| LONELY PLANETS: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life David Grinspoon New York: HarperCollins, 2003 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN 0-06-018540-6 | 440pp. | HC/BWI | $25.95 | |
| Page 55: | "Mariner 2, the first machine (from Earth) to successfully visit another world, flew by Venus in December 1962 and radioed back news that was disheartening, at least for carbon-based creatures on Earth looking for close company or a nearby vacation paradise. The surface of Venus is hot as a kiln and dry as bones. There, organic molecules would fare about as well as a snowball in hell." |
| Notice how Dr. Grinspoon qualifies this claim, leaving open the possibility that machines from somewhere else have successfully visited other worlds (not necessarily in our solar system). In fact, no one on Earth has any way to be sure such visits have never happened — which is Dr. Grinspoon's point. Throughout the book, he almost never fails to maintain this open-mindedness. |
| Page 60: | "Along with the planetary perspective comes a realization that many of our problems and opportunities are global. The Earth has many lands but only one atmosphere, and we are all in it together. Shifts in global consciousness must be impossible to perceive accurately while they are in progress, but it is not inconceivable that a new planetary identity, which might be decisive for long-term human survival, is slowly dawning (painfully slowly). Certainly, efforts to communicate with intelligent extraterrestrials do not make much sense unless they are made on behalf of all humans. Merely contemplating the possibility of finding other life makes obvious our deep identification with all Earth's inhabitants." |
| These are noble sentiments, and I largely agree with them. However, I must point out that there are those who would challenge the view that communicating with ET make sense only if done "for all mankind". Still others would be happy to use it as a distraction. |
| Page 62: | "The real planets provided a rude awakening from our dreams of Earth-like neighbors, but we're now learning to love them as they truly are. Just the fact that the planets were where we thought they'd be and our travelling machines actually reached them and worked has got to be the most solid confirmation of the scientific and technological revolutions of the past four centuries." [A footnote adds:] "Stuff that in your socially constructed pipe and smoke it!" |
| Bravo, Doctor! The assertion of the so-called post-modernists that science is a social construction, its theories no more valid than any other viewpoint, is enormously vexing. However, in reading through the book, I found places where Dr. G seemed to veer alarmingly close to the Post-modernist viewpoint. Examples will be cited. |
| Page 86: | "Cosmic Evolution carries a message of complete and profound unity, which I think can be read as a reason to care deeply for all things, especially for the living Earth and its creatures, the most highly evolved local products of matter's slow climb from formlessness. Against this backdrop, the anthropogenic mass extinction that we are currently inflicting upon Earth seems a desecration of cosmic proportions." |
| More noble sentiments, which I share. But are they science? It seems more appropriate to put them in the later Beliefs section. |
| Page 87: | "Here on this rocky speck of living stellar afterbirth the climb of matter has somehow arrived at what we proudly call intelligence. Here the universe has grown up to an age where it wants some answers about its own provenance. Here on Earth, the cosmos has awakened from a 12-billion-year dream. It seems that our consciousness, in inchoate form, was here all along, waiting for the right conditions to precipitate out of inanimate matter. Elsewhere, is it slumbering still, or were we among the late sleepers?" |
| A poetic description, and a true one if taken as poetry. But it comes close to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's declaration that consciousness, in elementary form, was inherent in matter from the beginning, that evolution is purposeful, and that organization to ever higher forms (complexification) is fore-ordained. All these things may be true; but we certainly don't know that yet. It's not science. |
| Page 103: | "Imagine a long rope with a large number of cats tied to it at regular intervals. Some of the cats would try to get as far from each other as possible, whereas others would seek each other out to fight, groom, or play. Now, picture this happening in a fluid tank where they all have kitty Aqua-Lungs, or in the weightlessness of an orbital cat house where all the cats can move about in three dimensions. The final shape of the rope would be quite twisted because of the complexities of feline social life. Proteins become folded and twisted because of the social interactions among all the side groups of their amino acids." |
| The doctor has a real genius for analogy. |
| Page 111: | "Reid [Thompson] died in 1996 of cancer, which seems to be an occupational hazard of experimental chemists (though in his case I have no idea if there is any connection)." |
| Carl Sagan died of myelodysplasia, a pre-leukemic syndrome, also in 1996. (Well, he died of pneumonia, but after a two-year battle with myelodysplasia.) And see page 175, where Grinspoon mentions the 1994 death of Jim Pollack, his advisor at NASA Ames, from a rare form of cancer. Coincidence? |
| Page 118: | "There are many ways to describe the history of life on Earth. We could think of it as a sequence of geological dioramas—you know, Jurassic©, Cambrian, Rastafarian, Bohemian—with depictions of the flora and fauna populating each." |
| Migosh: "Jurassic" is copyrighted? By Steven Speilberg, no doubt. Hey, maybe I could copyright the name of a geological age. Yeah: Ordovician, that's the ticket! It has "vice" in it... (I didn't include this in the musical refs because Rastafarian and Bohemian are more cultural than musical categories.) |
| Page 127: | "Although I cannot follow Teilhard all the way to his Christian conclusions, I find his vision of the human place in Cosmic Evolution to be prescient and inspiring. I am with him when he says, 'With homanization, in spite of the insignificance of the anatomical leap, we have the beginning of a new age. The earth gets a new skin. Better still, it finds its soul.' " |
| My concern with Teilhard is not his concepts of the "psychozoic age" and the "nöosphere", but with the terminology-challenged, quasi-mystical descriptions of earlier ages. See my review of The Phenomenon of Man, in this section, for more details. |
| Page 137: | "We live in a universe of stars. They're the most energetic, stable power sources in the cosmos, and for life not to use them would be like a hungry pack of dogs ignoring a pile of juicy T-bones. Starlight is there for the taking. Photosynthesis is probably not the only way to power a biosphere. Even on Earth, some species ride the chemical surf of hydrothermal vents or otherwise draw power from the planet itself. However, even these creatures are not completely "off the grid". All reside in a solar-driven biosphere. Over the long haul, all live off the Sun in various indirect ways." |
| I'd like to see this explained further. Creatures living off hydrothermal vents (aka "black smokers") are too deep in the ocean for photosynthesis. They rely only on the energetic chemical species coming from the vents — chiefly hydrogen sulfide. The flows of H2S are driven by heat stored in the Earth's core, heat produced by the decay of potassium-40 and other long-lived radioactive isotopes. Those isotopes were made in stars that perished before the Sun was formed. So how are these creatures living off the Sun? |
| Page 140: | "What we have learned from the extremophiles is that life is much more adept than we ever thought at adapting to use different chemical sources of energy. . . . We've found creatures exploiting the energy released in reactions between different combinations of hydrogen, methane, iron, sulfur, manganese, and nitrogen. The big surprise in the world of extremophiles is really this wide range of chemical fuels. . . . Extremophiles teach us that on a planet with rampant disequilibrium, life will find multiple chemical systems to feed off. It must be 'easy' from an evolutionary perspective to switch to new chemical food sources. This tells us that once life gets started on a planet with deep and long-lived energy sources, it can survive drastic environmental changes." |
| I hadn't been aware that so many elements were involved as energy sources. But I'm a novice when it comes to extremophile biology. What concerns me about this passage is that it seems to contradict Grinspoon's earlier statement that all life on Earth lives off the Sun. |
| Page 143: | "We discuss evolution as if it were a done deal, for which we were providing the wrap-up commentary, rather than an ongoing, unfolding process that we are bound up in. We are more like the first sunflower shooting up in a patch of thousands, opening our petals, and confidently declaring, 'There are no other sunflowers, and therefore sunflowers are extremely unlikely.' The first intelligence will always be the only intelligence. Only if it is really not too swift will it conclude from this that it represents something that must be highly improbable." |
| Now this I agree with 100 percent. My only complaint is a mere quibble: Grinspoon should have reminded his readers that the first intelligence is the only one because intelligence gives it dominion over its particular ecological niche — in the case of homo sapiens, the entire planet. |
| Page 174: | "To follow the changing environment of Venus we need to be climate modelers, cloud physicists, atmospheric chemists, and volcanologists. No one can do all of this, but we've had lots of help. [A footnote adds:] "As John Lewis says, twisting the 'standing on the shoulders of Giants' line of Newton, we've been stepping on the ankles of midgets." |
| Way to go, John and Dave. Got any more flattering comments to lay on your helpers? |
| Page 194: | "Unlike the Voyagers, which were flyby missions, Galileo is an orbiter. When it got to Jupiter, it fired its powerful rocket perfectly, slowed down, and established permanent residency, becoming (as far as we know) the first artificial moon of Jupiter." |
| Another example of Dr. Grinspoon avoiding unsupportable claims of primacy. It requires a certain "willing suspension of egotism" that is not always easy to achieve. |
| Page 195: | "Galileo carried the first digital camera ever flown in space..." |
| This is the one place in the book where Dr. Grinspoon fails to disclaim human primacy in space technology. It may be significant that this phrase also contains a formatting error. (See my Errata list.) |
| Page 209: | "By March, Mayor and Queloz were confident that they had something, but they were reluctant to announce their discovery. They wanted to be careful because for many decades astronomers have announced discoveries of extrasolar planets (those orbiting other stars), only to be proven wrong. Such false alarms have harmed many careers." |
| In Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! (reviewed here), Arthur C. Clarke matter-of-factly refers in an essay to such a discovery being made in 1942. This surprised me, for I knew of no such finding. Clarke does not provide a citation. I wonder if Dr. Grinspoon can shed any light on this. Perhaps I'll have the chance to ask him. |
| Page 229: | "Mariner 4 caused the first major backlash (since 1920 anyway) in what has been a cyclical pattern of raised hopes followed by disillusionment. NASA's critics sensed blood in the water and went in for the kill. Congress held hearings and several scientists, most notably the microbiologist Barry Commoner and Philip Abelson, the editor of Science, ridiculed NASA's goals of searching for life on Mars as a wasteful, irresponsible, pseudoscientific pipe dream. In an editorial published in Science in 1965, Abelson warned, 'In looking for life on Mars we could establish for ourselves the reputation of being the greatest Simple Simons of all time.' " |
| This is a fine example of Clarke's Third Law in action. |
| Page 245: | "This is why we are reductionist—we have to break the universe into little pieces to have a chance at understanding any of it. The picture only gains solidity from the detail work, which must often be done at close range, with a narrow focus. Then we need to step back and take in the larger view. . . . The problem, then, is not specialization. It's isolation. We can see more by dividing the universe into pieces, but only if we are able to put it back together again. . . . When we do this, the scientific community functions as a sort of 'hive mind,' in which the capacity of the collective is greater than that of the individuals involved. |
| Here Dr. Grinspoon succinctly makes the case for stepping over the barriers scientists often build for themselves with their narrow specializations. |
| Pages 247-8: | "It's hard to think of two more different planets than Venus and Pluto, yet politically they have in a way ended up in the same boat (I hope they're not sharing a cabin because they'd be fighting the whole time over the thermostat.) Pluto's biggest problem is that it is not Europa. Venus's biggest problem is that it is not Mars. Both Venus and Pluto should factor into a broad biocentric exploration plan. Venus is, in many ways, our best hope for learning about the ongoing functioning of complex Earth-like worlds. As a representative of a completely unexplored realm, Pluto is an unopened time capsule dating from the earliest days of the solar system. Pluto will teach us about the history of planetary ice and how some of it became water and then life on Earth. Pluto also seems to have an active interchange between its surface and atmosphere, so we are almost guaranteed to find some kind of complex phenomena there that will surprise us when we finally see them. It is also the case, if you are attached to 'life as we know it,' that even a liquid water ocean in the interior of Pluto cannot be ruled out." |
| And here he argues cogently and provocatively (with a bit of whimsy) for a comprehensive program of planetary exploration. Indeed, from a strictly scientific standpoint this is for me the most provocative passage in the book. A liquid ocean inside the planet that's the epitome of frigidity? The possibility seems absurd — just as the possibility of active volcanoes on a moon of Jupiter once did. Again, Dr. Grinspoon reminds us rightly that Nature's behavior is not bound by our expectations. One thing that amazes me about his writing is that he never quotes Haldane's dictum, to wit: "The universe is not only queerer than we imagine; it is queerer than we can imagine." I can say that again, and I will. |
| Page 264: | "If our metabolism and structure were based on some chemical system other than carbon chemistry, on a planet without liquid water, would we know anything about this carbon potential?" |
| Why not? We "carbon units" know something about the potential for life forms based on silicon. Dr. Lewis discusses this briefly in his book Worlds Without End (reviewed here). |
| Pages 264-5: | "Some scientists, coming from a biochemical background, even talk about what we can learn by sequencing alien DNA and comparing it to our own. To me this seems as ridiculous as dissecting crashed saucers at Roswell. Expecting to find DNA elsewhere is like expecting a Star Trek universe with humanoid aliens who speak English and insist that we join them for dinner at eight." |
| Had I the opportunity, I'd ask Dr. Grinspoon to consider that saying or writing "DNA" is a lot more comfortable than "the complex molecule that forms the basis of the aliens' method of inheriting somatic characteristics". In other words, "DNA" in this context is just a shorthand label for the alien equivalent. Perhaps I'm missing the essence of Dr. Grinspoon's complaint. |
| Page 265: | "Time and again we think we know more than we do. We may never be able to imagine an alternative kind of life, but I bet we will eventually come across one." |
| OK, quiet on the set! Cue the Haldane quote. . . . Doctor? [1] I'll add that the doctor's preceding paragraph is another example of his well-founded open-mindedness. In it, he pushes the bounds on the definition of life far, far back. He writes of the possibility of life forms of galactic size, or as small as atoms, energized by electromagnetic fields or the strong nuclear force, existing at rates much faster or slower than ours. Like him, I was a science fiction fan in my youth, so I don't find such concepts very startling. They are, to borrow his phrase, scientifically incorrect. Yet who is to say they are impossible? |
| Page 280: | "I regard the absence of flagrant disequilibrium in the Martian atmosphere as a likely sign that Mars is dead—not mostly dead or almost dead or just dead on the outside but completely dead. Perished. Deceased. An ex-biosphere." |
| He's not a Monty Python fan. I'm sure of it. If he were a Monty Python fan, he would have added more synonyms for death (e.g. "its biosphere has passed on; it has shuffled off this mortal coil; it is six feet under; it has met its maker; it's in a pine box; it's pushing up daisies...") and, before that, he might have said that it's not "pining for the fjords". On the other hand, page 358 reveals that he knows about Duck's Breath Mystery Theater. |
| Page 283: | "While we're considering heretical ideas about life in the solar system, let me speak in defense of my other favorite underdog biosphere: Io." |
| He goes on, over the next several paragraphs, to make some excellent points. It's all part of the way he refuses to exclude possibilities just because they seem unorthodox. If he's right, the design of experiments to prove it will be challenging — and fascinating. And he just may be right. Certainly, Io veritably quivers and bubbles with geologic activity; that was apparent from our first close glimpses of its face. Those images had an impact. "When a moon hits your eye like the big pizza pie that is Io..." |
| Page 321: | "When we consider such far-out notions as the zoo hypothesis (we are being protected) or directed panspermia (we were seeded by advanced aliens), we must keep this in mind: even before the Earth was born, there likely were technological civilizations living for billions of years [his emphasis], possessing capabilities that we cannot even begin to contemplate." |
| I would say this is possible, rather than likely. One potential problem with it is the low abundance at that early era of heavy elements needed to make rocky planets with molten-metal, magnetic cores, and to form the molecules of life. A footnote on this page points out that the stars which make heavy elements in their supernova death throes are short-lived, so many generations of them could have expired within the first billion years. Despite this, I tend toward caution. Astronomers in general hold that stars older than the sun tend to be metal-poor, and thus are poor prospects for life-bearing planets. |
| Page 328: | Scanned image: "Two dimensional pictures constructed from overlapping triplets of A and B proteins." |
| Dr. Grinspoon describes the investigation by two Japanese researchers of "Bacteriophage ΦΧ174". Their idea was that aliens might encode a message in the genetic structure of some organism. ΦΧ174 was the first genome to be sequenced, and three instances of prime-number pairs occurred in it. SETI enthusiasts know that this is a classic method of encoding images for broadcast. Let's say you receive a message that repeats a sequence of 169 bytes. One thing that should occur to you is that 169 = 13 x 13. The next thing is to arrange the numbers in 13 rows of 13. If luck is with you, an image will appear. Dr. Grinspoon tried this trick with the 11x11 sequence from ΦΧ174, but found only random noise, as the image on page 328 shows. (In fact, they look like empty crossword-puzzle forms.) He says nothing about the other pairs, 7x13 and 13x41 in size. |
| Page 368: | Dr. Grinspoon devotes a number of pages to The Disclosure Project. Founded by Dr. Steven M. Greer, a former emergency-room physician, the Disclosure Project seeks to open up for public scrutiny the records of contact with alien technology it claims the U.S. government is hiding. Grinspoon attended a lecture by Greer, and reports the gist of it. Among Greer's claims is the standard conspiracy theory that, as Grinspoon puts it, "These evil, rich, polluting, militaristic alien-hiders will resort to any means necessary to maintain their control." |
| Both Dr. Grinspoon and I feel that such claims are laughable. (And when considered in the aggregate, they look even worse.) Greer says the U.S. government has "reverse-engineered" several crashed alien spaceships ("How come these guys are such bad pilots?" Grinspoon asks) and thus acquired incredibly powerful weapons with which it plans to provoke interstellar war. (Why? Don't ask.) Dr. Grinspoon debunks Dr. Greer quite thoroughly. But I think his arguments bear summarizing here, because the conspiracy theories refuse to dry up and blow away. Greer, cannily, doesn't care about physical evidence; he relies on testimonials by (ostensibly) credible witnesses. Grinspoon points out that a) all those people can't be right, and b) if there were anything to the story, he would have heard about it more directly. I hasten to add that the picture painted by Greer and his ilk of a powerful, ruthless, half-century-old secret conspiracy conveniently ignores the fact that Greer and his ilk are walking around loose talking about it. I guess people like Greer are lucky the way Teela Brown in the Niven story was lucky: The black helicopters always crash on the way to their houses, and the G-men sent to bring them in (or rub them out) always get somebody else by mistake. And there is also this: It's totally loopy to maintain that the military forces of this planet could hope to compete with an enemy that was already conducting interstellar travel on a routine basis. Yes, even if our guys had the same weapons technology. As an American military leader said, not so long ago, "Quantity has a quality all its own." |
| Page 380: | "As I've pointed out, any aliens who came to Earth would probably be thousands, if not millions, of years more technologically mature that we. Who are we to tell them the rules? This provides a pretty good loophole against any debunking based on the seeming illogic of alien behavior and capabilities." |
| There's a scene in The Mote in God's Eye [2] where a human spaceship is attacked by an alien solar-sail craft. The pilot escapes by taking the ship through the sail. Afterward, a scientist protests that this could have been disastrous. "Did you expect that the sail might have been made of unreasonably strong material?", the pilot asks. "If so, they still would have used just enough to do the job." My point is that no matter how advanced the aliens, they still would be bound by the laws of physics. They might have devices based on physical principles unknown to us; but unless everything we know is wrong, we could comprehend a good deal of their technology. As for their behavior on Earth, there are three possibilities: They want to communicate; they want to remain hidden; or they don't care. In the first case, I presume they would have little trouble "talking down" to our level. In the second, it seems safe to expect that they would succeed; we would never know they were among us. In the third, I think their presence would be obvious. But I grant that we might be mystified by their activities. A good evocation of this scenario is the novella Chains of the Sea. [3] |
| Page 392: | "There is a large asymmetry in galactic radio discourse. It's much easier to listen in than it is to broadcast. But there is a kind of broadcasting that someone out there must be doing for SETI to succeed, and we can't do it yet. [His emphasis] What is required is not just a level of technology or transmitter power, but a long-term committment. If you do the math (with the Drake Equation), you find that for SETI to be viable, for us to have a reasonable chance of finding a signal, there must be many civilizations broadcasting for thousands of years. We are not even close to being able to become one of these serious broadcasters." |
| Dr. Grinspoon has the right of this. Let's look a little deeper. If the broadcasts are omnidirectional, immense power is called for. The transmitter facility probably would be off-planet so it could tap undiluted solar power continuously and dump waste heat outside the biosphere. The picture changes for beamed signals: far lower power levels can be used. But the antennas would be very big — if my calculations are correct, thousands of kilometers across. So the end result is the same in either case: You have large, expensive facilities in space, maintained and staffed for millennia, with attendant spaceships for supply and crew rotation and significant other infrastructure. This is part of why I've suggested that interstellar travel may turn out to be less expensive in the long run. |
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.