Peter Watts - Blindsight

Of course I had to extrapolate on the details, given how little is actually known about these beasts. To this end I pilfered data from a variety of sources on gas giants [58] Liu, W., and Schultz, D.R. 1999. Jovian x-ray aurora and energetic oxygen ion precipitation. Astrophysical Journal 526:538-543. , [59] Chen, P.V. 2001. Magnetic field on Jupiter. The Physics Factbook , http://hypertextbook.com/facts/ . , [60] Osorio, M.R.Z. et al . 2000. Discovery of Young, Isolated Planetary Mass Objects in the Orionis Star Cluster. Science 290: 103-106. , [61] Lemley, B. 2002. Nuclear Planet. Discover 23(8). , [62] http://www.nuclearplanet.com/ . , [63] Dulk, G.A., et al. 1997. Search for Cyclotron-maser Radio Emission from Extrasolar Planets. Abstracts of the 29th Annual Meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, July 28-August 1, 1997, Cambridge, Massachusetts. , [64] Marley, M. et al. 1997. Model Visible and Near-infrared Spectra of Extrasolar Giant Planets. Abstracts of the 29th Annual Meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, July 28-August 1, 1997, Cambridge, Massachusetts. and/or brown dwarves, [65] Boss, A. 2001. Formation of Planetary-Mass Objects by Protostellar Collapse and Fragmentation. Astrophys. J . 551: L167. , [66] Low, C., and D. Lynden-Bell. 1976. The minimum Jeans mass or when fragmentation must stop. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 176: 367. , [67] Jayawardhana, R. 2004. Unraveling Brown Dwarf Origins. Science 303: 322-323. , [68] Fegley, B., and K. Lodders. 1996. Atmospheric Chemistry of the Brown Dwarf Gliese 229B: Thermochemical Equilibrium Predictions. Astrophys. J. 472: L37. , [69] Lodders, K. 2004. Brown Dwarfs-Faint at Heart, Rich in Chemistry. Science 303: 323-324. , [70] Adam Burgasser. 2002. June 1 edition of the Astrophysics Journal Letters. , [71] Reid, I.N. 2002 Failed stars or overacheiving planets? Science 296: 2154-2155. , [72] Gizis, J.E. 2001. Brown dwarfs (enhanced review) Online article supplementing Science 294: 801. , [73] Clarke, S. 2003. Milky Way’s nearest neighbour revealed. NewScientist.com News Service, 04/11/03. , [74] Basri, G. 2000. Observations of brown dwarfs. Annu. Rev. Astron. Astrophys 38:485-519. , [75] Tamura, M. et al. 1998. Isolated and Companion Young Brown Dwarfs in the Taurus and Chamaeleon Molecular Clouds. Science 282: 1095-1097. scaling up or down as appropriate. From a distance, the firing of Rorschach ’s ultimate weapon looks an awful lot like the supermassive x-ray and radio flare recently seen erupting from a brown dwarf that should have been way too small to pull off such a trick. [76] Berger, E. 2001. Discovery of radio emission from the brown dwarf LP944-20. Nature 410: 338-340. That flare lasted twelve hours, was a good billions times as strong as anything Jupiter ever put out, and is thought to have resulted from a twisted magnetic field. [77] Anonymous, 2000. A brown dwarf solar flare. Science@Nasa , http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast12jul_1m.htm .

Burns-Caulfield is based loosely on 2000 Cr 105, a trans-Newtonian comet whose present orbit cannot be completely explained by the gravitational forces of presently-known objects in the solar system. [78] Schilling, G. 2001. Comet’s course hints at mystery planet. Science 292: 33.

Like many others, I am weary of humanoid aliens with bumpy foreheads, and of giant CGI insectoids that may look alien but who act like rabid dogs in chitin suits. Of course, difference for its own arbitrary sake is scarcely better than your average saggital-crested Roddennoid; natural selection is as ubiquitous as life itself, and the same basic processes will end up shaping life wherever it evolves. The challenge is thus to create an “alien” that truly lives up to the word, while remaining biologically plausible.

Scramblers are my first shot at meeting that challenge — and given how much they resemble the brittle stars found in earthly seas, I may have crapped out on the whole unlike-anything-you’ve-ever-seen front, at least in terms of gross morphology. It turns out that brittle stars even have something akin to the scrambler’s distributed eyespot array. Similarly, scrambler reproduction — the budding of stacked newborns off a common stalk — takes its lead from jellyfish. You can take the marine biologist out of the ocean, but…

Fortunately, scramblers become more alien the closer you look at them. Cunningham remarks that nothing like their time-sharing motor/sensory pathways exists on Earth. He’s right as far as he goes, but I can cite a precursor that might conceivably evolve into such an arrangement. Our own “mirror neurons” fire not only when we perform an action, but when we observe someone else performing the same action; [79] Evelyne Kohler, E. et al. 2002. Hearing Sounds, Understanding Actions: Action Representation in Mirror Neurons. Science 297: 846-848. this characteristic has been cited in the evolution of both language and of consciousness. [80] Rizzolatti, G, and Arbib, M.A. 1998. Language Within Our Grasp. Trends in Neuroscience 21(5):188-194. , [81] Hauser, M.D., N. Chomsky, and W.T. Fitch. 2002. The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298: 1569-1579. , [82] Miller, G. 2005. Reflecting on Another’s Mind. Science 308: 945-947.

Things look even more alien on the metabolic level. Here on Earth anything that relied solely on anaerobic ATP production never got past the single-cell stage. Even though it’s more efficient than our own oxygen-burning pathways, anaerobic metabolism is just too damn slow for advanced multicellularity. [83] Pfeiffer, T., S. Schuster, and S. Bonhoeffer. 2001. Cooperation and Competition in the Evolution of ATP-Producing Pathways Science 20 292: 504-507. Cunningham’s proposed solution is simplicity itself. The catch is, you have to sleep for a few thousand years between shifts.

The idea of quantum-mechanical metabolic processes may sound even wonkier, but it’s not. Wave-particle duality can exert significant impacts on biochemical reactions under physiological conditions at room temperature; [84] McMahon, R.J. 2003. Chemical Reactions Involving Quantum Tunneling. Science 299: 833-834. heavy-atom carbon tunnelling has been reported to speed up the rate of such reactions by as much as 152 orders of magnitude . [85] Zuev, P.S. et al. 2003. Carbon Tunneling from a Single Quantum State. Science 299: 867-870.

And how’s this for alien: no genes . The honeycomb example I used by way of analogy originally appeared in Darwin’s little-known treatise [86] Darwin, Charlie “Chuckles”. 1859. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Penguin Classics Edition, reprinted 1968. Originally published by John Murray, London. ( damn but I’ve always wanted to cite that guy); more recently, a small but growing group of biologists have begun spreading the word that nucleic acids (in particular) and genes (in general) have been seriously overrated as prerequisites to life. [87] Cho, A. 2004. Life’s Patterns: No Need to Spell It Out? Science 303: 782-783. , [88] Cohen, J., and Stewart, S. 2005. Where are the dolphins? Nature 409: 1119-1122. A great deal of biological complexity arises not because of genetic programming, but through the sheer physical and chemical interaction of its components. [89] Reilly, J.J. 1995. After Darwin. First Things , June/July. Article also available online at http://pages.prodigy.net/aesir/darwin.htm . , [90] Devlin, K. 2004. Cracking the da Vinci Code. Discover 25(6): 64-69. , [91] Snir, Y, and Kamien, R.D. 2005. Entropically Driven Helix Formation. Science 307: 1067. , [92] Wolfram, S. 2002. A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Media. 1192 pp. Of course, you still need something to set up the initial conditions for those processes to emerge; that’s where the magnetic fields come in. No candy-ass string of nucleotides would survive in Rorschach ’s environment anyway.