Where are all the aliens?

“Where are all the aliens?” asked Enrico Fermi in 1950. Fast forwards seventy years, just about my entire lifetime, and we’re asking the same question: despite enticing hints, we have yet to find direct evidence of extraterrestrial life. There is a good chance that that will change in the  coming decade.

First, I’d like to document my attitude towards extraterrestrial life when I was a kid. Let us now fast backwards in time to a time not long after Enrico Fermi said his famous assessment of life beyond the solar system. I was almost an adolescent. My uncle Arthur (1898-1958) was building a little retirement cottage in Forked River, New Jersey—the reality of stomach cancer, alas! prevented the realization of his dreams. Our family visited the nearly-completed bungalow many times before my uncle’s death in 1958.

The incomplete kitchen walls were covered with cardboard. All visitors were invited to sign their names on the wall. My brother, Robert, wrote the following:

Arthur Dorsett

3^rd Canal Drive, Mars

Reminiscence of Percival Lowell! Lowell was an American businessman and amateur astronomer, who became famous for his assertion that Mars was inhabited by intelligent life. He saw—or at least thought he saw-- a pattern of lines on Mars that he assumed were canals that brought water from the poles to a dying civilization.

At the time of my brother’s writing on my uncle’s wall, it was still possible to believe that Mars possessed intelligent life. These hopes were dashed when Mariner fly-bys revealed Mars to be a frigid, red desert.

(I remember listening with interest to a re-broadcast of Orson Welles’ 1938 radio play, War of the Worlds, based on a book by H. G. Wells. The original broadcast  caused a great deal of panic by its realistic presentation of a Martian invasion.)

By the time of my yearly adolescence, however, there was little hope that extraterrestrial life would ever be found in our solar system. Now I’m not so sure.

I had been fascinated with Mars. I remember writing with fascination about the red planet and its two moons, Deimos and Phobus. I could almost imagine these two little moons, probably asteroids captured long ago by Martian gravity, passing overhead, no brighter than first magnitude stars, as I imagined myself standing next to a Martian crater. I had been convinced, however, that Mars was a lifeless, frigid desert.

(Ditto with the possibility of life in the rest of the solar system. Who could imagine life on a planet other than ours? Possibly on moons? In our solar system, however, the majority of moons are around gas giants with atmospheres and temperatures that made life as we know it impossible. Or so we thought.

In modern times, the possibility of life on Mars is once again a serious possibility. If life actually exists on that planet, however, there will be no little green men, but, at best, microbial life.

Recent flvbys over Mars have indicated that in the remote past, that  is, billions of years ago, Mars was a much more habitable planet than it is now. There is evidence that the planet once had a surface ocean, perhaps even a kilometer deep. Photos reveal dry riverbeds, shorelines, and strong indications of water erosion. Unfortunately, Mars has a very thin atmosphere and no magnetic field to protect life from cosmic rays. The surface water dissipated into space long ago, but there is evidence that water  exists underground. There are probably aquifers beneath the surface in many areas of the planet. There is evidence of seasonal variations of methane in the atmosphere; methane is a biomarker for life on earth. There is other indirect evidence that has convinced many scientists that life either once existed on the planet or has gone underground. We’ll see.

Perhaps soon: A Mars rover is set to drill about ten meters into the surface, and will analyze the soil for signs of fossils or living organisms.

There is also the theory of panspermia, the premise that life began elsewhere in the universe and came to earth via a comet. It has been proven that primitive life could have survived such a journey. Many comets from Mars have struck the earth. Perhaps we’re all Martians!

Possibilities of life exist in other areas of the solar system as well. Enceladus, for instance, a small moon of Saturn, has a large ocean buried beneath ten kilometers or so of ice. Plumes from that ocean regularly ‘geyser-up’ from the depths of Enceladus. (Material from these geysers form one of the rings of Saturn.) Organic compounds, and more recently, phosphorus, have been discovered in these plumes, further indirect evidence of life.  Other moons, for instance, Jupiter’s Europa, contain subterranean oceans filled with who knows what? Life? We will soon find out.

Even if there is no evidence of extraterrestrial life in our solar system, we must not forget that the universe is an incredibly large place, filled with billions of stars, most of which contain planets. Although no earth-like candidate has been found  among  the five thousand exoplanets discovered so far, search for earth-like planets is just beginning. Some one has said that we have analyzed a glass of water, as it were, while the ocean of the  vast universe remains undiscovered.

Life didn't necessarily begin in a warm little pool that Darwin advocated, it just might have arisen during extreme conditions in oceanic vents. So called extremophiles today live under boiling conditions--no worry about climate change for these guys! When life originated on earth, over 3 billion years ago, conditions were far too hot to support human life. Some scientists believe that primitive life might exist  in the upper atmosphere of Venus, the surface of which is hot enough to melt lead!

There are thus at least several possibilities of life in our solar system. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if extraterrestrial life is discovered while I’m still alive--and I've been a senior citizen for almost twenty years! Even when we lower our expectations from sublime to slime, the headlines will be splendid. And slime might be a lot more attractive than the slimy humans making headlines today. Who knows? We don’t—yet.

 

Deimos and Phobus, the moons of Mars  with which I was fascinated with when I was a kid, are almost certainly dead. But they probably contain enough precious metals to make a fortune many times over. The mining of asteroids is a distinct possibility for the next generation. This has the potential of enriching humanity to an extreme degree--if we're fair that is, and humankind hasn't been fair in the past, to say the least. Aber das ist ein weites Feld; enough for now. 

Book Review: Quichotte, by Salman Rushdie

Quichotte
by Salman Rushdie  
Random House 2020
London
390 pages          

The late Tom Wolfe, journalist turned author, whose major novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, appeared in 1987, complained that many modern novelists failed to do enough research regarding the themes broached by their novels. If he were alive today, he certainly would not have included Rushdie among those novelists whose lack of planning and whose unfamiliarity with details is readily apparent. Quichotte is as complex and detailed as a Tibetan sand mandala.

The well thought-out many layered plot contains fictions within fictions, some of them "written" by a fictive character of the novel. It is done so well that as we open each Babushka doll, as it were, we are surprised, even delighted; he maintains this artistry to the very end of the novel as we open the last doll, and are left with, well, nothing.

This, in keeping with the Quichotte tradition, is a picaresque novel with a very complex plot. The constant progress of the story line, including many twists and turns, is very entertaining. The theme of the novel, however, is bleak. In Rushdie’s words, pertaining to  the fictive author of the doubly fictive Quichotte character:

He talked about wanting to take on the destructive, mind-numbing junk culture of his time just as Cervantes had gone to war with the junk culture of his own age.

Nothing very ambitious, then, she (his sister) said. 

                                                               --page 289

                                                     

Rushdie is being ironic here, for his novel is very ambitious indeed.

At one point in the narrative, it is asserted that only two attitudes to life are valid: one, that life has meaning, albeit a hidden one; and two, entropy wins, thus life has no meaning at all. Entropy does indeed win. The end of the novel reminded me of Macbeth’s famous lines, that life...”is full of sound and fury,/ signifying nothing.”

The novel is very much about the Indian diaspora, symbolic of the near impossibility of finding a solid home in a world where "the center no longer holds.” The main characters of the novel, including the characters Quichotte's fictive creator invents, all hail from India. They have changed their names to better assimilate—Ismail, for instance, becomes Smile—but it doesn’t really work. Even if they feel at home in the West; even if they marry Westerners, they are more than occasionally reminded that their skin tone prevents them from being fully accepted. They wind up being at home nowhere, not in India, Pakistan, the United States or Britain. This describes, perhaps, Rushdie’s own view. After partition, Rusdie’s father chose Pakistan, while Rushdie chose to remain in India. Rushdie subsequently moved to Britain. Can one imagine Rushdie at home in the England of Brexit, in the India of Modi, in the Pakistan of Khan, or in the United States of Trump? I think not.

Rushdie is an expert story teller, as evinced by the wonderful tale of Ayesha in The Satanic Verses. A parallel to that tale is the equally beautiful, if sad, story of Sancho. Seeking love like his doubly fictive father, he takes a bus where he encounters the blue fairy in the form of an old woman—the blue fairy is central to the Pinocchio tale of a puppet being transformed into a real boy; Sancho is on his way to see “Beautiful from Beautiful, Kansas” a young Indian woman he had encountered on the journey cross-country with Quichotte. (Jiminy Cricket, you guessed it, had previously appeared to Sancho in the form of an Italian-speaking cricket, the Grillo Parlante, They have lively exchanges, in English and in Italian. Ruhsdie’s humor, however, fails here, a least for me.) Just as he rings the doorbell of Beautiful, from Beautiful, he disappears, since he is no longer an integral part of Quichotte’s imagination. It is a beautifully told tale; no Disney ending here, however. The tale, like the novel, ends in annihilation.

For Rushdie, however, a story is more than just a story. If life has no meaning, stories, quintessentially human, are what give life meaning, at least on a temporary basis. Religious faith is no longer possible for secularists like Rushdie; other fictions, such as nationalism, etc. are no longer possible either. Even Quichotte’s quest for romantic love is mocked; Quichotte’s quest begins only after his so-called, Internal Event, his stroke. Prior to this, he was, apparently, more rational.

There is one exception to the belief that life has no meaning. It is the belief in some form of the Golden Rule. If life truly had no meaning, all the mean-spirited characters of the book would be as valid as the kind ones. What makes junk culture junk culture, the windmill aimed at by the lance of Rusdie’s prose, is its inhumanity, its assault on the truth that we should treat neighbors with love and kindness.

The center no longer holds, but the center is still there. There is apparently a warm ocean beneath ten miles of solid ice on one of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus. Who, standing on the frozen surface, would be aware that life potentially exists far beneath his feet? Viewed metaphorically, every lie, every conspiracy theory, buries the source of potential life deeper and deeper. 

The book offers No Exit. At the end, the main doubly fictive characters, Salma R. and Quichotte, try to escape a collapsing world by transportation to another Earth, a system devised by Evel Cent, formally known as Awwal Sant. It doesn’t work. They are instead transported to the room of the dying fictive man who created them:

He saw the first minute creature enter, gasp, and faint, its hope turning to despair… The microscopic man, the creature of the Author’s imagination, had brilliantly done the impossible and joined the two worlds, had crossed over from the world of Fancy into the Author’s real world, but in this one he was unassimilable, helpless, puny, gasping for air, not finding it, choking, and so lost.

Stop! cried the Author, knowing what would happen next, the thing he could not stop, for he had already written it; it had already happened, so it could not be prevented from happening. His heart pounded, feeling as if it might burst from his chest. Everything was coming to an end.

The end cannot be changed after it has ended, not the end of the universe, not the death of an Author, nor the end of two precious, even if very small, human lives.
     

There they stood in the gateway, on the threshold of an impossible dream: Miss Salma R and her Quichotte.
                                                                      page 390
                                                                        

Entropy wins again! This is an entropic version of Alice having fallen trough the Rabbit Hole. Here, however, there will be no vials marked Eat Me and Drink Me; there will be no Cheshire Cat, no Mad Hatter, no Queen of Hearts, no anything.

It is a tribute to Rushdie’s genius that he is able to entertain us so fabulously as we gaze into the kaleidoscope of his creation, fascinated by its many moving jewels. We are delighted throughout; most of us moderns are able to handle the bleak ending as well. For as Buddha taught in his doctrine of anicca, everything changes; most of us now are aware that nothing is permanent, everything in the universe must come to a (non-Disney) end. Even great novels.