outer space life: April 2007 Archives

Of course, you've already heard.

A team of European astronomers have discovered a planet five times as massive as the Earth orbiting a distant, dim red star known as Gliese 581. I've already started lamenting the proto-future, the first contact with extraterrestrial life, that I imagine my generation -- already so media savvy, so keen to negotiate alternative spaces with their own sets of digital constraints -- will probably just miss out on. I could cry, just weep, thinking about it.

Although most scientific developments of this magnitude -- including the recent discovery of another new planet within our the confines of our own solar system -- leave only blips on the cultural radar, this latest one is being bandied around like it was season 3 of LOST. We know very little about it, of course, considering it was detected like all extrasolar planets initially are: by measuring the infinitesimal gravitational wobble it causes in its home star, in this case, a red dwarf, a star a fraction as bright as our "sun." Our picture of it is not exactly in HD, to say the least.

What has everyone buzzing, however, is that Gliese 581 exists just within the slim parameters necessary for biological life. Not too close, nor too far, from its neighboring star, the planet's surface temperature vacillates inside of a tepid margin conducive to liquid water. The SETI people, chuffed, happy to be quoted about something people are interested in, tell us they've already checked Gliese 581 for signs of a radio signal, twice, to no avail. "We'll try again," they offer, eternally hopeful.

But this is as much as we know, at least until the planet's orbit crosses beams, so to speak, with the light emitted from its home star, in which case the fluctuations in wavelength and light-intensity will give us a few clues about its composition. Despite this profound intangibility, the headlines are all the same; the phrases "new Earth," and "super-Earth" are ubiquitous, while the selling point of the story is the potentially rocky, potentially water-friendly nature of the planet. Rocky, the articles specify, like Earth.

This attitude of immediately referring to the Gliese 581 object as being a "Super Earth" already adheres a first-generation science fiction mythology to something that is, pragmatically, only a faintly-detectable stirring in the gravitational balance of a distant star system. Why are we so eager to symbolically bequeath to Gliese 581 the nominal future of our own planet? Is it because we have no other conception of planetary "life" that we so quickly equate potential life with being inherently Earth-like? Can we not conceive of other modes of existence?

It says a great deal about our lack of imagination that we would throw such a loaded term around outer space; on a cosmic level, we are still conquistadors, feebly imaging ourselves 20 light years away, at home.

James Gardner is part of a new breed of complexity theorists: an armchair philosopher that goes beyond the epistemological, who posits broad, celebratory theories about the nature of the future of the universe. His first book, Biocosm, proposed the "Selfish Biocosm" hypothesis, which suggests that intelligence doesn't emerge in a series of Darwinian accidents, but is hard-wired into the cycle of cosmic creation; it's a really beautiful idea, putting us right at the center of a living, breathing, intelligent universe, which, incidentally, is the title of his newest book.

Dude also rolled with J.P. Sartre in 1967, edited the Yale Law Journal, counts Ray Kurzweil among his colleagues, and was a six-year Oregon State Senator. I also went to elementary school with his son.

Thanks to the good people over at the Willamette Week, I had the opportunity to pursue some really metaphysical, extended e-mail conversations with Jim Gardner, the most interesting of which is featured below. Get deep with me: it's worth it.

Universe: I'm interested in the process of explaining complex scientific ideas to a lay audience. There are moments of great elegance in your book, in terms of how compactly you manage to lay out huge ideas. Is this something you find difficult -- or, as a self-avowed "scientific generalist," does this sort of synthesis come naturally?

Gardner: The composition of both Biocosm and The Intelligent Universe was excruciatingly difficult for me. The two books presented the most daunting set of intellectual challenges I have ever confronted, both in terms of coming to grips with the implications of some very unusual ideas and then communicating those ideas and implications to a lay audience. That being said, there were extraordinary “Aha!” moments I experienced throughout the process of writing both books that were truly exhilarating—moments that more than compensated for all the pain.