^B00:00:01 >> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. ^E00:00:04 ^B00:00:18 >> Jane McAuliffe: And welcome to this third of the Bloomberg Dialogues. This one entitled "Stories about Life in the Cosmos: Historical, Cultural, and Artistic Perspectives on Astrobiology." I am Jane McAuliffe, the director of the John W. Kluge Center, and very pleased that we can conclude such a successful year of Bloomberg Dialogues with this third one. This is the moment when I do ask you to silence your cell phones, and also remind you that this is being filmed for the Library of Congress and the Kluge Center websites, as well as for the Kluge Center YouTube and iTunes U channels. Just a word or two about both the Kluge Center and the Bloomberg Astrobiology Program, before I get to the introduction of this dialogue and its directors. The Kluge Center was created about 15 - exactly 15 years ago - through a generous gift from the philanthropist John W. Kluge. Fundamentally, the Kluge Center does three things. It hosts scholars in residence, both senior and junior, for extended periods of research in the collections of the Library of Congress. Over the course of a year, we have about 100 or 120 scholars here in residence. We also mount a great number of public programs, such as the one that you'll be enjoying this afternoon. These are hosted by the Kluge Center on an almost weekly basis, and attract audiences from all over the Washington area and beyond. The final thing that we do is every few years, we manage the selection process for the Kluge Prize, which is a million-dollar prize in the humanities and social sciences, for those areas that are not covered by the current group of Nobel Prizes. We are very close to the announcement of the next Kluge Prize. It will be announced next week. And this year, because we are celebrating our 15th anniversary, the amount of the prize, instead of being one million, will be one point five million. So somebody is getting very lucky next week. The Bloomberg Astrobiology Program. This is a fascinating and unique - ^E00:02:48 ^B00:03:30 This afternoon so that I can thank her in person for her dedication and commitment to this program. The Bloomberg Dialogues, the three Bloomberg Dialogues, have gathered scholars across the fields of the humanities and the social sciences during this year. This third dialogue brings together distinguished scholars in the fields of literature, history, media studies, and rhetoric. These scholars, from whom you will hear this afternoon, have spent a day and a half in conversation, and we're very much looking forward to harvesting the insights of their intensive workshops. Next year, we will welcome our next Bloomberg chair, who is Nathaniel Comfort, a historian of science from Johns Hopkins University, and he will be here in the Kluge Center, which I think most of you know is right next door as of October 1st. We are starting another round of competitive adjudication of applications for the Bloomberg chair, and those applications are due December 1st. Details are on our website, so if you know any colleagues who would be interested in this opportunity, be sure and let them know about it. I'm particularly grateful to Derek Malone-France and John Baross for directing these dialogues. And I will introduce each of them in turn, and then will ask them to introduce our panelists for this afternoon. Dr. Derek Malone-France, who is standing here, is an Associate Professor in the departments of Philosophy and Religion at the George Washington University. He's also the executive director of GW's university writing program. Last fall, he taught an undergraduate course entitled "Human Existence and the Search for Life beyond Earth," which explored contemporary, philosophical, religious, political, and social implications about the ongoing search for life in the universe. He's the author of two monographs, the first Deep Empiricism: Kant, Whitehead, and the Necessity of Philosophical Theism, and the second Faith, Fallibility, and the Virtue of Anxiety: An Essay in Religion and Political Liberalism. And I know he has just started a sabbatical, which accounts for his beatific glow. [ Laughter ] Dr. John Baross is a Professor in Oceanography and the Astrobiology program at the University of Washington, and he is seated here in the front row. And you will hear from him very soon. He specializes in ecology, physiology, and taxonomy of microorganisms, from hydrothermal vent environment - extreme ocean environment. More broadly, he's interested in the origins of life and the possibility of life on other planetary bodies. In recognition of his work, John was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. He's also a member of the American Society for Microbiology, the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the International Society for the Study of the Origin and Evolution of Life. I now turn you over to Derek and John, and again, a word of welcome to all of you this afternoon. >> Derek Malone-France: Thank you, Jane. And thank you so much to Jane and to everyone at the Kluge Center. Too many people to name, but lots of wonderful support for a program that has been just the most exciting thing in my life this year. It's been great experience, and I want to thank Mary Voytek as well from NASA for her support for all of the things associated with the Bloomberg chair. We are joined today, along with myself and John, by nine distinguished scholars, and it was a real pleasure to discuss a wide range of really profound issues over the last two days with them. And I'm looking forward to hearing what they have to say now as well, and I'll introduce them just by name, and title, and institutional affiliation, because the list of accomplishments would go on for the whole few hours that we have. D. Graham Burnett is Professor of History at Princeton University, and Kenneth Knoespel is the McEver Professor of Engineering and the Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech. Marc Raboy is the Beaverbrook Chair in Ethics, Media, and Communications and a Professor in the department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Robert Marzec is Associate Professor of Environmental and Post-Colonial Studies in the department of English at Purdue University, and David Bates is Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. What we'll have now are a few minutes of comments by each of our panelists, followed by a bit of exchange and then an open Q and A with you, the audience. So take notes, think about what you'd like to ask for more information about or press back on, and we hope to have a lively exchange with you as well. So we'll go ahead and get started with Ken. >> Kenneth Knoespel: Okay. Before anything else, I would like to thank the Kluge Foundation, and really the work that the Bloomberg Foundation has done, together with NASA, to bring us together for these conversations that we've had over the past day and a half. These have been important conversations. As a cultural historian of science and technology at Georgia Tech, I have focused a lot of my research on the legacy of Isaac Newton, within Europe and beyond. I also have had the opportunity over an extended period of time to participate at Georgia Tech and other institutions, in the transformation of disciplines. ^M00:10:01 Really the development of curricula that would engage both the sciences, technology, engineering, and the human sciences. Humanities and social science. I think that one of the things that has been so striking in our conversations over the past two days has been John Baross's repeated emphasis that astrobiology takes us to the very inception of a new Darwinian voyage. And that Darwinian voyage, that we in many ways are already engaged in, anticipates a broad range of different discoveries. Discoveries, of course, that will happen beyond this planet. But also, I think, as our discussion in the coming minutes will indicate, discoveries about ourselves. This discovery of what it means to be a human, what it means to be an individual, what it means to work together in effect as a community, as we look forward to receiving the significance of these discoveries that we anticipate. I'm so struck in our conversations that we are at a point where we're really engaged in thinking about a new engagement of disciplines. The term came up very recently, really a post-disciplinarity. I think given the range of discussions that are taking place within not only the United States but the world today about the future of education, astrobiology is in a position to really participate very vigorously in those discussions. For example, not too long ago, I had the opportunity of talking to a young woman coming in to Georgia Tech who sat across from me at my desk and said, "I have perfect SAT scores. Can you assure me that I'm not going to waste either half of my brain?" I take this reaction from this young woman as a challenge to think about moving beyond the limits that currently we find very frequently within our curricular designations within institutions. I think that this is a challenge that astrobiology gives us. Now, there are three challenges that I also find myself engaged in thinking more about giving - given our discussions. One of them is to really look at the significance of not simply astrobiology, but the way in which astrobiology invites us to continue to think about terrestrial biology. This question of who we are, and where we are going. And above all, this emphasis on a human community working together. The second challenge that I think a lot about is - involves really the international context of the work that we're being challenged to do. While we inevitably think about the leadership of the United States and NASA, we find ourselves obviously at a point where the work, where the discoveries that we're engaged in are going to have worldwide significance. The other challenge, and the challenge that we spent a lot of time talking about in the past day and a half, is one that I think is very close to home with lots of people within the human sciences. And that is interpretation. What do these new discoveries mean? And the interpretation of these discoveries, as embedded as they certainly will be in ongoing work in science and technology, also involve the work of many, many people in our generation, in coming generations, of what they mean for us as human beings. So it's been a pleasure for me to participate in these discussions and I look forward to really our ongoing work together as a group of participants in these discussions, and with the broader community. >> Marc Raboy: Thank you. Mark. Thank you - first I totally echo Ken's words of appreciation. It's been a fantastic experience to be here the past two days, and I can't thank you all enough for it. I'm going to take a completely different approach in the few minutes that I have. As was mentioned in the introduction, I'm a professor of media studies. Media and communication studies, and under that rubric I think about a number of things. What I want to talk about here is some of the issues raised by the way in which media construct narratives and create what most people understand as knowledge about the world, and what is frequently very distorted. Not to say imperfect, not to say imaginary knowledge about the world, and I'll - I'll end with a point to some of the ethical issues that that raises, and I hope you'll see that there is a connection with the topic of astrobiology there. So what I'd like to do, and there are obviously numerous examples that one could raise, but I want to point to a particular set of examples with regard to the types of concerns that are raised by the astrobiology program. I ask you to imagine for a moment what the world was like to people living before the discovery of what we know today as the radio spectrum. Radio waves, and all the ways in which we communicate using these invisible, inexplicable to a certain extent, means of communication. And when the radio spectrum was first discovered around the end of the 19th century, it raised all kinds of ideas in the minds of people who had been thinking about things like spiritualism, communication with the dead, or psychical research. Ways of explaining inexplicable phenomena, or telepathy. And the example I want to use is one involving the person who actually first developed a practical system for using the radio spectrum to communicate. An Italian-British inventor by the name of Guillermo Marconi, who may be familiar as a name to some of you, who is often thought of as the inventor of radio, but who is more properly the inventor of the use of wireless technology to communicate. When Marconi first came on the scene and showed that it was possible to use this invisible, inexplicable medium of what we now call the radio waves to send intelligible signals, the popular media of the time, newspapers - we're only talking about newspapers and magazines, now - seized upon this as a tremendous evocative possibility, and the kind of question that was often posed to Marconi was, "Mr. Marconi, when are we going to be able to communicate with Mars?" Marconi, being very down-to-earth, shall we say, would sometimes reply by saying, "Well, I think we have enough problems with trying to deal with communication here on Earth." And sometimes, he would be a bit flippant and say, "Communicate with Mars - why not?" If he actually said that, newspapers like the New York Times would publish headlines saying "Marconi says we are about to communicate with Mars." So you can imagine the kind of turbulent context that this would create in the community at large about questions, about fears, possibilities, all the kinds of questions that could be raised by what was essentially very imperfect information about the capacity of technology at the time. Now, I don't have time to go into other examples, but something that might be familiar to people in the room is Orson Welles' famous 1938 radio broadcast "The War of the Worlds," which was a fictitious broadcast, but purporting to be an actual breaking news report about an invasion - a real-time invasion of the Earth by aliens from Mars. Which created panic in some parts of the North American population at the time. So to tie this back to what we're talking about, I think the kinds of issues that are raised by this, by media representations of important and poorly understood questions. ^M00:20:03 It raises - it points to issues about the balance between rights and freedoms. Freedoms like Freedom of the Press - I mean, who's going to say the New York Times cannot publish a headline saying we're about to communicate with Mars. Or artistic freedom. I mean Orson Welles - should he be allowed to imagine a story about an invasion of aliens, and should CBS - is it responsible for then to actually broadcast that as though it is not necessarily a piece of fiction, but as some form of reality? Then we come back to our own time, which is characterized by information abundance, and by so much misinformation and ways in which it is actually easy nowadays, using social media, new technologies, to actually insulate oneself in a world of their own making. I mean, what kind of ethical, sociopolitical, cultural questions does this raise? Thank you. >> Derek Malone-France: Thank you, Mark. Robert? >> Robert Marzec: Okay. Well, my name is Robert Marzec. I'm a professor at Purdue University. And I also want to thank Derek Malone-France and Don Chiarello, and John Baross, for inviting me to be a part of this exciting exchange of disciplines, which is very new to me. I should say that I had never really thought about astrobiology in any serious way before coming here. My background is in post-colonial studies, and in environmental studies. My research is very concerned about the future of the planet. Its habitation, its species, human race, and I especially focus on climate change and specifically the transformation of the human species into a large global-scale force in the course of the last two centuries. Human are impacting the planet, impacting habitations in ways that they never did before. It's no longer an impact on a local scale; it's an impact on a global scale. We have become planetary movers, and we are now in the midst, because of climate change, of what scientists are now calling the sixth greatest species extinction, with something like 30 to 50 percent of life on the planet dying off, purportedly within the next century. What interests me about NASA's astrobiology program is its concern for life. The origin of life, what constitutes life, what makes life possible, how we can promote life. How we can concern ourselves with habitations. What it means to inhabit a planet. The discovery of life outside of our own planet can be a very hopefully humbling experience. It will be interpreted many different ways, but I would hope that a kind of humbling experience would happen with humanity on a global scale. To get humans to rethink their position as being the center of the universe. I want to bring up an image for a second here. I'll wait for this to come up. This is an image of the transformation that humans have had on the planet, just over the course of roughly the last 50 years. What you're looking at is a description of the globe in terms of humans and land mammals per weight across the globe. I want you to see in the darker area here is the weight of humans and their impact on the planet, and human pets and livestock - you'll notice how all of these greyer areas and black areas express the kind of human colonization of the earth. Everything directed towards a kind of anthropocentric concern. The green areas are wild animals. Animals that are not really about what humans want on the planet. Now, this is one way to think about humans in what many scientists are now referring to as the next geological age, the Anthropocene, which is a human-controlled, human-dominated planetary system. A discovery of life off of our planet would hopefully impact the way that we treat our own planet. The way that we think of our own forms of habitation on the planet. And there are many organizations across the Earth now that are very concerned about habitation. This is not just an abstract issue. There are organizations like the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement, which started with just about 200 people who were forced up to the point of starving because of not having access to an ecosystem, to a habitation that could enable them to survive. So because they didn't have the capacity to survive, and this had to do with larger corporations taking over their land and not letting them plant, so that they could have food to sustain their existence, to not have a sustainable existence, they began to squat in certain territories. This movement, which began with simply 200 people, has now blossomed into over 300 million people and families, with schools and universities, and they work globally, transnationally, with organizations like the Via Campesina, the international peasant farmer's movement. This is an understanding of habitation on a planetary scale. And what I would hope, with the interest that NASA has with the discovery of life elsewhere, that we are not the only and not the supreme form of existence, and that we could rethink our relationship to the many species on our own planet that we don't even know about that are in some ways just as alien as a species from outside of our own solar system or outside of our own planet. And that to me has really changed the way that I think about the potential that astrobiology could impact the humanities. >> Derek Malone-France: Thank you. David? >> David Bates: Thanks. I'd like to just talk briefly here today a little about the language, the discourse or some of the metaphors that we use to talk about life. And particularly biological systems, when we think about searching for life, whether on Earth or in other systems of the universe. I recently came across an article in the New York Review of Books that discussed some of the recent origins of life debates and exobiological debates, and the title was "The Teeming Trillions of Machines that Make Up Our Bodies." And I think this is a really indicative of the way that we think about biology today, is that we are made up of trillions of metabolic machines, replicating machines, information machines even. And this is perfectly consistent with a broader range of discourses around neurophysiology, cognitive neurosciences, that emphasize that living systems, including complex mammals and even human beings, are essentially a kind of engineered system. Engineered through evolution now, rather than a god creator perhaps, but nonetheless automatic systems in particular. And I think that these are not mere metaphors, in that we could argue and talk a little bit more that one of the challenges today is that we live in a society that's increasingly defined by technologization and automatization. What does it mean to be part of a system that really does have these kinds of automatic tendencies? Now this link between the metaphors and thinking about life is obviously a long historical process that we could go back at least to Descartes, who thought about the body in terms of automatic machines and clocks of his 17th-century moment. Hydraulic systems. We can think about the 19th-century discovery of electrical communication, the telegraph system, which spurred new ideas about the nervous system, in particular the brain, as something analogous to a telephone switching device was also possible by the time of the 20th century, and then into the 1940s the most probably influential metaphor of all would be the brain as a digital computer, which was developed very early in the history of computing technologies. What I'd like to point out is that in some ways we're still living in this era of the 1940s and '50s and the development of cybernetics, it was no longer the metaphors of machines and living systems, but in fact an explicit theory that there were only natural and artificial cybernetic organizations. In other words, there was no qualitative difference between a natural and an artificial machine, let's call it. So what I'd like to do here is just briefly mention a kind of counter to this tradition, the French philosopher Georges Canguilhem, who was a philosopher of science and technology, writing just after the war on this question of machine and organism. What he pointed out in this essay was that a machine, no matter how complicated, it could be a learning machine, an adaptive machine, a very sophisticated machine, it was always going to be defined by its material organization. Its engineering. Its - let's say it's fixed by the design of its own organization. ^M00:30:12 Now that meant, no matter how complicated the behavior of this machine, if it broke down, if it had an error, if it failed, you would just have a disaster. In other words, it would stop functioning. Now Canguilhem thought about living systems as capable of something quite different - what he called improvisation. A living system, when it encountered an error, an obstacle, a pathology, could improvise. His example was the intestine of a rabbit that could become a uterus in an emergency, or more dramatically, the stroke of a child, where half the brain is destroyed, and yet due to the plasticity of the nervous system, the child would develop normal cognitive abilities. The point I would like to make here is not to simply reanimate this debate between machines and organisms, but since we are still living with the legacy of cybernetics, is to think a little bit more carefully about what Canguilhem was arguing about living systems. Living systems I think what he was trying to say are not what they are - in other words, whatever they happen to be at a specific moment in time, they were capable of becoming something else. Not just in the process of evolution, but as a living system, that individual was capable of becoming what it was not. Now if we take that seriously, I think that does not mean that we are going to counter this machinic language of the contemporary era with a vague mysticism or a vague theological vitalism. I think we have to take seriously, what does it mean for something to become what it is not? That for me is an argument for thinking much more creatively about what machines are, what open systems are, what technologies are possible, rather than simply opposing an older vitalism and a kind of hard-nosed mechanism. And I think when we talk about astrobiology in particular, that's a very provocative question. I just offer this as an example of what a critical history of our own contemporary language and discourse might offer us for some new directions for thinking along these lines. Thanks. >> Derek Malone-France: Thank you. Graham? >> D. Graham Burnett: Thank you. Is my slide up? >> Derek Malone-France: Yes. >> D. Graham Burnett: It's a pleasure to be with you this afternoon. I was introduced as a historian of science from Princeton, and that's true, but it's not in that capacity that I'll be speaking with you here for the next four or five minutes. I'm really here today as a kind of an amateur advocate, and as a representative of an organization that has some significant ties to the astrobiological questions that have been in conversation in these last two days. So I thought I would just take a moment to run you through the website for the Society for the Protection of Exobiological Microorganisms. Many of you here will know that, while a lot of the conversation around extraterrestrial life in the past has sort of circulated around a slightly obsessive preoccupation with finding creatures like us, creatures with faces. Most of the folks who are seriously invested in research in astrobiology now are spending most of their time focused on really relatively small organisms such as we might really genuinely encounter at some point in the not too distant future. I'm thinking of things like the thermophilic bacteria that inhabit the deep-water vents here on Earth, and other kinds of sort of extreme environment microorganisms that can live in hyper-saline environments, and practically pure sulfur, and all kinds of terrible places. Terrible places very much like those on many of the planets and other celestial bodies in the cosmos. Now we haven't yet - it's very important to say - encountered yet any of these microorganisms, but we may. And the kinds of conservation and protection questions that will come up, if and when we do, are very much like those that we encounter with the kinds of organisms we're concerned about here on Earth, where questions of the protection of biodiversity are of course essential and very important to many of us. And of organized political action. So we admit that we're a little perhaps ahead of the curve in certain ways. It's been the Society for the Protection of Exobiological Microorganisms, and I just thought I would sort of give you an opportunity, if you come to care about some of these questions, to contact us and get involved. And it's a pleasure for me to look around and see a number of friends of the organization here in the audience today. Founded by a handful of concerned citizens in 2015, the Society for the Protection of Exobiological Microorganisms is one of the country's most effective trans-galactic conservation associations. [ Laughter ] Dedicated to meaningfully and ethically responsible stewardship of celestial micro-fauna, SPEM fights on behalf of hypothetical extraterrestrial entities that cannot be seen with the naked eye. It's possible that these complex life forms play essential roles in the ecology of the cosmos, and SPEM serves as a crucial forum for the education, advocacy, and policy-making that bears on their future. So some of you will have recognized immediately that our logo, "SPEM in alium," is actually a Latin phrase, meaning "hope in any other," and of course that is a big part of who we are at SPEM. And I won't play for you the beautiful Thomas Tallis motet, but if you follow up on the site you'll get a chance to see. What kinds of things can you do if you get involved with SPEM? Well, SPEM is currently working on several important new initiatives, and volunteers can contribute in important ways. Active projects include the "Thermophile Working Group," the "Enceladus Plume Circle," and the "Pro-Tem Consortium for Astrobiological International Law." It took a long time to evolve the large-scale conservation regimes that govern the protection of macro-fauna here on Earth, and we foresee real challenges in extending those transnational regimes inter-galactically. But we are already thinking about those questions, as are many people at NASA. Questions of property rights on non-Earth bodies have already of course come up, and there's a lot of serious work to be done on that. And we seek to inform ourselves - again we are primarily amateurs, not experts - but we wish to link experts who may not otherwise have seen that they should have connections. So we seek - we also have a number of regional citizen's collectives, which seek to gather like-minded conservationists and amateur astronomers, and what we call speculative biologists. So there's opportunities for outreach. You know, very briefly, you know a lot of folks have wondered about whether, in the end, reproducing the kinds of structures that protect rare and threatened macro-fauna on Earth are suitable for extension to non-terrestrial environments, and at this point SPEM's position that we do strongly advocate for the foundation of extensive planetary preserves and reserves, wherein the diversity of exobiological life, undisturbed, may endure in natural environments. Stewardship of the extraterrestrial environments for future generations is an essential goal of the SPEM initiative. So again, if you want to return to get involved, you'd have an opportunity to think about that. And I'll close just quickly by mentioning that, you know, we are effectively and consortium advocacy body, so we rely not only on volunteer input from people like you who might want to get involved, but we also look to extend our network of engaged communities and certainly we've had some luck with that so far. We're still trying to work on some of these organizations, but we thought we would put their logos up now just to indicate that we think of them as in our circle. [ Laughter ] Thank you for your attention. >> Derek Malone-France: Thank you. Alright, well I want to now give an opportunity for audience members who have questions to move towards the microphone. It's located here sort of towards the center back, and while they do, if any of our panelists have questions for one another or further comments they'd like to make, having heard what one another have said. Maybe I'll get it started with you, Ken, and ask you a little bit more specifically, in terms of answering that challenge from that young woman who came to speak with you, as you turned back around to your own university and looked at the ways in which departments and programs, and faculty appointments, and all of that are structured, what's your hopefulness in terms of that kind of post-disciplinarity? >> Kenneth Knoespel: I would respond to the question by looking at the development of programs that have been remarkable successful in the United States that provide a kind of model for the interdisciplinary work that I have been really talking about. Bioengineering is one of the strongest-growing programs that brings together work in biology and engineering. It has attracted an enormous number of not only excellent students, but excellent women. And it has done so by focusing attention first and foremost on problem-based education. And I think problem-based learning is something that I trust most of our colleagues in the audience are well aware of. But the objective is to create communities of people from multiple disciplines working on a common problem. Not simply thinking that biology or mathematics or computer science is going to have the sole answer for the solution, but that the answer is going to come from both faculty and students, and in many cases faculty learning from very, very smart students. ^M00:40:06 How it is possible to begin formulating answers to some of these extraordinarily complicated problems that we're continuing to confront. That excites students. It excites students that move well beyond a really defined limits very often of defined curricula within many of our institutions. I think that astrobiology is really a challenge that will continue to really draw that - draw that forward even more. >> Derek Malone-France: Okay, thank you. Other thoughts along those lines? I'll remind people that mic is right over there. Marc, thinking further about your comment about misinformation, misunderstandings, the abundance now - and I know you've worked a lot on issues of governance, civil society, and then also the general public interaction with the media. In your experience dealing with those issues in other areas, what sort of shifts, generally speaking, do you think need to happen to make these conversations both more educational and providing an opportunity for the public to genuinely give robust and substantive feedback to policy-makers and decision-makers? >> Marc Raboy: Well right now there is a tremendous uncertainty about the way in which information media are headed. I mean, legacy media are frantically looking for ways to transform themselves so they continue to survive in the new environment. And there are new uses of media emerging every day. So to - when I think about the question you asked, I try to look at it in a very, very broad overview sense. I mean, for example, issues connected with Internet governance, which covers everything from spam to the ways in which news is disseminated. These are tremendously important issues that cannot be handled within any one national framework. So there actually are international venues, global venues, in which these questions are being discussed. And there is a wide array of actors from international organizations to national governments, the technical community that is continuing to develop technological tools and so on, and civil society organizations. So, I mean that's a general response to this. I think to the extent to which we can have some kind of vigorous, robust democratic debates, starting at the local level and percolating up to the international global level - I mean, that's the only way, I think, that we can begin to get a handle on these issues. >> Derek Malone-France: Okay. Sir? >> That - oops. Excuse me, it turned on. One thread that I noted in the discussion among the interdisciplinary approaches here was - seemed to be this concept of life. And how the various disciplines, the hard sciences and the soft sciences, if you will, conceive of this notion, and how move forward as a society to come to grips with what is the implications of astrobiology for life. Whether it's the microorganisms of the extraterrestrial boundaries of us, or others. And part of human nature seems to have dealt with this, in the context of mysticism, religions if you would. But mystical notions of life, and what that means in terms of the media representations of how we think about ourselves, or life in general. So I'm rambling, but the basic notion I - for folks to respond to would be, what's it mean now that we have life as a focus of astrobiology? >> Derek Malone-France: Thank you. That's a great question. Anybody want to get the ball rolling on that? >> Well, I mean, historically that's where the ball got rolling, was really with the development of a sort of modern, scientific, mechanistic worldview. In the 17th century, life was the key problem. It was the challenge. I think that's something that we shouldn't think has disappeared. I think that we were talking in our sessions already yesterday about the fact that there is no definition of life that people are really comfortable with, and yet it seems to animate a lot of our interests in this arena. So I think that recognizing it's an open question is really important, but understanding it is a question that has a historical, a political, a moral valence is essential, as I think with the SPEM initiative, it's to recognize that these questions have larger consequences. So that when Europeans in the 17th and 18th century went out to collect specimens of life, and understand life in this new context, it went along with a military and a colonial expedition. That's something that we want to think about even before alien life becomes a problem. >> Derek Malone-France: Ken, did you want to... >> Kenneth Knoespel: I thank you for your question about mysticism, and I think I would be very interested in relating it really to the comment about humility. That there seems to me to be sometimes a lack of humility. And I think that if we can engage in projects such as astrobiology, with a kind of reverence, to use a word that sometimes isn't used very often, but a word that fits certainly with humility, one allows oneself to have room for what our cultures - our multiple cultures have shared within the context of that word "mysticism," which is a very, very broad spectrum indeed. But I don't think - I think the point I would make is that discussion about astrobiology does not, in effect, draw an X over what our cultures have regarded or have experienced as mysticism. >> Derek Malone-France: Robert, did you want to... >> Robert Marzec: When you speak of mysticism, to me that indicates a kind of desire of the human to be more than what it is. A moment of transcendence. John Baross, who I sense in his concern for astrobiology, it's to be able to transcend the moment that we are right now. I think we've developed especially in the West a culture that forgets what life is. Life, the orientation of the culture is now towards a kind of economic transcendence, more consumerism. Which in my mind is not about life. That has generated, in fact, an increasing destruction of life across our planet. And so if this raises issues of life, multiple definitions of life and for me one of the key definitions of life is to open up more possibility. And not to let the desire to be more than what you currently are transform into something that can be self-destructive or destructive of other organisms, or destructive of an ecosystem or habitation. So I think that, if this brings a global conversation about life, that would be amazing. >> Derek Malone-France: Other questions from the audience? Until someone comes up to the mic, I'll add a thought there as well, which connects to what David said about mechanism and the way that we think about organisms like ourselves and those that we study. And it's an interesting - I don't know if irony is actually quite the right word, but the fact that we have come to think about ourselves in these machine terms, in a sense, makes our fascination with life other than our own less, not more understandable. Because life becomes less special, in a sense, right? It's not really life at all. There's no distinction to be drawn between the organic, the inorganic, the biological, the non-biological. So to the extent that new developments in biology and the philosophy of biology are starting to call into question whether these mechanistic understandings are actually adequate to what we're seeing scientifically, it can have a salubrious effect on us now humanistically as well. Because it reaffirms that there is something special. And this doesn't mean that you couldn't create special life out of inorganic materials that didn't look like us. You know, I don't have a great stake in the "can silicon do what, you know, carbon can do" in terms of, you know, knowing the final answer to that. But it seems to me that that idea of opening up possibilities, the idea of being something that you're not, or becoming something that you're not, as a way of thinking about life makes us special and makes other things special, whatever they're constructed of, if they have that kind of potential. That's a really crucial point. ^M00:50:22 >> Hi. So I've been listening to this discussion since the start, and I think in addition to this thread of life, one thing that I see that seems to be coming up a lot is the idea of to what extent thinking about astrobiology and life on other planets can make us think differently about life on Earth. I think it's important, or I suggest that it's important, to not think too hard about what happens when and if we find life out there, before we understand better the way that we treat this planet. I'm an anthropologist and archeologist. I work a lot with the environment. I've lived in cultures that have found ways to inhabit places that we think of as marginal. And maybe there is something that we can learn about living in marginal places from microorganisms, and maybe there's something to be said for thinking about habitation as well, how it is that we inhabit different places on Earth. And actually adapting ourselves in a way that doesn't necessarily involve changing all of the environment to reflect what we think is ideal. And so living life really as a being that organically fits into what we already have at our hands - so I think one of the things that I'm going to maybe sort of throw the discussion back to Robert, when he mentioned the Landless movement in Brazil, the MST. You were talking about them as being in league with the Via Compasina. What is it that we can learn from those kinds of transnationals movements about habitation? And what is it that we can do with these more urgent questions that are at our fingers, or how can we use astrobiology to think about now? >> Robert Marzec: That's a great question. I wish I had a great answer for that. I bring this up as an example because I want to use it as an alternative to the kinds of energies that are put into modes of production around the planet that have a tendency to destroy habitations. And the key issue or perhaps the key concern of that movement, and the way it makes itself possible, is thinking how to live in a local habitation. So as the movement progressed, from say central and southern Brazil into northern Brazil, when farmers in northern Brazil wanted to become part of the movement, the people that started the movement were very smart. They said that you need to understand your local habitation as you also become part of this more cosmopolitan organization. So, for instance, the original members of the movement said, "We will tell you what we know, but we will never speak for your local camp. So you should only speak for yourself." So there's a deep commitment to thinking your habitation, and then how your habitation can relate to a larger system. And it's a concern for sustaining life. And that's where I think NASA's concern for not only the discovery of life, but what makes life possible, what sustains it, can be one of the key ways in my mind that we can connect the two. And make this search for life so crucial to life right now on our planet. >> You mean not just the living organism, but what does it mean to think about life in this more... >> Yes. >> Yeah, okay. >> This question is also for Robert. I work in space and I study astrobiology, and oftentimes I've seen a decent amount of headbutting between the space and the environmentalist communities. And for you as an environmental researcher who is recognizing all of these wonderful benefits that you can get from studying astrobiology, as you've been talking about, how can we kind of reconcile those differences between the two communities and get researchers to, first of all, understand what we can get from astrobiology? >> Robert Marzec: That's a great question. You're - if you had asked me that question two days ago, before sitting through these dialogues, I would have said, my concern is about the environment. If somebody tells me they've discovered life on another planet, I don't care. I'm concerned about our planet. But the way in which it seems to me - and I hope this is the direction I think we have to build this direction, because it doesn't quite exist yet, but there are signs of it in the way the John Baross talks about his concern for stewardship. Stewardship is one of the key words that appears in NASA's astrobiological roadmap. And in my mind, there's the connection we can make. We can build for this concern for stewardship. I think the search for life is not about - I hope it doesn't turn into this, of course it could - the colonization of other places, because our whole planetary history, modern history, is made up of colonization and the destruction of life. But with an encounter with life based on building more possibility, stewardship, changing our own attitudes toward the life on our own planet, that would be one beginning. That's a kind of abstract answer to your question, but what would have to come from that is the kind of disciplinary concerns that the other members here are talking about. Changing the discipline. Building new disciplines, new kinds of departments, post-disciplines, and so on. You know, it's very difficult to do that because students are tracked, and they're not allowed to take programs outside of their own disciplines. And that needs to change. >> Derek Malone-France: I don't know - Graham, given the connection here that you're seeing between the protection of exobiological microorganisms, and the existing organizations and regimes dedicated to that here on Earth, do you have anything you want to add there? >> D. Graham Burnett: I do. Mostly I'd like to put a question back to the questioner, in a sense, because I bet that you've seen choice moments of exchange between these more traditional terrestrial narratives of protection and conservation and the communities that you're involved in. So to be honest, what would benefit us most would be to hear from you. >> I agree with what Robert was saying about getting new perspectives on how other organisms can evolve and survive on other planets and in places that we really don't understand. And to give us another platform off of which to think about life on Earth. I also am very interested in actually being able to create an ecosystem that is in itself sustainable, such as with Biosphere 2 in Arizona, where they created an ecosystem, one for a study for colonization, but also to look at the sustainability and what you need to do to be able to have an environment that is completely closed and works on its own. >> D. Graham Burnett: But when you said that you've seen butting heads, what about that? >> A lot of that is definitely between space in general and environmentalists - not necessarily just astrobiology on its own. Oftentimes I've heard that space research is conspicuous consumption, and of course that money could be used for other things. But I think a lot of the time, people don't realize how little money is actually being given to the space community in the first place, and there's a lot of other money. >> Derek Malone-France: Thanks. >> I'll add one thing here, which is to say that as I enter into these conversations where I find both of these sides represented, my impulse is always to say, it's all the environment. Right? We're in a solar environment. We're in a galactic environment, we're in a cosmic environment. We know things about how that environment has shaped life on Earth. For example, we probably couldn't exist if our star was a first-generation star, because we wouldn't have rare earth metals, right? So we live in an interconnected system, and the interconnections at a great distance may be less obvious. But we certainly shouldn't assume that they're not more determinative of what happens here in the terrestrial environment. So expanding that notion of the ecology, the environment - and I think I take it to be that that's a big part of the history of the term astrobiology, as distinct from exobiology, right, because it encompasses everything. Exobiology is more specifically about what's off Earth, and astrobiology is everything, including what is on Earth. That to me is a deeply powerful environmental trope, at the very idea of astrobiology. ^M01:00:08 >> Derek Malone-France: Okay. Maybe this is - we have one last question. >> We have a question. Does any member of the panel believe that the subject of UFOs should be considered with the subject of astrobiology? >> Derek Malone-France: This is a very important topic to a lot of people in terms of thinking about life beyond Earth. Our particular project has been focused on our search for life elsewhere and our thinking about how that impacts humanity and society. And particularly with a focus on microbial and simple life, as that's what's most likely to occur in the near future. And also - and this is really important - because there are so many other venues in which people are discussing the kinds of things that you're interested in. So I would say it's not something we've talked about here, which is not to say that it's not worth talking about, but it has not been a focus of our discussions. We have a second panel. It's a perfect time to stop. Don't get up, because it'll just be a few moments, unless you want to just get a little water here at the back. And we'll have five more brilliant speakers here to provide insights and entertain. Thank you. [ Applause ] We now return with our second panel, and we have Andrea Hairston, who is the Louis Wolff-Khan 1931 Professor of Theatre and Afro-American Studies at Smith College. Colin Milburn holds the Gary Snyder Chair in Science and the Humanities at UC-Davis and is a Professor of English there as well. Ursula Heise is a Professor of English and newly-minted Marcia Howard Chair in Environmental Humanities at UCLA. And Blakey Vermeule is Professor of English at Stanford University. Andrea, I'll let you take it away. >> Andrea Hairston: [ Inaudible ] This is Octavia Butler, from "The Parable of the Sower." "Consider, whether you are a human being, an insect, a microbe, or a stone, this verse is true. All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change." That's from her Earthseed religion. She goes on to say, "Why is the universe to shape God? Why is God to shape the universe?" So she wrote this in the early '90s, I think, if I - if my foggy brain is working correct. And I was a fan by then, so I inhaled this book. But as a young person, I watched Star Trek. I'm an old lady. And because of watching Star Trek, I didn't actually think I was going to do the things that Star Trek depicted, but I was very interested in science. So because of the stories, because of the visionary implications of the stories, and the discussion my family had - we watched an episode and then would argue about it for two hours. In the '60s - this was 1966 to 1969. So when I went to college, I was a physics and math major. But the environment for black women in physics and math in this time period was horrific, and I was very smart and I said I don't want to do that. I can spend my energy on being an artist, because I had also always been involved as a theatre person and a writer. So the second semester of my junior year, I switched my major to theatre. And my first play was called "Einstein," which is really funny now that I'm thinking this through. It's amusing. But I didn't really write too much science fiction after that for many, many years. I went off and became a math textbook editor for a while, went to graduate school, came back, taught, did theatre, travelled the country, and in 1995 I was a guest professor at the University of Hamburg. And while I was there, I felt like an alien. My German family had been from Bavaria, so the reason I felt like an alien wasn't just because I was from the United States and I was black, but because I was bayrisch. I was in northern Germany, and I did not understand them, even though I thought I should since I was fluent. So that was when I decided to write science fiction, in order to understand encounters with my own people, but using aliens as a way to imaginatively investigate encounters with people on this planet. So when I came back from Hamburg, I started writing the science fiction plays. I started working with all kinds of people and had them write science fiction plays. So one of my groups was I had pregnant and parenting teens from Springfield, Massachusetts, along with recovering drug addicts, and I had them do a play on what would happen if an alien came to your neighborhood. They were like, "They wouldn't come. They'd go to North Hampton." [ Laughter ] After we got over that hump, they did research, and then they did their play. Which was really amazing. They came up with things that I would never thought of. And I also had them read Octavia Butler. They were very engaged by the research process, by the fact that I was also a black writer who was writing science fiction, and that Octavia Butler was that. The groups I worked with were inner city Hispanic and African-American young people, along with a few older social workers. So they were very taken with the cosmological problems that Octavia raises, in "Parable of the Sower" and also in the "Xenogenesis" series that I think Ursula will talk a little bit about, so I won't discuss them. But the whole idea of colonizing, exploring, becoming other by being with others, and what would that mean for us today, right now in Springfield in 2000 or 2001. So they were very engaged with these ideas and took them into their daily lives, even though one might have thought - or even they thought before they came - that it would have nothing to do with their lives. I think part of what I've been spending my time with is dealing with the parables and the metaphors that are allowing us to comprehend our own humanity, that we can gain from a scientific understanding of the universe. >> Derek Malone-France: Thank you. Colin? >> Colin Milburn: So I'd like to echo my colleagues in expressing my enthusiasm for the conversations we've had the last couple of days about the cultural dimensions and social implications of astrobiology. And for my remarks today, I wanted to, if - think a little bit about the role of stories and cultural narratives for our anticipation, our understanding, and the way that we might start to imagine addressing and thinking about astrobiological discoveries, both now and in the future. If we really want to take seriously the ways in which stories can help to shape, massage, mediate the general social appreciation for and anticipation of astrobiology, I think we need to pay close attention to video games. And the reason for this is, today I think it's arguable that a dominant - if not the dominant - way in which North Americans engage with and encounter stories of space exploration and astrobiology is precisely through video games. Now of course, this is perhaps no surprise given that science fiction has been a characteristic force of video games since the earliest days of the medium. If we think about one of the very first video games ever made, 1962's Space War, programmed at MIT, is about an outer-space battle, loosely based on the science fiction novels of E. E. Smith. This type of framework for video games, throughout its early history and into the present, has been quite characteristic. We can think about, of course, Asteroids, through Alien Syndrome, any number of other games that deal with space travel, outer space adventures, alien invasions, etcetera, etcetera. But what I want to do today is talk a little bit about two games, more recent games in particular, because they're not just about science fiction or outer space in general, but more particularly the way in which they engage astrobiological concerns in particular. So the first of these is 2008's Spore, created by Will Wright and published by Electronic Arts. Many of you may know this game. It was really widely advertised at the time that it was published, and it explicitly tries to engage and activate an astrobiological imaginary - the beginning of the game tasks the player with playing the role of a microbe on an alien planet. You must help this microbe to survive in its aqueous environment, or liquid environment I should say. Then, later stages, you as the player are in charge of helping this microbe or the genetic lineage that it represents evolve into more complex multi-cellular organisms, eventually organisms with intelligence, who develop civilization, and then ultimately becoming a space-faring race. ^M01:10:16 This is a saga that spans eons and eons of evolutionary history, and then, the final stages of the game, you end up in an outer space scenario. Where then you practice astrobiological techniques of needing to find other planets that may bear life. And so you use radio signaling and so forth to try to figure out which planets in this vast, vast cosmic environment may in fact support life, intelligent and otherwise. Another game that's similar in this way is the Mass Effect trilogy. The first game came out in 2007, and it features a very complex narrative involving biological intelligences, non-biological intelligences, life of all different manifestations, from the microbial on up. It's a game that really asks us to think, in its narrative complexity, about the expansiveness of that category that we describe as life, which came up in the last panel. Similarly to Spore, part of the game mechanic of this game Mass Effect features a galactic map where one must maneuver through the cosmos searching for planets that bear life. Often one is looking for signs of intelligent civilization, but we use various sensing instruments to measure bio-signatures and other kinds of atmospheric signatures of different planets to understand their chemical compositions, the types of life forms that they possess and whether or not we want to go investigate them on the basis of the information that we're given. I focus on these two games in particular, because of course there are thousands upon thousands of games that deal with life on other planets. But these two in particular have been quite influential in inspiring a certain number of game players to become interested in real-life astrobiological scientific research, and even become involved. And so I'm speaking in particular about the way in which certain game players become motivated to join large-scale citizen science projects, such as SETI@home, Stardust@home, Zooniverse, Galaxy Zoo. These projects are scientific research projects that enroll hundreds of thousands of scientists and non-scientists to participate in astronomical and astrobiological projects for - in the case of SETI@home, it's involving distributed computing project, donating processor cycles of individual computer hardware to contribute to computational analysis. In the case of Stardust@home and some of these other projects, it's actually using individual game players or software users for their own ability to sift through scientific data. But I've looked at and studied some of the communities that get engaged with these projects, and it's always very striking to me that many players - I call them players, but many participants of these citizen science projects suggest that they became interested in these projects because of a general interest in science fiction and in science fiction video games in particular. And very frequently, we hear about Spore as a portal through which participants entered these games. SETI@home in particular, and Mass Effect. So in the case of Spore, it's not particularly surprising that this would be the case, that there was a surge of participants in SETI@home after the release of Spore. The reason for this is that SETI and Electronic Arts had entered into an agreement whereby they would cross-advertise, so that Electronic Arts promoted SETI as something that Spore players might be interested to get involved with, and SETI created a special portals designed specifically for Spore players to get involved in the project. But in the case of other - there are other games such as Mass Effect where there hasn't been this kind of direct linkage between the two, and I've been very interested in studying the way that participants in citizen science projects express why they become motivated. And just as one brief indication of this, there is a SETI@home team called the Mass Effect Team, which brings together enthusiasts and players of Mass Effect from around the world to join in SETI@home. One of them explains his or her motivation by saying on an online message board, "I play a lot of games with aliens in them, Dead Space 1 and 2, Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3 etcetera, and think it would be awesome to have interstellar knowledge and be able to co-exist." So with that wonderful sentiment. >> Derek Malone-France: Thank you. Ursula? >>Ursula Heise: So I teach English and Comparative Literature, and specifically environmental literature, and as part of that, I teach a lot of science fiction as the genre that, from the 19th century onward, has most explicitly engaged with scientific and with environmental issues. Science fiction as a genre has been really good at predicting some scientific discoveries and technological innovations, like nuclear power and cloning. And it's been really lousy at for seeing others, like the idea that we'd all carry powerful mini-computers in our backpacks. >> Andrea Hairston: Star Trek had that though. Come on. >> Ursula Heise: I mean, you know. Not really. In most science fiction, the computers were actually still getting bigger and bigger in the '70s and '80s, even as - and even that is limited, actually, in science fiction. You'll all remember that Bill Gates in 1974 himself still said that he could not foresee that anybody would have a use in their own home for a computer. So that was just a few years before, before PCs became popular. And so, science fiction I think is important for thinking about astrobiology, because it provides some of the central narrative patterns that are likely to come up if and when we actually encounter life, microbial or otherwise, off of the Earth. So I wanted to run through three basic plot patterns. They are not the only ones, but they're, I think, really important ones that have shaped our imagination of what it would be like to encounter life on other planets, and that have also shaped some of the computer games that Colin was talking about. So the first one is the idea that life from outer space is threatening to us, and that it actually might threaten humanity, either in part or wholesale, through war or disease. That runs all the way from H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds from 1897 to Michael Crichton's Andromeda Strain from 1969, both novels that have been turned into films multiple times. War of the Worlds obviously the last time by Steven Spielberg in 2005. So that's one of the major plot patterns that recurs. There's an interesting variation on that in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space from 2000, which gives an interesting explanation for the Fermi Paradox, the question of why there aren't a lot of intelligent cultures out there. The answer that this novel gives is that there is an ancient race of intelligent machine life intelligences that actually eliminates intelligent life as soon as it comes up anywhere, because there's in the past been a horrendous galactic war between a multitude of intelligent civilizations. So they want to prevent that from ever occurring again, so that's the reason why we don't find a whole lot of intelligent civilizations in the universe now. So what it shares with the others is the idea that this is really dangerous for humans, as they enter space. The second main pattern is that as aliens are discovered or as they visit Earth, they might hope to unify an otherwise deeply divided humanity that it might even be at war. So the science fiction "The Day the Earth Stood Still" from 1951, which was also remade, as you all know, with Keanu Reeves as Klaatu later on is one version of that, as is Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End from 1953. This is for obvious reasons a plot pattern that was particularly popular during the Cold War, where there's kind of utopian hope that the aliens come to express. They will help do what we on our own can't seem to be able to do, that is, recognize ourselves as a species and live as a - as a species together. The third one is that the arrival or discovery of aliens propels humans into a future where they either mingle their genes with others and themselves become aliens, or where they speciate into a multiple, post-human varieties or species that are themselves more or less alien in kind. So Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix from 1986 is one example of that, and then Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy from the 1980s would be - would be another example of that. That's a pattern that's repeated itself recently in multiple variations, and I think for a variety of reasons it's the most interesting one in terms of thinking about environmental implications of science fiction and the encounter with alien life through astrobiology. So I just want to point out three things that these novels usually do, and I think it's probably obvious to everybody that alien life and the speciation of humans into various forms of alien life themselves function as metaphors that force us to reconsider what it is that we mean when we talk about humans as a species. ^M01:20:03 I notice whenever we sit in a room with scientists, as humanists, that the scientists very easily talk about humans as a species, whereas that's a move that comes a lot harder to us humanists, especially those of us who are in any way engaged in studying different historical communities or different cultural communities. You always go, well, wait a minute. What do we mean by human, and aren't we just extrapolating what our own culture means by human. So the idea that we actually have to work quite hard as humanists to assemble what it means to be human is something I think to keep in mind, and something that these novels, films, and games remind us of. The second is by virtue of the way in which the human body is reconfigured through the introduction of alien genes in these novels. These can be genes actually from outer space, or technologies that aliens introduce for mixing plant and animal with human genes on Earth, reminds us of the way in which our own body is actually a multi-species community. It consists of bacteria, of microorganisms that inhabit us, for whom we are a habitat, and without whom we would be something completely different than what we are. A lot of our genetic material, as we now know, is actually not itself human. So what does it mean to be human in view of the fact that our own bodies are actually partly non-human? And then the third one resonates with something that Robert said in the previous panel, and that is the way in which the encounter with alien life, real or imagined, makes us reconsider the way in which we inhabit our own planet. Not just with the other species in our own bodies and then the other humans that surround us across cultures, histories, and values, and across the boundaries that separate us, in those terms. But the other species that co-inhabit the planet with us. And specifically the kinds of species that are - that surround us all the time, but that might as well be alien to us in terms of how little we know about them and how little we pay attention to them. One film that has beautifully foregrounded this is "Microcosmos: Le peuple de l'herbe," so "The People of the Meadow," by Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou from 1996, which is a - is not a science fiction film, prima facie. It's a nature documentary, but one that does almost entirely without any words or explanations, and whose central trope is borrowed from science fiction. It focuses on the mostly very small animal life in an average European meadow that is filmed in such close-up - and I've put a few of the close-up images on the slide here - that these creatures come to seem like aliens from another planet. And what the - the film culminates in a wonderful scene where we see what looks like a golden deity sort of slowly being born from a liquid surface, and it's only when that being then takes off with a very characteristic buzz that you realize that we've just witnessed the birth of a mosquito that seems like emergence of a new - of a new mythological goddess in this movie. So a film that borrows from science fiction and from astrobiology, to make us take a new look at the very ordinary life that surrounds us. >> Derek Malone-France: Thank you. Blakey? >> Blakey Vermeule: So my name is Blakey Vermeule. I teach at Stanford. I have a very longstanding and strong interest in the psychology of storytelling. The ways that we come to assimilate new ideas and information, and the way that we also resist new ideas and information. How do stories spread? Why do some stories come to be more salient and available to us than other stories? How is it possible for us to hear some stories and not others? And then I think most maybe crucially, for this group of people, are we capable of actually changing our minds in the face of new evidence? Or do we only ever really confirm certain beliefs that we already hold. So just imagine, fast forward a few years, and NASA announces that they have discovered some microbes on another planet, or microbial life on another planet. How are we going to react? What's going to be the reaction? Well I think the first thing that will happen - I can reasonably predict, and all of you can reasonably predict as well, is that there will be a host, really a plethora of conspiracy thinking around this issue. A friend of mine says that alien life can be swapped in for the word Shakespeare in what James Joyce famously said, namely that Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance. So you just swap in "alien life" for that, for "Shakespeare," and I think it works perfectly well. So we can imagine immediately that there's going to be a host of conspiracy theories. Why is this the case? Well, as Paul and I were talking about earlier today, people seem to really believe and want to believe that there is a kind of secret cabal of controllers, people on the inside, who have some information that they are guarding or hoarding. And that the rest of us only need to work a little bit harder to dig that information out. So that's going to be sort of the first thing that happens. But then there's some other - other issues that will come up, I predict. One of these issues has to do with crisis, with the sort of idea of opposition, that Ursula was talking about before. What is that - what's the sort of basis of this belief? Well, there's plenty of evidence at this point from cognitive science that humans have a very, very strongly evolved preference for social information over other kinds of information. There's a lovely quotation, probably apocryphally contributed to the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, who said, "The mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep." But I'm afraid that on this view, none of us is really all that civilized. We have rather primitive brains. And our brains show strong evidence indeed for social over other forms of selection, so that we select for social cures earlier and more intensely than we select for cues about the physical or numerate world. And so, this is the sort of context in which this story will arrive. Namely that there will be a kind of crisis narrative, and that this crisis narrative will be framed almost entirely in terms of certain very basic ancient tropes of storytelling. The idea of that the sort of group of protagonists may be us, versus some group of antagonists. It could be the alien life forms themselves, it could be another great civilization. Who knows? It could be NASA. So I'll just stop there. But I think when we think about the possibility of this encounter and how it's going to go, I think we should pay close attention to the way that humans take in narratives and process them. Thank you. >> Derek Malone-France: Thank you all, and I'll say again now, as at the end of the first panel, we'll have an open Q and A with the audience. There's a microphone back here towards the center. I encourage people to head in that direction. As people are preparing to ask questions, I'll throw one out for the whole panel. We talked a number of points over the last two days about how the kinds of narratives you've described and the various mediums you've talked about have scripted us to a certain extent, humanity that is, in terms of what the reaction might be. Blakey, you gestured in a sense toward some predictability about those reactions based on the previous kinds of stories that we've consumed. The way in which we work cognitively. I wonder the extent to which you think there's a possibility that the script will get thrown out, right? Is there some, in your mind, sense that there might be something different that happens than what has been previously contemplated in all of these various attempts to imagine what contact will be like? Or do you think that the imagination that's been engaged with that for a period of time has really kind of covered the field of possibilities? >> Blakey Vermeule: I think it's a fascinating question, and I think for me it's more a question of which script is going to become activated, or which schema, as Ursula says, is going to become activated. There's a rather famous scenario in "Independence Day" that we've been batting back and forth, whereby the presence and the discovery of life on another planet suddenly unites or unifies the entire human world. Peace breaks out all of the sudden. Nobody's fighting anymore. To me that's a powerful and very utopian possibility, in a way. ^M01:30:28 >> Derek Malone-France: Any others? >> I agree. I agree that it'll be a matter of which script gets activated, because there are quite a few of them. I don't expect that it's going to be a completely new script, probably. At least initially not. But a lot will depend on what kind of life we discover out there, and how it is related to our own. So I think the story is going to be very different if this turns out to be a life that in its fundamental structures is related to our own. That'll I think cast us in a very different role and position, vis-a-vis these new organisms, and if it turns out that this is life that really obeys very different biological principles and is made up of very different components than life here on Earth. In other words, the degree of alienness to our own life, and whether there's any possible evolutionary or historical relation between how life evolved on our planet and how it evolved there. I think will really inflect which of these scripts get activated. Then there's a whole lot of other things that will influence which of these scripts, and which conspiracy theory or whatever else, gets activated, and that'll be, you know, who discovers this? What is the nation? What is the organization? What's the institution that is credited with discovering the organism? What use do they plan to make of the knowledge? How much of the knowledge about it do they divulge? How much do they keep secret? I mean, all these are going to be crucial questions. The other thing we should also point to is that almost guaranteed, there's going to be very different scripts activated in different parts of the world. >> Derek Malone-France: Okay, sir? >> Yes, good afternoon. First I want to thank both panels for a very fascinating afternoon. Thank you. This may boil down to another stewardship question, however I want to approach it from a different angle. This panel has clearly pointed out that there is a - that popular culture has pretty much already assumed that we will find life on other planets. That's been going on for probably centuries, in terms of science fiction, all the way back to the Greeks. >> Dogon people imagined it too, so it's not just a Western - so you find, and Native Americans. You can go to the museum right now, and they will talk about beings from the stars. So it's a common practice among storytellers all over the world to imagine beings beyond the terrestrial realm. And not just gods. So I'm not saying beings that control this world, but beings who have a whole other existence and evolution and reality on other places. >> Yeah, I agree. I agree. So there is a great ache for one of these stories become real. However, so far, there is no life yet discovered on the other planets. There are some pretty good theories that, if you're going to find life on other planets, you have to find a lot of it or there isn't any of it. So far that's been what we've found here in our own solar system. It's also the case that we may get a 30-meter telescope build and do spectroscopic analysis of exoplanets far in other solar systems and possibly we'll find a signature of life, but we wouldn't really know if it was life. And in order to determine if life exists on most planets, at the minimum we'd have to spend 400 years of light-years to get there and 400 years of light-years to get back. So my question is to flip this a bit on its head, because it couldn't be a popular question for astrobiology, but what if Earth really is alone? What if there is no other life but ours? And there as a consequence no other intelligence but ours? I would ask the panelists to reflect on what that question might bring forward, because I think it's a story that's a rather unpopular one. And it might be the one that we encounter. >> I think one of my questions with that is that it's hard to prove that we're alone. In other words, because we can't reach or, you know, find or get to, isn't the same as to prove that we are alone. So I think we would have a problem with proving that we're alone. But proving that we're, you know, functionally alone, it doesn't matter if that signature is life or not. We'll never be able to get to that, and what might that mean? I think is a - you know, something that we've contemplated that as well. So that we're isolated, that we're very unique in our - you know, zone of the universe. And that would reflect a lot on what we do again with our planet. So I think it comes back to stewardship for life here, as well as stewardship for whatever we might find. So I think the answer to that would be that we still have to do the work here that we need to be doing. >> Yeah, I agree entirely. I think that it's unlikely that the continuing lack of evidence will decisively end the desire for there to be. But yet, it also continues to provoke the reverse of us interrogating ourselves. The more that we look outside and simply find a mirror, the more likely, one hopes, that we would be able to develop the necessary strategies and politico-social technologies to be able to be good custodians of this planet. So I agree entirely, and I think some indications of the way in which that search for otherness ends up reflecting back on ourselves, and may indeed have the kind of effects of custodianship of this planet are indicated, as Ursula pointed out, in the Microcosmos film where the science fictional trope is in fact the mechanism. Looking outwards to see the alien and to discover that it's us. I've seen this even in very mundane ways. I was once at a workshop on atomic force microscopy at Curtin University in Australia. And as a bacterium emerged on the screen from the scanning microscope activity, one of the researchers that I was working with announced, "Oh, we've accidentally killed this bacterium by puncturing it with the probe of the microscope." And as it became more and more distinct, everyone gathered around there looked in sorrow at this bacterium that otherwise was completely beyond our perception. But in bringing it up front and into our vision, we had a sort of self-estranging experience of indeed what we had actually done. We'd committed a murder on the microbial scale and hadn't even been aware of it until it was brought to our attention. So somehow about that looking outwards in order to see ourselves I think is really crucial. So not to give up on that looking outwards, but to use it to advantage. >> Yeah, I would just add I agree with - with that approach to it. I mean, we are surrounded by aliens as it is. And so in some ways, the fact that the popular imagination has anticipated this for such a long time means that it in some ways has its cultural meaning regardless of what the scientific realities will end up being. But I think one way in which that trope that has been around of alien life can take on new significance is by using it in exactly the way in which the filmmakers use it. We talked yesterday about - about the life that we constantly discover on Earth itself. I mean, I just finished writing a book about endangered species and extinctions, and how they get culturally represented. And one of the most to me bewildering things to discover in reading through the science is that, well, we're constantly discovering new species. The number of species is constantly going up. Scientific publications cannot keep pace with the discovery of new species. I mean, the recent census of marine life has turned up four or five thousand new species, which you can go look at online at the gallery. And they look stranger than most of the stuff you see in video games. You know, the microbial life anyway, any entomologist will show you pictures that are mind-blowing of, you know, a spider that crawls around and has eight eyes and things like that. They're all sort of things that we usually associate with aliens. So I think that in some sense, if we can use that longing for there to be other life and say but there is a lot of other life, and a lot of it we haven't taken that great care of. So maybe if we pay more attention to it, that might be useful. But I also wanted to point to something else, which relates a bit tangentially but I think is important. There's another pattern about our encounter with alien life that's not that common in American science fiction but quite common in East European science fiction. So the Strugatsky brothers and Stanislaw Lem, the Polish writer, have written quite a few science fiction novels in which humans encounter alien life and indeed intelligent alien life. ^M01:40:03 And are unable to understand the first thing about it. Even in the case of the novel Solaris, after a century and a half of studying it, the whole scientific discipline dedicated to it, they really don't know the first thing about it. So the idea that we could encounter something that is alien in so basic a sense that we really would not be able to understand it. Even in its most basic outline, is something that's pretty alien to the Anglo-American science fiction imagination. But that is also a possibility out there, that the truly alien might be truly unintelligible to us. >> China Mieville, though. Embassy Town. That's an example of the truly alien encountered by us that we don't understand as well, so. >> I'll just add that there is a historical context here, right? For large periods, even century-long periods, during Western history, there have been times when everybody knew there was intelligent life in our solar system. And then Percival Lowell shows that there aren't canals on Mars, and people go through a period where they lose interest in the concept. And what happens is that new technology emerges that makes a different kind of looking possible. And so the search gets reinvigorated, and that happens again when we suddenly find that we can take telescopes out of our atmosphere and we can see much further with the same technology. We just take it off Earth. I suspect that it - you know, even in the long course of things, if we don't find something, we don't find something, we don't find something, we're at a point now where people would be aware of the possibility of technological change in a way that would sort of blunt the sense that we've proved the dispositive, right? So that's just a... >> We've discussed how since Descartes and Lemaitre there's been a mechanistic paradigm dominance, especially true since the mid-19th century. I wonder if we've gone too far in exercising the ghosts of vitalism and the soul. Because human beings are emotional, imaginative, desirous creatures. Animals have feelings. They're sentient creatures, so if we take this reduction, this positivist tendency too far, we might ourselves become mechanistic in our thinking towards one another. I was thinking of B. F. Skinner's behaviorism - Soviet Union's social engineering, not just genetic engineering. Social engineering. Because of scientific blueprints of how we automata should perform stimulus and response. So I'm going on, but just in the philosophers, Whitehead and Heidegger suggested as a corrective to this imbalance, to this of our scientistic, technological civilization. We should read the romantic poets. I would also suggest that myths have since time immemorial been a source of different diverse communities, a source of the mania, wonder, and splendor of the cosmos. And today science fiction may be, as Joseph Campbell said, a kind of creative myth to explore the astrobiological realm. >> Derek Malone-France: Does anybody want to pick up - Blakey? >> Blakey Vermeule: Well, I'll just respond to that. I mean, you're absolutely right. There's no question that scientific metaphors have driven all kinds of downstream effects that are negative. I think of the fallout from Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene as an example of that. In my mind, it's very important to distinguish between those downstream effects and the underlying science insofar as we can understand it. That's often much more difficult than you would think it should be. To actually get behind the metaphors, behind the rhetoric, to some sort of agreed-on state of affairs. I think that materialism, as a set of concepts, is very poorly understood and has gotten a terrible rap, in a way. So there's no question that - that it's material all the way up. The question is how we understand that and talk about it, and what the sort of social effects of that understanding amount to. >> I think what your comment also points to is that the mechanical metaphor is also pinned on what the predominant machine in each age is, right? So in Freud you find all of these sort of hydraulic metaphors for how the psyche works, and today you find a lot of analogies with the computers. So mechanical metaphor doesn't equal mechanical metaphor. In terms of materialism, there has actually been, you know, I think a real resurgence of thinking about the so-called "new materialisms" over the last 15 or 20 years in the - in the humanities. In the sense that people are trying to think in new ways about the agency - not intentionality, but agency of inanimate forces as well as of non-human actors. Animals, plants, and so forth. And to reconsider also our own agency in view of the fact that we're not entirely human ourselves, right? So those have gone - those have gone hand-in-hand. And along with that, there's I think a somewhat different perception of machines as indeed having a kind of agency. Not necessarily intentionality, although who knows? At the rate we're going that might be another thing that will be coming, much anticipated by science fiction too, right? The intelligent machine. >> I was wondering what the sort of creative community might deal with the notion that Fermi is right, and that we're just frustrated in our attempt to find astrobiological phenomena. That we instead - we turn it around and we create it. We take inorganic materials, we move to the Mercury first, or Pluto, or pick your point. And create life and environments of our own. So where does that take us in this view of life? >> I think this has been a concern of many science fiction stories as well. I think we could even trace it back to something like Frankenstein, because it introduces the question of responsibility for the life that we create. So it's - alongside issues of protection and so forth of non-terrestrial life, we now have direct responsibility for this non-terrestrial life. And so, in that regard, it's certainly a possibility scenario that has been imagined. And whether it can be done in a way that is responsible on other planets, or on this one, is an ongoing experiment. Because of course we are in the midst of a massive biological revolution, in terms of biotechnology, going back to the 1970s and now increasingly introducing techniques of synthetic biology. Where the ability to create an organism from scratch, as it were, is seemingly increasing to be a very strong likelihood. So we are presented with that possibility, as it were, right now. And not needing another planet to relocate alien life on, because it presents itself as a possibility that we need potentially to grapple with in the very near future. So I would be hesitant to project it off to too far of a science fictional future. Certainly not beyond Earth, but rather to already engage with it. If it's a helpful tool for thought to think about this scenario of relocating alien life of our own creation elsewhere, then that is helpful, but to be attentive to that it's something that may happen here. >> So one project that is currently being worked on is the so-called de-extinction of certain extinct species, especially the woolly mammoth and the passenger pigeon with silicene that's sort of fallen flat. That's - it's really interesting because in actual fact, they're not going to be pure - I mean, even if they succeed, which is not clear at this point. But they might. The genome is not going to be pure passenger pigeon, because we don't have a complete genome. So it's going to be filled in or substituted with fantailed pigeon genes. And same with the woolly mammoth. We don't have a complete genome, so if this were to succeed, it would have elephant genes, which has some - has led some people to describe this as not so much de-extinction of an extinct species as creation of some new synthetic organism that actually hasn't existed before. The question of, would you then do with them - whether they're ever going to create more than a zoo population, whether they can be reintroduced into the wild, and what that would do. Especially in the case of something like the woolly mammoth, really? Now that we have climate change and the tundra is melting, you know, how comfortable are they going to be? >> But there are also questions too about the passenger pigeon needs a huge massive population in order to function as an individual pigeon. ^M01:50:06 So it's not like you can just create a few individuals, and then recreate or reintroduce the species, because again, it's not about the individual. It's about a group phenomenon in which individuals are part of that. So there's been a lot of ethical debate about bringing these creatures back as zoo, you know, spectacles. >> Derek Malone-France: One thing to think about that we haven't talked about is the clash of interpretive frameworks that will occur when something like that happens. Whether we take it somewhere else and cultivate it, or whether it just happens here in a laboratory, there will be some people who are tremendously upset at the idea that we are playing God. There are sure to be conflicts in the future over technology of this sort, right? That we're going to have to negotiate culturally. Part of what this kind of event is a very small, tentative step, but it's a small, tentative step in the direction of having the kinds of conversations that might allow us to mediate, at least to some extent, the sorts of conflicts that are inevitable. But perhaps can be managed in certain ways better than in other ways. So thank you all very much. Wonderful set of questions, and I want to thank this panel, and the first panel, again for their time and great thoughts. ^M01:51:32 [ Applause ] ^M01:51:37 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at www.LoC.gov. ^E01:51:44