Weird Life: The Search for Life That Is Very, Very Different from Our Own

by David Toomey

  He continues, “For that, the speculations of science fiction . . . are as valid as anything science can suggest.” We might add that science, likewise, has only so much to say about problems of communication and understanding between mutually alien intelligences. And these, too, are matters that science fiction writers have thought about a good deal. And so, with care and deliberation—and only for a single chapter—we cross the line.

  * * *

  * The Drake Equation: N = R* × fp × ne × fl × fi × fc × L. R* is the number of stars that might host planets formed annually in the galaxy; fp is the fraction of those stars that actually have planets; ne is the fraction of those planets that are Earthlike—that is, having an environment suitable for life; fl is the fraction of Earthlike planets on which life actually appears; fi is the fraction of Earthlike, life-bearing planets on which intelligence appears; fc is the fraction of intelligent beings that develop the desire and ability to communicate with other worlds. L is the longevity of each society in the communicative state.

  * On August 15, 1977, Jerry R. Ehman detected a strong narrowband radio signal while working on a SETI project associated with the Ohio State University. The signal matched the expected signature of an interstellar signal, and it lasted for a full 72 seconds. Ehman circled the signal on the computer printout and wrote “Wow!” in the margin. It was not detected again, and so has not satisfied the requirement of the scientific method that data from a given experiment be reproducible.

  * We will get to ideas of even weirder life—with different physics—in Chapter 9.

  * In 1965, Intel cofounder Gordon E. Moore described a trend whereby the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The figure of eighteen months used by Shostak (and many others) is derived from Intel executive David House’s estimate of the period in which chip performance doubles. (Kanellos, “Moore’s Law”)

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Weird Life in Science Fiction

  Extraterrestrial beings have appeared in science fiction for more than a century, and there are now enough to fill a large encyclopedia. In fact, there is such a compendium: Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials.1 Although its entries represent a vast and wide-ranging body of speculative organisms, only a few are of interest here, as only a few could be classified as weird life.* Probably the reason for their relatively small number is simply that authors find them unnecessary. Most science fiction authors use extraterrestrials to offer commentary on humankind—usually critical, occasionally flattering—and such aliens need have only superficial differences. Take, say, fourteenth-century samurai, give them purple skin and pointy ears, allow them to intone a few sage-sounding proverbs, and many readers, especially those who have fallen behind in their studies of feudal Japan, will be happy to believe they are getting a genuinely otherworldly take on the human condition.

  It is true that many intelligent extraterrestrials in science fiction have a biology unlike that of humans. Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness, for instance, features beings that can change their gender. But even ambisexual life is not weird in the sense I mean here, and in fact in our nonfictional world it is fairly common. Many plants and animals, including a mollusk with the lovely English name slipper limpet (and the somewhat less lovely Latin name Crepidula fornicata), are male at certain times in their life cycle, female at others.

  Some of the life depicted in science fiction that is weird in the sense I mean here is rendered with no explanation of its biology. The “Hooloovoo” from Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, for instance, is “a superintelligent shade of the color blue.”2 No doubt a few graduate students somewhere spent a late night theorizing about its biochemistry, but most readers take it as the whimsical construction that Adams most probably intended, happily suspend their disbelief, and read on.

  Suppose we define “weird life” broadly and generously, and begin with all the weird life in science fiction. When we remove depictions of alien life that is not truly weird (like Le Guin’s ambisexuals), and remove impressionistic renderings (like Adams’s Hooloovoo), we are left with a handful of attempts both to depict weird life and to explain it, accomplished with various degrees of plausibility and detail.

  There are many depictions of life based on silicon. Among them are a planetwide ecosystem and a life-form with a biochemistry of silicon and superfluid helium—the latter organism suited to very cold environments. In fact, authors of science fiction have imagined several varieties of cryogenic weird life, including some that survive on Kuiper belt objects, the icy bodies that circle the Sun in orbits beyond Neptune and have surface temperatures a frosty 30 degrees above absolute zero. The Kuiper belt organisms, the size and shape of shrimp, have a biochemistry based on fluorocarbons with oxygen difluoride as the biosolvent; they warm themselves by secreting a pellet of uranium-235 inside their bodies and moderating its nuclear fission through their shells. A convincing depiction of life at thirty degrees above the point at which molecular motion ceases would be a formidable challenge for the most ingenious science fiction, but one writer envisioned still-colder organisms that survive by using a biosolvent of helium, which is liquid at just 2 or 3 degrees above absolute zero.

  There is a minor science fiction tradition of life in stars.3 Writers depicting such life face a rather different set of problems. The atmosphere of a Sun-like star has several layers, one of which is the “chromosphere.” The temperature of a chromosphere reaches 1,000,000°C, hot enough to tear atoms and molecules apart, leaving their remnants as an ionized gas called “plasma”—hardly the stuff of which life is made. Nonetheless, several science fiction authors imagined beings that use magnetic fields to coax that plasma into chemistry and biochemistry. Again, such ideas would seem as strange as science fiction might manage. However, there are depictions of life taking forms and surviving in locales still more exotic—plasma-based organisms in the accretion disk of black holes, beings composed purely of quantum wave functions in the gravity wells of stars, and life in a parallel universe with different physical laws entirely.*

  In most of these works the weird organisms are as shocked to learn of humans as humans are to learn of them. In many cases, the shock is only the story’s beginning. When it has passed and both species have acknowledged the vast gulf separating their natures, they must somehow bridge that gulf, and to do it they must overcome enormous—in fact, unprecedented—challenges to communication and understanding. For the reader or viewer (many examples come from television and film), much of the pleasure of these stories derives from seeing humans and weird life cooperate to do exactly that. It is no surprise that there are many examples of such cooperation, and no surprise that one such example plays a role in what is probably the best-known encounter with weird life in all of science fiction.

  That encounter appears in a screenplay by Gene L. Coon, a writer for the original Star Trek television series. The crew of the Enterprise encounters a silicon-based life-form. Mr. Spock (who, as most readers no doubt know, is an English-speaking extraterrestrial) initiates a telepathic interchange during which the creature learns enough vocabulary and calligraphy to etch the words “NO KILL I” in rock. You might think that its rendering of English letters in a perfectly executed Helvetica would earn some admiration from the crew of the Enterprise. Not quite. The apparent confusion of nominative and objective case gives them pause, and Captain Kirk wrestles with an interpretation. “A plea for us not to kill it?” he wonders, “or a promise it won’t kill us?” Seeking an answer, Mr. Spock employs telepathy again and finds that they had underestimated the creature. Employing a poet’s economy of language and a minimum of rock-eating acid, it had meant both. Soon mutual understanding on larger issues is achieved, Dr. McCoy dresses the creature’s wound with “thermo-concrete,” and on one planet at least, carbon-based and silicon-based life manage to coexist.

  Since intelligent weird life of science fiction is
weird in a variety of ways, it follows that humans and weird life who wish to communicate and understand each other must seek a variety of avenues for communication and understanding. A rather different avenue is suggested in the work of science fiction writer James White, who has said that the political unrest and violence of his native Northern Ireland compelled him to conceive of a place that represented its opposites. The setting for twelve of White’s novels and numerous short stories is a space-based hospital, with patients that include delicate dragonfly-like chlorine breathers, ambulatory vegetables, and armor-plated elephantine beasts that can withstand atmospheric pressures four times that of Earth’s at sea level. The facility itself boasts wards with various atmospheres and gravities. The attending physicians, themselves representing eighty-seven different species, are expected to understand exotic chemistries and treat equally exotic ailments—a challenge even to the most accomplished among them. They meet that challenge with “education tapes” that temporarily endow their user with the expertise of a physician who is a member of the species being treated. Owing to an imperfection in their design, the tapes convey not only the medical knowledge of the physician, but his, her, or its personality. Included in that personality are gastronomical and sexual appetites—for the stories’ characters, more communication and understanding than is strictly necessary, and for the stories’ readers, interesting and amusing plot complications.

  Communication between humans and White’s beings is challenging, among other reasons, because they experience pressures, chemistries, and radiation differently than we do. Another author has depicted beings who experience time differently than we do. As you might expect, communication between humans and these beings demands much effort and much imagination. As you also might expect, these beings inhabit a world radically unlike any described so far.

  WHEN YOU LIVE UPON A STAR

  A neutron star is the remnant of a supernova explosion. Far more dense than even a white dwarf, it is a mass of the Sun squeezed into a sphere the size of a city. While the electron shells surrounding the atomic nuclei of white dwarf stars are greatly compressed, the electron shells surrounding atomic nuclei in neutron stars are crushed entirely, so that the nuclei themselves are pushed together. In the 1970s, when pulsars were discovered to be rapidly rotating neutron stars, Frank Drake—the same Frank Drake who in 1959 conducted the first serious search for radio signals from other civilizations—gave popular lectures on the phenomenon. To help his audiences visualize the surface of a neutron star, he described it from the point of view of creatures who might be living there.

  Seven years later, a physicist and engineer named Robert Forward modified the same idea as a basis for a science fiction novel called Dragon’s Egg. Forward imagined tiny creatures about the size of a sesame seed, composed, like the star’s crust, of densely packed atomic nuclei and having a metabolism that relied on nuclear chemistry. Familiar chemistry depends on the electromagnetic force, but Forward’s hypothetical nuclear chemistry was mediated by the strong force, and because the force is so much stronger than the electromagnetic force, the reactions of the nuclear chemistry are much faster—in fact, about a million times faster. The effective relative timescale between Forward’s beings and humans would be a million to one, meaning that one of the beings would live its natural life span, the equivalent of our three score and ten, in all of fifteen minutes. Although both species manage to send and receive messages with radio, this temporal disparity presents an obvious challenge. It is met because the inhabitants of the neutron star have the patience to wait half their lives to complete a single exchange with the humans, and because the humans (who have a somewhat easier time of it) possess the technology to greatly slow recordings of the messages they receive. All in all, organisms living on the crust of a neutron star was a fairly wild idea, but Forward’s rationale was sufficiently grounded that he could later publish it in the journal New Scientist.4

  The idea of weird life on neutron stars is remarkable, among other reasons, because such life would be incredibly dense, having adapted itself to places where matter is greatly compacted. Another sort of weird life, adapted to regions where matter is spread thinly, might be incredibly diffuse.

  NEBULAE

  Sir Fred Hoyle may be best known as the astronomer who coined the phrase “big bang” (derisively, as it happens) to describe the currently most favored theory for the universe’s origin. Hoyle also enjoyed an avocation as an author of science fiction. In 1957 he published a novel called The Black Cloud. Its central character, and the cloud of the title, is a nebula of hydrogen and more complex molecules that, although diffuse, is organized in the manner of a living being. (Like Forward’s neutron star life, Hoyle’s cloud was well grounded in science—enough that Freeman Dyson, in his hypothesis of life in a distant future, cited Hoyle’s novel as inspiration.5) The cloud propels itself by manipulating magnetic fields, and thinks with electrically charged dust particles—the rough equivalent of a vast set of neurotransmitters. When a group of radio astronomers realize that the cloud is both alive and intelligent, they manage to communicate with it via radio waves, and translate its messages into audible English speech.

  The cloud catches on quickly and, offering a nice reversal of perspective, politely explains to the humans their sheer improbability: “Your first transmission came as a surprise, for it is most unusual to find animals with technical skills inhabiting planets, which are in the nature of extreme outposts of life.”6 The cloud notes that the gravity on a planet’s surface severely constrains the size of animals and so the size—and therefore the complexity—of their brains. Moreover, gravity forces the development of “muscular structures” to enable mobility and “protective armor” like skulls to shield the brain. Naturally, these requirements exact a cost, constricting the size of the brain. Since the cloud is unencumbered by gravity, it labors under no such restraints. It enjoys another advantage over planet-bound organisms. Like most life on Earth, the cloud derives energy from sunlight to initiate and sustain chemical reactions. But because its surface area is enormous, it can avail itself of far more energy than can all of Earth’s biomass together. The cloud concludes its lesson to the humans with barely concealed condescension, noting, “By and large, one only expects intelligent life to exist in a diffuse gaseous medium, not on planets at all.”7

  A RANGE OF WEIRD LIFE

  Most of the authors who depicted weird life did so for only one or two works. In fact, only a few science fiction authors have produced large bodies of work focusing on weird life. Of these, the most prolific may have been Henry Clement Stubbs, writing under the pen name Hal Clement.

  Clement studied astronomy at Harvard and taught high school science, and all Clement’s aliens are the sort of intelligent weird life one might expect from the mind of a good science teacher—one who could look at a chemistry experiment and imagine a world inside it.* One of Clement’s novels is narrated by a being that breathes sulfur and drinks copper chloride. Another features life on a planet with an atmospheric pressure 800 times greater than Earth’s. Yet another depicts an alien and a human, with radically different conceptions of normal, making their way across a planet whose conditions are at the absolute tolerable limits for each, and gradually coming to mutual understanding. It is the plot of a hundred Hollywood buddy movies, except that the divide that separates our heroes is not merely cultural or economic or racial. It is biochemical.

  Clement’s best-known work is a novel called A Matter of Gravity, its action set on a massive (and, of course, fictional) planet whose rapid rotation causes it to bulge outward at the equator and makes for gravity that increases from a challenging 3 times Earth gravity at the equator to a crushing 300 times Earth gravity at the poles. The intelligent species on the planet are a kind of armor-plated centipede half a meter long, their technology at a stage roughly comparable to that of medieval Europe. The centipedes have a fear of heights—rational, as fears go, in that in the planet’s gravity things fall even sho
rt distances at the speed of a rifle bullet. Otherwise, they think and behave like any sampling of intelligent humans with a scientific bent, making and testing hypotheses, and building on the results. When they meet the arrivistes from Earth, the centipedes bargain for knowledge. They are quick studies of human psychology, and like the hayseed in the city, they get the better end of the deal—enough that they can bypass a scientific revolution or two. All of which is to say that the centipedes are rather familiar character types. Their weirdness is only skin—or, armor-plate—deep.

  All of Clement’s aliens are rational thinkers who think with scientific method, or learn to. All hold that the universe is comprehensible. The resulting view of nature—much the same in Hoyle’s The Black Cloud and Forward’s Dragon’s Egg—is reassuring. The universe may be fascinating and awe inspiring. It may hold wonders we have not imagined. But all of it, with enough time and effort, can be understood.

  There is, though, another sort of weird life in science fiction, and it is more disturbing, in part because it is truly and deeply weird—weird, we might say, all the way down. One of the best examples is one of the earliest, in David Lindsay’s 1920 novel A Voyage to Arcturus. The planet on which the action takes place has not only weird life, but an alternative to Darwinian natural selection, a hyperactive and directed sort of Lamarckian evolution in which creatures can actually will the properties of their progeny, the result being a natural world so “energetic and lawless” that no two creatures are alike.8

  A more recent example appears in Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris, with film versions in 1972 and 2002. The novel and films differ slightly, but in each, scientists from Earth have discovered a planet that is covered by what they describe (most easily but probably inaccurately) as a living ocean. In the generations that follow, thousands upon thousands of scientists study the ocean, venture hypotheses, and gradually construct theories as to its internal ecologies, its biochemistry, and its origin. Some believe it is conscious; others suspect it is merely very complex. On all these matters there are many schools of thought, dissenters within each, and naturally, decades of scholarship that fill whole libraries. Yet for all of this, not one of the scientists can say with any assurance exactly what it is they are studying.