Cat people and crinkly foreheads are not inevitable

Today’s Age has that rare thing – a news story about science. Specifically, astronomer Dr Alan Boss’ assertion that the existence of extraterrestrial life is “inevitable”. (ET? There goes the neighbourhood, Richard Alleyne of The Telegraph, Chicago; printed in The Age, February 17 2009.) Dr Boss is from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, and they don’t have any such announcement listed as news; Dr Boss does have a lecture scheduled for early March, however, talking about this idea in the context of his new book, The Crowded Universe…but while there’s a shade of self-promotion, I think we can assume it’s all for science.

Dr Boss (and his students must love that name) reckons the aliens must be out there because of “the new belief that there is an abundant number of habitable planets like Earth” – according to the article, there could be “100 billion trillion Earth-like planets in space”. The most interesting bit – why this “new” belief has come about – is entirely absent from the article, so all we get is a retread of the old “well, if there are so many planets out there, there must be life on some of them!” routine. That argument may hold some water (if you’ll excuse the pun, which you’ll get as you read on), but as I’ve been reading in What Does A Martian Look Like? (Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, Ebury Press, 2002; I’ll be talking more about it on my book blog) this is the least interesting reason to believe life is out there.

The standard idea in astro-biology is that life can exist on planets in the “habitable zone” around a star: that is, the range of orbital distances in which the temperature variation allows water to exist as a solid, liquid and gas. This is rubbish for a number of reasons, not least the fact that the existence of water in various forms is dependant on a vast number of things beyond just a planet’s distance from the star. In our own solar system, now that Mars has proven barren, Jupiter’s moon Europa is the most likely candidate for extra-terrestrial life, with it’s liquid ocean safe below the huge ice-sheets on its surface.

But that’s assuming you even need water for life to exist. And why should you? Just because Star Trek and Star Wars prefer aliens who look like humans with ill-conceived cosmetic surgery or anthropomorphic animals, it doesn’t mean that’s what life will look like. Stewart and Cohen argue that astro-biology is really just the application of Earth-based biology on other planets. It’s parochialism on a grand scale; the galactic equivalent of travelling the world but spending the whole trip in “Irish” pubs and eating at McDonalds.

How do we get past this? Jack&Ian (this is how they refer to themselves in the book) say we need a new discipline, “xenoscience”, to properly consider what aliens will be like. An essential ingredient of xenoscience is imagaintion, and in a sense this is where science fiction, or at least the popular kind – where the “science” really translates to “physics buzzwords and folk biology as window dressing on a fantasy story” – has failed us. Yes, some authors have thought about what life might really be like, but mostly the point of an “alien race” is just to act as a stand-in for some aspect of human culture. For my money, the biggest proof of this is that no-one stops to think about what it really means to have half-human half-Vulcans. Even if alien life did, impossibly, look very similar to us, it doesn’t mean we can shag it, marry it or build a picket fence and have 2.4 children with it; that people accept this in Star Trek is a clear sign they don’t really think of Vulcans, Klingons and the rest of them as truly alien; I’m sure if you suggested the same sort of “first contact” or “close encounter of the fourth kind” with a more realistic ET, you’d probably be blocked by the Great Australian Internet filter.

I’m not quite finished the book, so I can’t tell you what Jack&Ian reckon a Martian would look like. But whatever life does exist out there, odds are it will be incredibly unfamiliar to us; truly “alien”. If we’re to recognise it when we see it, let alone have any chance of conversing with it, then we need to embrace the imagination we have. Imagining something doesn’t make it possible, but science is about change, about difference, and about possibilities. Often it works by eliminating possibilities – but we can’t eliminate them if we don’t at first consider them.

A day for birthdays

I just got home from a lovely little birthday party thrown for one of my Anarchist Guild Social Committee castmates, and I had been so intent on getting the fairy bread right and excited that we used electrostatic charge to stick some of the party balloons to a curtain that I almost forgot who else was born on February 12: Abraham Lincoln.

Yes, it’s true: America’s tallest president turns 200 today, and I’d like to take the opportunity to talk about variation in the human population…nah. I’m kidding! I want to talk about Charles Erasmus Darwin, because he’s 200 today as well.

What to say about Charles Darwin? He studied medicine, but didn’t complete the course because – according to various sources – he both found it boring and was afraid of blood. He came up with one of the most powerful scientific ideas of all time, but delayed publishing it for twenty years to study barnacles in infinite detail. (If you find that intriguing, I recommend Rebecca Stott’s Darwin and the Barnacle, probably the finest book written about Darwin.) He possessed a gentle nature, and detested all forms of cruelty to man and animal alike; he once tried to have a man freed from an asylum when a letter written by the patient came into his possession and seemed rational, though even the man himself latter admitted he was insane when he wrote it. And he greatly opposed vivisection, writing in a letter in 1871 that it was “a subject that makes me sick with horror” and cutting the discussion short “else I shall not sleep to-night.”

Even 100 years ago, scientists gathered to celebrate his contributions, and when he died in 1882, he was buried in Westminster Abbey a few feet from the grave of Isaac Newton. A century later in the age of genetics, molecular biology, and even the resurgence of not-quite-Lamarckism via epigenetics, his name is synonymous – for better or worse – with his legacy, the theory of evolution via natural selection. And now, 150 years after the publication of Origin of Species, his name and deeds are being discussed in hundreds if not thousands of blogs across the globe.

Not bad for a life’s work, eh?

February 12 is also – unofficially – “National Freedom to Marry Day” in the United States, which has been celebrated for a decade today. It’s tempting to think that the date was chosen on purpose, as a refutation to all those neo-conservatives who argue that homosexuality is “unnatural” (and who, in the States at least, are pretty likely to consider evolution pretty unnatural too) – but of course, with only 365 days to choose from, I’m sure there are plenty of other reasons. Probably it was convenient to make it coincide with an official holiday – Lincoln’s Birthday.

Whatever you did today, I hope you can take a moment to think about Charles Darwin, the man, as admirable a scientist and human being as ever there was. But spare a thought for Alfred Wallace while you’re at it; if it weren’t for his famous generosity, Darwin might be no more than a blip on the scientific radar, and in 2023 we’d be celebrating his 200th birthday instead.

Fire

As Australian readers will know, Victoria has been devastated by bushfire over the last week, with nearly two hundred lives lost and whole towns destroyed. If you’re looking for a place to help, the Australian Red Cross is a good place to start; use their web site for donations of money, as the call centre is overrun, and if you want to donate blood that’s great but you can afford to leave it for a month or two (they have enough for immediate use and more donors than they can currently schedule).

If you don’t have much money to spare, there are other ways to donate; Australian companies are donating all or some profits from sales on a particular day, from Coles (Friday 13th) to smaller local businesses like Trampoline (Friday 13th) and The Book Grocer (Saturday 14th). Closer to home for me, the Australian comedy and arts communities are holding benefit gigs left, right and centre. This Sunday is the Anarchist Guild Social Committee’s meeting #9, and we’ll be donating some of the ticket income to the appeal; a larger scale fundraiser gig, Out of the Ashes, will be held on February 22 at Trades Hall. I’d encourage you to get along to one or both of these, or to any other events in your local area.

The ginger science alliance

It’s not often you get to see a redheaded comedian speak about the beauty of the universe, and pictures from the Hubble space telescope in particular, and even less often that the person in question isn’t me. So it was lovely to be in the audience tonight to see Rod Quantock at the Ian Potter Gallery in Federation Square do just that.

If you don’t know who Rod is then I can only assume you’re either under the age of 20, you have no interest in the Australian comedy scene, or both. He recently did a show titled “First Man Standing” and it’s not much of a stretch to imagine he was one of the first stand-up comedians, at least in the modern sense, in Australia. If you’re my age or older, you’ll probably remember him from The Big Gig, Australia: You’re Standing In It, or possibly (and I apologise in advance, Rod) the Cap’n Snooze advertisements of the eighties.

Now, Rod being Rod, he didn’t exactly stay on topic; his style may be best described as lovingly rambly. But it was a grand half hour that featured, among other things, a model of the history of the universe contructed using only four human beings, one of whom played a dinosaur. (That might have been me, but I swear it was all Rod’s idea.) One thing he did mention, however, when sketching out his plan for establishing equilibrium in the ecologically disastrous times ahead,  was that humans are made of 80% water, and, perhaps inspired by Rod and Dr Karl, I’m going to go off on a tangent about that.

Like just about all living things of which we’re aware, we are made largely of water. There’s a lot of fluid in our bodies: blood, lymph, saliva, bile…all mostly water. Our cells are full of it, with anything up to 90% of their mass accounted for by H2O. That varies, of course; you or I have a large though uncertain number of cells in our bodies (it’s in the millions of millions), and they come in about 200 different types.

Interestingly, fat cells have a hugely lower water content than other cells: they’re only about 14% water, which is less even than bone, which is about 22% (“dry as a bone”, indeed!). This explains why in adult humans, the actual percentage of water is around 55%-65%, with men at the top of the range and women at the bottom. This varies quite a bit depending on body shape, size, health, fitness and how much you’ve had to drink. (There’s a pretty good breakdown of all this in the Wikipedia article on body water.)

Now, water is obviously pretty exciting and important for all of us, and when I say us, I mean “living things”. The Earth is in what’s known as the “habitable zone”, the narrow band in which a planet orbiting a star can have water in all three states: vapor, liquid and solid. The habitable zone varies quite a lot, depending on the size and temperature of a star; for hotter stars the zone is further away, for cooler stars it’s closer. Over a star’s lifetime the habitable zone will change, but since stars have long lives, there’s no reason to suppose life won’t usually have time to kick off and develop into complex forms. You know: like us.

The nice thing about all this rambling is that next year is both the International Year of Astronomy (much as 2005 was the Einstein International Year of Phsyics), and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species (not to mention the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin). Aside from Moby’s refrain that “we are all made of stars” (the elements heavier than Hydrogen – i.e. all of ’em – which are created via nuclear fusion in stars), physics and biology are, like all sciences, inextricably linked. It’s a bold time of exploration both inside and outside of ourselves; as Rod pointed out, not only will the successor to the Hubble space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, be launched, but we’re also learning more every year about genetics and also neurology. While I don’t think humans will run out of things to investigate any time soon, in the next decade or so we’re going to find out some very exciting stuff.

How sad, Rod pointed out, that we’ve managed this only at the precise time we’re all likely to die out…

The Time Lord at 45

November 23, 1963: a television programme like no other premiered in the United Kingdom. So today, Doctor Who is 45, and it’s an exciting time to be a fan, as David Tennant finishes up his run in the title role over the next year, ushering in both a new Doctor (who at the moment would seem to be all but confirmed as Paterson Joseph) and a new show runner, perennial best-episode-of-the-season author Stephen Moffat.

This is a science-themed blog, though, so it’s worth me taking a moment to reflect on the sometimes rocky history between two of my great loves: science and Doctor Who. Things started out well: the first episode, An Unearthlty Child – justly lauded as one of the series’ greatest – includes a couple of brief classroom scenes in which the Doctor’s granddaughter shows her vastly superior science knowledge. Over the years the Doctor has generally championed science; during John Pertwee’s tenure in the seventies, and despite the fairly blatant Buddhist overtones of that era and various seemingly supernatural foes, he always insisted that magic was merely advanced science not understood by humans. This stretched a bit, including such unobserved phenomena as psychic abilities and so on, but by and large it was clear that the Doctor is a scientist.

Mind you, it was also John Pertwee who famously called on a suffering UNIT technician to “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow” and perpetuated the myth that “classical aerondynamics” suggests bumblebees can’t fly… And these were signs of the trend to follow. In the late seventies, scientific concepts and terms were tossed into scripts where they bore no resemblance to their re-world counterparts; during the eighties a tendency to mix real world science with nonsense escalated to the insane psuedo-science of Time and the Rani.

These days, science and the good Doctor might seem estranged. The show has become a member of that quite specific genre of science fantasy: fantasy with the trappings of science (a niche occupied also by Star Wars). Since Russell T. Davies took over, the only real-world grounding for Doctor Who has been a social one: the famliy and context of the current companion, which during his series has always been contemporary (though, as sharp readers will know, set one year in the future).

It’s easy to get caught up in arguments about this sort of thing; time “paradoxes” (they usually aren’t, and if they are…well, they’re paradoxes, and by definition cannot exist) and black holes are particular bugbears, with the former almost unknown in the series until recently (surprisingly, for a show about a Time Lord!) and the latter ascribed any and all peculiar abilities. But really it’s the Doctor’s attitude that makes the show still one of science’s greatest allies.

He’s not a two-fisted adventurer or a soldier or even a policeman; the sonic screwdriver might be a magic wand and is occasionally wielded as if it were a gun, but even so the Doctor’s main weapon continues to be his mind. He’s a thinking hero, a man of action whose first action is always to analyse his foe, to outwit rather than outgun. It’s true these days this sometimes gets lost in the emotional drama, which Davies rightly put first when reestablishing the show, and sometimes the Doctor’s solution relies almost entirely on information never established in advance (the void matter being attracted to the void in Doomsday, for example), but the Doctor is still the thinking man’s hero. Science is about asking questions, examining the observed facts, establishing patterns…

There are few finer examples of a science hero than Eccleston’s Doctor, trapped in 10 Downing Street, marshalling the facts about the Slitheen in order to discover their identity and weaknesses.