficient world views in school science classes have been done to death (the comments on Reiss’s statement on the Guardian Science Blog say it all).
My personal stance is that it is important in schools to explicitly state what science is not, as well as what it is. Science is not a methodology for analysing non-evidence-based beliefs, which includes most religious beliefs as self defined. It is a separate issue if a student wants to argue a religion is evidence based; that’s a good discussion topic for the religious studies class. There would be less angst all round if boundaries, rules, and definitions were more clearly defined in this way.
It is the duty of the educational authority (in the broadest sense of the term, but here including Michael Reiss) to agree the ground rules, and to instruct and enable teachers to relay them to children at the start of term. It boils down to making sure kids know up front what science is and what it is not.
There are two reasons this has not happened. First, the authority setting the rules is itself confused over what science is; and second, there is political comfort in maintaining that ambiguity in an atmosphere where the setting of any boundary is seen as an implied attack on anything lying outside it. The first weakness may be countered with a relentless appeal to reason, defense of the scientific method, and political lobby. The second requires political courage from our leaders, faced with the inescapable truth that the intellectually honest position, without vindictive or malicious intent, will be painful to some.
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