Category: Science

The Human Family Tree – National Geographic

The Human Family Tree is a 2-hour documentary that explains why race is an optical illusion.  The show will be repeated 09/06/09 at 1pm, but is also available on Netflix now.  Because of the wonders of DNA and genetic markers, scientists are able to trace the migrations of human populations back to their origins in Africa.  Be sure and watch the show until the end, where the filmmakers do a wonderful trick with their participants.  At the beginning of the show, project director Spencer Wells visits a street fair in Queens, New York and his team takes cheek swaps from crowds of people, all claiming to be immigrants from all over the world.  Many people volunteer and their stories get told during the documentary.  Most of these people expect the DNA to confirm their family genealogy that they cherish and has been handed down to them by word of mouth and photos.

At the end of the show the filmmakers meet outdoors in a giant field and have all the volunteers stand in groups based on the prominent markers in their DNA.  The groups are roughly arranged like a map of the world.  Many of the people whose stories were featured on the show are surprised by what their biology reveals, like one black man grouped with the Europeans and one Puerto Rican woman grouped with Native Americans.

The show is full of wonderful computer animation, beautiful high-definition filmed sequences from all over the world and staged scenes that act out what life was like tens of thousand of years ago.  Science really has learned vast libraries of statistical knowledge from combining anthropology and DNA research.  What it shows is racial characteristics are insignificant compared to all the rest of our traits.  Essentially humans are almost identical, far more so than other animal species.  We may look very different, but our DNA tells us otherwise.  In fact, one of the more interesting tidbits to come out of the show is that Africa is the most genetically diverse continent because it’s population is the oldest.

Watching this documentary makes an excellent companion to the book I am listening to, The Evolution of God by Robert Wright, which explores the rise of religion across the globe starting with hunting and gathering societies.  Wright measures the development of religion by how well it deals with ethnic diversity.  Even though humans are all alike, we’ve always been very xenophobic, and the presentation of The Human Family Tree would be in accordance to the highest spiritual development in religious philosophy as explored by Wright. 

It would be fascinating to chronicle the religious history against the histories of the various migrating populations that the DNA markers reveal.  Would it be possible to follow the paths of memes like paths of genetic material in our blood?  The majority of the world’s worshipers in God build their beliefs on the political and social conflicts of one tiny group of people, living in one tiny part of the world, concerning events that happened two and three thousand years ago, while ignoring all the religious practices of vast hordes of people that migrated all over the globe.  But then most of those religions were tied to local ethnocentric and highly xenophobic tribes.  We are becoming global on so many levels.

The Human Family Tree makes social, philosophical and political statements through it’s work with exploring the science of DNA, with implications that are far greater than teaching us about human migration patterns.  As graphically illustrated in the show, everyone has two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, and if you follow the math it doesn’t take that many generations until you are related to nearly everyone on Earth.

Most people don’t know much about their ancestors beyond their grandparents or maybe one of their great grandparents, so they imagine their heritage coming from one individual.  But if you go back a few hundred years and had to picture yourself the product of 128 or 256 individuals, what can you claim to be?  It’s hard enough to spot traits you get from two parents, so why imagine yourself to be the product of any race, culture, country, or other identity?  All we can be is the human we are at the moment and any cultural heritage is just silly pretending.

JWH – 9/4/9

Has the Universe Gotten Too Big for Science Fiction?

District 9 is the much talked about new science fiction movie that was released just days ago.  But I have to ask:  Is District 9 science fiction? Since we get so few new science fiction movies every year why should I even suggest that one isn’t science fiction?  We’re always overwhelmed with comic book movies that are obviously too silly to be science fiction, and ignoring the franchise films, like Star Trek, we were gifted with what many fans would consider two uniquely classic-SF movies this summer:  Moon and District 9.  I enjoyed watching both, but unfortunately I don’t consider either to be science fiction, not by my picky old fart definition of science fiction.

But am I deluded, blowing smoke up my own ass, by worrying too much that science fiction has fallen asleep with alien pods in the room?  I know hordes of old SF fans in their 40s, 50s, and 60s that stopped reading SF after the 1980s, or even earlier, who are all wanking nostalgic for SF from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, living in a retro science fictional paradise.  This new fangled stuff might look like science fiction, it might walk like science fiction, but it doesn’t quack like science fiction.

District 9 uses outer space aliens as a metaphor for a story about immigration xenophobia and racism.  And even though District 9 opens with a magnificent flying saucer orbiting perfectly over Johannesburg, South Africa, with max-gnarly alien aliens, I still don’t consider it science fiction.  Why?  Real science fiction is about exploring the cutting edge of reality, and District 9 uses its aliens like other movies use angels or dragons to tell a fable.  More than that, District 9 models its action after video games rather than modern science fiction magazine stories – but does District 9 model the emerging post-modern SF magazine stories?

Now, I’m not saying that District 9 isn’t a very creative film, I’m just saying it’s not science fiction.  It uses science fiction as a metaphor for human xenophobia, rather than being speculative fiction about first contact with a non-human intelligence.  Sure it’s a fun, gripping movie, with a fascinating storyline and engaging characters, told with stomach churning hand-held camera anxiety.  District 9 is gritty and realistic about human nature, but is totally unscientific, choosing to stay well within the cliché tropes of SF, which are getting moldy-oldie even for me.  Even though the aliens look very different from us, they act just like us, especially at our worse, which I believe was the intention of the film’s storytellers.  District 9 is an allegory about apartheid, and all other political histories where one group of human beings treat another group of human beings with zero empathy.

Then again, am I wrong?  I want to define science fiction by the standards I use in my review of “The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.”  I don’t think I’m the only one sniffing out changes in SF.  Read Jason Sanford’s “The noticing of SciFi Strange,” and his story “The Ships Like Clouds, Risen by Their Rain.”

Then read the gorgeous “Exhalation” by Ted Chiang, which just won the 2009 Hugo Award for short story.  These are cutting edge stories marketed as science fiction, but are they really science fiction?  I’d call them fantasy, but they aren’t even fantasy like Tolkien, L. Frank Baum, J. K. Rowling or Lewis Carroll.

We’re living in a post-modern science fiction world where science fiction has little relationship to science, or reality.  In our age of tremendous science and technology, science fiction has decided to become fantasy.  Why is this?

An old friend Jim called me this weekend to tell me that he and his wife were watching The Universe, a TV series about astronomy and Stacy decided the universe was too big for her mind to handle, which Jim thought was hilarious.  Reality is big, and the old purpose of science fiction used to be producing sense of wonder about the vastness of space and time.  Has the universe gotten to big for science fiction?

And, has the universe gotten too big for our cozy little minds?  Has science fiction pulled back from the event horizon of reality, fearful of facing the black hole of science fact?  As much as I want science fiction to be about science, the story from The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction edited by Allan Kaster, that had the greatest emotional impact on me was “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss,” by Kij Johnson from Asimov’s Science Fiction. 

26 Monkeys is a purely fantasy tale that is a post-modern science fiction story where the universe is too big, and the only way to comprehend it is with allegory.  The story is scientifically fatalistic, in that the characters give up on trying to understand the sense of wonder in their lives. 

This is even more explicitly stated in “The Ray Gun: A Love Story,” by James Alan Gardner, another favorite from the above collection.  Read this story, but substitute the concept “science fiction” whenever you hear “ray-gun” while reading this story.  This story feels like meta-fiction about giving up science fiction, at least the old modern kind.

And what about Moon, the SF film about where humans refuse to go.  When did mankind decide the final frontier was not for them?

Science fiction has always been about the future, it always embraced modernism, showing absolute faith in science with the relentless belief that we will eventually comprehend reality.  Ivy League intellectuals have always considered the SF genre to be a literature for dreamy adolescents, so maybe it’s just taken science fiction a bit longer than the rest of the literary world to grow up and face the post-modern world of uncertainty.

JWH – 8/18/9

The Very First Light by John C. Mather

I just finished a revised and updated version The Very First Light by John C. Mather (and John Boslough), subtitled: The True Inside Story of the Scientific Journey Back to the Dawn of the Universe.  This makes a great book to read during the International Year of Astronomy 2009 because it shows how modern day Galileos do their work, not with handmade telescopes, but with space probes that look backwards in time, capable of finding direct evidence to when the universe was just 300,000 years old.  I intentionally selected this book to be a sequel to my reading The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg.  Both Mather and Weinberg won Nobel Prizes in Physics.

The Very First Light is the story of Mather’s development as a scientist, from graduate student to becoming the one of the lead scientists on the team that built the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) spacecraft, which collected data that validated basic ideas about the Big Bang theory origin of the universe.  The book chronicles how Mather got involved with doing experiments with balloon launched scientific instruments, that led to proposals for NASA to launch better instruments on sounding rockets, to designing a mission for the space shuttle that had to be redesigned after the Challenger disaster, to succeeding with a vast team of scientists that successfully orbited the COBE satellite with a Delta rocket that was so old and rusty that it had patches, but in the end the COBE team made discoveries that astounded the scientific world and proved what space based astronomy laboratories can do for the field of cosmology. 

In the revised edition of this book, Mather adds new information about his work on the James Webb Space Telescope, a telescope that could be more exciting than the Hubble Space Telescope.  (Follow the links to official NASA sites for each telescopes.)

I found The Very First Light to be a richly rewarding read into how scientists work and think.  Mather, along with his co-writer Boslough, make the story into a first person account, that quickly sketches pre-thesis discovery of the cosmic background radiation problem, to how a young scientist gets involved with NASA’s bureacacy and eventually goes to work on one of the most exciting scientific teams of the 20th century.  The book was too short for me, it could have been three times as long, and still I would have hungered for more details.

I’ve always wondered how those densely packed satellite probes are designed and built, and this book only roughly describes the process.  The book covers the three sensors of the COBE probe with NOVA science show level of details, but I ended up wanting a 13 part Ken Burns miniseries, the topic was so fascinating.   NASA does offer Legacy Archive for Microwave Background Data Analysis that has great detailed information on the COBE mission, as well as related probes that’s covered in The Very First Light for those people who want to know more.

When researching this review on the web, I noticed a lack of reviews for this book.  It first came out in the early days of the web, and the version I read is a revised edition published 9/29/08.  This book deserves more attention.  George Smoot, Mather’s co-winner of the Pulitzer, wrote his account of the COBE story in Wrinkles in Time, which appears to be out of print, but readily available used on Amazon and ABE.

JWH – 8/2/9

Making SETI Chit-Chat

Humans have been playing galactic wall-flower, afraid to make first contact with our alien neighbors, but what happens when a neighborly little green alien sends us an interstellar text message, what will we type back?  Linguists aren’t even sure if interstellar communication is even possible, but let’s say we overcome the language barrier rather quickly.  What will we say?  Yeah, I know, all those pesky scientists will want to send boring mathematical messages to see if our brains are bigger than theirs, or heaven’s forbid, it’s the other way around.

No, let’s say we can get down to some intelligent species to intelligent species chit-chat, what would you want to ask our new space alien buddies?  I think the first question I’d ask is, “Do you guys know many people from around here?”  I think the first thing I’d tell them would be, “Man, it’s been very lonely in this neck of the galaxy.  Geez, I was afraid we were the only sentient beings in the universe.”

Would we have enough in common to carry on a long distant relationship?  Another question I’d be anxious to ask, “Hey, you guys got television?”  Can you imagine the The Alien Channel?  I wonder if they have a better Monday comedy lineup than “How I Met Your Mother,” “Two and a Half Men” and “The Big Bang Theory.”  And what would they think of the human race if they could see “True Blood,” “Big Love,” “Dexter” and “Wipeout.”

SETI gurus assume we’ll have mathematics in common, and that might be true, but what might two intelligent cultures, separated by light years, share?  Music might be a possibility.  But imagine if giant redwood trees were big brain thinkers, with IQs of 300, but only they live in a world of little activity, with long slow lives.  What would they think of us hummingbirds?

Like the geek boys in Sixteen Candles, when asked what kind of proof they would accept, I’d also have to answer:  Video!  Even if we couldn’t understand our B.E.M. friends’ Monday night TV lineup, it would be great to watch anyway, like watching nature documentaries without sound.  Can you imagine the alien porn channel – “Whoa, did ya see that egg depositor on that giant beetle babe with the gold bikini last night!”  And would aliens feel like African Americans watching old movies with racial stereotypes when watching our science fiction films?

That brings up censorship.  Should we try to put on an act and project some kind of high minded normal view of human behavior, or just let it all hang out.  And would alien cultures be as diverse, bizarre and brilliant we we are?  What if we could load up some super laser canon with petabytes per second bandwidth, and blast all the daily human culture into the sky, what would they make of us?

What if they were brilliant mathematical lizards, but mainly lazed around laying eggs and thinking big thoughts about reality, would we blow their minds?  What if our alien neighbors made us feel like a race of Mother Teresas?  What if their pop culture is so vibrant that all we can do is form a cargo cult?

We have thousands of years of far out history that our children find boring.  We have magnificent sciences and mathematics to study, but our kids prefer listening to Lady Gaga or playing Call of Duty.  Most of our pop-culture is about mating, which I doubt has much interest to other intelligent species.  Will we have much to say to each other?  I don’t speak any other languages and seldom read web pages that aren’t based in the United States.  What does that say?

Science fiction always show alien diversity, with humans boogieing with all kinds of strange looking creatures, going on adventures, smuggling cargo, and being all PC BFF.  Einstein’s speed laws will make such joy riding very unlikely, but even if we could get close, would we want to?  Homo sapiens have all kinds of bacteria and viruses living in, on and around us.  Would we want to chance Wookie cooties?  And what’s the likelihood of becoming chums with another sentient race that enjoys the same mixture of air, temperature, gravity and atmospheric pressure as we do?

Science fiction has always assumed everything would be easy, and if we weren’t trying to exterminate each other, aliens would make great friends.  But I don’t know.  That might just be overly anthropomorphic, like imagining bears will be like Winnie the Pooh.

I want to know that aliens exist.  I want to share science and mathematics.  Passing tech tips back and forth will be great too.  But how much chit-chatting can we really expect?

Reality 

If we’re lucky, and I mean really lucky, like life on Earth lucky, we’ll one day detect an intelligent message coming from a not too distant star, hopefully within a few hundred light years.  At first only scientists will understand the signal, because it will probably take a great deal of abstract knowledge to understand the unnatural patterns in the signal from the rich existing energy patterns of our universe – and probably much of public will refuse to believe our eggheads. 

Slowly the science community will build their case that will convert the unbelieving.  It will take years, decades or even centuries to partly decipher the message, and when it’s revealed,  the communiqué probably won’t be all that exciting to the average woman and man, but just knowing we’re not alone will mean a lot philosophically.  Over vast periods, that span many lifetimes, we’ll slowly development interspecies communication.  And one day we might even get video, the real proof for the unbelievers.  Eventually, the excitement will die down, because it’s doubtful we’ll ever meet our new friends, and human life being what it is now, won’t make us that broad minded across light-years, because most of us are focused on the moment, the near and now.

We might be alone in the universe.  Then again, we might not.  But if we do discover other intelligent life, it won’t take away our existential loneliness.  Humans swarm over this planet by the billions, but most of them feel very lonely, because each of us is a singular soul, living as a solitary island castaway, tossing messages in bottles onto the sea, hoping for a little communication.  When the bottles must cross the distant shores trillions of miles away, it won’t feel any different.

Song of the Moment 

JWH – 7/28/9

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

The Time Machine is the big bang origin of the science fiction universe.  I’ve read The Time Machine a couple times before in my life, but I never noticed that it was the origin of all science fiction, but then I haven’t spent the last decade rereading the classics of science fiction before either.  On this third reading, this time via audio book, it seemed quite obvious that The Time Machine is the first science fiction novel.

Now a lot of people are going to argue with my revelation, by bringing up Jules Verne, or Mary Shelley, or many other stories that have fantastic elements in them.  And I completely understand because those stories are a kind of science fiction too.  No, I’ve come to the conclusion there are two types of stories labeled science fiction.  There’s the all-purpose label that imprecisely gets slapped onto almost any kind of far-out tale, and a second type, that’s very rare, that’s illustrated by what H. G. Wells wrote with The Time Machine.

This truer version of science fiction was created by Wells as a method to use science to speculate about the future.  Many writers have written stories that extrapolated the future from present trends, but Wells uses what he learned from the sciences, evolution and cosmology, to write what is essentially the matching bookend to the biblical book of Genesis.

The Time Machine comes after Charles Darwin, but before Albert Einstein and Edwin Hubble, but it’s message is just as thrilling and full of sense of wonder being read in 2009 as it was in 1895.  If you read this story as an adventure using a time machine, then you are seeing the book as generic science fiction.  If you read this book and realize that H. G. Wells is using his current day science to speculate about the evolution of man as a species, and the death of the Earth, then the term science fiction means something different.

H. G. Wells actually present three major speculative ideas for the readers of The Time Machine:

  • Time travel is the obvious idea that everyone talks about, but few people analyzes Wells theory for time travel.
  • Just a few decades after Darwin’s famous book, Wells suggests that mankind could branch into new species, and even species that aren’t as intelligent as home sapiens.
  • Finally, Wells paints a picture of the end of Earth after mankind is long gone.

H. G. Wells produces the essential elements of the science fiction novel out of these efforts.  Most people think inventing the concept of a time machine is the main science fiction element, but it’s not.  If the unnamed hero of this novel had traveled backwards in time, the time machine would only be a gimmick for writing historical fiction with a modern protagonist.  An absolute essential element of science fiction is its speculation about the future.

Many writers have suggested that Frankenstein is the first science fiction novel, but I don’t think that’s true, because the story wasn’t about the future.  It’s a horror novel.  A novel about a monster.  After reading The War of the Worlds immediately after The Time Machine and I’m struck by the immense difference between the two.  The War of the Worlds is an exciting novel, with far out aspects, and even sense of wonder, but it doesn’t feel like The Time Machine, it doesn’t feel like a science fiction novel that The Time Machine was.  It’s not about the future.  It’s about monsters from space.  It’s another horror novel.

Now I understand why I never felt H. P. Lovecraft was a science fiction writer even when he wrote about invaders from space.  I don’t know why movies like The Thing, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Them and all those other monster stories from the 1950s were considered classic science fiction films, putting them into same the genre as Forbidden Planet and 2001, A Space Odyssey.

When I start to think about this I see the term science fiction as a box for throwing all kinds of odds and ends into that are hard to classify.  Most people throw UFO or X-Files type stories into the science fiction box and I think that’s totally unfair.  Space travel doesn’t equal science fiction.  Aliens arriving in flying saucers is not science fiction, but just monsters from outer space.  ESP and all of that are just more monster stories.  The human race has a long list of monster stories, in fact most of the oldest stories, Gilgamesh, Ulysses, Beowulf, are about monsters.

The Time Machine gives us many clues to what real science fiction is about.  Another essential element is it’s speculation about seeing reality through scientific ideas.  When the Time Traveler visits the year 802,701 and our pinnacle of culture is forgotten, we are like Dorothy realizing we’re no longer in Kansas.  The difference between L. Frank Baum and H. G. Wells, is Wells uses scientific ideas in a different way than they were ever used before.  Instead of using science to understand the present and the past, he uses it to understand the future.

We will never know the future.  Science fiction isn’t about predicting the future.    Wells invented a kind of literature that tries to grok the future through scientific speculation.  By this measure Star Wars is not science fiction, but Star Trek sometimes is.  The War of the Worlds is science fiction, but not as much as The Time Machine.  Both novels are mostly fiction, but Wells weaves in concepts and speculation from the knowledge of 1895 science that he knew.  For instance, I’m trying to track down when astronomers first suggested the idea of the sun turning into a red giant.  It must be before 1895.

The odd thing about science fiction is you can’t learn science from science fiction.  You have to already know science to spot the science in science fiction.  It’s like jazz.  You can love jazz without understanding the concepts of music, but if you want to know what a jazz musician is doing, you have to understand music theory, even at a simple level.  Reading The Time Machine for me, was watching H. G. Wells take the science of 1895 and improvise speculative pictures of the future.

Most modern science fiction never even tries to do this.  Most science fiction is escapist adventure fiction.  Wells is working as a philosopher, using fiction with the lens of science, making science fiction a scientific instrument like the telescope, to show his readers something about the nature of reality and possible futures.  He’s pointing his finger at something, whereas most adventure science fiction doesn’t.  Real science fiction, as Wells invented it, points to a speculative concept.  It has something to say about reality, usually about the future.

But doesn’t all great literature point to something about reality?  The difference between fiction and science fiction is the science.  Most people study literary reality through lenses provided by culture, customs, upbringing, religion, and philosophy.  You have to study science to appreciate real science fiction, and few SF fans study scientific subjects.  Wells invented a kind of literature that many writers tried to copy, but few got it right.

And again, it’s not about predicting the future.  Time machines are extremely doubtful, and so are the Eloi and Morlocks.  Charles Darwin looks at nature and fossils and says, “Hey, there were probably other species of humans before us.”  Wells, takes that idea, and says, “Hey, maybe there will be others species of humans after us.”  That sounds very simple now, but try to do it yourself.  If you can, then you can write the kind of fiction I want to label science fiction.  If you take someone else’s speculative idea and turn it into fiction, for instance Star Wars, something I don’t want to call science fiction, then you aren’t doing what H. G. Wells did.

Yes, yes, I know I’m being very picky and splitting hairs, and probably sounding pretentious like those wine tasters who claim they detect all kinds of rare flavors when you can only taste alcohol.  Let me give you another analogy.  Watch the History Channel.  Can you tell when they are showing real history from made-up crap?  Many scholars would say The History Channel should be called the Science Fiction Channel.   I’m making two points here.  First, anything labeled History should be considered truly educational, and second, they are slamming The History Channel’s crap shows by using the label science fiction.

Can you see why I want to make a precise definition of science fiction?  One that will represent the best creative intentions of H. G. Wells, and not the one-size-fits-all box for weirdo ideas?

JWH – 6/24/9