Oceanworlds

by J. P. Landau

  A new chair had been added to the round table. The self-proclaimed conspiracy theorist “you can call me Jason” looked very much at ease, even while listening to the philosopher’s tirade.

  “So not only was JFK killed by the CIA, the Apollo Moon landings fake, but Russia, Germany, and the USA have been conspiring for decades to cover the UFOs ubiquitous footprints? I don’t expect somebody with your IQ to have figured this out so rapidly, but your collection of ‘theories’ are not even internally consistent. Not that you would know this, but the Second World War was decided on the Russian Front. Just in Stalingrad over a million casualties on each side. A perfect hoax to deviate attention from that flying saucer you keep in the basement. The Cold War? Just prolonging the smoke and mirrors. Are you able to even decipher what your lips are uttering? If I was a taxonomist, my conspiracy theory would be that you were intentionally grouped with humans instead of leeches.”

  “I would have presumed more thoughtfulness from a philosopher, but I guess all the good ones are long gone,” said Jason, enjoying his high ground. “I won’t stoop to your level. There’s really no need to be condescending. I think the evidence is beyond question and speaks for itself. But if people want to go beyond, and really understand ‘why’ UFOs are being drawn to Earth, there are just two words to remember: water and reproduction. You see, Earth has wonderful wet oceans and seas, rivers and lakes, in prodigious quantities. And if chemistry has taught us anything, it’s that water is not just essential for living beings, but hydrogen and oxygen make for an excellent fuel, possibly the best there is. So, it’s naturally a commodity that is always in high demand, whether in human or intergalactic circles.”

  “I would like to tackle that one,” said Neil.

  “Okay, sure. Go ahead,” said Jason.

  “Thanks,” said Neil. “Let me start by saying that the detection of a sentient alien being, an extraterrestrial microbe, or even so much as pond slime would rank as perhaps the greatest discovery in the history of science. I revel at the mere thought of it … the problem with UFOs is that they are as extraterrestrial as you or me. Why would any advanced alien civilization bother with Earth? There are huge amounts of watery real estate just about everywhere in the galaxy. There are billions, maybe trillions of comets—you know, balls of frozen water, just in our humble Solar System—”

  “I meant water in liquid form,” said Jason, unfazed.

  “Wrong answer, my dear Jason,” said Neil. “The laws of physics strongly constrain journeys across the vast gulfs between stars. The speed of light is simply too slow. Therefore, unless we are talking about very patient Methuselahs, aged a millennia and beyond, their spaceships need to accelerate to a fair fraction of the speed of light. And if they built such technological marvels, I would surely hope they mastered the art of fire a few generations back, don’t you?”

  “You just don’t get it, that’s the problem,” said Jason, but failed to follow this with an argument. After a pause, he continued, “The second point I wanted to make is regarding reproduction. There is ample proof, now publicly available by the disclosed US Air Force top-secret files, that there have been regular UFO excursions to our planet to abduct humans for breeding purposes—”

  “I’m sorry, Jason, but I can’t let this one go either,” said Neil. “I’ll only take a minute.”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “Hollywood and people like you are horrendously unimaginative when it comes to alien life. It’s shameful really. Aliens, whether in movies or those blurry photographs that ufologists have been waving at us for decades, always look to me like an actor in a bad costume: two legs, two arms, two eyes, head, ears, teeth, a cup-and-ball reproductive system, and, of course, big on mucus. Compared to a jellyfish, extraterrestrials and humans look like identical twins. Yet they are supposed to live on other planets, the product of completely independent lines of evolution. Let me show you something a bit more original. There is an exotic life form that senses its prey by detecting infrared rays; doesn’t have arms and legs, yet can slide faster than you can run; it swallows whole live creatures five times bigger than its head. And that, my friend, is called a snake. Anthropomorphic thinking restricts our imagination. I am of the opinion that if there’s biology beyond Earth, the vast majority will be microbial—single-celled life forms that tolerate a much greater range of conditions than more complex organisms can. But if complex life exists, I know one thing for certain: its strangeness will be well beyond our imaginative powers … having gotten that off my chest, let’s deal briefly with the issue of sexual reproduction between aliens and humans. And for that, let’s consider the definition of ‘species:’ two individuals that can have fertile offspring. Say, a Chihuahua and a Great Dane. You may not like what comes out, but it’s definitely fertile. You go another degree of separation and you encounter the mule, the offspring between a horse and a donkey. But it’s no longer fertile. In the case of humans, we long ago branched off from every other living thing. In fact, considering we can’t even interbreed with our closest relative, the bonobo, I applaud your fantastic optimism. It’s almost contagious—”

  He was interrupted by the audience, erupting with applause.

  The age of reason had settled back and Swami Kumbhar, one of the two last panelists, was about to give his opening remarks.

  “These are paradoxical times. Barely a week and a half ago the world was one, united by Shackleton. Yet today we have broken ranks into tribalism. So instead of speaking to my billion Hindus, my moral obligation is to try to reach whoever is willing to hear. Let’s learn from each other, let’s be humble and listen. The Christian, Muslim, and Jewish faiths have the story of the Golden Calf in their scriptures. It says the prophet Moses went up Mount Sinai for guidance from the God of Israel, staying there for many days. The Israelites grew restless. When he finally came down the mountain with the Ten Commandments, the people had already forgotten their true god and turned to idolatry of a Golden Calf. It’s a rich tale of many lessons, but I would like to bring out how easily we seem to have forgotten our calling.

  “We went to Saturn looking for the truth, whatever it may be. Yet a few missteps and mishaps have sent all of us into a panic, resorting to explanations of profound absurdity, betraying our beliefs in search of quick gratification, distrusting those that don’t look or think like us. But we already know from our heroes aboard Shackleton that all those wrinkles and divisions, the seemingly insurmountable chasm between countries and religions, suddenly smooth out to nothingness when we take sufficient perspective to identify our world not as the land of 1,000 languages but as a single mote of dust in the immensity of the cosmos.”

  After heartfelt clapping, Neil followed.

  “I will try my best to follow Swami Kumbhar’s insight and wisdom. I’m not one to promise miracles though! As the scientist here, I will speak on behalf of science and technology to the 2 billion Christians, the 2 billion Muslims, the billion Hindus, every other religion, as well as the agnostics and atheists. That phone in everyone’s pocket has a processor that requires quantum mechanics; it has a GPS that needs to account for special relativity and thermodynamics; its communication capabilities require electromagnetism, and optics, and acoustics, and satellites orbiting the Earth. It is a nutshell of 10,000 years of technological progress, summarizing most of what we’ve learned from nature. Technology has improved our lives enormously. That was a question, by the way. And I have no answer. The answer, in fact, may well be ‘no.’ Although we live in an era of technological wonders, we humans in many ways behave no differently to those during the Crusades. It troubles me to see that in a society absolutely dependent on technology, not only does almost no one understand the science behind it, but many flatly refuse to believe in it! How can we be so irrational to reject as false the underpinnings behind the technologies we use on a daily basis? Categorically rejecting reason because of dogma! That’s a recipe for disaster, because we must never forget that technology is amoral. Science
and its creations cut both ways: they can be used for good or evil. And that’s why Swami Kumbhar’s vision resonated strongly with me, and I mean that literally.

  “Did you know that when troops marching in unison are about to cross a bridge, they’re always ordered to break stride and go out of step? Objects vibrate at a certain frequency when they absorb energy. If a regiment marches over a bridge and the bridge’s vibrations are different from the troops’, they fight and cancel each other out. But if they coincide, they amplify with potentially disastrous consequences, such as in 1850 when over 200 French soldiers plunged to their deaths when a suspension bridge collapsed. I rejoiced on seeing all of us becoming one nine days ago, but deeply worry when a silly misunderstanding can so quickly break down society into polarized factions. That can spiral out of control by amplifying fears and prejudices of some against others. And all that is made possible by a device that’s in every person’s pocket, which allows everyone to be permanently connected with everyone else. Technology is not essentially virtuous or evil. Remember nuclear energy: it is the use we give it that can create enormous benefits or untold devastation. We the people, and especially those seated here tonight, have an immense responsibility … to be responsible. The Nazi Party went from fringe political outsiders to engulfing Germany in one decade. The German people of course weren’t intrinsically bad, yet a country marching in tandem did unspeakable things.”

  Further down, the conversation paused on the origin of life.

  “Yes, in the Bible, Genesis 1:26, God says, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ This, however, is symbolic writing. Our catechism now discourages literalism,” the priest paused and looked at Neil benevolently. “Pope John Paul II sanctioned the acceptance of evolution in 1996, although he reminded us that spiritual questions like the nature of the soul and a person’s relationship with God are beyond the realm of science. Religion and science are each a distinct tool for the discovery of truth. The realm of science is concerned with data that can be empirically proven. The realm of religion has to do with the meaning of life and existence in a way that surpasses the physical world. Both the religious believer and scientist make the same mistake when they wrongly attempt to use their own tools to judge the other. Theology and science each have their own methodologies, their own instruments, for the discovery of their particular areas of truth. However, and for the sake of argument, there is one instance in which science still needs an act of God: the beginning of life. Science has been great at explaining its evolution, but has so far failed in explaining its origin. Its inception. As someone once said, science is based on the principle, ‘give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.’ Until science aces that litmus test, the essence of life continues to be a miracle beyond its reach.”

  Neil followed, “Although it’s not my preferred candidate, the ‘miracle’ hypothesis for the beginning of life is indeed valid. Plus, a lot of scientists agree with you. Let me offer an alternative for what you called life’s inception. This view is based in organic chemistry and says that increasingly complex molecules are certain to arise in sufficiently rich chemical soups, at some point satisfying the criteria of ‘life.’ I haven’t explained how it happened, but I offered a path for it to occur. And let’s see what the geological records tell us: we have evidence of life on Earth in rocks 4 billion years old. This is remarkable, not only because it’s barely a few hundred million years after the formation of our planet but because that’s right in the middle of the Heavy Bombardment Era, where a disproportionately large number of asteroids were smashing against the planets of the inner Solar System. Want to see evidence? Look at the Moon, which can’t hide its scars through plate tectonics like Earth does. Our planet is eighty times more massive, so its gravity attracted tens of times more blows. Yet here we are—”

  The philosopher countered, “But all life on Earth comes from a single ancestor. If life is set to arise so spontaneously, we would surely expect more grandmothers. Your proposition sounds to me as if life on Earth results from an almost intentional winnowing, which sounds so perverse as to be inconceivable. And this intervention is analogous to an invisible hand, known by the gentlemen around us as God.”

  “Fair point,” said Neil. “But the Heavy Bombardment Era does provide a thesis. With the regular visit of falling objects, many of them possibly much bigger than the one that doomed dinosaurs to extinction, life was probably born and died repeatedly. That means life seems to require little time to emerge, maybe millions or even thousands of years to occur. On the question of why we all come from one single ancestor, one interpretation ventures that before life existed, oceans were chemically rich soups. Chemicals everywhere interacted with one another, mixing, breaking apart, reassembling, etc. But after life started, it expanded exponentially and pretty quickly sucked up those freely moving chemicals, using them as nutrients. It’s like life drained the soup of its flavor, leaving just the salty brine … and a staggering collection of complex molecules. We see this even today in hydrothermal vents. These are pockets of chemically and energy rich environments, but they are surrounded by all kinds of complex life, capturing every nutrient they can get their slimy tentacles on. If this is true, life has no chance of happening again because all the atoms needed have been used in building complex molecules devoted to the biological marketplace of life-as-we-know-it. But at the end, the honest humble reality is that trying to answer an extremely complex question with seriously limited knowledge is a Herculean task, maybe an impossible one. This is where Shackleton promises so much with the potential to change everything.”

  50 | Quantum Leap

  Hours later

  Abruptly, the Caird data began to trickle down to Earth. During the next hours, press conferences and official announcements from all major space agencies, as well as reactions from governments, scientists, and the media, mushroomed the world over:

  “The answer to the most existential question of all time—are we alone in the Universe?—continues to be both a reassuring and yet disheartening ‘Yes.’”

  “As a spiritual person, I always thought my religion needed extraterrestrial life in order to justify the unfathomable size of the Universe, the largesse with which God sized a cosmic arena we can never ever begin to explore. In the time of Isaac Newton, the clockwork Universe he helped make sense of clearly had a Maker behind the mathematical perfection of the five planets revolving around the Sun. Nowadays we know our Milky Way galaxy is so exceedingly big we won’t ever colonize it. And there are a trillion other galaxies. Today we have learned that all the exhilarating maybes and could-bes were the deceitful resonances of our own existence, which not only leaves us desperately alone but also bearing a terrible truth: Why? Why such incomprehensible wastefulness for a meager civilization inhabiting a humble planet at the periphery of all the major galactic action in a single, modest, no-name galaxy?”

  “Among the general public few really understood what a mass spectrometer was, yet everyone knew what could come out because it was so straightforward it required just one word: life. You can forget about all that now.”

  “This confirms our solitary confinement in this corner of the cosmos; a chance to feel special, or a chance to be crushed by the weight and beauty of our own loneliness.”

  CENTRAL VALLEY, CALIFORNIA

  “Mummy, it smells stinky around here,” said Emma from the back seat of the sedan.

  “That would be the famously hard-working Californian cows, pumpkin,” said Belinda. “They make more milk and cheese and yogurt than anywhere else in America.”

  “But it’s so dry here. You think they’re happy?”

  “I’m sure they love the nice weather.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Well … see those big barns over there in the distance?”

  “T
hat looks sad. British cows are happier, I think. What about the funny smell, Mummy?”

  “They have lots of gas.”

  “Eww. So, I’m smelling their farts?”

  She’s a quick one, thought Belinda proudly. “Hmm. I prefer to call it l’odeur de la merde de vache, which is French for perfume of the countryside.”

  The car climbed the State Route 152 by the San Luis Reservoir. Two decades of drought made it an ugly tattoo too low down the arm to hide. The road got windy as it traveled along the narrow canyon cutting through wilted needlegrass hills patched with grimy olive stretches of bushy trees, between the central valley and the south Bay Area.

  As soon as they cleared into the valley, Belinda’s phone dinged like a pinball machine going on a multi-ball rampage. The screen showed fifty-seven missed calls and a flood of messages. Belinda slammed the brakes and swiftly pulled over. A sense of foreboding paralyzed her.

  “What happened? Mummy?”

  Belinda was unable to answer.

  The phone rang. It was her good friend Alex from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She couldn’t command her hand to answer. Only Emma getting afraid of her made Belinda act. She accepted the call but remained mute.

  “B, are you there? B? Everyone on our team has tried to reach you. Belinda?” After a second, she followed, “Hey, gorgeous, it has nothing to do with Shack.”

  Belinda exhaled the captive air. “Alex, don’t ever ever ever do that again. I died ten times.”

  Emma vocally demanded an explanation, so Belinda put the call on speaker.

  “Emma, my dear, I need to speak urgently with Mom, okay?” said Alex. “You get to listen, but you won’t understand much—B, where have you been? Half of JPL has been trying to reach you for the past two and a half hours. Worst moment in history to be unreachable. Take my word for it.”