Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

One: I really feel like I ought to get in the habit of posting here, alongside / before my Tumblr.

Two: When I'm feeling down, I find myself seeking refuge in thinking about Shakespeare. I've been thinking about him a lot, this week. As usual, I end up wishing I could chat with his wife and daughters, 'cause I have a whole passel of his words to engage with. And the women in his later plays are a whole lot more complex, and drive more of the story, than the women in his early plays. He must have gotten his inspiration from somewhere.

Three: If humans ever colonize Mars, the different environment probably means the colonists will evolve into a new species within a handful of generations. If so, they'll be the first newly named species (after us) who'll have a say in what they should be called.

Four: Speaking of Shakespeare, Ben Crystal -- my favorite contemporary Shakespeare scholar -- did a TEDx talk on what he's learned from using the methods of theater from Shakespeare's time: Original Practice -- Shakespeare's craft (17 minutes). I've watched it three times, and each time, I get misty-eyed, and lumpy-throated.

Five: Have you seen the (apparently) recent trend of "unicorn" cakes? Two or three layer round cakes with a cartoon set of eyes and vaguely horsey mouth drawn on one side, and a fondant rainbow horn sticking out the middle of the top. One of my mutuals on Tumblr rightly described this as unicorn body horror. I recently got an idea for a more subtle unicorn cake:

Frost the whole thing in chocolate ganache, and after it's cooled and thickened, imprint tiny cloven hoof marks in a "trail" over the top. Brush those hoof marks with edible silver luster dust, and then cover the top (and sides, if desired) of the cake with candied mint leaves (or other herbs) to be the dew-covered foliage of the forest floor. That's the magic of unicorns.

But ... Tumblr, you know: it may suddenly take off three months from now. In the meantime, it's not exorcised from my mind yet, so I'm posting it here, now (slightly edited to mesh with Dreamwidth's format).

What if we really have had contact with extraterrestrial aliens, already?

Roswell, New Mexico.

Okay, okay. I know it’s cliché.

But hear me out. Besides, I’m offering this as a “What if--” a story prompt, if you will -- not a revelation of some nefarious conspiracy, nor a claim that I’ve figured out the Truth that They don’t want anyone to know.

If there is a single “Big Truth” out there, a) I don’t think anyone can know for sure what it is, and b) if we ever do find out, I don’t think it would be anything terrible or scary, after all (maybe a little sad).

Anyway --

On July 3, 2017, the BBC World Service rebroadcast an interview with the son of one of the men who found the remnants of the “alien craft” (Major Jesse Marcel).

I won’t link to it here, because website itself is inaccessible (audio with no transcript). But if you want to look it up, the keywords I used just now were “BBC World Service,” “Witness” (the name of the program), and “Roswell.”

Jesse Jr. was 11 at the time, and at the time of the interview (in 2010), he came across as sincerely convinced that the bits and pieces his father brought home to the kitchen table were: a) actually alien, and b) not at all like the scraps of weather balloon that were revealed to the public shortly after.

[Caveat] He was 11 at the time, and his father woke him up in the middle of the night to show him what he’d found. It could very well be that he was convinced by his father’s enthusiasm, and that his father was motivated by his desire to find something alien, so that neither of them were seeing these artifacts clearly. And over the years, Jr. could have doubled down on his belief in order to defend his father’s honor. [/Caveat]

Two details of the interview made my ears perk up, and take the idea that there really was some kind of “alien incident” at Roswell, 70 years ago a little more seriously:

1. Jesse Marcel Jr. insisted that his father made no mention of any alien bodies at the crash site -- and that the first mention of the Pentagon hiding “specimens” didn’t crop up until the 1970s.
   
   
2. When asked by the interviewer: “But why Roswell?” Mr. Marcel answered that the site was radioactive, because of all the nuclear testing, and surely, the aliens would want to investigate that. When the interviewer asked: “But why haven’t they been back?” he answered that he didn’t know.

But, as all our most serious-minded scientists (even the ones who are imagining life outside our solar system, and puzzling through ways to test for it) will tell you: Real-world interstellar travel takes a very, very, long time.

So: here’s what I’m imagining might have happened:

Around the time that predynastic Egyptians were domesticating the donkey, astronomers living on the planet that we are now calling “Kepler-425b” turned their telescopes to the sky, wondering if there were intelligent life on other planets like theirs.

...

Around the time that Alexander the Great was trying to establish an empire, their technology has advanced enough to send forth a ship in our star’s direction, carrying an unmanned probe, which has been programed with instructions to home in on any signs of proof of life -- especially intelligent life.

The ship is capable of traveling at incredible speeds -- almost half the Speed of Light -- but even so, those idealistic astronomers know they won’t live to receive any answers that that little probe may discover. It’s all for their future generations, if they are still around, to reap.

That little probe finally makes it to its destination 3,000 (Earth years) after it set out: a little, rocky planet third out from its star -- a medium-sized star just like the one it set out from. And as it gets closer, the signs of life are unmistakable. And closer still: the signature of enriched Uranium, and Plutonium! Exactly what it was sent to find. It comes in closer, maneuvering with the planet’s gravitational pull, preparing to send its message back home.

Except it crashes. It never gets to send that message. It gets dismantled; its parts get hidden away, and only those Earthlings that are thought to be delusional by others of their species believe it ever existed at all.

But the descendants of the civilization that sent it forth have no idea of its fate. They won’t even start looking for its message to arrive for another 1,400 years.

---

But (I hear you say)! Isn’t there another star with seven Earth-like planets, that’s much, much closer?

Yes, there is: a star we call “Trappist-1.” But it’s a dwarf star. The planets in its habitable zone are very likely tidally locked. This means that there’s a good chance the civilizations that arose on them have no concept of “Distant Stars,” much less develop the desire and the tech to venture among them (because the habitable zone on their home planet's surface is bathed in continual twilight, so they never see distant stars).

But I could be wrong about that. Still, if the scenario I outlined for the astronomers of Kepler-435b had played out on one of Trappist-One’s planets, instead:

For a probe traveling at almost half the speed of light to arrive in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, it would have had to leave its home while we Earthling Americans were engaged in our Civil War -- killing each other over whether some of us have the right to own others of us.

Those astronomers would’ve started listening for a return signal from their unmanned probe around the time Ronald Reagan was threatening to bomb the Russians with that same purified uranium. That signal was that was fated never to arrive.

Those astronomers might’ve shrugged their equivalent of shoulders, and wrote it off as a valiant, but failed, attempt.

If, however, they were determined to find us, and make contact, because they’re even more optimistic and friendly than we are, and allowing time to build a second probe to send it chasing after the first one...

That second “message in a bottle” wouldn’t arrive here until almost 2100.

If they already had a second probe ready to go, and their tech advanced in the meantime, and they manage the miraculous traveling speed of three-quarters Light Speed -- we might get a second chance to say “Hello. Sorry about the misunderstanding,” in 2042-ish.

...Assuming we don’t destroy our ecosystem and die off, thanks to global warming, by then.

okay.

So maybe this story’s ending is more than a little sad.

(I think I've glimpsed the singularity of the Fermi Paradox ... And it is us)

---

Oh, and most of the time I spent writing this was looking up names of stars, and crosschecking the timeline of human civilization.

Okay, granting that the Fermi Paradox is a hot mess, fallacy-wise, which of these common* answers to the question: “So Where is Everybody?!” would please you most -- or should I say -- leave you feeling the least depressed?

A. There’s no else out there.

We really are special snowflakes in the entire universe, and the only life to have sophisticated civilizations and advanced technology.

B. They’re all dead.

Any civilization with technology advanced enough to contemplate interstellar / intergalactic travel will end up destroying itself through war and/or pollution before they succeed.

C. They don’t care about us, or our planet.

We’re too insignificant and boring for anyone to spend resources to get here or try to communicate with us -- not even to mine our asteroids or kidnap us and harvest our livers ... or whatever.

D. Interstellar / intergalactic travel actually is impossible.

Doesn’t matter how sophisticated a civilization is, or how advanced their technology, no one is getting off any of their respective rocks, and we’re never going to get to meet them, or they, us.

E. Why are you talking like “first contact” is a good thing?!

You better hope we never do find proof of more powerful, alien, beings out there. Only bad things could result. Very. Bad. Things.

*”Fool! They’ve been communicating with Earthlings for years, already -- just ask the elephants!” is, unfortunately, an uncommon answer.

I originally posted (pretty much) this to dialecticdreamer's journal this morning -- this is slightly edited and expanded, since I've been thinking about it all day (and I've been meaning to post about it here, and kept forgetting):

A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to a Radiolab show on symmetry, and the second half (~25 minutes) of the hour was dedicated to mirror images: Mirror, Mirror. In the first part of that segment, it was pointed out that, in inanimate stuff (rocks, metals, etc) molecules are about 50-50% left- and right handed in orientation. But in every form of life we know of, ever, all molecules are left-handed.

The first thought that popped into my head was: "Ooh! Medusa!" Could it be that when a living thing looks on the face of Medusa, half the of all the the molecules in their body instantaneously "switch" to their mirror images? So that what was once a living, sentient, thing, is now an inert mass of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen? And could some creatures (oh, such as the Weeping Angels, perhaps, or the Gargoyles from that late, lamented, animated series) have some means of voluntary control over this, and thus switch from "Living" to "Stone" and back again? ...Not sure how surviving the stone state would work, exactly, but wood frogs managed to figure something out with regards to freezing, so...

And then, my brain quickly hopped from folklore/mythology/fantasy to science fiction, with a few more thoughts:

Is it the Left-handedness that's the magic key that turns on the Life light, or simply the uniformity? If it's uniformity, than it's likely that the life on half the planets in the universe is lethally toxic to life on the other half, and could go a long way toward explaining Fermi's Paradox -- the really technologically advanced species know this, and decide it's safer to STAY HOME. If so, that's a bummer for those of us who like to imagine our stories being true, someday, somewhere. But it's a massive lot happier than the usual explanation: they destroyed their environments, and killed themselves off in wars before ever developing space-travel (to which I say, BTW: "Anthropomorphize, much?").

Also: Which came first? Did inanimate "Stuff" become "Life," with its ~Will to Survive~, when a certain quorum of complex molecules all shared the same handedness, by random planetary coin flip? Or did the ~Will to Survive~ come first? In other words: though not "Will" as we Puny Humans conceive of it, was there -- is there, nonetheless -- something going on in certain particular amino acids that causes an active 'preference' for linking up with each other and 'rejecting' molecules that turn in the opposite direction?

If Stuff became life by planetary coin flip, then the chances are pretty high that half of all life is lethal to the other half.

But:

If the "Will" came first, then it could be that complex intelligence is just as inevitable as complex organisms. The deliberate choices which are key to active problem solving are simply a natural extension of the molecular "choices" made by the proteins in our cells (Life=Survival=Evolution = Adaptation=Problem Solving). Also, if it really is "Something Special" baked into the amino acids floating out there in intergalactic space, maybe All. Life. Period is Left-handed. We'll say that's true, anyway, so our aliens can eat each other's food, and happily swap bodily fluids without worry.

Audrey's in her room, watching a DVD of Deep Space Nine (just the other end of a very short hallway from this office). I'm kinda half-eavesdropping. I remember liking it a lot, years ago, when I watched it during its first broadcast run (I haven't watched it since, that I remember).

I recognize the voices of the main characters, and the theme (and incidental) music, but ...

Commander Sisko is sounding a lot more authoritarian and quicker to bellow than I remember. As a matter of fact, every character is sounding rather shouty to me, from this end of the hall.

And I can't remember if I even noticed that aspect, back in the day. And if I did, if it grated on my nerves the way it does now...

But it does remind me that the whole Star Trek universe is built around the quasi-military establishment of The Federation.

{sigh}

Thanks to my searching out clips and trailers for that PBS Nova episode I wrote about the other day, this hour-and-a-half long film showed up in my YouTube recommendations: Alien Planet. It's basically a sci-fi tale thinly disguised as a documentary -- peppered with interview clips of astrophysicists and paleobiologists, to lend credence to the events of the story. But the disguise is so thin, it might as well have been bought at dollar store, the afternoon of Halloween.

I get the feeling that the film's creators started with ideas about the sorts of alien creatures they wanted to render in CGI, and then scrambled to figure out what sort of planetary environment would give rise to such creatures (a few of the experts said something to the effect of: "[Creature X] is one I find rather surprising, but I suppose it's possible, if Y and Z..."). Which seems the wrong way 'round, to me. But it's still more creative and in-depth, in terms of imagining widely populated and diverse ecosystems, than any imagined alien planet I can remember from our current pop culture. And it was a fun way to lose misplace ninety-four minutes, if you have the time to spare. So I thought I'd rec it.

BTW, the film was made in 2012, and it's mentioned in one of those clips that 2014 will be the big year for discovering new exoplanets. IIRC, two new (separate) programs dedicated to searching for Earthlike exoplanets will start up later this summer.

So: Yay!

1. I remembered, in replying to raze, yesterday, that I eventually learned react before the scary music cue, and thought that it might be good to make that clear.

2. Much of the language in this poem is self-reflective, adult, and jargony. So I tried to make the two lines where I'm "hiding," at least, sound more like the voice of the two-year old me (cue Eleven's regeneration speech).

3. Question -- Considering the above: Back then, my actual name for the show was "Scare Trek." Should I call it that, in the poem?

A SPASTIC CHILD WATCHES THE T.V.

I learned to tell a story at age two
(At least, the craft of pacing and suspense).
Propped up between my parents on the couch,
With season one of “Star Trek” on the screen,
I could not hide, but quickly learned:
Anticipate the music's minor shift,
Then plug my ears and close my eyes and hum
Until the things that scared me went away.
I never feared the aliens as much
As all the angry shouts and lasers' whine
That always happened – every episode –
As soon as any “monster” came on-screen.

Could I have understood, as young as that:
My difference, too, was something that they feared?

Back in March, I posted 5 Reasons I Hate the 'Robot Apocalypse' Trope, which has come up in the news again, thanks to the U.N. deciding to preemptively ban autonomous killing drones.

But this morning, as a clip from The Terminator's score played on a radio news program, I thought: "What if the robots become self-aware, and decide to be Conscientious Objectors?"

:-)

Let's do this "Countdown" style:

Why I Hate the "Robot Apocalypse" Trope in Science Fiction (and Science "News")

Reason Number Five:

It's lazy (and, therefore, boring) storytelling. Whether television, movies or the news, it is so damned predictable. And, in terms of science reporting, I can't help but wonder if there's a chilling effect on the culture when it comes to the study of robotics and computer programming.

Reason Number Four:

It's likely not to happen anytime soon, anyway; ysabetwordsmith linked to this article a few days ago (and that's what got me thinking about how much I hate this trope) Why Robots Will Not be Smarter than Humans by 2029.

So can we please start thinking up some fresh, new, story ideas -- you know, speculating on the consequences of things that are more likely to actually happen?

Reason Number Three:

Even if robots do become self-aware, and smarter than us, it would be analogous to the rise of a new species in the ecosystem. And conflicts only arise between species when there's competition over resources.

If robots ever do become so "smart," fast, and strong that we humans would have no chance to fight against them, then why would robots want to wipe us out or be our "Overlords?" The worst I can imagine happening is they just get bored with the tasks we've programmed them to do, wander off, and do their own things.

Reason Number Two:

The whole concept of building an Artificial Intelligence out of gigabytes and processing speed reduces "intelligence" to something quantifiable, fundamentally simple, and absolute (ultra-simplified, like any "model"). The dominance of this trope supports the assumption that Living Intelligence is just as simple, instead of the fluid, complex, and beautiful thing it is.

And that can have real, negative, consequences for people unlucky enough to be labeled as having a low "Intelligence Quotient."

And the Number One Reason I hate "The Robot Apocalypse"
(and wish it would slip off to the Idea Netherworld, along with geocentrism and "women have no souls"):

( TL;DR version: Karel Čapek was trying to tell us that all people (even 'artificial' people) will fight for their freedom, and are capable of love and self-sacrifice. )

But is the pop-culture take away idea from this play: "Hey, we'd better fight for the civil rights of all people, regardless of their origins, or the color of their skin, or their socio-economic status, or else we'll become obsolete and overrun?"

No... That would be too hard. It's far more comfortable to perpetuate a trope built on fear -- and repression -- of anything deemed unacceptably different.

If robots evolve to a critical level of complexity -- say, if they can heal themselves, reproduce themselves, and become self-aware -- should they still be considered "robots" at that point? Or will they have become an actual (i.e. biological rather than "artificial"*) life form?

Albeit silicon, polymer, and metal-based, rather than carbon, protein** and phospherous-based life forms, like us, but living things, nonetheless. And therefore, no more or less creepy than any other alien creature we can imagine.

Personally, I think what makes robots vaguely sinister is their puppet-like qualities: things that move through the world, and can act upon it, without feeling any connection or desire of their own -- the force of their actions come from some unseen & and unknown inventor-master who is manipulating them, and through them, us (Like the actual zombies of Voodun, or the Gollum of Talmud mythos) -- we can be tricked by their appearence and actions into caring for them, and they don't care or know in return. So who is caring and knowing.

But if they become sophisticated enough to be self-aware, then their actions will be self-motivated, and their survival instinct will require emotions. Without the puppeteer, they are no longer puppet shells.

Does this make sense?

It's only "Random (ish)" because it came to me after brooding for a week on the Watson/Jeopardy!/Terminator jokes that so many people seem to think are oh-so-clever and original.

*"Artificial" -- Middle English < Latin for "contrived by artifice" -- something crafted.

**Could proteins and enzymes, which are long chain molecules, be the biological version of polymers and plastics?