Multiple Disciplines, Imagination, and the Big Picture

Mars' "Happy Face" crater On March 4--as the Mars Global Surveyor was locking into the red planet's orbit to begin its mapping mission, and two other spacecraft were hurtling toward Mars on other investigative missions--a multidisciplinary group of scientists, along with teachers, artists, writers, and a theologian, gathered to contemplate the Big Picture. During a long weekend in California's Silicon Valley, an estimated 200 people discussed, listened, and watched as future possibilities and probabilities unfolded in a kaleidoscope of erudite theories, random musings, unbridled concepts, and intriguing artwork from the fields of anthropology, astronomy, biochemistry, genetics, physics, cosmology, linguistics, psychology, planetary science, robotics--and science fiction. They viewed the Big Picture through many small lenses in a wide range of focuses. The primary theme for CONTACT XVI was using a multidisciplinary approach and imagination in a quest for more knowledge about the universe and its potential extraterrestrial life forms. Although CONTACT conferences may have been more attuned to physical and social sciences in the previous 15 years, life sciences pervaded this year's gathering, March 4-7 at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., and at a hotel in Santa Clara, Calif. For instance, one speaker, biochemist Hy Hartman of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), posited his theory of the origin of life on Earth, then brought things full circle with comments about exploring the universe. Hartman countered the long-held theory--that life gradually developed from a "soup" in the ocean of ancient Earth, with a primordial atmosphere composed of ammonia, hydrogen and methane, and sunlight to energize the necessary reactions--put forth by Russian biochemist Alexander Ivanovich Oparin back in the 1920s and British biologist J.B.S. Haldane in the 1930s. Harold Urey and Stanley Miller conducted experiments in the early 1950s that supported that theory by producing amino acids in laboratory simulations. "When you compare the universe to the Earth, we are fantastically depleted in certain rare gases. This means the atmosphere we have here is an outgas atmosphere. We are also tremendously depleted in hydrogen Ž. That [primordial] atmosphere was basically water and carbon dioxide and nitrogen. [So the atmospheric] environment in which life began was basically CO2, nitrogen, and water vapor .... The Urey-Miller experiment is wrong, completely wrong as a historical document," Hartman asserted. "Life does not involve only carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, [and] oxygen. It involves things like iron and magnesium, inorganic systems, nickel, cobalt, [and] transition metals. It involves sodium, potassium, [and] calcium. Ž We have made a fundamental error to think that life is based on carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur," he continued. In terms of the search for life, he maintained that " ... When you're looking for life, if you're good at spending your time looking at organic chemistry, you're going to find it everywhere except here on Earth. On Earth ... geochemistry gave you biochemistry, [which] gave you molecular biology, [which] gave you cell biology. So you have to invoke the whole Earth--not just the atmosphere, not just the ionosphere, but the lithosphere." It is a biological perspective that needs to change, according to another speaker. Not a scientist but a science fiction writer, Greg Bear issued a challenge to biologists: Rethink the paradigm. Bear, who has almost 20 novels to his credit, has concentrated heavily on biology for the past five years. The author says recent findings regarding the complexity of DNA mark "the beginnings of the end of the modern synthesis of Darwin's successors, if not Darwin himself." He continued, "Things are not as steady as they seem in biology right now. Modern Darwinian synthesis is the sine qua non in biology. But that's patent nonsense. It cannot work that way anymore. The gene system is the Queen's library. It is very, very complex and it is self-directing. It's networked, and to cooperate, genes must be socially attuned. Everything in nature is networked, and everything that is networked [can] advance." Bear told The Scientist, "Biology is approaching a crisis point where a certain innate conservatism is not allowing it to see and put together the facts that it has now gathered about life and how life works. I'm the gadfly, and I can say that it's so obvious there is something wrong with our basic paradigm. I don't have to rely on grants. But it is obvious. When you talk about a gene being able through some system of coordination to produce more than one kind of protein, that's paradigm-shifting right there. That idea shatters all the old simple notions of what genetics was. And," Bear added with a smile, "I've not met a single biologist who has an objection to any of my crackpot theories--either that or they're humoring me." So what do biology, biochemistry, and other disciplines have to do with science fiction? In a word, inspiration, according to planetary scientist Chris McKay of NASA Ames: "[Science fiction writers'] input is critical and useful because in some sense, [it] is the foresight of our species. One need only look at Jules Verne. Words I now use in technical papers were first made up in science fiction articles 50 years ago. Science fiction blazes the distant future and illuminates many different possible paths. As a culture, we must choose which way to go. Technology and science are about working out the details. But the dialogue is important." Renowned science fiction author Poul Anderson agrees: "A good deal of people's interest in science was awakened early on by science fiction. We furnish ideas, and tread where scientists cannot or dare not. Our purpose here is to spark ideas, give people things to think about. " In the end, regardless of whenever and wherever we might find other life, something about the search allures us, and as conference director Jim Funaro concluded, that may be as biological as cultural. "We are social mammals and our species' need for others of our own on this planet must surely trigger a primordial drive to believe in others of our own kind out there. When we look into space, the mother of all isolation, we feel lonesome. Our most profound and biologically based fear is not fear of the unknown, but of the uninhabited." As new findings have emerged in the biological sciences, the search for extraterrestrial life also has escalated. Talk abounds at the Johnson Space Center about sending first a robot mission to Mars to construct, as McKay puts it, "the robot house on the prairie," and then a human team to take over. "NASA now has the tools and determination to go and search for life and Earth-like planets like we've never been able to before, and Ž at a pace that's millions of times faster than before," McKay points out. "We don't really know yet whether Earth satisfies the Copernican Principle and whether planets like Earth are around and whether they have intelligent life. But there's only one way to find out, and that is to go and look." Why spend money looking for something that may or may not be out there when there are so many issues that need attention right here on Earth? It's a question that's often been raised since 1960 with Project Ozma, the first Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project to scan the skies for signals emanating from extraterrestrial civilizations, right up to NASA's recent announcement of a new Astrobiology Institute.1 The Scientist surveyed a cross section of the scientists in attendance at CONTACT XVI to try and answer the question. "As for the issue of money, it's really not much," explained Seth Shostak, public programs scientist for the SETI Institute. "With regard to SETI, we're spending four to five million dollars a year right now and it's all private money. Even when SETI was a NASA program, it amounted to one penny per taxpayer who paid $10,000 a year in taxes. The Astrobiology Institute has just started, and there certainly aren't huge amounts of money being poured into it. Still, this misperception exists." Photo: Malin Space Science Systems/NASA Photo: Malin Space Science Systems/NASA Photo: Malin Space Science Systems/NASA All photographs in this article were taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera on the Mars Global Surveyor. While Shostak targeted the media as the cause for misperception, the media has also stimulated great public interest in finding out whether E.T. is out there. "More than half the people in the United States believe that there is intelligent life somewhere out there, and many believe that life has already visited here," Shostak noted. "The one thing that Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch are most interested in is, 'Can you find not only life, but life that can hold up their part of the conversation?' That's the purpose of SETI." Even so, some people would argue that paying scientists to sit and contemplate extraterrestrial life is tantamount to paying them to daydream. "But daydreams have given us science, and art and poetry, and everything that's great about humanity," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology biochemist Hy Hartman. "The United States is going into space for three reasons: military--space is the ocean of the military future; economic--you can't even get your credit card validated unless the satellites are working; and scientific. The point is, we are going into space, and that means we're now going into the universe, very far away from home, and we want, and need, to know more about what we're heading into." Virtually everyone cited the potentially far-reaching scientific and medical knowledge to be gained. "Generally, I see it as a fundamental part of what we need to know," said psychologist Albert A. Harrison of the University of California at Davis. "As we address problems we may encounter out there, we learn much more about life on Earth. It also seems to me to be a natural progression in science. We have been looking on Earth and we are looking outward now. This will tie into the Space Age, which is really not that far along. We will return to the moon, set forth for Mars." CONTACT Web site:www.cabrillo.cc.ca.us/divisions/socsci/anthro/jfunaro/contact/contact.html SETI Web site:www.seti.org NASA's Exobiology Web site:exobiology.nasa.gov/ssx The bigger scientific picture is another reason to keep up the search. As Reed Riner, professor of anthropology, Northern Arizona University, put it: "For all the biodiversity that we're watching being threatened here on Earth, if not disappearing, ... it's still a sample of one. Even if we don't find another sample within our lifetimes, all of the alternative images of the future that have been considered are kinds of Rorschachs. They can tell us a lot about possibilities and probabilities, but they can also clarify things we know, giving us at the very least a better perspective on our sample of one." Harrison agreed: "In terms of the life sciences, we are dealing with the fundamental issues of the origin and distribution of life, and there will be profound kinds of implications if we discover that the same processes that occur on Earth are replicated other places." Beyond the prospects of practical knowledge to be gained, "the real answer is understanding our place in the universe and answering it is an important goal," said Chris McKay, planetary scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. "When you move into a new neighborhood even though you have a lot of work to do on your house ..., you still take a little time to walk around ... to see who's there. The metaphor is appropriate here. I agree, we need to fix our house, but we need to put some effort into seeing who's in the neighborhood." S. Bunk, "Astrobiology makes debut under NASA," The Scientist, 12[13]:1, June 22, 1998. A.J.S. Rayl (ajsrayl@loop.com) is a freelance writer in Malibu, Calif.

Multiple Disciplines, Imagination, and the Big Picture

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