I hardly ever watch a film version of a book I love because my mental images from the book get mangled by the film maker’s vision. There’s also the problem of changes to the plot, since film and novels are entirely different kinds of media. The outliers, though, are interesting (and I sure did love Bladerunner). And when I heard that AppleTV would do Asimov’s Foundation books, I resolved to watch because I was satisfied there was no way on Earth my book images would conflict with what a filmmaker might do. How could anyone possibly produce a film version of these books?
Judging from the comments I see online, a lot of people realize how remote the AppleTV series is from the source. But here we get into something interesting about the nature of science fiction, and it’s something I have been thinking about since reading Keith Cooper’s book Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact. For the streaming variant of Foundation is visually gorgeous, and it pulls a lot of taut issues out of what I can only describe as the shell or scaffolding of the Asimov titles. Good science fiction is organic, and can grow into productive new directions.
A case in point: The ‘moonshrikes.’ They may not be in the books, but what a marvelous addition to the story. These winged creatures the size of elephants take advantage of another science fictional setting, a ‘double planet,’ two worlds so tightly bound that their atmospheres mix. You may remember Robert Forward playing around with this idea in his novel Rocheworld (1990), and to my knowledge that is the fictional origin of what appears to be a configuration well within the laws of physics. In the streaming Foundation, a scene where Hari Seldon watches moonshrikes leaping off cliffs to soar into the sky and graze on the sister world is pure magic.
Keith Cooper is all about explaining how this kind of magic works, and he goes at the task in both literary and filmed science fiction. Because the topic is the connection between real worlds and imagined ones, he dwells on that variant of science fiction called ‘hard SF’ to distinguish it from fantasy. As we’ve seen recently in talking about neutron stars and possible life forms there, the key is to imagine something that seems fantastic and demonstrate that it is inherently plausible. Asimov could do this, as could Clarke, as could Heinlein, and of course the genre continues into Benford, Baxter, Vinge, Reynolds, Niven and so on.
Image: The moonshrikes take wing. Credit: AppleTV / Art of VFX.
It’s hard to know where to stop with lists like that (and yes, I should mention Brin and Bear and many more), but the point is, this is the major thrust of science fiction, and while AppleTV’s Foundation takes off on explorations far from the novels, its lush filmography contains within it concepts that have been shrewdly imagined and presented with lavish attention to detail. Other worlds, as Keith Cooper will remind us in his fine book, are inescapably alien, yet they can be (at least to our imaginations, since we can’t directly see most of them yet) astonishingly beautiful. Cooper’s intuitive eye gets all that.
The rich history of science fiction, from the pulp era through to today’s multimedia extravaganzas, gets plenty of attention. I’m pleased to report that Cooper’s knowledge of SF history is deep and he moves with ease through its various eras. His method is to interview and quote numerous writers on the science behind their work, and numerous scientists on the origins of their interest. Thus Alison Sinclair, whose 1996 novel Blueheart takes place on an ocean world. Sinclair, a biochemist with a strong background in neuroscience, knows about the interplay between the real and the imagined.
Sinclair talks about how Blueheart’s ocean, being warmer and less salty than Earth’s oceans on average, is therefore less dense and floats atop a deeper layer of denser water. The aquatic life on Blueheart lives in that top layer, but when that life dies its remains, along with the nutrients those remains contain, would sink right to the bottom of the dense layer. She raises an additional point that on Earth, deep water is mixed with surface water by winds that drive surface water away from coasts, allowing deep water to well up, but with no continents on Blueheart there are no coasts, and with barely any land there’s no source of nutrients to replenish those that have sunk to the bottom.
Here is the science fictional crux, the hinge where an extrapolated problem is resolved through imaginative science. Sinclair, with an assist from author Tad Williams, will come up with a ‘false bottom,’ a layer of floating forests with a root system dense enough to act as a nutrient trap. It’s an ingenious solution if we don’t look too hard, because the question of how these floating thickets form in the first place when nutrients are in the oceanic deep still persists, but the extent to which writers trace their planet building backwards remains highly variable. It’s no small matter imagining an entire ecosystem over time.
The sheer variety of exoplanets we have thus far found and continue to hypothesize points to science fiction’s role in explaining research to the public. Thus Cooper delves deeply into desert worlds including the ultimate dry place, Frank Herbert’s Arrakis, from the universe he created in Dune (1965) and subsequent novels. Here he taps climatologists from the University of Bristol, where Alexander Farnsworth and team have modeled Arrakis, with Farnsworth noting that world-building creates huge ‘blue-sky’ questions. As he puts it, SF “…asks questions that probably wouldn’t be asked scientifically by anyone else.”
Solid point. Large, predatory creatures don’t work on desert worlds like Arrakis (there go the sand worms), but Arrakis does force us to consider how adaptation to extremely dry environments plays out. Added into the team’s simulations were author Herbert’s own maps of Arrakis, with seas of dunes at the equator and highlands in the mid-latitudes and polar regions, and the composition of its atmosphere. Herbert posits high levels of ozone, much of it produced by sand worms. Huge storms of the kind found in the novel do fit the Bristol model and lead Cooper into a discussion of Martian dust storms, factoring in surface heating and differences in albedo. All told, Dune is an example of a science fiction novel tat compels study because of the effort that went into its world building, and recent work helps us see when its details go awry.
Image: Judging from the comments of many scientists I’ve known, Frank Herbert’s Dune inspired more than a few careers that have led to exoplanet research. The publishing history is lengthy, but here’s the first appearance of the planet Arrakis in “Dune World,” the first half of the original novel, as serialized beginning with the December, 1963 issue of Analog.
The explosion of data on exoplanets, of which there were close to 6000 confirmed as Cooper was wrapping up his manuscript, has induced subtle shifts in science fiction that are acknowledged by writers as well as scientists (and the two not infrequently overlap). I think Cooper is on target as he points out that in the pre-exoplanet discovery era, Earth-like worlds were a bit easier to imagine and use as settings. But we still search for a true Earth analogue in vain.
…it’s probably fair to say that SF before the exoplanet discoveries of the 1990s was biased towards imagining worlds that were like something much closer to home. Alas, comfortably habitable worlds like Earth are, so far, in short supply. Instead, at best, we might be looking at habitable niches rather than whole welcoming worlds. Increasingly, more modern SF reflects this; think of the yin-yang world of unbearable heat and deathly cold from Charlie Jane Anders’s Locus award-winning 2019 novel The City in the Middle of the Night or the dark, cloud-smothered moon LV-426 in Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) that has to be terraformed to be rendered habitable (although that example actually pre-dates the discovery of exoplanets).
Changes in the background ‘universe’ of a science fiction tale are hardly new. It was in 1928 that Edward E. ‘Doc’ Smith published The Skylark of Space, an award-winning tale which broached the idea that science fiction need not be confined to the Solar System. In the TV era, Star Trek reminded us of this when we suddenly had a show where the Earth was seldom mentioned. Both had some precursors, but the point is that SF adapts to known science but then can make startling imaginative jumps.
Thus novelist Stephen Baxter, a prolific writer with a background in mathematics and engineering:
’Now that we know planets are out there, it’s different because as a writer you’re exploring something that’s already defined to some extent scientifically, but it’s still very interesting…You know the science and might have some data, so you can use all that as opposed to either deriving it or just imagining it.”
What a terrific nexus for discovery and imagination. If you’re been reading science fiction for as long as I have, you’ll enjoy how famous fictional worlds map up against the discoveries we’re making with TESS and JWST. I found particular satisfaction in Cooper’s explorations of Larry Niven’s work, which clearly delights any number of scientists because of its imaginative forays within known physics and the sheer range of planetary settings he deploys.
No wonder fellow SF writers like Alastair Reynolds and Paul MacAuley cite him within these pages as an influence on their subsequent work. Niven, as McAuley points out, can meld Earth-like features with profound differences that breed utterly exotic locales. This is a man who has, after all, written (like Clement and Forward) about extreme environments for astrobiology (think of his The Integral Trees, for example, with hot Jupiters and neutron star life).
And then there’s Ringworld, with its star-encircling band of technology, and the race known as Pierson’s Puppeteers, developed across a range of stories and novels, who engineer a ‘Klemperer Rosette’ out of five worlds, one of them their home star. Each is at the point of a pentagon and all orbit a point with a common angular momentum. Their home world, Hearth, is an ‘ecumenopolis,’ a world-spanning city on the order of Asimov’s Trantor. Here again the fiction pushes the science to come up with explanations. Exoplanet scientist and blogger Alex Howe (NASA GSFC) explains his own interest:
“The Puppeteer’s Hearth is one of the things that keyed me in to the waste heat problem,” says Howe, who is a big fan of Niven: “I describe Larry Niven as re-inventing hard science fiction… not as SF that conforms strictly to known physics, but as SF that invents new physics or perhaps extrapolates from what we currently know, but applies it rigorously.”
Howe is an interesting example of the involvement of scientists with science fiction. A writer himself, he maintains his own blog devoted to the subject and has been working his way through all the classic work in the field. I’ve focused on SF in this review, but need to point out that Cooper’s work is equally strong coming in the non-fictional direction, with productive interviews with leading exoplanetologists. For now that we’re actually studying real planets around other stars, worlds like TOI-1452b, a habitable zone super-Earth around a binary, point to how fictional some of these actual planets seem.
So with known planets as a steadily growing database, we can compare and contrast the two approaches. Thus we meet Amaury Triaud (University of Birmingham), a co-discoverer of the exotic TRAPPIST-1 system and its seven small, rocky worlds. The scientist worked with Nature to coax Swiss SF writer Laurence Suhner into setting a story in that system.
Says Triaud: “If you were in your back garden with a telescope on one of these planets, you’d be able to actually see a city on one of the other planets.” Similarly, the snowball planet Gethen from Ursula le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) is put through analysis by planetary scientist Adiv Paradise (University of Toronto). Thus we nudge into studies of Earth’s own history extrapolated into fictional planets that invoke entirely new questions.
Here’s Paradise on snowball planets and their fate. Must they one day thaw?
“If you have a planet that doesn’t have plate tectonics, and doesn’t have much volcanism, can the carbon dioxide still escape from the outside?… You might end up with a planet where all the carbon dioxide gets locked into the mantle, and volcanism shuts off and you end up with a runaway snowball that might suppress volcanism – we don’t fully understand the feedback between surface temperature and volcanism all that well. In that case, the snowball would become permanent, at least until the star becomes brighter and melts it.”
Cooper’s prose is supple, and it allows him to explain complicated concepts in terms that newcomers to the field will appreciate. Beyond the ‘snowball’ process, the carbonate-silicate cycle so critical to maintaining planetary climates gets a thorough workout, as does the significance of plate tectonics and the consequences if a world does not have this process. Through desert worlds to water worlds to star-hugging M-dwarf planets, we learn about how atmospheres evolve and the methods scientists are using to parse out their composition.
Image: NASA’s playful poster of the TRAPPIST-1 system as a travel destination. Credit: NASA.
Each world is its own story. I hope I’ve suggested the scope of this book and the excitement it conveys even to someone who has been immersed in both science fiction and exoplanetary science for decades. Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact would make a great primer for anyone looking to brush up on knowledge of this or that aspect of exoplanet discovery, and a useful entry point for those just wanting to explore where we are right now.
I also chuckle at the title. Amazing Stories was by consensus the first true science fiction magazine (1926). Analog, once Astounding with its various subtitles, used ‘Science Fiction – Science Fact’ on its cover (I remember taking heat from my brother in law about this, as he didn’t see much ‘fact’ in what I was reading. But then, he wasn’t an SF fan). As a collector of old science fiction magazines, I appreciate Keith Cooper’s nod in their direction.
Thanks for the tips Paul!
I just bought ‘Blueheart’ and ‘The City in the Middle of the Night’!
The (new) Irish Amazon website wanted €195 (!) for ‘Blueheart’ but I got it shipped to my daughter in Maryland for $7 and she’ll bring it to Ireland when she visits me at Christmas!
I recently finished ‘Here and Beyond’ by Hal LaCroix – did you read that book yourself Paul? I thought it was wonderful.
Haven’t read the LaCroix title, Adam, but at your recommendation I’ll add it to my list. Thanks!
There is something very wrong about that Amazon site. The price of €195 appears for several hardback books and even ppbks that I checked. The price is way out of line for the same books on other Amazon sites (e.g., US, UK) and other platform sellers that I use.
I also notice that the hardback version uses the cover image for Cavalcade published 2 years later. Blueheart and Cavalcade were both priced at £16.99 when released (isfdb.org books by Sinclair). The most expensive copy I could find on AbeBooks.com was a used copy in fine condition at $27.83 ( £20.60).
As a US resident, the idiotic ending of 0% tariffs for low-cost (less than $800) items mailed to the US, Amazon in Eire will not ship to the US. Interestingly, another media vendor located in the UK assured me today that CDs shipped from their UK warehouse via their carrier would not have tariffs added to the price. I don’t believe the items were to be put in the diplomatic bag. ;-)
Hi Paul
Very interesting I need to look up the Apple TV show and also a few other books you have mentioned too.
Cheers Edwin
Alien landscapes in movies have come to be rather predictable. Once you had quite exotic landscapes, like that of Venus in “The Silent Star” (1960). Hollywood tended to use the same locations, such as those olique, layered bare rock hills, so often seen in Star Trek TOS, and even in contemporary SciFi movies. The “Alien” movie franchise created a lot of imitators of the bare, dusty, airless world, LV-426, and later LV-410. These worlds are as bleak as Io in “Outland”. They make our lunar surface look positively friendly and pleasant to look at.
In contrast, SciFi artists are far more creative. With the power of computer graphics and 3D rendering of movies, we really should be getting much more imaginative alien worlds in movies. Avatar is a notable standout, IMO, even if Pandora looked like a Roger Dean record cover with some “flora” looking like bioluminescent marine animals, perhaps inspired by Cameron’s deep sea dives.
Perhaps what we need is more artists painting landscapes of exotic exoplanets, using the best knowledge of what these surface conditions might be like, which then might be the basis of commissioned backdrops like the famous ones by Bonestell of Harpalus Crater for “Destination Moon”, The surface of Zyra in “When Worlds Collide”, and Altair 4 in “Forbidden Planet”. With computer graphics and green screens, the actors could interact with real-seeming landscapes on a sound stage.
Apart from the unrealistic physics, my irritation with depictions of inhabited alien worlds is the absurd ecosystems, often with isolated giant predators such as those in Star Wars and Star Trek, with few or no other organisms in the same ecosystem. No wonder tasty human morsels are chased after. Those beasts must be extremely hungry! Food chains need an energy source. With a biomass pyramid, the further up the food chain the organisms inhabit. Apex predators need a lot of organisms lower down the food chain to support them. The richness of these food chains should be fairly evident in the environment, whether photosynthetic plants provide the primary stellar energy trapping organisms, or geological chemical energy at the base of abyssal ecosystems. Granted, a polar bear might look like a lone predator on the ice floes, bey we know that there is a rich food chain from algae at the base, then zooplankton, shellfish, crustacea, fish at various food chain levels, and even orcas that surface to breathe in Arctic waters. Birds are usually present and highly visible. Yet SciFi movies often pick one, often deadly, predator as the only apparent organism on a planet that our hapless humans have to contend with. So little imagination, and perhaps insufficient budget to properly world-build.
What might an ecosystem look like on a very different exoplanet? What organisms and ecosystems might result from evolution under very different conditions, from near Earth-like to extremely exotic?
As Earth’s oceans become increasingly acidic, animals needing CaCO3 skeletons will find it increasingly energy-consuming to maintain them. It has been suggested that fish might become scarce compared to cephalopods. Sharks with cartilaginous skeletons might be OK, but they become toothless. What sort of mouths would evolve to allow them to survive as apex predators feeding on squid? One feature of island fauna is often a diminished size compared to their continental relatives. Yet often in movies, islands seem to have fauna far larger than their mainland relatives. That isn’t necessarily wrong (e.g., the giant Galapagos tortoise, the now-extinct New Zealand Moa), but not common. How did King Kong appear and survive on Skull Island, apparently on his own? At least he was a herbivore, but that T. Rex he grapples with in the 1933 movie, was a carnivore. What was it eating? The same problems exist with terrestrial cryptozoa. Where is the needed population of Loch Ness Monsters to maintain a viable breeding population, and what were they feeding on? A single “Nessie” is nonsensical.
Terrestrial complex life is almost all metabolically aerobic. Could complex life exist on a planet where O2 is very scarce, with sulfur perhaps replacing it. As elemental sulfur is not gaseous at our temperatures, what might complex life look like on a world where H2S replaced H2O? On a world that was very acidic, would all hard animal parts have to be organic compounds, rather than carbonate-based? Could metals be far more common, too, in such structures? Terrestrial life uses quite complex mechanisms to create electrical nerve firing to control muscles. Could simple, conducting organic polymers conduct electrons instead, making very fast responses even in large animals?
Alien worlds, especially inhabited ones, might prove queerer than we can imagine, paraphrasing Haldane. I hope we start to see some more serious thought on this, imagining new biology, organisms, lifestyles, and ecosystems. Shouldn’t AI be useful in lightening the cognitive load to create such possible worlds and explore them in fiction?
A.T.,
Your review of alien planets brings to mind the successively re-emerging Arrakis
biosphere of Dune. Though I did read the original serialization in Analog back in the 1960s, I have not followed the story that closely since, save for the 1980s movie. And to that I have a tie in below.
Many of my friends who at the time got more caught up in this sand tide, seemed to suggest that there were some ecological underpinnings to the story. I guess compared to the exoplanets thus far discovered, with or without sand worms, it has its fascinations and charms, but I don’t understand how it has all that free oxygen in its atmosphere. From this distant perspective, Arrakis seems somewhat like a dried out apple,… well, with some unpleasant things writhing under its skin. Positive export balance in the millennia up ahead, I suppose. But its nature (spice) seemed to be like kick starting interstellar travel from outside.
Though with all the sequels that the original installment generated, maybe there was a digression or two that addressed these issues. Allegories suggested or intended have flourished for sure whether Dune holds much water otherwise.
But I strongly suspect that there are some significant gaps in the Dune ecosphere.
What the blazes would sand worms eat or ingest when there aren’t human colonists to goad them or serve as burger king offerings? The description of the place, other than being hot and the inspiration for active desert garb…. Do things really add up? Or do you have to have an overdose of celestial seasonings tea bags in one’s cup to really appreciate its genius? At the very least this work does not cause anticipation of hyperventilating shaggy sand worms on Mars
As to the distinctions between the books and the film(s): for a time in the 70s I was living and studying in the Pacific NW and the degrees of separation between myself and the author were such that a number of friends or acquaintances seemed to have visited his large property on the Olympic Peninsula. There were parties and game weekends and visitors possibly obtaining better answers to the questions I just posed than I now possess. Between my own classes I was working part time at a deli just off the U of Washington campus where I met many customers who had been to these campouts in the woods, though not Frank Herbert himself. But since I started work with a friendly drama student who showed me the ropes of running a grocery until 2:00 AM, a fringe benefit was becoming acquainted with the additional drama school community, casts of Shakespeare plays on campus. And what do you know! One day, dropping in on a bike like most of the rest, was a young actor who came to pay his respects to his fellow actor and classmate Joe. Within a decade the cyclist would become the original screen Muad’dib.
When I read Dune with the iconic ppbk book cover by Bruce Pennington in the early 1970s when I was entering university, I thought it was a clear allegory of the Great Powers trying to carve up the Middle East and especially Arabia, to gain control of the oil discoveries there. The Great Houses were the Great Powers – USA, Great Britain, France, etc. Paul M’uadib, from House Atreides (a wet, green planet) was Lawrence of Arabia who sided with the arabs. Spice was obviously oil, as oil was the new fuel that powered transport from autos to aircraft and made intercontinental flight possible. The Lansraat could be the League of Nations, later the Security Council of the United Nations. By the 1960s, when Dune was written, the Great Powers might have become the “Seven Sisters”, the huge transnational oil companies in control of teh oil wells. Paul Atreides could have been Mosaddegh of Persia (now Iran), nationalizing the oil fields and taking control back from the oil companies and the West. While there has been a claim that Dune was the name given in homage to the beach sand dunes of the West Coast USA, they are clearly more like the desert sand dunes of the Arabian desert, the Sahara (which was once grassland), and now Mars. Recall that the climate of the Middle East and North Africa was once far wetter. Egypt was, and remained, the great grain producer feeding itself and Rome. Petra was once a key city on the trade routes until the climate changed and the rains stopped. So Arrakis could once have been fairly lush, but its state by the time the story is written would have made it a barren world, and without sufficient photosynthetic plants, unbreathable. However, it is possible that technology kept the atmosphere breathable, although I don’t recall it from the books I read (liberating the O2 from the SiO2? But as the galactic technology seems to do without microchips, where is all that silicon?)
As for the ecology, it is nonsense on stilts. While Arrakis was once green (and returning to that state in “God Emperor of Dune”, a desert planet would be as oxygen-free as Mars. The small oases in the hidden sietches could support some life, although it is not clear where the Fremen get their food from. While the Sahara and Arabian deserts host a diverse wildlife, they are ultimately dependent on teh sparse vegetation. Apparently, there is no such vegetation on Arrakis, at least in the deserts where the Fremen live, with plants primarily in the city of Arrakeen. The sandworms – absolutely make no sense. They are like that huge asteroid worm in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. (Is the SW’s sarlacc a dwarf, sessile version inspired by the sandwoms?). If Herbert knew of the fossil ancient whale ancestors found in Egypt, I could imagine they were resurrected as sandworms.
I have no such interesting anecdotes of Herbert and MacLachlan; all I can say is that Dune fans I knew were putting cinnamon in their coffee as a spice substitute. I suppose pumpkin spice lattes could be the contemporary version of this? OT. In Japan, some people drink coffee and tea with gold flakes.
I thought it was mentioned in one of the books was that the sand worms released oxygen.
Another allegory is about the rise of early Islam. With Paul as the prophet, the Fremen as Arabs & the Empire as the Byzantines.
Thanks, A.T.
Not recalling everything at once and not wishing to stray too far off topic,
I also remember reports coming back from across the Puget Sound to the neighborhood around the U circa ’77 that “Dune” was in production in Mexico somewhere and that the Mexican army had casting roles on both sides of the conflicts which would follow. The far future as I had not imagined it – unless it was a delayed soccer game.
Joe my grocery store colleague late that spring and a little early technically, played as Puck in Midsummer’s Night Dream, the production in a wooded glade on campus. In addition one of the students in an astronomy “recitation section” I chaired, played Queen Hyppolyta. With invitations from both, could not miss the event. But I’m unaware whether MacLachlan joined that production too.
Paul, do you happen to know which episode of the Foundation series has the scene you described of the moonshrikes drifting between planets? Just today my 11-year-old asked me if something like that could be possible. (I said I didn’t think so because I thought the atmospheres couldn’t last, but happy to know it is in fact plausible.) Anyway I’d love to find that episode to show the scene to her. I watched the first season but didn’t continue with the show afterwards.
Jon, I think it’s episode 6 of season 2, titled “Why the Gods Made Wine.” Close to the end of the episode. It’s an extraordinary scene.
Thanks Paul! I just downloaded and watched it. Yes, great to look it, but ultimately not a scene to show my 11-year-old daughter out of context, as there’s also the whole revenge trampling inextricably woven in to the moonshrikes taking off!
Absolutely. Context required.
Actually, before deleting the file, I scrolled through the rest of the episode quickly and noticed there is an earlier scene in the same episode, a flashback where Hari is a young boy and he witnesses the moonshrike taking off. This was maybe the scene you were thinking of — you actually get a better view of the beasts and their flight, and I agree it is impressively done! I showed it to my daughter today.
Yes, you’re right. Glad you track that down, Jon.
It would be interesting if AI could make a film based directly on any of these books. AI is getting awfully smart !
It is the task of the writer of speculative fiction to imagine what life is like in the universe; to construct models of living things and the ecosystems they might inhabit. Many of these writers have impressive scientific credentials, so these fictional worlds and the critters in them are often plausible and believable. Far from being pointless wool-gathering, these fictional planetary landscapes are the only way we have of conducting a preliminary reconnaissance of these terrains (although it is possible that in the very near future we may acquire real data to assist us with these speculations!).
Bur right now, we are crippled by a complete ignorance of what alien life might be like. With only one example to work from, our own planet, we simply do not know if “alternative life forms” are even possible, much less if they are widespread throughout the universe.
Just what do we know?
We know that life is common on our planet, and it has evolved the ability to flourish in every environment on the planet. It is ubiquitous and hardy, adaptable and varied.
We know life appears to be built on one basic model, there are no competing or alternate forms. Whether this is due to the impossibility of other types of life or whether the local configuration simply out-competed all the other forms long ago we simply do not know. We have no idea if extra-terrestrial life forms will be based on carbon chains in aqueous solution, will be composed of amino acids and based on DNA type structures; in other words, be like us.
We have speculated on many different ways the universe might evolve highly complex chemical systems, or even alternative architectures altogether such as mineral, electromagnetic, nuclear, plasma, relativistic, etc. Does the universe have a tendency to spontaneously generate “living things” (whatever that means) from simpler structures or is something more or less like terrestrial life the norm? Is the ability to create consciousness built into the very fabric of space time, or is there only one way nature has come up with to do so. And if aqueous carbon chains and protein-enzyme reactions controlled by nucleic acids are the only way this can happen, how similar to our own life would alien biology be? We simply don’t know. Will the alien plants be edible? Would their predators recoil from us in horror because our chemistry was detectably toxic to them? Would we be able to catch each other’s diseases? Would our dead decompose when buried in their soil?
There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence available that suggests carbon-based aqueous life may be common in the universe, but the evidence is nonetheless circumstantial. We really don’t know.
The universe has often demonstrated its ability to surprise us, so I am not willing to rule anything out. But for the time being, I will restrict my speculations on alien life to the basic carbon-water-amino acid model. DNA may not be the evolutionary mechanism, but something similar to it will be.
Within the aqueous, organic carbon model, we have demonstrated that the genetic code can be reprogrammed to incorporate additional amino acids by modifying tRNA. Such organisms might make us very sick trying to digest them. We do know that we cannot digest or make use of foods with the opposite chirality (c.f. Olestra, as a synthetic indigestible fat substitute.)
There is also speculation that a macromolecule with just 2 bases might have preceded the 4 bases in DNA. We don’t know if the chirality of our biology is the same or different elsewhere.
Relatively minor changes, to be sure. If, a big if, life were to be found on Titan, it would surely have to be very different from terrestrial life, if only because of temperature.
You may recall the kerfuffle over the possibility that life could substitute arsenic for phosphorus, an idea that emerged from Paul Davies’ lab, where he has speculated about an undetected “Shadow biosphere.” Yet I have just read that some complex marine life living in the toxic abyssal hot vents manage to handle the presence of arsenic by creating crystalline arsenic compounds that are stored in their cells. A very interesting adaptation, and one that suggests that life elsewhere might have similar strategies to cope with unwanted, potentially toxic elements in their environment.
Life does require energy sources that can be harvested, stored, and released in some way. The possible chemical space that could be harnessed is vast, far greater than the ones that terrestrial life uses. Whether life elsewhere in very different environments can make use of these is another matter. I would refer you to a CD post Energetics of Archaean Life in the Ocean Vents on the energetics of amino acids in different deep ocean vents that, to me at least, hints that life in very different exoplanet conditions might be composed of different [organic] molecules. I think lab experiments, possibly aided by AI to search chemical space, might show possibilities. It may even indicate new biosignatures.
I try to keep my mind open to life’s possibilities, but hopefully not so open that “my brain oozes out of my ears!”
There have been experiments with alternative DNA structures using 6 bases rather than our 4.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13314
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/07/living-organism-pass-down-artificial-dna-us-scientists
This definitely raises the possibility of alternate forms of life out there in the universe. Which makes me wonder whether our form of life is among the most common or an outlier?
@Ivan
From teh Guardian article and the Nature abstract, I gather that the 2 new bases did nothing. The genetic code was not expanded (at this point) to a potential 216 codons.
What amazes me is that these non-functional bases didn’t break the protein coding function of the base DNA. Bacterial DNA, unlike our DNA, is far more densely packed with genes. If the new base pair was inserted randomly in teh bacterial genome, I would have thought some important proteins could be :broken”. Perhaps CRISPR was used to carefully insert the base pair between the genes in non-coding sequences.
There is a 2023 review by Romesberg, Discovery, implications and initial use of
semi-synthetic organisms with an
An expanded genetic alphabet/code, indicating that the pharmaceutical company, Sanofi, is furthering research to expand the genetic code to produce novel protein therapeutics.
Science fiction becoming science fact…possibly.
@Henry
>Does the universe tend to spontaneously generate “living beings” (whatever that means) from simpler structures, or is something that more or less resembles life on Earth the norm?
It’s always the old question of determinism: either we remain in the realm of randomness and statistics—and therefore with a frustrating degree of uncertainty—or we assume a “direction” in the universal order of matter and then ask ourselves, “Who’s in charge?” No! I won’t say any more because I don’t want to end up at the stake (not right away, anyway :)
Perhaps if we want to escape this dilemma, we need to think about the universe differently? This is where science fiction comes in, for example, with parallel or multiple universes.
Personally, I don’t believe in the idea of a norm, of normality, and therefore of a kind of matrix, because *our* universe is not repetitive but rather creative, even if the “basic ingredients” are broadly the same. If we accept that “something”—matter—emerged from “nothing,” from nothingness before the Big Bang, why would there be repetition of the same structure? To what end? The same question applies if we assume a universe that generates randomness.
> Is the ability to create consciousness integrated into the very structure of space-time, or is there only one way for nature to do so?
I was going to answer, “It depends on the nature of space-time,” but in the infinitely large, we have no way of knowing if there is another structure of space-time. Perhaps the quantum world could answer your question? I don’t know…
Paul’s paper invites us to question the function of science fiction.
I would say that human specie beings is curious, so when she has no answer to the unknown and her technology is powerless to provide her a minimum of certainty, she invents this unknown through scienc-fiction. This allows her to reassure herself, to exorcise her fears, to progress—better something than nothing! – or simply for the pleasure of creating. It is as if mankind were progressing in its quest for the unknown by using two parallel paths that complement each other: technology on the one hand, which represents the field of concrete, and science-fiction on the other, where anything is possible.
@Paul
>The key is to imagine something that seems fantastic and demonstrate that it is intrinsically plausible
…which almost always brings us back to Technology, which seems to be an intermediary between the human species and its universe if it wants to make something a reality, otherwise it remains in the realm of the imaginary. Consider: flint size; Saturn V; solar sails; Dyson sphere; Alcubiere; interstellar travel, etc… except perhaps for time travel, perhaps because it is a concept ;)
It sounds silly, but I’m always amazed to see how an idea can be developed into concrete objects (and also concepts*): yesterday I built a cat house; at first it only existed in my head, but two hours later it was a pretty wooden house. Alfred Hitchcock said that his films were already practically conceived in his head and that filming was just a secondary task to be completed.
* Science fiction is fruitful and can lead to other ideas, but only if it is shared. If it remains in a single brain as a [Centauri] dream, and has no impact, it is useless.
The Ancients distinguished between the material world and the world of Ideas. In a way, science fiction has replaced the gods or Peyolt; Alien is a modern variant of the Minotaur; the laser disintegrator is the transposition of Zeus’ lightning bolts, etc. Finally, nothing has really changed ;)
But as the scientist says to the dreamer: “Well then, my dear friend, you are completely in the realm of science fiction ! :)
“The Two Cultures Revisited. Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice”
Interlitteraria 2019
By Dominika Oramus
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338613129_The_Two_Cultures_Revisited_Stanislaw_Lem%27s_His_Master%27s_Voice
Abstract.
I would like to take, as my starting point, the famous 1959 lecture of C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, where science fiction is by and large ignored, and see how the consecutive points Snow is making are also discussed in the following decades of the 20th century by other philosophers of science, among them Stanislaw Lem, Steven Weinberg, and Jonathan Gottschall.
In 1959 Snow postulated re-uniting the two cultures through the reform of education. In the 1960s and 1970s Lem did not believe in any reform, but prophesied that science left alone would procure the final war and, probably, the self-inflicted technological death of the West. I am then going to juxtapose Snow’s argument with a science fiction novel concerned with the same civilizational crisis: Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice.
I am not clear what Oramus’ point is in this essay. C.P. Snow was a British academic, writing about his knowledge of academia, the split between STEM and the humanities, and their inability to cross-communicate. The Two Cultures (TTC) was published in 1959 (just as I was entering British primary School).
Lem’s His Master’s Voice (HMV), published in Polish in 1968, would reasonably refer to a period no more than a decade after Snow’s essay.
Oramus wants to contrast HMV with TTC, both to suggest that Snow failed to note, possible even read, science fiction, despite his proximity to the astronomer and SciFi novelist, Fred Hoyle, and that Lem does address the culture clash in HMV.
She seems to fail to undersatnd that the mostly US scientists at Los Alamos were educated differently that the British academics. IDK when US Liberal Arts education started, but in Britain, the brighter students are quickly split into Arst or Science disciplines on entering Secondary education at 11. At 16, the split is complete and continues at university. By contrast, even STEM education includes some mandatory choice of humanities units.
Does science fiction bridge the gap between the two cultures, falsifying TTC premise? IDK. Certainly the scientists and adjacent scientists write decently, whether [science] fiction or non-fiction. Asimov was a prime example of an excellent, but non-literary writer. Clarke wrote better fiction, but IMO, also better at technical non-fiction. Greg Benford would be my goto scientist and good SciFi author infusing science into his books. Steven Baxter, is perhaps science adjacent educated but writes solid science infused SciFi. Oramus mentions Snow’s contemporay Hoyle, yet Snow doesn’t seem to be aware of Hoyle’s SciFi oeuvre.
I have read that UK literary authors remain behind teh times when writing contemporay fiction. For example, cellphones made no appearence in novels even after 2 decades of introduction to the masses. My personal experience of the trend of literary authors writing SciFi is that their novels are somewhat meandering, often use flowery language, but have no concept of scientific facts, supporting the Snow premise even today. (I shall refrain from naming names to protect the guilty.) British writers probably remain condemned to a lack of science education due the British education system.
Scientists wanting to gain some knowledge of the humanities are offered a vast range of material, especial TV in Britain, produced by humanities graduates. Science, OTOH, is relatively sparse, even on the BBC, and is generally kept far simpler for viewers without a science education.
My conclusion is that the [UK] scientist wanting to learn something of the humanities, particularly the arts and literature, can readily acquire at least a modicum of understanding from available media sources. However, the humanities-educated person would find it somewhat harder to acquire a good understanding of science disciplines and new science discoveries. If this hypothesis is reasonably true, the scientists should be able to communicate with the humanities about humanities subjects more easily than the “artists” tpo scientists about science subjects.
I will accept that the above may reflect my biases as a UK STEM-educated person who likes humanities material via the media. Now if only I could write as well as Asimov…
Dune is a bit of an oddball in prose science fiction. I skipped the Analog serialization in the early 1960s , not sure why, because I was a subscriber, keep the issues because of the excellent John Schoenherr illustrations. Bought the hardback when it came out. Found it a ripping yarn and was entertained.
I note that I came to science fiction as a reader in 1953 and quickly got into SF fandom. I had a good circle of SF readers to talk to in the 50s and 60s. I came to Dune after reading SF for 12 years, and man did a read it. magazines and all the used paper backs I could pick up (for 5 cents in those days!). So by 1965 it was a ton of prose SF . Cut my teeth on Heinlein’s Ya novels, but ran out of those fast. The various libraries I frequented seems to have an uncountable number of Groff Conklin anthologies. So I caught up on just about every good SF short story from the 1940s and 1950s . Read Astounding, Galaxy and F&SF , man… the used book store used to sell those 3 for a dime! Galaxy was my go to magazine in the 1950s, H L Gold was publishing the best stuff, especially Fred Pohl and C M Kornbluth, but also, Bradbury , Blish, Brown, Dick, and man!, Bester, The Demolished Man and that ultimate baroque space opera The Stars My Destination, Galaxy was the best. Analog still had good stuff, what is one of Heinlein’s best novels Double Star (the second being Door Into Summer). I of course read Clarke’s big think novels of those days. Asimov’s foundation was in ACE paperback form with titles that made no sense. Tho I don’t think ACE ever published Second Foundation.
I discovered Cordwainer Smith (the totally unique SF writer) , Simak, Merrill, de Camp, Theodore Sturgeon (the writer’s writer as Stephen King said) , Wilson Tucker, … so many …
With that lengthy introduction … after me and my SF reading friends digested Dune, we all agreed it was a good read… but … would not list it in our top 20 SF novels.
A friend of my mine said he thought it was the novel that Campbell could never get out of A E van Vogt. Galactic Empire with Psi-Powers (Boy, Campbell was a soft target for Psi Powers!).
It remains so today , among a fair sized group of SF readers I still know, Dune is considered a good read but not great read.
I can refer the reader to Judith Merril’s review of Dune in the March 1966 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
I also note that the year , 1966 , that Dune won a Hugo it tied with …And Call Me Conrad by Roger Zelazny …. people tend to forget that.
Amazing Worlds is a good survey of planets and exoplanets, as well as an introduction to understanding their complexity. I worked with Keith on his book about SETI, The Contact Paradox, which I also highly recommend.
Looking back on worlds of science fiction, there is an element of growing up with the transformation of exo-solar planets as something of a fantasy given a visa to enter science fiction; and then the object of a long fruitless search only to flourish suddenly with an expanding catalog, bound soon to include 10,000 entries.
No reason to stop there. Observational technologies allow us to discern at least as much about them as astronomy could about Mars a century or more ago. Yet up this point ( untile recently) , whether for the solar system or stellar exoplanetary systems, we had little to nothing that constitutes biological data save for detection of compounds in the Allende meteorite. The recent assay of the asteroid Bennu (OSIRUS-REx) is a similar result. In each [The Japanese mission Hayabusa 2 is a comparable example, but its sample results are still in question].
Like exoplanet transits or the doppler shifts of a star due to an exoplanet’s orbiting mass, these measures are subtle and difficult but with vast implications.
As for the two samples from a crashed meteor and a dust covered minor asteroid, the compounds in question are building blocks for life as we know it, originating on rocks made of materials older than the solar system, or at least dating measured by the Earth’s oldest unmolested rocks, uranium decaying into lead.
The inference is that chemicals of life in the solar system predated solar ignition,
already in the shared cloud of gas and dust from which this and other planets formed – and likely a bunch of other stars in the nearby cradles, gone off now to seek their fortunes. Maybe dozens, maybe hundreds.
A year or two ago, found the courage or fortitude to read Olaf Stapledon’s two works on exoplanets, so to speak. It stemmed from reading an introduction posted on these Centauri Dreams pages. Prior I had only read an excerpt or two in an s/f anthology checked out of the public high school maybe when I was in 8th grade. Inscrutable would not be an exact description, but suffices for now.
Close to 100 years ago, the term exoplanet had yet to be coined, but one could say that manufacturing them was part of the Starmaker’s job. Stapledon’s “Last and First Men” about the future of the Earth had the remove of an extrapolating paleobiologist like Richard Leakey, maybe smoking weed. Several orders of “men” arrived and fell, clearing the terrestrial stage for further experiments. Dispassionate about a “run” of our successors of one sort or another for 10 to 100 million years was not quite the tone; it was more like a certain sympathy for things yet to come that were bound to fail.
If that were not enough for a merciful wake-up call to a dawn on this very different world, Stapledon pulls the same stunt with the cosmos, As was reported here on Centauri Dreams a couple of years ago, it began with thenarrator’s falling into a faint on an English hillside, the narrator takes a tour of the universe, starting modestly with a visit to an inhabited planet and then picking up momentum, visiting with the Starmaker himself. He pilots this consciousness magic bus and pick up a few of his hosts along the way. Though I don’t remember if he introduces himself with first or surname beyond mentioning he came from Earth.
Yes, too much to cover here save that consciousness of the narrator moved through space and time as much as The Author demanded. Usually that’s the case, but in this one it’s for the Guinness Book of Records. The point here is that Stapledon appears to subscribe to a universe filled with life and with space time bounds similar to the ones we have become familiar with. He must have come to subscribe to “galaxies” with their announcement straight off the press.
Or maybe he had an inside source, kind of like Giordano Bruno? Well, we can’t be too sure about that Bruno’s sources either.
For myself, I like to note the inexplicable intuitions that people MIGHT have and wonder how they insinuated themselves into their minds. Because in some respects, Stapledon appeared ahead of his time – and in others, one could say that he was dead wrong or believed in a soon to fall consensus. But as long as we don’t clearly understand consciousness, the matter is worth considering.
It might just be that being an Oxford don, Stapledon picked up on many of the latest discoveries and theories of science. But in the matter of planet formation,
he had picked the wrong horse. The theory that he adhered to in Starmaker was that exoplanets and our own were formed as a result of near collisions of stars, transfer of matter, gas and dust drawing out into space and some of it to coalesce around one or the other stars. Consequently, even Stapledon thought that planetary formations were infrequent and much more isolated than we observe them to have occurred now. But since he had an infinite universe and his narrator’s unincorporated mind keeps wandering farther and farther afield, from galaxy to galaxy and maybe even galactic clusters, the Starmaker is a chronicle of visits and habitations ( or possession in the sense of “witchcraft” ), sharing the perceptions of many species with civilizations adapted to their myriad environments.
After a while visitors or hosts joined the trip on the magic bus. Stapledon records some cultural exchanges with species from many environments and heritages, to put it mildly.
So the oddity is: Stapledon’s universe was a wider desert than the one we inhabit, yet he racked up an array of intelligent species living in environments as diverse as we can imagine now. But he understood very little about stars, how they formed or their composition. Had someone told him that they were made largely of hydrogen atoms rather than iron (or some compounds that allowed them sentience too !), he would have been shocked. Or maybe not, what with the shocks he presents to a reader.
At times Stapledon would lapse into current controversies, suggesting that alien sentient creatures on a strange world could divide into “bolsheviks”, pacifists and
other parliamentary, revolutionary or atavist adversaries. But more often his narrative was like telling stories about zoo exhibits such as an ant farm and then a bat cave’s social controversies suggesting that many of the exhibits had exceeded our possibilities already or long before.
Trying to figure out a summary end to this. So here goes. I could imagine Stapledon declaring in an enigmatically in an interview, perhaps a boast:
“I’ve never awakened from a nightmare.”