Or take Isaac Asimov’s novel The Gods Themselves. Asimov depicts an alien world with three sexes, which join together at maturity into permanent union. Members of each sex are attracted to members of the other two. At the end they transform from ethereal beings that can move through each other into “hard ones” that are physically solid. In fact, something very similar has already happened in evolutionary history, when the ancestors of mitochondria penetrated archaea to make amoeba-like cells ancestral to your own. Another lineage was joined by cyanobacteria to make the cells ancestral to all algae, seaweed, and plants. Even the fluidity of bacterial movement, their ease of penetration and genetic transfer, was stalled with the evolution of the real “hard ones”—the eukaryotic ancestors to animals.
ANOTHER EXAMPLE of scientific truth being stranger than science fiction: In a story by the golden-age (1938–1946) science fiction author A. E. van Vogt, two spacecraft rendezvous. They link hulls, breed their human inhabitants, and, having accomplished their mission, continue on their interstellar way. Literally, this is a far-futuristic posthuman scenario. The spacecraft has become the skin or exoskeleton of the human. The mode of reproduction has radically altered, and the phenomenology of human existence, too. How strange. Yet this is, I would argue, an allegory for what has already happened to people. When we look at these lonely, far-future descendants who have forgotten their past but occasionally link up for some quality time in the depths of space, we have to think of ourselves. We are constructed partly of hard parts (e.g., the skull encasing cranial software) and have “forgotten”—lost touch with—the deepest parts of our biological history. The events that induce us to seek each other out and regenerate new beings that grow from amoeba-like cells are part of a bizarre microbial past compared with which our ape heritage seems positively flattering. Insofar as “we” remain cells, the “spaceships” of our bodies are at once glorious crafts carrying us across dry land and cyborg extensions of our soft and slippery inner core.
Moreover, we must assume that the Vogt crafts, in order to avoid needing to restock themselves with food, to be truly space-faring rather than merely “camping out” in space, they must be jointly a recycling, self-sustaining ecosystem. And if they continuously recycle bio-elements to support their symbiont-like humans, then we have not just an allegory but a literal description of present ecological relations on what Buckminster Fuller called Spaceship Earth. A human being feeds collectively on its external ecosystem; one is not a Platonic island separate unto oneself. Thus the posthuman lesson from van Vogt’s story (as I choose to interpret it, imagining the necessary details of the life-supporting craft) is that what we call “human” really includes the bacteria, the protists, the plants, and fungi—everything we need both within and outside our bodies to be what we are. The meeting of the human-containing spacecraft in the depths of space reinaugurates the pattern of interconnecting, thermodynamic flows, exposed only partly to conscious control, that established our cellular forms in the first place. We naturally gravitate toward repetition of those processes that allow for the genetically safeguarded repetition of our pattern of metabolic cycles in new, inevitably aging entities. It is instructive to think of machine and organic evolution together. Although, for example, we like to distinguish conscious mechanical creation from unconscious genetic evolution, modern devices such as color televisions depend for their manufacture on so many globally distributed processes that eventually these decentralized functions become self-perpetuating or “unconscious” at the level of individual worker or company. A woman does not make a baby consciously, yet her conscious choices can influence embryogenesis. Similarly, mechanical production processes that were once consciously engineered become more automated and “physiological” as consciousness, moving on to new and more pressing tasks, forgets its former triumphs.
The machine craft imagined by van Vogt are no less strange than our dependence on agricultural machines and cell phones, laboratory-made antibiotics, and factory-made automobiles. A true space-faring ecosystem requires not just ecologically complementary life-forms but also the mechanical “shell” necessary to protect life from astronomic insults, from radiation and collisions. We are open thermodynamic systems simultaneously using high-quality-energy sunlight (through the intermediary of food) to organize our environments, even as we inevitably degrade that energy, adding heat and entropy to our surroundings in a high-stakes process. Technology has appeared on Earth, while many species of mammals, and other animals and plants, have disappeared. We are already cyborgs packed with prostheses—although the prostheses are usually outside, not inside, our bodies. Yet even this may not be true. For, from a deep-ecological standpoint, we ourselves can be seen as spaceships made by massive populations of intermingling cells. Instead of an exoskeleton protecting us from cosmic rays, we have an endoskeleton protecting us from gravitational strain. Instead of sparsely colonizing space from a base on Earth, we celled organisms have densely settled the land from a base in the ocean. The calcium extruded by cells to make bones in our bodies was, for our ancient cell ancestors, a poison. Eukaryotic cells shed calcium ions, and this ancient marine waste was stockpiled; eventually it became involved in the metabolic processes of cell communication and growth, and evolved, in our animal ancestors, into muscle movement and, in us, into thought. The inevitable thermodynamic pollution resulting from life’s growth was shaped by and incorporated into life’s structure. And this appropriation of calcium was not an isolated incident. The same thing happened with free oxygen, which also began as a toxic waste. Over time, the outside becomes the inside, the house a body.
As we try to imagine the immense journey from cosmic birth through life’s origin some ten billion years later to the evolution from bacteria of humans taking up the most recent third of known time, our temporal sense is strained. Nevertheless, our ability to imagine infinity, so important to mathematics and physics with its eternal laws, suggests a bizarre alliance between infinity and time. In evolution the post-man rings once, but in infinity he has already always rung. “The Earth is no more a rock with some life on it,” it has been said, “than you are a skeleton infested by cells.” The sheer temporal immensity of the evolutionary process may make it difficult, if not impossible, for us to picture it without Zen-like perspectival shifts that are apt to emphasize more what we don’t or cannot know than what we can. Our hard parts and cells feel like one skin-encapsulated being—but when I think how, when I’m driving a car, a close scrape impinges on me physiologically, giving me a sensation as if the metal to which no neurons are attached were part of my own body, I am persuaded that, when it comes to ego, there is no absolute there there.
In other words, our bodies are what Samuel Butler, Darwin’s contemporary and author of The Way of All Flesh, called microbial “tool-kits.” Butler envisions a day “when all men in all places without any loss of time are cognisant through their senses of all that they desire to be cognisant of in all other places, at a low rate of charge so that the back-country squatter may hear his wool sold in London and deal with the buyer himself—may sit in his own chair in a back-country hut and hear the performance of ‘Israel in Egypt’ at Exeter Hall—may taste an ice on the Rakaia [a New Zealand river] which he is paying for and receiving in the Italian opera house. . . . [This is] the grand annihilation of time and place which we are all striving for and which in one small part we have been permitted to see actually realised.”3
This is fascinating, for here, circa 1865, Butler—who took Darwin to task for making life too mechanical and got back at him by applying evolutionary theory to machines in order to consider them as natural—extrapolates the telegraph to anticipate the Internet.
Perhaps the greatest science fiction story would be a literal description of our present reality, but couched in terms that made it unrecognizable until near the story’s end. We love the future because we don’t know what it will be but because we can, to a slight extent, shape it and because in our narratives it is always
uncannily familiar. In a linear frame, however, we have to be careful with prediction because it is too often simple extrapolation. Butler may have “predicted” the World Wide Web, but in decades past it was also predicted that every home would one day have its own rooftop helipad and that each town would have its own telephone. Linear extrapolation is doomed because exponential rates of change cannot continue. “Only two things are infinite,” said Einstein, “the universe and human stupidity.”
But rather than end with a mysticism-friendly scientist, let’s give the “last” word to a science-friendly mystic. In 1974 Alan Watts wrote in an essay titled “Psychedelics and Religious Experience”:
The Western man who claims consciousness of oneness with God or the universe thus clashes with his society’s concept of religion. In most Asian cultures, however, such a man will be congratulated as having penetrated the true secret of life. He has arrived, by chance or by some such discipline as Yoga or Zen meditation, at a state of consciousness in which he experiences directly and vividly what our own scientists know to be true in theory. . . . There is no way of separating what any given organism is doing from what its environment is doing, for which reason ecologists speak not of organisms in environments but of organism-environments. . . . The Western scientist may rationally perceive the idea of organism-environment, but he does not ordinarily feel this to be true. By cultural and social conditioning, he has been hypnotized into experiencing himself as an ego—as an isolated center of consciousness and will inside a bag of skin, confronting an external and alien world. We say, “I came into this world.” But we did nothing of the kind. We came out of it in just the same way that fruit comes out of trees.4
PART II
STARDUST MEMORIES
CHAPTER 4
STARDUST MEMORIES
QUANTITATIVELY, dust refers to solid particles with diameters of less than 500 micrometers. A micrometer, also known as a micron, is a millionth of a meter, or 0.000039 of an inch. The eye of a needle is 750 microns wide, enough to get some camel dust through. The diameter of the period that ends this sentence is about 450 microns—it would make a nice little piece of dust if it could be liberated from the prison of this page.
But despite its physical insignificance, dust has outsized negative connotations. It is an avatar of the unclean. It is the ensign of entropy, of buildings destroyed or neglected, matter without purpose. Dust is what gathers on books that are not read, on cabinets and shelves. It is the figure of the fragment, of division and disintegration, of the unswept, the unloved, the overlooked, and the discarded. It is what Tad Allagash snorts in his comical attempt to hoover any remaining traces of “Bolivian marching powder”—cocaine—in Jay McInerney’s 1980s novel Bright Lights, Big City. To be clear, a Buddhist saying goes, you must wipe the dust from the mirror of your mind.
Much of household dust is keratin, the main protein of skin. Human skin sheds continuously. You lose about 1.5 grams of it per day. The detritus does not go entirely to waste. First, it is decomposed by fungi, who like it moist. Human flakes predigested by fungi are a staple for Dermatophagoides farinae, Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus, and Euroglyphus maynei. These mite species excrete protease enzymes that linger in mattresses and furniture—until the comparatively colossal rear end of a person sits down, at which time they are released in sometimes invisible puffs. The allergenic dust is a main reason for indoor sneezing, itching, and irritated eyes.
But dust ain’t all bad. Illuminated by slanting rays, it becomes pixie dust. Like a wink of the Lucretian real behind all mythology, it becomes a princess kissed by the sun. Thus, this same humble substance that piles up on bookshelves, that darkens corners and lies flat on surfaces in an apparent effort to disguise its pitiable dishevelment (and why shouldn’t it, after all, for what is dust but a debased form of dirt?), this asthmatic antithesis of the grandeur of existence, this figure of the unwanted so unremarkable it often escapes even negative attention, this forerunner of filth on the clichéd white glove of the fastidious housecleaner, this accoutrement of the homeless, this essence of crumbling, sometimes swirls and reflects, like glitter happy to be free of the mirror of our minds.
A dust grain can be a world. In Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who!, a perspicacious elephant listens to a talking speck that turns out to be a tiny world on a grain of dust, one city of which, Whoville, contains a bustling community of humanoid Whos. I read the Seuss book to my son. It was a crash course in imaginary microbiology and crypto-anthropology, whose lesson was that within what we overlook are sometimes rich and unsuspected worlds.
When I was eighteen, in 1978, I would sometimes smoke angel dust in the bleachers with the black kids at lunch. This was in L.A. My fellow students bought it sprinkled on parsley. This is a dangerous drug that can cause very bad reactions. I was lucky that, for me, it just led to pleasant numb feelings under the California sun.
My father, Carl, was filming the Cosmos series for television at the time, and I was living with him and his second wife, sharing a room with their son, my seven-year-old half-brother Nick, now a successful science fiction writer. It was the first time I had lived with my father since my parents divorced when I was five. My dad let me hang out in his trailer, which had belonged to Marlon Brando, on the lot at KCET in L.A., where I would listen to punk rock on FM radio. I was from the East Coast, out of place, and had no friends to speak of. There was one girl I had my eye on, but that was about it. Blair High School was ethnically partitioned, one-quarter Hispanic kids, one-quarter black kids, one-quarter Asian kids who gravitated toward studies and chess club, and one-quarter spoiled white kids. In gym I had the chance to take modern jazz dance. There was only one other boy in the class. He was tall and effeminate, and got into a fight with a very dark girl half his size but twice as fast. She whipped off her two earrings, he whipped off his one, and they started flailing away at each other. This led to him getting kicked out. The white teacher asked me to stay after and wanted to know what I thought of the situation. I asked her if she was asking me because I was the only guy, and she said yes. “But you’re the only white girl in the class,” I said.
The next day after class, I was jumped by several boys on the steps of the little building past the pool. Phyllis, one of the black girls who knew me from the bleachers, was by the tennis courts and yelled, “Just run, white boy, as fast as you can to the principal’s office. Don’t look back.” I did and identified the kids. For a few days, I stayed away from school, accepting my stepmother’s painkillers, which she had for her back pain and which allowed me to forget about the fact that I’d have to return to school once the bruises and swelling on my face died down. When I returned to school, my tough black friend “Blue” informed me the kids I’d identified got kicked out and that there was a contract out on me. I did not take this seriously, considering it movie bluster inspired by The Godfather.
Aside from Blue, my only other friend at the time was Tim, a white boy who was gay and had an older boyfriend who was a professional therapist. One day, Tim and I were in my room listening to my David Bowie albums, whose songs like “Starman” and “Life on Mars” I half-hoped to share with my dad (not so much “Space Oddity,” I explained, which was too popular). My half-brother, Nick, was playing superhero and jumped from the arm of the couch toward Tim, who stepped away. When he hit the floor, my stepmother had enough. She insisted my father speak with me. Soon thereafter, to my smug amusement, he lectured me, giving a rationalist discourse on natural selection as the basis for a normal heterosexual relationship. He underscored the evolutionary uselessness of Eros diverted from its natural goal. Instead of the Old Testament, he was appealing to Charles Darwin to make the same point.
I was glad he was paying attention to me, even if it was negative attention. The stories of neutron stars a spoonful of which weighed tons, of black hole portals to different places and times, and of higher-dimension objects moving through lower-dimension worlds that he’d told me as a boy he was now sharing with th
e nameless masses. Why, my unconscious must have wondered, was he spreading his message about contacting life in outer space to millions when I, his firstborn, had been neglected? Was I mere human dust, disposable detritus taken root in the fertile medium of my microbiologist mother, only to be forever after confined to the plutonic outskirts of his emotional universe? At least in Adriatic Italian dialect, as I would learn two years later from my college girlfriend, whose own undivorced parents were bhang-smoking partiers on Cape Cod who welcomed me into their home, there was a name for the dust you swept up—mundessa. Ah, to be embraced, named, recognized, even if only momentarily, on the way to the eternal dustbin.
Dust’s relegation to a trope of dirt and insignificance, entropy and loss, is belied by its astronomical grandeur. And few, if any, have been more eloquent on this grandeur than my father, whose own bones now gather the stuff in sites next to his parents, moved from Florida to accompany him in Lakeview Cemetery in Ithaca, New York. From Martian dust storms as part of the genesis of his thoughts on how dust and smoke could affect life on Earth, to his study of Triton’s streaks as windblown dust, to his “pale blue dot” speech, perhaps his most beautiful, in which he calls Earth seen from space “a mote of dust,” my father took dust deadly seriously. And he led others to do so. He drew the world’s attention to the role of particulate matter in blocking out light. Extrapolating from Martian dust storms, he tirelessly warned of a nuclear winter, the unsuspected result of smoke and dust rising in the aftermath of a superpower confrontation. The darkening blanket would, he suggested, shut down agriculture on a global scale. His advocacy and interaction with Soviet scientists played a role in ending the Cold War—which, ironically, was inaugurated by the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite that set off the space race and the attendant massive funding that made his spectacular career in space science possible.
Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science Page 6