Centauri Dreams

Communicating with extraterrestrials isn’t going to be easy, as we’ve learned in science fiction, all the way from John Campbell’s Who Goes There? To Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life (and the movie Arrival). Indeed, just imagining the kinds of civilizations that might emerge from life utterly unlike what we have on Earth calls for a rare combination of insight and speculative drive. Michael Chorost has been thinking about the problem for over a decade now, and it’s good to see him back in these pages to follow up on a post he wrote in 2015. As I’ve always been interested in how science fiction writers do their worldbuilding, I’m delighted to publish his take on his own experience at the craft. Michael is also the author of the splendid World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet (Free Press, 2011) and Rebuilt: My Journey Back to the Hearing World (Mariner, 2006).

by Michael Chorost

Ten years ago, Paul Gilster kindly invited me to guest-publish an entry on Centauri Dreams titled, “Can Social Insects Have a Civilization?” At the time I was planning to write a nonfiction book about the linguistic issues of communicating with extraterrestrials. Though actual, face-to-face contact anytime soon is deeply unlikely, the concept is nonetheless theoretically interesting because it casts light on buried assumptions about language and communication. I sold the concept to Yale University Press. The working title was HOW TO TALK TO ALIENS.

I got busy, but I soon began to feel that the project was rather empty. I realized that in an actual First Contact situation, we’ll suddenly find ourselves in a complicated situation with a deeply unfamiliar interlocutor that has an agenda of its own. We’ll inevitably find ourselves winging it. Theory could be irrelevant. Useless.

For a while I tried to finesse the problem by putting scenarios in between the theoretical stuff. I imagined a human and an alien talking—specific humans, specific aliens, concrete settings. I soon realized that the scenarios were the most interesting material in the book.

That’s because positing a concrete situation made the problems, and the possible solutions, stand out clearly. Given a particular situation, what would people actually do?

It dawned on me: It made more sense to write the book as a novel. I withdrew from my contract at Yale and returned the advance. They were kind and understanding about it.

So I committed myself to a novel—but I wanted it to be as content-rich as the book I’d promised to Yale. I decided that the human characters would be scientists: an entomologist, a linguist, a neuroscientist, and a physicist. To succeed they’d have to pool their expertise, educating each other. That would imbue the novel with the scientific content.

But this risked me writing a deadly dull novel larded with exposition. I wanted the characters—both human and alien—to be vivid and unforgettable, and for their actions to drive a propulsive plot. I wanted the reader to be unable to put the book down.

I think I succeeded. I hired an editor to help me, and she made me do rewrites for three years; she was relentless. But at last she said, “You set yourself one of the hardest imaginative problems you could possibly have chosen, especially for a first novel. I think you managed it in a way that feels genuinely convincing. I want to say clearly upfront: this book is worth it. There is no story like this in the world.”

So I’m pretty confident that I now have a publishable novel—but getting there was really hard. I thought it would take about three years to write, which is how long my two nonfiction books took. I was wrong. It took eight.

When I started, I knew I wanted the aliens to be really alien: no pointy-eared, English-speaking Vulcans. I decided to make them sapient social insect colonies. That would make them aliens without contiguous bodies. Without hands as we know them. Without faces.

Therefore, I first had to figure out what a social insect civilization looks like. I didn’t want to take the easy way out by positing (as Orson Scott Card did) that a social insect colony would have a centralized intelligence, e.g. a Queen that gives orders. I felt that was cheating. I wanted the colonies to be genuinely distributed entities in which no individual insect has language or even much in the way of consciousness. Furthermore, I wanted the insects to be no bigger than Earthly ones, which ruled out big brains of any kind.

This gave me some very challenging questions. (From now on I’ll use the word “hive” as shorthand for “social insect colony.”)

• How does a hive pick up a hammer?
• How does a hive store and process the information needed for language?
• What is the physical structure of the hives?
• How does a distributed consciousness behave?
• What does such a civilization’s technology look like?
• What does its language look like? What’s its morphology, grammar, vocabulary?
• What does a society of hives look like?
• What events in the past set this species on the path to language and technology?

It took me two years just to answer the first one about picking up a hammer. I would imagine a bunch of insects clustering around a hammer and completely failing to get any leverage. Then I’d give up, deciding the question was unanswerable.

But finally, I figured it out: the hives parasitize mammals by inserting axons into the motor cortexes of their brains. That way, they can control the mammals as roaming “hands.”

And this was a key insight, because it helped me understand the hives as truly distributed entities. A given hive could have several dozen “hands” roaming the landscape, doing various things. Furthermore, it would have no front or back in any human sense.

This worldbuilding was fun, but it was the least efficient way imaginable to write a novel. I designed the aliens and their world before working out the plot. This led to a big problem.

Which was this: the aliens were so alien that I didn’t know why they would want to interact with humans in any way, nor us with them. What would we want to talk about? Or do together? This meant I didn’t have a plot.

I didn’t want to default to science fiction’s classic reasons for interspecies communication: war and trade. They struck me as stereotypical answers that would lead to a stereotypical novel. Besides, they begged the question. Species that are trading or fighting have to be similar enough to have things to trade, or to fight about. That would vitiate my goal of writing really alien aliens.

So I knew what kind of plots I didn’t want. But that didn’t tell me what kind of plot I did want. I sat down every day and wrote, hoping to figure out an answer.

This was, as I said, a very inefficient way to write a novel. Why didn’t I practice by writing, and publishing, a few short stories? Build up my cred, get my name out there? But I didn’t want to do those things. I wanted to write this novel. I grimly stuck to it, day after day.

After a while I had a bare-bones plot. When Jonah Loeb, a deaf graduate student in entomology, asks how to deal with an intelligent ant colony besieging Washington, D.C., the answer is, “Ask it to stop.” Jonah gathers a team of scientists and travels to a hive civilization in order to learn how.

I gave the other scientists names, figured out their dissertation topics, and worked out some of their characteristics. The neuroscientist was arrogant. The linguist was prickly and defensive. The physicist was socially awkward. Jonah, the protagonist, was deaf, like me, with cochlear implants. He was smart, but neurotic.

But I didn’t know how to make the characters come alive on the page. They all talked the same. Their only motivation was scientific interest. They had scant backstories or inner lives. They were, in short, boring.

I was even more at sea with the alien characters. They had no personality. I mean, really, how do you give a social insect colony a personality?

The plot, too, remained threadbare. I fabricated encounters, goings to-and-fro, arguments. But it just didn’t hold together. Often I’d add a new element only to realize it invalidated another element.

So I had dull characters and a plot made out of cardboard and duct tape. Finally, I admitted I needed help. I hired a freelance editor, and we started fresh.

The editor had me write up descriptions of each character’s goals and motives, and a detailed plot outline. We went through the manuscript one scene at a time, and she often told me to rework it before we went on to the next.

Slowly, the characters came to life on the page. I had made the protagonist, Jonah, deaf because I thought that would underscore the theme of communication. But Jonah only came to life when I thought back to my own feelings in my early twenties. I realized that Jonah was driven by feeling like an outsider. He desperately wants to be included and to prove himself.

This characterization let me set up a key dynamic: an outsider protagonist trying to communicate with aliens—the ultimate outsiders. Clarity for the character led to clarity for the story.

I slowly got better at solving problems by framing them in terms of character and plot. I knew that Tokic, the hives’ language, would have to be exotic—but creating it overwhelmed me. I’m no grammarian, and certainly no inventor of languages.

But then I realized I only had to develop enough of the language to support the plot. I wanted the plot to turn on misunderstandings and mistranslations as the humans struggled to learn the language.

A key source of confusion, I realized, would come from how differently shaped the hives and humans are. Humans have arms and legs that are attached to them. On the other hand, a hive is essentially a giant, stationary head with dozens of “hands” roaming the landscape. Not only that, the “hands,” as parasitized mammals, have minds of their own. Hives give their hands general orders, and the hands work out the details. A hive can disagree with its parts, and its parts can disagree right back.

I realized that the part/whole distinction would be built deeply into Tokic, rather like how human languages build gender deeply into their grammar. (In English, consider how hard it is to talk about a person if you don’t know their gender.) When you’re addressing another entity in Tokic, you have to be very precise, on the level of grammar, about its partness or wholeness.

Now consider: To a hive, is a human being a whole or a part?

A hive would find this question really hard to answer. As a mammal, a human being looks like a “hand”—a part—but it talks like a whole. Yet in Jonah’s team, each member is legitimately a part. In Latin, membrum means “limb” or “part of the body.”

Jonah, as a cochlear implant user, is even trickier for a hive to understand. A cochlear implant is a computer; it runs on code and constantly makes decisions about what’s important for the user to hear. It’s a body part that literally thinks for itself. As such, Jonah is kind of hive-like. When a hive asks what Jonah is and the team gives it an answer it doesn’t understand, the hive attacks the team and they must run for their lives.

I worked out Tokic’s parts/wholes grammar, and that made it possible for me to write the scenes where things went wrong. These were tough scenes to write, because I had to keep track of what a hive said, what the humans thought it said, the humans’ mistaken reply, and so on. I also had to be careful not to let the scenes get bogged down.

I’ve noted how inefficient my writing process was. But I do think it was productive in one way: I spent so much time thinking about the novel that a great deal of information accreted in my mind. I think that led to more richness in the worldbuilding and the story than would have happened if I’d written it faster.

There’s so much more I haven’t mentioned, like how an alien robot reads Wallace Stevens’s poetry and names itself after him; the brutal 1.8-gee gravity of Formicaris and the unexpected solution that lets the human team function there; the superheavy stable element that facilitates interstellar travel; the electromagnetic weapon that gives humans Capgras syndrome; the octopoidal surgeon who operates on Jonah and Daphne to upgrade their cyborg parts; and the illustrations. I had those done by professional science illustrators.

So now you have a sense of what my novel’s about. It’s still titled HOW TO TALK TO ALIENS; I think its unconventionality, and slightly academic air, will help it stand out. I hope you’re now as excited about it as I am. You can see a bit more about it at my website, michaelchorost.com.

If you know of any literary agents who’d be interested—please let me know.

The sublime, almost fearful nature of deep time sometimes awes me even more than the kind of distances we routinely discuss in these pages. Yes, the prospect of a 13.8 billion year old cosmos strung with stars and galaxies astonishes. But so too do the constant reminders of our place in the vast chronology of our planet. Simple rocks can bring me up short, as when I consider just how they were made, how long the process took, and what they imply about life.

Consider the shifts that have occurred in continents, which we can deduce from careful study at sites with varying histories. Move into northern Quebec, for example, and you can uncover rock that was found on the continent we now call Laurentia, considered a relatively stable region of the continental crust (the term for such a region is craton). Move to the Ukraine and you can investigate the geology of the continent called Baltica. Gondwana can be studied in Brazil, an obvious reminder of how much the surface has changed.

Image: With Earth’s surface constantly changing over time, we can only do snapshots to suggest some of these changes. Here is a view of the Pannotia supercontinent, showing components as they existed about 545 million years ago. Based on: Dalziel, I. W. (1997). “Neoproterozoic-Paleozoic geography and tectonics: Review, hypothesis, environmental speculation”. Geological Society of America Bulletin 109 (1): 16–42. DOI:<0016:ONPGAT>2.3.CO;2 10.1130/0016-7606(1997)109<0016:ONPGAT>2.3.CO;2. Fig. 12, p. 31. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Studying these matters has something of the effect of an earthquake on me. By which I mean that in the two minor earthquakes I have experienced, the sense of something taken for granted – the deep stability of the ground under my feet – suddenly became questionable. Anyone who has gone through such events knows that the initial human response is often mystification. What’s going on? And then suddenly the big picture emerges even as the quake passes.

So it can be with scientific realizations. Let’s talk about how scientists use various methods to study rock from different eras to infer changes to Earth’s magnetic field. Tiny crystal grains a mere 50 to a few hundreds of nanometers in size can hold a single magnetic domain, meaning a place where the magnetization exists in a uniform direction. Think of this as a locking in of magnetic field conditions that can be studied at various times in the planet’s history to see what the Earth’s magnetic field was doing then.

The subject is vast, and the work richly rewarding for anyone asking questions about how the planet has evolved. But now we’re learning that it also holds implications for the evolution of life. In a new feature in Physics Today, John Tarduno (University of Rochester) explains his team’s recent work on paleomagnetism, which is the study of the magnetic field throughout Earth’s history as captured in rock and sediment. For the magnetic poles move, and sometimes reverse, and within that history quite a story is emerging.

Image: The University of Rochester’s Tarduno, whose recent work explores the effects of a changing magnetic field on biological evolution. Credit: University of Rochester.

For Tarduno, the implications of some of these changes are striking. They grow out of the fact that the magnetic field, which is produced in our planet’s outer core (mostly liquid iron) continually varies, and the timescales involved can be short (mere years) or extensive (hundreds of millions of years). It’s been understood for a long time that the field reverses its polarity, but accompanying this change is the less known fact that a polarity change also decreases the field strength. Sometimes these transitions are short, but sometimes lengthy indeed.

Consider that new evidence, presented by Tarduno is this deeply researched backgrounder, shows that some 575 to 565 million years ago the Earth’s magnetic field all but collapsed, and remained collapsed for a period of tens of millions of years. If that time range piques your interest, it’s probably because this is coincident with a period known as the Avalon explosion, when macroscopic animal life, rich in complexity, begins to appear. And now we’re in the realm of evolution being spurred by magnetic field changes. The implications run to life’s own history and even as far out as SETI.

Named after the peninsula in which evidence for it was found, the Avalon explosion occurred tens of millions of years earlier than the Cambrian period which has heretofore been considered the time when complex lifeforms began to appear on Earth. It came during the Ediacaran period that preceded the Cambrian, and seems to have produced the first complex multicellular organisms. The sudden diversification of body scheme and distinct morphologies has been traced at sites in Canada as well as the UK.

Image: Archaeaspinus, a representative of phylum Proarticulata which also includes Dickinsonia, Karakhtia and numerous other organisms. They are members of the Ediacaran biota. Credit: Masahiro miyasaka / Wikimedia Commons.

So this is an ‘unexpected twist,’ as Tarduno puts it, that may relate significant evolutionary changes to the magnetic field as it reconfigured itself. Scientists studying the Ediacaran period (between 635 and 541 million years ago) have found that rocks formed then show odd magnetic directions. Some researchers concluded that the magnetic field in this period was reversing polarity, and we already knew that during a polarity reversal (the last was 800,000 years ago), the magnetic field could take on unusual shapes. Recent work shows that its strength in this period was a mere tenth of the values of today’s field.

This work was done in northern Quebec (ancient Laurentia), but later work from the Ukraine (Baltica) and Brazil showed an even lower field strength. We’re talking about a long period here of ultralow magnetic activity, perhaps 26 million years or more. Events deep inside the Earth’s inner core seem to have spurred this. I won’t go into the details about all the research on the core – it’s fascinating but would take us deeply into the weeds. For now, just consider that a consensus has been building that relates core activity to the odd Ediacaran geomagnetic field, one that correlates with a profound evolutionary event.

Image: This is Figure 2 from the paper. Caption: Changes deep inside Earth have affected the behavior of the geodynamo over time. In the fluid outer core, shown at right, convection currents (orange and yellow arrows and ribbons) form into rolls because of the Coriolis effect from the planet’s rotation and generate Earth’s magnetic field (black arrows). Structures in the mantle—for example, slabs of subducted oceanic crust, mantle plumes, and regions that are anomalously hot or dense—can affect the heat flow at the core–mantle boundary and, in turn, influence the efficiency of the geodynamo. As iron freezes onto the growing solid inner core, both latent heat of crystallization and composition buoyancy from release of light elements provide power to the geodynamo. (Left: Earth layers image adapted from Rory Cottrell, Earth surface image adapted from EUMETSAT/ESA; right: image adapted from Andrew Z. Colvin/CC BY-SA 4.0.)

In the models Tarduno describes, the Cambrian explosion itself was driven by a greater incidence of energetic solar particles during periods of weak magnetic field strength. Thus we have the basis for a weak field increasing mutation rates and stimulating evolutionary processes. Tarduno cites his own work here:

Eric Blackman, David Sibeck, and I have considered whether the linkage might be found in changes to the paleomagnetosphere. Records of the strength of the time-averaged field can be derived from paleomagnetism, whereas solar-wind pressure can be estimated using data from solar analogues of different ages. My research group and collaborators have traced the history of solar–terrestrial interactions in the past by calculating the magnetopause standoff distance, where the solar-wind pressure is balanced by the magnetic field pressure… We know that the ultralow geomagnetic fields 590 million years ago would have been associated with extraordinarily small standoff distances, some 4.2 Earth radii (today it is 10–11 Earth radii) and perhaps as low as 1.6 Earth radii during coronal mass ejection events.

As Tarduno explains, all this leads to increased oxygenation during a period of magnetic field strength diminished to an all-time low, along with an accompanying boom in the complexity of animal life from the Ediacaran leading into the Cambrian.

Notice the profound shift we are talking about here. Classically, scientists have assumed that it was the shielding effects of the magnetic field that offered life the chance to survive. Indeed, we talk about a lack of magnetic fields in exoplanets like Proxima Centauri b as being a strong danger to life because of incoming radiation. This new work is saying something profound:

If our hypothesis is correct, we will have flipped the classic idea that magnetic shielding of atmospheric loss was most important for life, at least during the Ediacaran Period: The prolonged interlude when the field almost vanished was a critical spark that accelerated evolution.

Maybe we have been too simplistic in our views of how a magnetic field influences the development and growth of lifeforms. In recent decades, work has been showing linkages between these magnetic changes, which can last for millions of years, and spurts in evolutionary activity. So that it is precisely because of low magnetic field strength, rather than in spite of it, that life suddenly explodes into new forms during these periods of high activity.

Jim Benford has often commented to me that despite having mounted the most intensive SETI search with the most powerful tools ever available, we still have not a trace of a signal from another civilization. Is it possible – and Jim was the one who pointed out this paper to me – that the reason is that the magnetic field changes that so affected life on our planet are rare elsewhere? Because it now looks as though a magnetic field should be considered less a binary situation than as a variable, one whose mutability because of core activity can take the world it engulfs into periods of low to high magnetic strength, and some eras millions of years long in which there is hardly any field at all.

I mentioned Proxima Centauri b above. Whether or not it has a magnetic field has yet to be determined, which points out how little we know about such fields around exoplanets at large. Further investigation of Earth’s magnetic past will help us understand how such fields change over time, and whether Earth’s own history has been unusually kind to evolution.

The article is Tarduno, “Earth’s magnetic dipole collapses, and life explodes,” Physics Today 78 (4) (2025), 26-33 (abstract).