Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures

by Ed Finn

  In light of the challenges we face due to our anthropic vantage point, it seems critical that addressing the question “are we alone?” will require understanding what we mean by we. Today, we have one key advantage over Schrödinger’s time—we have several scientific communities poised to address a fundamental understanding of life and an international community of curious humans that could be mobilized if sufficiently motivated. And through creative funding efforts, we may have the resources to galvanize these communities toward a common goal that would otherwise be impossible. We are thus poised for a new era of science to address some of the most profound questions of human existence. Our great leap forward demands a reimagining of what is possible, motivated by advances in fundamental theory. It may be that in order to find other selves in the universe, we have to consider a “self” that is radically different, and to get there we need to imagine entirely new ways of doing science.

  [1] Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). First published in 1944. [back]

  [2] Quoted in Robert Rosen, “The Schrödinger Question: What Is Life? Fifty Years Later,” in Glimpsing Reality: Ideas in Physics and the Link to Biology, ed. Paul Buckley and F. David Peat (New York: Routledge, 1996), 170. [back]

  [3] Stephen Jay Gould, “The Genomic Metronome as a Null Hypothesis,” Paleobiology 2, no. 2 (1976). [back]

  [4] Abundant in this context means relative to expected abiotic values—for methane this abundance is still quite low relative to other atmospheric gases such as N2 and O2. [back]

  [5] In fact, life on Earth was not remotely detectable for much of its history, in particular before the Great Oxidation Event that led to a rise in atmospheric O2 2.45 billion years ago. [back]

  [6] Learn more about the summer 2016 NExSS workshop in Seattle, “Exoplanet Biosignatures Workshop Without Walls,” at https://nai.nasa.gov/calendar/workshop-without-walls-exoplanet-biosignatures. [back]

  [7] Learn more about the December 2016 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine workshop, “Searching for Life Across Space and Time,” at http://sites.nationalacademies.org/ssb/currentprojects/ssb_173278. [back]

  [8] See https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arkydforeveryone/arkyd-a-space-telescope-for-everyone-0. [back]

  Negotiating the Values of Space Exploration

  by Emma Frow

  “Shikasta” stands out as a tale that celebrates diversity in ways of knowing and doing, across science, engineering, and other cultures. By drawing us into the lived experiences and personal trajectories of her protagonists, Vandana Singh opens up a host of important questions about ways of understanding life, culture, and approaches to (space) science. It is no surprise that all scientists have their own personal stories and experiences—often ones that profoundly shape the questions they are interested in and the work they do—but we also know that these narratives can become marginalized in the excitement of reporting the details of scientific findings. “Shikasta” celebrates the many narratives that are part of science, while simultaneously showing us how challenging it can be to seamlessly integrate personal and cultural experiences with modern scientific ways of understanding the world. Our three protagonists—Chirag, Kranti, and Annie (together with their unnamed, departed colleague)—are liminal characters, each straddling different worlds and all sharing a feeling of not fully belonging to any one place. They are “insiders” to space science in terms of having formal educational pedigrees, yet “outsiders” in espousing a different set of values and approaches to doing their science, and choosing to pursue nonstandard strategies for accomplishing their work. Their experiences shed light on a critical topic for twenty-first century space exploration and for science more broadly: how to orient our scientific investigations and expeditions so as to further our social and cultural values, alongside our scientific priorities.

  Futures of Space Missions

  Our motivations for exploring space have always included a wide variety of pragmatic and more philosophical perspectives.[1] In the future envisioned in “Shikasta,” dominant motivations driving space exploration seem explicitly focused on colonization and resource exploitation. The idea of going into space simply to “look for life”—as our protagonists wish to do—is presented as seemingly radical and subversive compared with what has become a dominant commercial and exploitative approach to space exploration. This raises a provocative question: by 2035, will the search for life in the universe—an age-old question for humanity—become subsumed by more instrumental aims? Will finding life just be a step along the way to finding possible alternative planets to Earth, particularly if our own world becomes less habitable or uninhabitable? With growing threats from climate change and natural or human-induced disasters, some scientists are already suggesting that space exploration should be seen as an “insurance premium,” with goals of colonization being necessary “for the long-term survival of the human species.”[2]

  Singh’s story offers us a clear example of how different values might shape the search for life in the universe. For example, if the search for life is part of an instrumental wish to find new sites for possible colonization, then Shikasta 464b (Shikasta b, for short), with its geographically small “terminator” zone, would not seem to be a leading candidate. But if the goal is simply to find life, wherever and however it might exist, then casting as wide a net as possible and exploring a range of candidate planets with smaller or larger, more plausible or less plausible habitable zones, could be a potentially valuable strategy.

  Because the 2035 space mission being run by Chirag, Kranti, and Annie is motivated by a different set of core values from the space science establishment, they turn to a different model for funding their work: crowdfunding. Scientists working in different fields are increasingly pitching their projects on crowdfunding websites to seek private donors who identify with the project goals. Space missions are no exception; for example, Lunar Mission One is an international crowdfunded initiative launched in 2014 to send a lunar lander (and digital time capsules) to the Moon.[3] By 2035, more such missions certainly seem plausible. There is also a growing commercial spaceflight sector, operating within a different institutional context to more traditional space R&D. Over the next 20 years, will we see a proliferation of smaller groups embarking on space missions? Or is the funding, expertise, and coordination required to develop and execute missions so significant that it will continue to be concentrated in the hands of a small number of government agencies and large private companies?

  Chirag, Kranti, and Annie present their search for life as purely curiosity-driven, and expressly not about an attempt to colonize another world. Indeed, they actively reject the “trash, burn, and leave” approach, based in part on their personal and cultural experiences of colonization. Annie discusses her distaste for the lack of responsibility and reciprocity in Western science, with its focus on the ownership of frontier lands (be they metaphorical or physical). One senses that her research collective draws on the virtue of curiosity as a means of trying to distance themselves—even just a little—from the more instrumental, economically and politically entangled nature of contemporary science. At the same time, our protagonists are unashamedly socially and politically active citizens, and have developed a funding model that allows them to invest resources and support back into social justice and educational initiatives in their communities.

  What responsibilities might even a “pure,” curiosity-driven search for life come with? Are there ways that the research collective might express responsibility through the design and structure of the space mission itself? For example, what will happen to Avi at the end of the mission? Will he be switched off and left on Shikasta b, adding to an already-significant collection of human-made space debris? Or does the team’s desire not to colonize space extend to an ambition to leave no trace of him on Shikasta b, and even to bring him back to Earth? Has the mission set aside sufficient funding for this extraction? Considering the full life c
ycle of the mission is just one example of how an entire project might be structured around particular values—in this case, being explicitly concerned with not colonizing, exploiting, or polluting other planets.

  Moreover, this story reveals an important tension regarding human activity in space. Our protagonists adamantly wish to avoid accusations of colonialization, but is it possible to identify or observe life without interfering in it? The very practice of science revolves around “taming” nature, trying to bring it into our realm of understanding and categorizing or managing it in some way. As he roams the terminator zone, we see Avi’s behavior start to change. If there is life on Shikasta b, Avi may be interacting or engaging with it. As such, he is not practicing the “radical observation” approach of the rest of the project team, who are seeing at a distance, but rather is intervening in and perhaps influencing the course of life on this planet. How does the research collective grapple with the notion that in their search for life they are inevitably intervening in that life? A cosmology that does not separate an individual from the world they inhabit might not see this as a particularly problematic tension, but can the research collective in “Shikasta” completely distance themselves from the idea of “colonization” when they have sent a robot to investigate another planet? In exposing tensions of this nature, Singh’s story offers a springboard for open discussion around identifying and reconciling the different values inherent to space exploration. This is complex terrain, worthy of collective consideration as we continue to search for life beyond Earth.

  Defining and Looking for Life

  Singh’s tale offers a number of tantalizing complications to our understandings of “life.” First, at the local or individual scale: In the character of Avi we have a robot whose “intelligence,” ability to adapt to his environment, and visible changes in behavior on Shikasta b seem to place him in an ambiguous state—is he a living organism or a nonliving machine? Current technical understandings of “life” seem to be primarily the territory of natural scientists—life is a natural phenomenon “out there” to be found, studied, explored, using a variety of possible lenses (biological, chemical, physical, etc.). But ownership over the definition of “life” may become increasingly problematized as our ability to build and engineer systems becomes ever more sophisticated. As synthetic biologists develop the ability to precisely engineer or even rewrite the genetic code,[4] or as engineers build systems like Avi with increasingly sophisticated abilities to learn and display “intelligent” behavior, will we see growing debates over definitions of life? Will terms like “natural life,” “synthetic life,” and “artificial life” be used to delineate different kinds of life,[5] or to carve out new claims of ownership over life-forms, or to stake particular political positions? One can imagine the boundaries between living and nonliving, and different definitions of life, becoming increasingly salient policy issues by 2035, with implications for funding, rights, and responsibilities based on where these lines are drawn (and who gets to draw them).

  “Shikasta” also encourages readers to consider a more expansive set of discussions about life—for example, focusing not just on living beings (on Earth or elsewhere in the universe) but also living systems, and actively pursuing different methods and techniques (at different scales) for trying to identify and understand life. The alternative approach espoused by our protagonists seems to be less about starting from a checklist or set of theories about what constitutes life, but rather practicing a form of “radical observation,” and searching broadly for “apparent violations of physical law” as signs of where and how life might be manifest.

  Furthermore, the lines between beings and their environment become increasingly blurred in “Shikasta,” promoting what we might call a more holistic understanding of life—an understanding that draws both on scientific ideas (for example, the Gaia hypothesis) as well as different cultural understandings of life (such as those held by the ancestral peoples of Annie, Kranti, and Chirag). The idea that “life” cannot be separated from its environment is a way of understanding the world that has implications for contemporary reductionist practices in genetics, including species conservation, and recent genomic efforts to resurrect extinct species[6] or to determine the “minimal” genome for life.[7] That individual beings can somehow exist “independently” of their environment is implicit (and troublesome) in many of these ongoing efforts.

  The astrobiology community seems acutely aware of how definitions of life impact the search for life—looking for life in the universe is inescapably tied to knowing what to look for. We have seen this tension played out in the public spotlight, for example around the Viking missions.[8] As Steven Dick points out, “the Viking landers in 1976 embodied implicit ideas about the nature of life as a metabolic process in order to build and undertake the biology experiments.”[9] The types of experiments designed to be taken up on spacecraft are necessarily linked to expectations about what forms of life might be found. The astrobiology community openly acknowledges “the possibility that ‘weird life’ might exist with signatures dissimilar from those produced on present-day Earth.”[10] Much attention is thus given to trying to identify what kinds of factors might render planets habitable, and honing in on what key biosignatures then become most plausible to search for. This is an explicitly interdisciplinary endeavor, but one that in practice adopts a relatively reductionist lens, identifying possible biomarkers and developing tests to search for the presence of those markers.

  In contrast, with Avi, we get the impression of a robot carrying relatively little equipment—life is literally being “looked for” through the camera lens. The “experiments” underway are not ones that test for chemical or atmospheric biosignatures based on hypotheses about the chemical composition of life, but experiments in testing whether cultural narratives developed by Chirag, Kranti, and Annie could potentially align with and help make sense of patterns visible on the terrain of Shikasta b. In this case, our protagonists seem to be exploring narrative as a way of testing hypotheses and knowing the world. We might say they are looking for societal or cultural biosignatures instead of chemical ones. Singh’s story challenges us to think of culture as integral to the pursuit of astrobiology—in this case, as defining the very terms by which one might search for life.

  In their 2015 Astrobiology Strategy, NASA identifies “technosignatures” (“biosignatures that indicate a technologically advanced civilization”) as one of ten broad categories of biosignatures that might be searched for.[11] Intriguingly, when we as humans have sent out explicit signs of our own existence to the universe, we have often focused on sending out technological and cultural artifacts to represent who we are—photographs, musical recordings, toys. We celebrate and characterize human civilization by showcasing our cultural and artistic achievements. The Voyager’s Golden Record is a prime example. Yet our search for life on other planets typically looks for very different signs of life—based on atmospheric and geological conditions, the presence of water, chemical signatures of metabolic activity.

  The protagonists in “Shikasta” show us how diverse ways of conceptualizing life and relationships with the environment, drawing on perspectives that might not be mainstream (or may indeed be actively marginalized), can open up different ways of doing science. Throughout her narrative, Singh encourages us to think about life at multiple scales and through a variety of lenses, prompting reflection on what we gain and miss with each. Different perspectives fade in and out throughout the story, showing us powerfully how they can be simultaneously present but not necessarily seamless to reconcile with one another. As readers, we are invited to see how actively grappling with diverse standpoints and the tensions between them can prove generative in terms of opening up the possibilities for finding life on other worlds. With diversity increasingly understood as bringing strength to scientific research teams and company boardrooms, so too might there be benefits to designing space missions that encompass diverse ways of investigating an
d valuing life.

  Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Vandana Singh, Sara Walker, and Zach Pirtle for stimulating and most enjoyable conversations over the course of this project.

  [1] William Sims Bainbridge, “Motivations for Space Exploration,” Futures 41, no. 8 (2009). [back]

  [2] Michael J. Rycroft, “Space Exploration Goals for the 21st Century,” Space Policy 22, no. 8 (2006): 160. [back]

  [3] See https://lunarmissionone.com/what-is-lunar-mission-one.html. [back]

  [4] Jason W. Chin, “Expanding and Reprogramming the Genetic Code of Cells and Animals,” Annual Review of Biochemistry 83 (2014). [back]

  [5] Lindsay Hays, ed. NASA Astrobiology Strategy 2015. (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 2015), 156. [back]

  [6] Carrie Friese and Claire Marris, “Making De-Extinction Mundane?” PLoS Biology 12, no. 3 (2014). [back]

  [7] Clyde A. Hutchison III, Ray-Yuan Chuang, Vladimir N. Noskov, and Nacyra Assad, “Design and Synthesis of a Minimal Bacterial Genome,” Science 351, no. 6280 (2016). [back]

  [8] Linda Billings, ed. Astrobiology: The Story of Our Search for Life in the Universe, vol. 2, Missions to Mars, (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 2011). [back]