First Contact – The Germ Scenario

By James and John Gaines

                The February, 2015 issue of Popular Science has a thought-provoking article by Corey S. Powell entitled “Have We Found Alien Life?” (pp. 34-39 and 70).  It reports on the research by USC scientist Kenneth Nealson into a one-celled organism called Shewanella oneidensis that appears to be able to grow uniquely on the charges from an electrode.  This allows the bacterium to “breathe rocks” in a way unlike other earthly creatures, but perhaps like others that may be discovered eventually in outer space.  The article goes on to examine, in parallel, possibilities of microbial life on other planets of the solar system and ways to go about detecting it. 

                Nealson’s discoveries, while not oriented specifically towards alien biology, bring up the sensible scenario that when we make contact with other-worldly life, it may be us doing the contacting, and the life may not be intelligent by any existing standards.  Of course, this type of first contact scenario poses a number of significant risks that have been imagined in part by science fiction in the past.  H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds treats the matter in reverse, since technologically superior and malevolent Martian invaders are eventually laid low by germs from earth.  B-movies of the 1950’s were concerned, in contrast, with the dangers to Earthlings from germs that would come to earth accidentally.  In the case of The Blob, an amoeba-like organism survives inside a meteor and winds up absorbing the tissues first of an imprudent hermit and then of much of the population of an isolated town.  Invasion of the Body Snatchers imagines a different sort of cosmic fallout in the form of spores that grow first into exaggerated peapods and then morph into humanoid form, taking over the psyche, as well as the body, of the nearest human.  These pod creatures are not strictly speaking microbial or one-celled, but the idea is similar.  Other films, such as The Crawling Hand, feature some kind of contagion that comes back to Earth with a space explorer and spreads (in this instance with merciful slowness) into the human race before it is stopped.  It is not quite clear in The Crawling Hand that the organic processes are due to a new species or simply to radiation-induced mutations of human cells, but as one can deduce from the title, this drive-in fare is more concerned with the sexual attributes of its “Swedish” female lead than with hard sci fi. 

                In more recent times, the discovery of quasi-microbial remnants in meteorites and the apparent evidence of water on Mars have revived speculation about microbial life that could be soon proven on one of the near worlds.  Some anxieties have arisen over the possible contamination of our own ecosystems by these strangers.  During the exploration of the Moon by Apollo astronauts, there had been relatively little concern that moon rock samples might pose any dangers.  For one thing, there was ample evidence that the Moon would be sterile, given the fact that water was not positively identified there until after the missions were finished.  Secondly, the samples were quite limited and were subject to careful scrutiny.  Thirdly, the astronauts themselves functioned to some degree as canaries in the coal mine, since the return to Earth was not instantaneous and any glaring peril might presumably unveil itself during the flight back.  After extended examination, moon rock samples were eventually distributed far and wide, so the fact that they have produced no discernible damage proves retrospectively that any anxieties were unnecessary.

                However, this comforting lack of extraterrestrial life so far may not hold true for future expeditions.  Asteroids, the immediate target for NASA missions, might seem to pose no greater danger than the moon rocks.  We must keep in mind, though, that one important goal of asteroid encounters is potential mining.  One wonders if importation of tons of material would be treated with the same scrupulous care as NASA’s tiny samples, especially if the goal were not pure science, but commercial capitalization.  This still limited risk is multiplied many times when it comes to samples from some of the other interesting bodies in our solar system, such as the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune.  Besides satellites like Triton and Europa, which might have submerged liquid seas, other worlds may sustain underground microbial life.  Powell’s article specifically mentions Mars, Titan, and Ganymede as places that might sustain rock-consuming microbes not dissimilar to the ones discovered by Nealson and his team.  In regards to the Saturnian moon of Enceladus, Powell says, “hydrothermal vents below its South Pole… would be natural homes to rock-breathing microbes” (35).  NASA certainly embodies much of mankind’s present knowledge about biochemical contamination and could be counted on to apply what it knows, but in view of severe budget restrictions and the general neglect of much hard scientific R & D on a worldwide scale, we wonder if what we know now might really be enough to protect our planet against possible contamination. 

                In this regard, two additional B-movies deserve consideration.  It! The Terror from Beyond Space and 20 Million Miles to Earth postulate more substantive imports in the form of vaguely reptilian and bipedal creatures that are brought back on spacecraft.  In It!, the importation is strictly involuntary and unknown until after the return trip is initiated.  The ET kills several of the crew and menaces others before a drastic solution is found in the form of depressurization of the ship.  This was a good enough idea that it was duplicated years later in the film Alien, where the danger of exposing Earth to its dragon-like creature was far more explicit.  In 20 Million Miles, on the other hand, the importation is deliberate and the Venusian is thought to be utterly harmless until it is exposed to the air and rocks of Earth, which make it grow into a giant that terrorizes Rome before succumbing to a mere bazooka.  Leaving behind the sensational appearance of both monsters, let us ponder the means of transmission rather than the exterior, since a real danger may not come from something that roars or looks like a dinosaur.  The It! scenario, where a stowaway bacterium would not be discovered until it is already on the way to Earth and holds, so to speak, a human crew as hostages, is a frightening possibility.  In a worst case, it might lead to the termination of the mission and its human component.  A 20 Million Miles eventuality might be all the more ghastly, since control on our own planet could not be preserved simply with nets or bazookas. 

                Returning to the Nealson characterization of his organism as “rock breathing,” it may be worthwhile to examine a particular risk of an organism “hiding” itself inside the Earth.  Humans generally tend to think of the Earth as a vast machine for decontamination, rendering harmless everything from nuclear waste to plague remains.  However, what if a rock breathing microorganism got under the surface of our most important rock – this planet?  We who are mainly limited to controlling the surface of the planet do not currently possess the means to reasonably decontaminate the Earth itself I an alien microorganism managed to establish itself below us.  What could be the potential effect of a life form that could digest the very underpinning of our existence?  Only one sci fi example exists, as far as we know, of such a threat to Earth’s minerals, the rather far-fetched film Monolith Monsters, in which alien crystals begin to grow disproportionately and dehydrate any living things that come in contact with them.  Ironically, they are easily conquered when a dam is breached near a salt flat and the flood of sodium chloride dissolves them into harmless sand.  Yet this threat is literally superficial and does not begin to approach the complexity of having to deal with a harmful organism proliferating underneath the outer crust of the Earth. 

                So to “get real” with this admittedly unusual sort of scenario, what could be done?  First, it seems prudent that a containment area away from the Earth would be a good idea.  The Moon might be a possible candidate, but let’s not forget that, thanks to tides, the Moon is also an important part of the Earth’s environment and may not make a good celestial guinea pig.  Better would be a moon around the Moon, since NASA is already proposing to tow an asteroid into lunar orbit as part of its preparation for missions to the Asteroid Belt and Mars.  Such an installation might cost more than one on the lunar surface, but would add a useful degree of separation in a worst case situation.  Secondly, it would be important to test possibly life-bearing samples not only in a vacuum, but in simulated Earth-like conditions.  If earthbound industries and laboratories are the eventual destination, it follows that we would have to be sure that organisms would not get out of hand if they were exposed to oxygen, moisture, cosmic ray protection, and the other privileges we enjoy.   Lastly, some consideration should be given to conducting materials processing at a location above the Earth’s surface.  This would be enormously expensive in the beginning, but might actually pay for itself to some degree by greatly reducing the mass of material that would have to be moved from space to Earth, given the fact that navigating our atmosphere is the most expensive and dangerous part of such transport.  Ultimately, it may be impossible to completely eliminate the danger of harmful exposure to organic life if we are determined to travel beyond our present home.  On the other hand, failures like the Challenger disaster should convince us that safety has to come first, especially on a planetary scale.

Closed-Loop Meme

                                             

                                                "Closed-Loop Meme"

                                                 by John Gaines

          
               A closed-loop meme is a concept used as a form of cultural shorthand between a select group to express a concept or emotion as a form of shorthand.  Although all memes function as a form of “cultural compression” in terms of abbrievating a concept to those “in the know”, closed-loop memes are unique in that the symbolic language they use is almost impenetrable to outsiders.

                One of the most famous uses of closed-loop meme in science fiction occurs in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok”, in which Picard must communicate with an alien being who communicates only in narratives from his species’ mythic cycle. Picard ultimately solves the problem of communication by understanding the common features of the alien’s narrative descriptions and the Epic of Gilgamesh.  The episode details the difficulties of cross cultural communication and the necessity to finding a common thread between cultures to connect them; without an understanding of the Gilgamesh legend, Picard could not have solved the puzzle of understanding the alien’s speech, which was entirely a form of closed-loop meme referencing its own legends.

                The concept of a closed-loop meme is often used as an intentional safeguard of knowledge between members of a subgroup to prevent infiltration from outsiders. In Life Sentence, the first book of the Domremy cycle, the religious group of Dissenters use a symbolic language called Crop Talk to communicate with each other to prevent their messages to each other from being decoded by the authorities. The main character, Klein, is introduced to the language of Crop Talk through a friend, and his communications in Crop Talk with the Dissenters form a major part of the novel’s plot.

 

                Although closed-loop meme can be used to safeguard minority groups for benevolent purposes, it can also be used to nefarious ends.  Our as yet untitled second book in the Domremy cycle portrays the flip side of closed-loop meme; a society where it functions as a tool for oppression and ignorance rather than the preservation of knowledge and group identity.  The Garanian species is ruled by a monolithic “Unity” government that preserves order and its own existence at the expense of individual joy and choice, and much of this is accomplished by eliminating knowledge of the planet’s history from all but a select ruling echelon.  Within this echlelon, concepts from the planet’s past, before its Unity government had arisen, are illustrated through a series of symbolic historical references that make no sense to the vast majority of the planet’s population, who are only taught a distorted version of history through “Approved” historical texts.  As the main Garanian character, Tashto, is deployed to a peace conference, he uses the rare opportunity to interact with other cultures to try to understand his planet’s history and how the Unity government came to be—and what truly came before.

      

First Contact: the Quarantine Hypothesis

By James and John Gaines

                Back in the 1950’s, the noted physicist Enrico Fermi developed a line of thinking now called the Fermi Paradox, which stated, roughly, given the mathematically good possibility of intelligent life on other planets in the galaxy or the known universe, why had none of them made contact with humans or left something to demonstrate their existence?   He might well have looked across the lunch table when he developed these thoughts, since he was at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the middle of a nuclear lab complex, talking with a group of scientists that included Edward Teller, the godfather of the hydrogen bomb.  Let’s keep this context in mind as we develop the discussion.

                For all his off-the-cuff brilliance, Fermi’s paradox does leave considerable room for doubt.  His mathematical calculation of Intelligent Life probability fails to take a few important things into consideration, most notably the factor of universal entropy.  In figuring the tens of billions of years that “early” galactic civilization(s) may have had to spread across space, he did not recognize that life develops on planets and that planets, and the stars that enable them, also have a lifespan.  In fact, many are developing or disappearing right now, within our own, so far short, human window of IL.  Thus, geologically and astrophysically, a civilization does not have forever to get its message across.  

                Moreover, we have to consider that there may be such a thing as a Species Threshold that applies to the situation.  By that, we mean that each species has an evolutionary “window” between the time that it emerges from a determined existence (i. e. homo erectus) and the time when it is capable of ending its existence through overpopulation, conflict, or perhaps other processes of degeneration.  Humans have had only 10,000 years or so of anything we deem civilization.  We still have only a partial idea of how life and intelligence develop, much less of how they may become extinct.  In Fermi fashion, we can consider that we are probably typical in this respect and that other forms of IL would be subject to the same phenomenon of a Species Threshold, possibly absolute, possibly not.  The concept that an interplanetary IL civilization would arise and simply stay the same, continually able to initiate first contact with another IL, therefore seems counter-intuitive. 

                We can conclude that even under a best-conditions scenario, IL first contact chances may be less than Fermi optimistically calculated.  Assume, though, that Fermi is not far off the mark and that there is now at least one IL form in the galaxy that might be capable of contacting us but hasn’t.  This apparently willful neglect in turn suggests that something like the Star Trek version of Prime Directive is at play: interstellar civilizations may have an avoidance policy in effect regarding life forms that have failed to achieve a given level of achievement.  Science fiction has posited this situation many times, beginning perhaps with Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker.  Contemporary variations are too numerous to list.  It is worth mentioning, in addition, that we humans have not proven so far to be a very encouraging study group in some ways.  Other than a few exceptions like the Great Wall and the Pyramids, humans spent long centuries without producing progress observable from space.  Even as late as the nineteenth century, the energy footprint of a great city like London, Beijing, or Baghdad would have been miniscule compared to purely natural phenomena like major volcanic eruptions.  Our first radio broadcasts, arguably the best long-range testimony to our technology, would have been gibberish to a passing IL presence.  They may have been completely ignored, since they were merely analog forms of audio tracks (and who says other ILs even use the same bands and conventions of audio communication that we do?) in a plethora of different languages, not even sensibly digitalized.  The same holds true for television, keeping in mind that the first broadcast capable of reaching even the nearby space of our solar system was of a speech by a fellow named Adolf Hitler.  Of course, the next major observable event would have been the first explosions of the atomic bomb, which accelerated with mind-numbing speed to ever larger, more powerful, and obviously aggressive bombs. 

                We arrive more or less inevitably at the realization that IL life forms in our vicinity may not want to hasten a first contact.  If you heard that a boy from a house way down the street had just murdered part of his family, would you invite him into your yard to play?  Not bloody likely.  Better to make sure that you did not attract his attention in any way.  A Stellar Quarantine might in this case seem to be a scenario that reduces the risk for an IL form in our spatial neighborhood, whether or not the neighbor decided that we were worthy of further observation at all (this will be treated in a late post). 

                At this point, we are tempted to argue, as cock-eyed optimists, that surely the human race had proven that it is capable of better things than World War II or Mutually Assured Destruction.  We have the UN, the Internet, Neil Armstrong on the Moon, the Hubble Telescope.  Doesn’t that prove that we have a worthy side to our existence?  The trouble is that all of our advances, especially in the direction of space, have been driven by a military motive that may not seem like acceptably civil behavior to the neighbors.  Our first satellites were launched on rockets designed originally to destroy London and Moscow, if not New York.  Sputnik caused a virtual panic in military applications that quickly spread into the outer reaches of our atmosphere.  For one Hubble, we have scores, perhaps hundreds, of active spy satellites pointing the wrong way, back down toward Earth, sending drones with explosive payloads to the eradicate the villain-du-jour.  The Space Shuttle was designed primarily not for the inoffensive International Space Station, but to deliver unspecified military machines into orbit.  Now that the Space Shuttle is mothballed, it has been replaced by the secret X-37B vehicle.  No one is supposed to know what it’s doing on its long robotic missions, but we think we can be sure it’s not surveying crops or tracking bird migrations.  All this astro-military activity could not help but send a message to an IL observer that we humans may not be ready to learn how to pop up unannounced in other planetary systems. 

                When immigrants came to the booming USA in the early 20^th century, they had to pass through Ellis Island.  Not because Americans wished to embarrass them or keep better track of them or help them adjust to a new environment, but to quarantine disease carriers before they could set foot on Manhattan Island.  Whether our physical microbes are damaging to extraterrestrial IL forms, we cannot know yet, but we can reasonably surmise that our mental microbes are probably strictly undesirable.  We may be in the Ellis Island Infirmary of interstellar relations at this very moment.  Our future will be judged by one factor, and only one: whether we can cure ourselves of our undesirability.

“Getting Real About First Contact – The Conquistador Hypothesis”

By James and John Gaines

                In the first installment of this series, “The Ferengi Hypothesis,” we promised to return to the possibility that aliens contacting the Earth may do so, not to eradicate or consume humanity, but to enslave them.  This topic already has a very large science fiction footprint, ranging from movie classics such as “This Island Earth,” where humans are to be a subservient race to the more advanced Metalunans on a colonized Earth, to the laughable “Future War,” where humans have been abducted to serve silly cyborgs on a distant world.  Popular culture has further explored the prospects of various kinds of alien abduction, often with the goal of “high-jacking” the human race through the introduction of alien DNA, a long-running theme in the television series, “The X Files.”  Such widespread interest shows that this contact hypothesis, though in many aspects not the most likely, does deserve a deeper scientific and anthropological investigation.

                Science would suggest that the usefulness of humans as off-planet slaves would be pretty limited.  Preparations for a trip to Mars have shown that even for such a short journey, in cosmic terms, our species is not well-suited.  We require rather large amounts of food, moisture, breathable air, and waste treatment facilities that make interplanetary travel – at least with our present imaginable technology – very difficult.  “2001, A Space Odyssey,” which had the advantage of Arthur C. Clarke’s probing mind, proposed to solve these problems by keeping the larger part of an interplanetary crew in some form of suspended animation.  NASA’s plans for a Mars mission do not include this scenario, but it is still unclear how our physiology would stand up to the everyday effects of space travel.  Much of the experimentation on the International Space Station and other orbital missions has concerned the deleterious influence of prolonged weightlessness, but this problem is probably less serious than that of prolonged exposure to cosmic rays.  Recent prospects of enveloping a manned Mars vehicle in layers of common plastics may prove useful, but their overall efficacy has yet to be proven.  Furthermore, these short-run considerations are only part of the problem, because as the film “Avatar” postulates, mankind’s abilities to function even on “earthlike” planets may be limited by all sorts of toxicities in alien ecosystems.  In addition, humans on an alien world would be subject to attack by alien micro-organisms and could easily suffer the fate of the Martian invaders in Wells’s War of the Worlds, felled by the most humble of unfamiliar life forms.  It would appear that, all in all, the value of human beings as space slaves would probably be rather low.

                More plausible is the possibility that aliens may desire to exploit the human race in situ, keeping them on Earth to perform various tasks the aliens judge unsuitable for themselves.  This is the key to what we call “The Conquistador Hypothesis.”  As with “The Ferengi Hypothesis,” we believe that useful speculation in this direction can take place in consideration of previous examples on our own planet, especially first contacts made during the Age of Discovery, when Europeans began exploiting native cultures.  While noteworthy comparisons can be made with some parts of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, the most massive examples come from the New World, where Spanish and Portuguese colonies sought to set up slavery-based economies for the benefit of the “mother countries” across the oceans. 

                The large-scale enslavement of Native Americans became a priority concern of the Spanish as soon as Christopher Columbus’s second journey to the Indies.  He longed to enslave the hostile Carib tribes, despite initial opposition from the Crowns, but also took over a thousand Arawak slaves and sent several hundred to Spain.  The fate of these transported slaves was similar to what is described in previous paragraphs about humans transported to other planets: they died in huge numbers during and immediately after shipment.  In fact, they proved less movable than African slaves who were already being imported as house servants and luxury court servants by the Portuguese.  However, in the meantime, Columbus was pioneering another sort of in situ slavery to collect the newfound gold on the island of Hispaniola.  His scheme deserves close attention because it is fiendishly systematic and applicable on a large scale.  After corrupting or intimidating all the leadership of the Native American tribes, Columbus established a gold quota that each individual had to render to the Spanish, in exchange for which they obtained a metal token to be worn for identification.  Any natives without a token were subject to cruel and immediate execution.  As administered by Columbus, this system failed, inasmuch as it provoked often violent resistance from the enslaved, rapidly destroyed the very infrastructure that made implementation possible in the first place, and produced very little profit.  Within a generation, most of the Native American population of Hispaniola was eradicated.  On the other hand, this failure was due to cluelessness and stupidity on the part of Columbus and his minions.  An alien power contacting Earth could easily avoid the pitfalls by carefully maintaining human elites to administer an exploitative system, sweetening the pot for them by distributing a fraction of the profits, and managing terror in a more selective process to ensure the compliance of human slaves.  As we suggested in “The Ferengi Hypothesis,”  the mere possibility of such an approach makes it absolutely essential in the case of first contact that tight cooperation be maintained among human leaders and that protocols to avoid corruption be in place before contact occurs.

Columbus was only the first of the Conquistadores, and tactics changed as the Spanish Empire moved onto the American continents.  In Mexico, Cortes raised the divide-and-conquer strategy Columbus had dabbled with among native tribes to a fine art.  Recent historians such as Peter Koch, in The Aztecs, the conquistadors, and the Making of Mexican Culture, have shown how Cortes would pretend to befriend one tribe, offering military and economic assistance in order to obtain information and logistical support, then move on to an adjoining area where the process would be repeated.  His most brilliant coup was to inveigle the Totonacs, Cempoallans, and even the originally hostile Tlaxcalans into aiding his advance against the Aztecs, since these harassed peoples had bitter scores to settle with their oppressors on the other side of the sierra.  The Aztecs, prey to political and spiritual confusion, allowed the Spanish and the allied horde to approach until it was too late.  Aztecs had maintained their dominance over surrounding tribes through a combination of bloody terror through human sacrifice, combined with a strangely benign form of “flower wars” that obtained slaves without destroying the main source of needed manpower.  Perhaps they thought the Spanish would continue their strategy in such a way as to offer them, in turn, military support against other peoples.  In any case, their response – a combination of bluster, mumbo-jumbo, gifts, and honors – was a pathetic failure.  Once the Aztecs had been slaughtered in a series of battles, all Mexico lay at the feet of the Spaniards and they systematically asserted rule by mollifying native groups at first and then ruthlessly crushing any opposition.  Though the Aztec king Monteczuma has been critiqued and psychoanalyzed by generations of scholars who blamed him personally for the downfall of his regime, today’s world leaders show that they have learned little from history.  The modus operandi of the current American president in particular shows marked similarity to Monteczuma’s approach to “international” problems, and there is no indication that Barack Obama would behave differently in an interplanetary situation.  In fact, his recent insistence on “American exceptionality” would invite any tricky alien strategist to use a typical Cortes policy co-option to obtain his aid in subduing any parts of the planet unwilling to comply with the “advantages” being offered them. 

Of course, the goal of the Spanish invasion of Mexico from the beginning was precious metals.  Cortes was only sent to conquer them after intelligence had provided adequate proof of a fortune to be dug out of the earth.  The development of large-scale mining , as well as the construction of a European-style infrastructure of palaces, forts and churches, required huge pools of physical labor in a country where the wheel had not yet been put to economic use.  Other types of labor-intensive exploitation, such as harvesting lumber and cultivating plantations, accompanied the administrative projects.  In most cases where the Aztecs had already established the bases for slavery, it was simple for the Spanish to redirect manpower to their own priorities.  When necessary, less docile elements of the Native American population could be forcefully “settled” around mission churches, where the priests, under the guise of spiritual conversion, would also provide intelligence and surveillance for the forces of order, at the same time instilling an ideology of total obedience and an idolatry of poverty among the populace.  Humans could expect, in the event of a Conquistador-type contact, that the same process would be followed: divide-and-conquer politics, assimilation of existing earthly channels of authority, phased economic domination, and installation of an ideological system (perhaps based on digital communication?) to ensure the progressive elimination of resistance and the transformation of the consciousness of the slave population.  Again, the only obvious way to impede such a program is a pre-coordinated opposition from the very earliest point of encounter.

Pizarro’s conquest of Peru in many ways mirrors the Cortes strategy in Mexico and that of other minor conquistadores in other parts of the Americas, but adds one glaring addition: kidnapping.  Pizarro’s expedition was in some aspects much more vulnerable than that of Cortes, at least until he arranged to be admitted to Cuzco and in a commando-like operation kidnapped the Incan king Atahualpa.  Rafael Varón Gabai describes in Francisco Pizarro and his Brothers: The Illusion of Power in Sixteenth-Century Peru the intricacies of the carrot-and-stick approach employed by the Spaniards while the Incas were locked in internal feuds.  When Pizarro demanded ransom for the king’s release, it appeared to offer the Incans the prospect of reestablishing the status quo ante and perhaps ousting  usurpers from their territory.  Yet the very value of the ransom they raised assured that the Spaniards would never do any such thing.  The rooms full of treasure so ignited the greed of the conquistadores that they were incapable of relenting.  Of course there was a certain amount of palace intrigue involved in Atahualpa’s fate, which in some aspects bore more resemblance to The West Wing or House of Cards than to the type of human-versus-alien shootout that is the stock of sci fi thrillers.  Yet it is not impossible that a first contact encounter on the conquistador model might involve a small number of operatives entering the White House or the Pentagon and engineering a kidnapping situation, either on a small or large scale, that would occult their ultimate goal of systematic enslavement and exploitation.  There is no reason to think that this would involve a ransom in the form of gold or other precious metals, but rather perhaps items that might not seem so valuable to the man in the world’s streets.  After all, for the Incans, gold was not really an article of everyday utility or a staple commodity, but rather a substance reserved for certain politico-religious purposes.  If first contact occurs, we should not blindly assume that the scale of alien values will resemble our own.

While Cortes and Pizarro set up structures that were effective in assuring vast amounts of human labor for the New World mines and for the plantations that followed, it is worthwhile,  in order to glean some possibly useful lessons, to look at one more conquistador who failed.  De Soto’s expedition, no less impressive in military might than that of his earlier countrymen, set out from the vicinity of Tampa Bay with a goal of subduing all of present North America.  He actually covered more ground than either Cortes or Pizarro, but wound up dying miserably (perhaps at the hands of his own men) without obtaining precious materials and, more importantly, without establishing a superstructure for slavery.  His army annihilated several tribes in the Southeast, especially the Mobiliens whom he hoped would be the Aztecs or the Incas of North America.  They eradicated many more indirectly through imported diseases, since the majority of the tribes identified by him had ceased to exist by the time subsequent explorers visited the area.  The pigs he brought along for food even changed the ecology of the region when they escaped and began to breed in the wild.  For all this, though, he failed to achieve dominance on a human level.  The main reason seems to be that the majority of Southeastern tribes seem to have been wary of his motives, uneager to interact with him, and capable of ongoing military resistance against a vastly superior technological force.  The first two factors are probably the most crucial.  De Soto was never able to assemble auxiliary enforcers like the Tlaxcalans or to worm his way into a local power structure.  When he did try to do this with the Mobiliens, they eventually reacted with fanatical fervor, preferring death to the last warrior rather than submission.  Their sacrificial example served as a powerful deterrent for other people who might have fallen under De Soto’s sway.  Despite the fact that Southeastern Native Americans represented a panoply of ethnic and linguistic groups, they were able to achieve a majority, if not unanimity, in their rejection of the newcomers.  Though this seeming victory was impermanent and came at a heavy price, twenty-first century humans owe it to themselves to be aware of this history.

Enslavement of indigenous groups was not universally successful under the conquistadores.  In some colonies, the Spaniards were able to use priests to implement and enforce an ideology that they were actually improving the indigenous peoples by “making them work” in virtuous ways, as Richard Lee Marks points out in Cortes, the Great Adventurer and the Fate of Aztec Mexico.  But where local conditions prevented the brainwashing of the Native Americans, there was an alternative.  For the Portuguese in Brazil and for the Spanish in the Caribbean area, a hybrid form of slavery was developed, as African slaves were massively moved to the Americas.  The history of African slavery, over-simplified in current school texts and in the media, was actually too long and complex to trace here in detail.  The main point pertinent to our discussion is that members of a different “race,” but of the same species, were enslaved to function in a slavery system originally conceived for Native Americans.  Given the conclusions reached in preceding paragraphs about the difficulty of transshipping human slaves to other planets, we should not forget that it may be easier for exploitative aliens to transship humans to other parts of the Earth in order to exploit their economic program.  In fact, it would be much easier to do so today than in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, since large population elements from some parts of the globe are already yearning for migration according to their personal economic imperatives.  It is not inconceivable that a conquistador-type alien power would actually offer to facilitate population migration as part of a larger enslavement plan.  This was already done to some degree by human colonial powers with residents of India who were enticed or coerced to migrating to other lands as part of an imperial scheme, leading to the presence of Indian ethnicities still active in the Caribbean, Africa, and the Indian Ocean islands.  A conquistador contact might seek large-scale re-engineering of the Earth’s populations in ways quite different from the Spanish Asiento system that accounted for the biggest percentage of African slavery in the past.  There is a danger that this could be combined with a form of creative outsourcing that would invite existing corporations on Earth to take advantage of the colonizing profit, above and beyond the control of existing human governments.  It would be silly to believe that aliens capable of travelling from star to star would have no other way of controlling humans than putting a collar around their neck, especially if the lure of a living wage would induce them to cooperate of their own volition with schemes that might be far beyond their comprehension. 

This last point, the vulnerability of Earth’s current population to manipulation through simple material demands, brings up the larger issue, already hinted at in the first installment, of the necessity for a social preparation for contact on our pre-contact planet.  While hunger, disease, environmental degradation, and ignorance to unaddressed all over our world, gaping opportunities are arising for an external force to seize.  The best preparation for ill effects of first contact is probably not to invest in exotic military programs that might prove as useless as the Maginot Line in World War II, but rather to upgrade our planetary population generally by forging a more fit, intelligent, and cohesive human race.  If we don’t, it could be that our neglect is preparing us instead to walk right into the shackles of an unknown kind of servitude from beyond our Solar System.

Cities of Future Past

                A recent Facebook piece on the ten most dangerous cities in America got us thinking about the link between urban blight and science fiction.  The cities chosen in the piece were, with the exception of Detroit and Memphis, mostly located in the vicinity of a larger metropolis  and were cited because of their high crime rates.  But the pictures accompanying the sparse captions were more telling, for they showed trash-strewn vacant lots, boarded up storefronts and decaying houses, that is to say, the back story for station house statistics.  At some point in our nation’s past, all these cities, such as Camden, Oakland, and Little Rock, showed great economic promise.  Yet the convulsive forces of economics and politics left them to rot.  Many other similar cities could be added to the list if one considers that the more successful ones are merely doing a more effective job of compartmentalizing their blight into mini-disasters, such as Homewood next to Pittsburgh, Roxbury in Boston or the currently famous case of Ferguson, Missouri.  Core areas can be tarted up with development grants to keep the tourists happy in their security cocoon, but outlying disctricts often literally pay the price by collapsing into neglect.  The area west of Chicago’s Garfield Park is an example, as are the rings of blight around Houston, successively written off as the megacity expanded.   Urban governments have dynamited the once-troublesome public housing complexes, sometimes with odd results, as in the case of Boston’s transforming Columbia Point into a branch of UMass.  However, as with the abolition of state psychiatric facilities after the 60’s, the misery did not cease to exist, but dispersed into rundown welfare motels or nomadic homeless populations.  As in the depression of the 30’s (no longer dubbed Great, because it’s obviously not the last), seasonal hobo camps are popping up everywhere an anonymous patch of woods will give them cover.  They remain invisible because their inhabitants hide from police, census workers, and even many charitable would-be helpers.  The governments breathe a sigh of relief at this, since localities want to hush up such detractions from their real estate values and the feds refuse to include them in unemployment statistics.

The fate of New Orleans, which we mention briefly in our novel Life Sentence could be a major case in point.  Following the predicted devastation left by Hurricane Katrina, there was an ensuing breakdown of human institutions all around the Big Easy.  Many police and emergency workers abandoned their posts to evacuate their families – understandably so, since there was no realistic evacuation plan.  Prisoners were left to their fates or forgotten as guards saw to themselves.  Only with the arrival of the National Guard reinforcements was there an improvised attempt to control looting or to scour neighborhoods for survivors.  Within the Superdome, a microcosm of misery developed among the disparate refugees, with some leaping off balconies as though Judgment Day was at hand.  Finally, the once-teeming Ninth Ward and parts of New Orleans East were simply red-lined by the banks and deserted, becoming an eerily precocious urban wasteland.

 In the postindustrial world, there is a possibility that such mini-disasters could become generalized, link up and expand into an extended dystopia.  Paul Verhoeven’s vision of Detroit or even the more laughable portraits of the Bronx in Escape 2000 or the City of Angels in Escape from LA may prove increasingly to be prophetic.  It is probably no accident that a Dutchman gave us the most coherent image so far of future urban desolation,  Even in relatively prosperous Holland, urbanization is taken most seriously, adhering to a wider European concern with the phenomenon.  A visit to any European city will make this immediately obvious.  Mass transit will whisk the newcomer immediately from Schiphol, Charles de Gaulle or Rhein-Main into a center city of lively and attractive pedestrian zones.  Contrast this with Washington or Los Angeles in our own country.  The down side is that even Europe faces the ubiquitous conditions imposed by corporate economies.  They have simply pushed their mini-disasters to the periphery, most noticeable in Paris’s infamous banlieue or southeast London.  Properous economies may be able to avoid this cycle for a time.  In the years it has taken to replace a gaggle of buildings destroyed in 9/11, China has built dozens of entire new cities.  Yet a glance around the world at the squalor surrounding Lagos or Cairo will show that the developing world seems to replace every success with a plethora of failures.  In the matter of urban decay, the human race is paradoxically united.

Some recent sci fi films even postulate that the beautiful people will simply abandon a decaying Earth to live on satellites or on Mars.  This is a logical, if not necessarily probable, outcome to contemplate.  In some ways, an orbital platform is the ultimate gated community.  The rich would no longer need Latino security guards and the limpiadoras could be robotic.  No need for poor-doors in the dwellings.  Better than a luxury suite at the Super Bowl, since there would be no need to be jostled by the hoi polloi in the parking lots.  Just as billionaires are lining up for trips beyond the ionosphere in space tourism ventures, rooms in the still-unlaunched (and government-assisted) Bigelow Space Hotel are already booked.  Near-Earth may be the Hamptons of tomorrow.

Meanwhile, back on terra firma, the over-populated Earth of Soylent Green or of Asimov’s Caves of Steel has become more and more threatening to Generation X and Millenials. Studies show that young people are increasingly aware that a future in something resembling Beaver Cleaver’s Springfield may be more illusory than George Jetson’s floating hi-rise.  They are more receptive than their forebears to the challenges of global warming and the prospects of alternative energy sources, more concerned with cleaning up the oceans and negotiating population dynamics.  Ultimately, that may be the only way we will ever really manage (or deserve) an interplanetary destiny.

What's Next, Ice Pirates?

      Now that the word on comet ice has come in from the Rosetta space probe, do we need to change our ideas about water in space?  Rosetta’s powerful chemical “sniffers” have found that the gasses emitted by its target comet, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, show its ice contains less deuterium than earthly water.  Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen that contains a neutron, as well as the usual proton and electron.  This detail confirms some earlier comet observations and threatens to topple the widely-held theory that our planet’s water come to us mainly from comets.  It would seem that all the water in comets from the Oort Cloud in our outer solar system may be deuterium-poor.  So now the search for terrestrial H2O among the planets switches to the asteroids, which are already high on the NASA to-do list for a variety of other reasons.  However, just because the outer solar system’s water may be deuterium-poor, this doesn’t mean that we necessarily have to chuck out all our existing concepts of space travel and exploration.

     In the campy sci-fi film Ice Pirates, conceived by Stewart Rafill and Stanford Sherman, the scarcity of water in a futuristic universe leads to a string of adventures and escapes for the heroes, who make their living by appropriating the liquid from a monopolistic superpower.  Ice cubes are an interplanetary unit of exchange.  In the film, the dearth of water is partly due to the monopoly, which goes so far as to destroy planets endowed with a rich supply.  While there is also a panoply of sci-fi material that posits the opposite scenario of worlds awash in endless seas (one thinks of Atreides' planet Caladon in Dune, for one), the perspective of a relatively waterless cosmos is well represented in other writings.  Yet, we have to remember that Rosetta's discoveries did not say that comets have no water, only that they have a different kind.

     It would seem unlikely, on face value, that deuterium-poor water would prove useless for humans.  The small quantity of extra neutrons in our planet's "deuterium-rich" water may simply be an insignificant difference to our physiology, though one supposes that some research may soon begin to examine this question.  Furthermore, even if comet water proves to be unsuitable for consumption by the human body, that is hardly the end of its applications.  More importantly, water may eventually be an essential element of fuels for future space vehicles, regardless of the percentage of deuterium involved. 

     As for water becoming a target of pirates as well as astronauts, the case seems even slimmer.  After all, water is a simple combination of two of the more abundant elements in the universe, hydrogen and oxygen.  An adequate supply of the two can easily produce their combined result.  For a technology capable of interstellar travel, this would not seem to be a “three-pipe problem.”  By its very nature, piracy involves multiple factors, for besides requiring a substance worth stealing, piracy on Earth has always required the geographic factor of “choke points,” straits or channels which concentrate commerce and make ships vulnerable to pirate raids.  This has been true from the earliest mentions of pirates in Greco-Roman seas and on the rivers of ancient China right up to our current pirate hot spots, namely the Gulf of Aden, the Malacca Strait, and the Niger Delta.  The universe may well eventually provide shipping lanes among the stars, but its vastness argues against the concentration of targets within a narrow area.  Space, unlike the Earth’s oceans, offers three or more dimensions for its ships.  If interstellar civilizations guarantee the security of difficult passage points by some form of forceful patrol, space piracy would probably prove unlikely.  Earth’s pirates almost invariably fled from even the most token military force and only fought naval ships when they were cornered.  In addition, manpower would prove far more difficult to come by in an interstellar setting.  All that is needed for piracy in Somalia, Sumatra, or Indonesia is a hopped-up fishing launch and a few miserable men armed with weapons less formidable than one could find in most suburban neighborhoods of America.  African peasants armed with Kalashnikovs are not going to cruise in outer space.  While pirates have always proved resourceful when conditions favored their development, those conditions on a spatial scale would be far more daunting than any faced by pirates in our history. 

     Ice and water will continue to be attractive, and perhaps crucial, commodities in our exploratory future.  Nonetheless, these materials may play a less important role in the eventual concepts of wealth than organic substances, such as chlorophyll or complex proteins.  As we prepare for our next “giant step,” a manned mission to Mars, we will face increasing reminders that much, much research is necessary here on solid ground before we can come to grips with even the most fundamental molecular and organic conundrums that space travel will present.

Earth -- The Opportunity Too Rich to Pass Up?

Here is the link to our article in Eerie Digest entitled "Getting Real About First Contact: The Ferengi Hypothesis," which we hope you will enjoy and maybe even honor with a comment.

http://www.eeriedigest.com/wordpress/2014/08/getting-real-about-first-contact-by-john-and-james-gaines