Galaxies
purpose: space / time intimately related
humans can't think very far or deep in time, but knowledge of cosmic or outer space helps
Our universe 12-20 billion years old
Farthest objects 12-20 billion light years away
(equivalence of age and distance helps comprehend space as time, time as space)
(For the past 2-3 centuries--since telescope use became widespread--religious fundamentalists have not raised objections to Earth not being at the center of creation, to the enormous size of the observable universe, or even to the notion of life on other planets, which makes them potential targets for missionaries, as some science fiction has depicted.
(However, many fundamentalists continue to dispute the age of the cosmos or Creation, perhaps because time--in contrast to space, offers little direct visual evidence of itself. Not to pick on religious literalists--average secular people also have little knowledge of cosmic time or space.)
Andromeda Galaxy, "sister galaxy" to our own Milky Way galaxy
Milky Way 200-400 billion stars; 50 billion+ planets (estimate . . . more are actually being observed every year)
Milky Way / Andromeda spiral galaxies
Some dwarf galaxies 10 million stars
Some giant galaxies 100 trillion
(Meat 72 galactic rotations (225-250 million earth years)
200 billion galaxies in observable universe
distance across a galaxy overwhelms human mind; distance between galaxies is far greater . . . .
The star nearest to our star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years away. A space shuttle flying at its normal speed would need 150,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri.
All true according to empirical measurements, but . . .
How much difference does knowledge make?
Humans evolved without knowing this; not essential to our daily lives; cf. arguments over Creation / Evolution
What purposes to knowledge?
humility
imagination
Summary of aliens in natural reality and in fiction:
The main evidence of extraterrestrial life form is statistical. The universe has so many stars and planets that Earth's conditions for generating life are unlikely to be unique. (Scientists continue to investigate how life begins; in any case it started quite soon after the earth's formation--3.5 billion years ago? However, no other planet in our solar system appears to support life, at least no advanced life-forms. Fungi and "shower scum" remain possible.)
The enormous scale of the universe almost guarantees extraterrestrial life. However, the same enormity of scale fairly guarantees that life-forms on different planets or in different star-systems may never communicate with each other. Humans currently cannot imagine overcoming the distances involved in interstellar space. (See Voyager.) Science fiction must always invent hypothetical "warp drives" or "ansibles" to overcome these distances.
The fact that outer space is real and (probably) rich with life that we can never see or know about creates a rich and consequence-free field of reality for the imagination to play with.
Humans evolved as social creatures. We think about our past and future in almost exclusively human forms. Alien-contact science fiction imaginatively connects human forms to non-human life forms that may be out there.
Questions:
What relevance to literature (or pop culture) regarding alien contact?
What relevance to discussion of ecotopias?
Irony BK 43
Preview irony in “They’re made of meat”; Men on Moon;
extended metaphor
Hinterlands flies 7.2, 7.8
1.16] Tsiolkovsky 1 is fixed at the liberation point between Earth's gravity and the moon's, but we need a lightsail to hold us here, twenty tons of aluminum spun into a hexagon, ten kilometers from side to side. That sail towed us out from Earth orbit, and now it's our anchor. We use it to tack against the photon stream, hanging here beside the thing the point, the singularity we call the Highway. [the singularity = popular science term for advanced evolutionary-technological transformation]
[1.17] The French call it le metro, the subway, and the Russians call it the river, but subway won't carry the distance, and river, for Americans, can't carry quite the same loneliness. Call it the Tovyevski Anomaly Coordinates if you don't mind bringing Olga into it.
[1.18] Olga Tovyevski, Our Lady of Singularities, Patron Saint of the Highway.
[3.6] But when he opened her right fist, something spun free and tumbled in slow motion a few centimeters from the synthetic quartz of his faceplate. It looked like a seashell.
[8.1] Late that night Charmian brought a special kind of darkness down to my cubicle, individual doses sealed in heavy foil. It was nothing like the darkness of Big Night, that sentient, hunting dark that waits to drag the hitchhikers down to Wards, that dark that incubates the Fear. It was a darkness like the shadows moving in the back seat of your parents' car, on a rainy night when you're five years old, warm and secure.
[46] The two seats beyond her companion were quickly taken by a couple who were talking politics. Antoinette and Golf Shirt took up the political theme seamlessly. recycling, speaking just loudly enough to be overheard. Her face, as she spoke, was expressionless. A bird trilling on a limb.
[47] She sat so easily on her stool, as if it were a nest [extended metaphor].
[75] No light burned in that room, but the city's dim neon aura filtered in through venetian blinds and allowed him to see the faces of the dozen or more people who sat perched on the bed and the couch and the armchairs and the stools in the kitchenette. At first he thought that their eyes were open, but then he realized that the dull pupils were sealed beneath nictitating membranes, third eyelids [as in reptiles or birds] that reflected the faint shades of neon from the window. They wore whatever the last bar had called for; shapeless Salvation Army overcoats sat beside bright suburban leisurewear, evening gowns beside dusty factory clothes, biker's leather by brushed Harris tweed. With sleep, all spurious humanity had vanished. They were roosting.
[72] The lobby was deserted and the desk clerk bent over a crossword. The couple drifted silently across the lobby and into the elevator, Coretti close behind. Once he tried to catch her eye, but she ignored him. And once, as the elevator rose seven floors above Coretti's own, she bent over and sniffed at the chrome wall ashtray, like a dog snuffling at the ground.
[81] Sometimes, at dawn, perched on the edge of his unmade bed, drifting into sleep—he never slept lying down, now—he thought about her. Antoinette. And them. The belonging kind. Sometimes he speculated dreamily. . . . Perhaps they were like house mice, the sort of small animal evolved to live only in the walls of man-made structures.
[82] A kind of animal that lives only on alcoholic beverages. With peculiar metabolisms they convert the alcohol and the various proteins from mixed drinks and wine and beers into everything they need. And they can change outwardly, like a chameleon or a rockfish, for protection. So they can live among us. And maybe, Coretti thought, they grow in stages. In the early stages seeming like humans, eating the food humans eat, sensing their difference only in a vague disquiet of being an outsider.
[83] A kind of animal with its own cunning, its own special set of urban instincts. And the ability to know its own kind when they're near. Maybe.
Allusion
Hinterlands 1.15, 2.1, 2.8, 3.2 (Kurtz), 4.6 Bambi, 7.7
Kuhn allusion; cf. Poplar Street Study
2 stories involve humans leaving Earth
Chocco 213 our home here on this planet
"Hinterlands" (BC 58-79)
58 dreaming of wet, dark streets in winter. Pain
58 bonephone implant, patched directly into the pain centers
58 we’ve got business
59 a confirmed meatshot: a returning ship with active medical telemetry, contents one (1) body, warm, psychological status as yet unconfirmed
59 clinical depression. One of the occupational hazards of being a surrogate
59 “Where are you getting all that dope?”
59 Toby Halpert’s Place in the Universe
Worker’s Paradise back at L-5
59-60 Tsiolkovsky 1 is fixed at the liberation point between Earth’s gravity and the moon’s, but need a lightsail to hold us here [cf. cyberfiddle story]
60 hanging here beside the thing—the point, the singularity—we call the Highway.
The French call it le metro, the subway, and the Russians call it the river. . . Call the Tovyevski Anomaly Coordinates if you don’t mind bringing Olga into it. Olga Tovyevski, Our Lady of Singularities, Patron Saint of the Highway.
60 pictures of Saint Olga that Charmian had taped . . . Our Lady of the Highway
60 en route to Mars, solo; her role in the experiments could have been handled by a standard household timer.
61 easily the most photogenic cosmonaut of either gender
61 the Alyut was gone
61 a young physicist began to slam the side of his monitor, like an enraged pinball finalist protesting TILT.
61 elevator . . . up to Heaven looked like Hollywood’s best shot at a Bauhaus mummy case . . . .
62 Heaven . . . ripe Disney dream of homecoming
62 a constant stream of raw data
63 corporate logos
63 ritual of drugs in pockets
64 Olga, our first hitchhiker
64 She blipped back into our space time like some amateur’s atrocious special effect
64 She’d gone after the ship’s communications gear with her bare hands
65 right fist, something spun free . . . looked like a seashell
65 she came, in her martyrdom, to fill whole libraries with frozen aisles of precious relics . . . more than 2 million tissue slides
65 seashell. Exobiology . . . : one and 7/10 grams of highly organized biological information, definitely extraterrestrial
65 product of no known terrestrial biosphere . . . come from another star. Olga had either visited the place of its origin or come into contact, however distantly, with something that was, or had once been, capable of making the trip.
65 Major Grosz . .. ship vanished . . .234 days later he returned
66 committed suicide, Highway’s 2nd victim; elaborate recording gear blank
66 Soviet Union might avail itself of the best minds in Western psychiatry
66 dummy Highway boat . . . a prop, a set piece
67 Heaven runs on Greenwich Standard . . . Birds have a very hard time in the absence of true gravity
68 “We’re getting fragments from Hofmannstahl . . . ‘Shone Maschine,’ something . . . ‘Beautiful machine’ . . . “
68 a breath of Heaven’s air . . . like cool white wine
69 Texas accent
69 Chilean Jorge . . . I knew he was a live one, one of the 10%. Our DOA count runs at 20%. Suicide. 70% of the meatshots are automatic candidates for Wards: the diaper cases, mumblers, totally gone. Charmian and I are surrogates for that final 10%.
70 Heaven was built after a dead Frenchman returned with a 10-centimeter ring of magnetically coded steel locked in his cold hand, black parody of the lucky kid who wins the free ride on the merry-go-round. . . . that ring was the Rosetta stone for cancer. So now it’s cargo cult time for the human race. We can pick things up out there that we might not stumble across in research in a thousand years.
70 Charmian says that contact with ‘superior” civilizations is something you don’t wish on your worst enemy.
70 multinationals
71 “That’s your minute.” . . . more like 3 minutes
71 promise of pain . . . there each time
71 poem Hiro quotes, Teach us to care and not to care.
71 like intelligent houseflies wandering through an international airport
71 At the edge of the highway every human language unravels
71 but the highway governed by rules
72 Dozens of new schools of physics have sprung up in Saint Olga’s wake. . . . hear the paradigms shatter . . . lifework of some corporate think tank is reduced to the tersest historical footnote, and al in the time it takes your damaged traveler to mutter some fragment in the dark.
72 Smart flies stick with Black Box theory . . . what we put into the box and what we get back out of it . . . optimize this exchange
72 we aren’t the only flies who’ve found their way into an airport. We’ve collected artifacts from at least half a dozen wildly divergent cultures. “More hicks.”
73 when the gestalt clicks, Hiro and I meld into something else
73 he was right: something felt terribly wrong this time
74 imagined Charmian wading in the shallow water, bright drops beading on her thighs, long-legged girl in a fishpond in Heaven
74 the Fear found me, really found me, for the first time
74 vast, the very hollow of night, an emptiness cold and implacable. It was last words, deep space, every long goodbye in the history of our species.
75 long finger of Big Night . . . Olga knew it first, Saint Olga. She tried to hide us from it, clawing at her radio gear
75 He hit me with the pain switch . . . like a cattle prod . . . drove me through the Fear
75 almost homelike . . . .mold itself around an absence
76 a surgical manipulator is carefully programmed against suicides, but it can double as a robot dissector, preparing biologicals for storage.
She’d found a way to fool it. You usually can, with machines, given time. She’d had eight years.
77 Charmian brought a special kind of darkness . . . sealed in heavy foil. . . It was a darkness like the shadows moving in the back seat of your parents’ car, on a rainy night when you’re five years old, warm and secure.
77 business as usual, really. A bad day in Heaven, but it’s never easy.
77-8 They talked about Leni’s diagrams and about her ballpoint sketches of molecular chains that shift on command. Molecules that can function as switches, logic elements, even a kind of wiring, built up in layers into a single very large molecule, a very small computer.
78 We aren’t the only hinterland tribe, the only ones looking for scraps.
78 Cling to this dark, warm and close . . . get high enough . . . hear the sea . . something we carry with us, no matter how far from home.
78 She holds the current record. She kept a man alive for two weeks
78 We both have the drive, though, that special need, that freak dynamic that lets us keep going back to Heaven. . . . Some people just aren’t taken, and nobody knows why. And you’ll never get a second chance.
78 feeling of profound rejection. But I’d wanted to go, wanted it so bad. Charmian, too.
79 Olga must have know, must have seen it all, somehow … . Even now, knowing what I know, I still want to go. I never will
79 her white smile, forever.
Most of our time units are based on astronomy
1 day = 1 rotation of the Earth (night and day, light and shadow)
1 month = approximately 1 complete revolution of the moon (month = moonth)
1 year = 1 revolution of earth around sun.
Exception (non-astronomical units of time)
The week as 7 days has no observable basis in nature
Instead, cultural or scriptural < Genesis account of God creating world in 6 days, resting on 7th
Futurists like H. G. Wells have proposed 10-day weeks (with 3 day weekends)
instructor's questions
How does the unknown become known? (look for metaphors)
Does apocalypse become evolutionary adaptation?
aliens change environment--do humans adapt?
Risky for a present generation to tell the coming generation what's desirable. What we think of as adaptive or correct behavior and equipment may not be so in a changed environment.
In "Poplar Street," Sunny is a bad our out-of-control kid in the pre-alien environment. But her dangerous attributes adapt to the alien environment.
For instance, instead of obeying her parents and doing as the previous generations model, she observes the new circumstances
Parents' generation reaction:
Poplar Street 147 entitled to explanation
Poplar Street 147 “You’ve no right . . . “
Poplar Street 148 [Mrs. D] could easily dominate . . . if dressed appropriately
Poplar Street 150 weapons?
Poplar Street 150 cf. Twilight Zone
aliens: 147 “these things are no longer necessary”
Poplar Street 145 Sunny was the first child to defy her parents and venture outdoors
Poplar Street 157 children proving adaptable
Poplar Street 158 Sunny who mediated
Poplar Street 158 discovered patterns
Poplar Street 158 used expertise to bully the grownups
Poplar Street 158 began to seem natural to listen to Sunny
"humanization" of aliens
Poplar Street 156 regrettable, enjoyed
Poplar Street 157 interesting
Poplar Street 157 thoughtful
Resist or join up?
Poplar Street 158 Mr. Anderson = Messiah or experiment?
Poplar Street 158 living with Aliens
Belonging 45 mimetic
Belonging 49 human fixtures. Functions of the bar. The belonging kind.
Who are the aliens?
Infinitely adaptable forms
Ultimate thought experiment
"too crazy"--?
What's the use of reading stories that cross you up so much?
Literature of the future--it's not going to be this way,
But Pride & Prejudice not the way it was in 1800s in England
Huck Finn not the way it was in pre-Civil War America
But as close as most people get
critical thinking is modeled--Sunny watches and adapts rather than remembering what her parents told her
Literature provides a place where you can differ but keep talking
Since "it's just a story," the stakes aren't as high as in bridge-building
Literature entertains and instructs
But condition, train, exercise mind for various possibilities
Literature is like play, but purposeful play
K S Robinson, Future Primitive 9 cf. Play, like wrestling of tiger cubs
[study of literature allows margin of error]
Art imitates reality
An imitation of reality for the sake of learning about and shaping reality
Don't give you the answer for what the future will be
Defense of study of literature, art, humanities
"tell us the right answer"
the answer will change, the world has already changed since I asked the question
> learn how to think
meet the future on its own terms as well as ours
"The Poplar Street Study" (VN 140-148)
Poplar Street 140 nice lawns; gunfire, dogfight
Poplar Street 141 trouble center of block
Poplar Street 141 professionals, gone all day & tired at night
Poplar Street 142 not a social unit
Poplar Street 142 “Father Knows Best” reruns
Poplar Street 143 totally ineffectual in controlling her daughter
Poplar Street 143 car went dead
Poplar Street 143 enormous presence on the Desmonds’ lawan
piece of modern sculpture, huge, iridescent [metaphor]
Poplar Street 144 cf. 8-foot mood ring [metaphor]
Poplar Street 144 bulges = eyes
small, metallic boxes
Poplar Street 144 rubbing arms together; mechanical voice
Poplar Street 145 Sunny: “Gross out, really.”
Poplar Street 145 “We’re surrounded.”
Poplar Street 145 other blocks deserted?
Poplar Street 145 Sunny was the first child to defy her parents and venture outdoors
Poplar Street 146 aloft at moment of freezing
Poplar Street 146 the Andersons might be the key
Poplar Street 146 a professional, self-confidence
Poplar Street 147 entitled to explanation
Poplar Street 147 “these things are no longer necessary”
Poplar Street 147 “You’ve no right . . . “
Poplar Street 148 [Mrs. D] could easily dominate . . . if dressed appropriately
Poplar Street 149 [Sunny blurts]
Poplar Street 149 Sunny & Mother’s beer
+ Sunny observes
“They all look alike”—“Not to me.”
Poplar Street 149 “a force field” < Star Trek
+ fantasies of adventure-romance
Poplar Street 150 weapons?
Poplar Street 150 cf. Twilight Zone
Poplar Street 150 “Why did aliens invade a suburban neighborhood?”
Poplar Street 151 “Except for Sunny what?” 152 TV = routine; welcome programming suggestion
+ Sunny
Poplar Street 153 weekly physicals
Poplar Street 154 rat food . . . lab rats . . . a study
Poplar Street 154 just physicals x premonitions
Poplar Street 154 Whitman’s candies . . . hidden, must hunt
Poplar Street 154 Sunny: “I will”
Poplar Street 155 Sunny: “I get all the chocolate creams”
Poplar Street 155 never see Sunny stifled like that
Poplar Street 156 additional testing
Poplar Street 156 control group; necessary to remove you
Poplar Street 156 regrettable, enjoyed
Poplar Street 157 interesting
Poplar Street 157 children proving adaptable
Poplar Street 157 thoughtful
Poplar Street 157 Five years passed before they saw him on Poplar Street again
Poplar Street 158 Sunny who mediated
Poplar Street 158 discovered patterns
Poplar Street 158 used expertise to bully the grownups
Poplar Street 158 began to seem natural to listen to Sunny
Poplar Street 158 Mr. Anderson = Messiah or experiment?
Poplar Street 158 living with Aliens
"They're Made out of Meat," (VN 69-72)
all dialogue
Meat 69 probed them all the way through [humor: "cavity search"]
Meat 69 radio signals? Messages to stars?
Ø from machines
Meat 69 sentient meat?
Meat 70 a meat stage? Cf. orfolei
Meat 70 thinking meat?
Meat 70 explore universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual.
Meat 71 meat sounds . . . singing meat
Meat 71 [mission] contact, welcome, log in all sentient races or multibeings without prejudice, fear, or favor
Ø erase records and forget whole thing
Meat 71 being meat, they can only travel through C space . . . limits. Makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal
Meat 71 So we just pretend there’s no one home in the universe
Meat 72 meat’s dream
Meat 72 marked the entire sector unoccupied
Meat 72 hydrogen core cluster intelligence
in contact 2 galactic rotations ago
Meat 72 Imagine how unbearably . . . unutterably cold the universe would be if one were alone
"Men on the Moon" (VN 238-247).
Originally in alternative futures section
How fit there?
Shares some reality with dominant culture, but sees it differently, reacts differently
Alt future as multicultural
Defamiliarizes technology, mission
Plus puts American space mission in historical continuum: "Space, the Final Frontier"; "New Frontier"
238 TV, Father’s Day, Sunday Mass
238 coat for 20 years
238 antenna (not cable)
238 snowing
239 two men struggling with each other. Wrestling
239 Apache Red. Chiseh tsah
239 wondered why they were fighting (x-virtual reality)
239 an object with smoke coming from it
240 didn’t know many words in Mericano
240 Faustin remembered that the evening before he had looked at the sky and seen that the moon was almost in the middle phase. . . . Are those men looking for something on the moon?
240 looking for knowledge
Faustin wondered if the men had run out of places to look for knowledge on the Earth
240 Rocks. Faustin laughed quietly
240-1 Indian school, some strange and funny things
241 The rocket was trembling and the voice was trembling.
241 voice from the TV wasn’t excited anymore . . . almost bored
242 TV, his daughter said. You watch it. You turn it on and you watch it.
Were you afraid this one-eye would be looking at you all the time? Amarosho laughed and gently patted the old man’s shoulder.
242 When he finished he studied the sky for a while.
242 That night, he dreamed.
Flintwing Boy was watching a Skquuyuh mahkina come down a hill.
243 It looks like a mahkina, but I’ve never seen one like it before. It must be some kind of Skquuyuh mahkina. [cf. Moon and America]
243 It walked over and through everything.
243 they faced east. [cf. Sun People?] Flintwing Boy said, We humble ourselves again. We look in your direction for guidance. We ask for your protection. We humble our poor bodies and spirits because only you are the power and the source and the knowledge.
244 without any rush
244 And now, Anaweh, you must go and tell everyone. Describe what you have seen. The people must talk among themselves and decide what it is about and what they will do.
244 went outside. The moon was past the midpoint
244 voice seemed to be separate from the face
245 He weighs less, the old man wondered, and there is no air except for the boxes on their backs. He looked at Amarosho but his grandson didn’t seem to be joking with him. [cf. Amarosho and Anaweh]
245 no life on the moon. Yet those men were trying to find knowledge on the moon. [i. e., no one to tell?]
245 He couldn’t figure out the mahkina. He wasn’t sure whether it could move and could cause fear. He didn’t want to ask his grandson that question.
246 Do they say why they need to know where everything began? Hasn’t anyone ever told them?
247 It’s a dream but it’s the truth, Faustin said. [cf. Revelation]
I believe you, Nana, his grandson said.