August 2007 Archives

I once said that 2007 on Universe would include many new features, one being an occasional review of a work of science fiction. Hello!

The Black Cloud is a 1957 science-fiction novel written by British astronomer Fred Hoyle. Like the novels of Carl Sagan, and, often, Arthur C. Clarke, it's something of an extrapolation of the author's deeply-held scientific conceptions. Because it was written by a scientist, further, it's almost overwhelmingly dry at times; the narrative often gives way entirely to pages full of mathematical formulae, diagrams, and lengthy expository footnotes.

The premise is such: teams of scientists around the world simultaneously discover the presence of an inexplicable mass moving steadily through the solar system, seemingly dead-set on hitting the Earth. After some pontification, it turns out to be a highly dense dark cloud, unlike any cosmic dustball ever observed. Cue a panic attack and the deft warning of heads of state.

As the cloud's erratic behavior proves to be impossible to predict scientifically, the scientists -- British stodgies at Cambridge, Americans lolling around Cal Tech and Mount Wilson -- realize the cloud might be some kind life-form in itself. Terrified that the being will block the Earth from the Sun's rays, unwittingly or otherwise, they attempt to communicate with it, a venture which, to their surprise, proves to be successful.

The black cloud turns out to be a startling, non-organic superorganism that is -- and this is an excellently clever turn of events -- completely surprised by the existence of life-forms other than itself. The cloud even claims to have always existed; "Wait until the Big Bang hears about that!" one of the scientists exclaims.

Our author, Fred Hoyle is an interesting character: he was the director of the Institute for Cosmology at Cambridge, but rejected the Big Bang theory because he found the idea of the universe having a beginning, and thus a cause, philosophically troubling. He was a notable feminist, pioneered the steady state theory, and even went against the commonly-held theory of chemical evolution, arguing rather that life on Earth was seeded by a steady influx of bacteria arriving from outer space on comets.

It's no surprise, then, that The Black Cloud is such an interesting, and fundamentally marginal, book. I originally picked it up because Hoyle's ideas -- particularly about the nature of life and its cosmic origins -- kept popping up in my reading: in footnotes, in passing, in complexity theory, particularly lauded by cosmic eschatologists like Freeman Dyson, who really do believe human life might evolve into conscious, interstellar dust clouds.

In a terrifyingly topical example of science imitating art, an international team of physicists have literally just discovered that under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust (like that making up Hoyle's "black cloud") can become organized into corkscrew-shaped structures, which, under the right circumstances, can then interact with each other in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and, ahem, (holy shit!) life itself.

These helical strands behave in a totally counterintuitive way, like attracting like, and can perform biological feats usually reserved for primordial stew: they can divide and form copies of identical structures, or "evolve" into more complex systems, for example. According to the researchers, who just published their finding in the New Journal of Physics, (an interesting action in itself, since the NJP is an open-access, online journal) nonorganic life is a definite possibility, and clouds of interstellar dust can likely self-organize, intuit, reproduce, and evolve.

The relationship between reality and fantasy in the realm of science fiction is in a constant state of evolution. Things which seem fantastic in 1957 can become scientific reality decades later; who are we to say if any speculation is too outlandish?

To quote the literary critic Robert Scholes, whose mid-1970s books on science fiction are among the rare few intelligent critical analyses of the genre, "because we know that the unexpected happens continually in the history of science itself, fiction...has a license to speculate as freely as it may, in the hope of offering us glimmers of a reality hidden from us by our present set of preconceptions."

Few things get me as riled up as the human being's lack of perspective: about our place in the "grand scheme of things," about our longevity, or about the kinds of impact -- damaging and otherwise -- that we have on our planet. We seem terrified of massive perspectival shifts, threatened by our own galactic history or the dark matters that astronomers so often bandy about. There is one trope, I've found, however, that can lead laypeople to safely revel in the sheer minisculity of our race: the Condensed History of the Universe. "Imagine that all of time were to take place in one day," the Condensed History posits, before thrusting the lofty events of cosmic time into moderately-paced succession, relegating all of human history -- all of life on Earth, in fact -- into one fleeting second book-ending the last hour of the hypothetical 24. We've all encountered this metaphor, in high-school science textbooks, gallantly curated natural history museums, educational films, or the conversations of our stoner neighbors.

In any case, I've been dabbling with history. Here is a short film of my authorship where not a lot happens until 13.7 billion years after the Big Bang:

"Not only are we not at the centre of the cosmos, but we are alien to it: we are a singularity. The Universe is strange for us, we are strange for the Universe."

PRIMO LEVI, "News From the Sky," from Other People's Trades

Every year, a few people decide to have their bodies frozen after death, in the hopes that the future will cure all that ails them. It's called cryonic preservation. You forgot it existed, right? So did I, but like all interesting things, cryonics is something that continues to exist, completely independently of your awareness of it.

As a literary trope, life-extension through procedures homologous to cryonics is as old as the hills; even Benjamin Franklin proposed the idea, and it's stuck around ever since, popping up in the works of Jack London, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Arthur C. Clarke. In these contexts, cryonics aids space travel, shutting down biological operations during century-long interplanetary flights, or transports characters through time, plopping them into the strange new words that are the fait accompli of science fiction. Presumably, the kinds of alienation endured by newly-awoken time travelers in science fiction novels and movies have a lot to do with our almost ubiquitous cultural cold-shouldering (so to speak) of the practice.

Still, it isn't fiction. Modern cryonics, after a tinfoil-hat boom in the mid-1970s, is more of a reality than ever. As it stands, it's only practiced by a handful of non-profit groups and satellite organizations around the United States: namely the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan. Alcor and CI's beginnings were, of course, dubious; and their rivalry, understated and surreal. The first Alcor conference in the early 1970s only attracted 30 attendees, and it conducted early cryopreservations out of a mobile surgical unit in a large van. Over the years, both organizations have accrued legitimacy despite Cease and Desist orders and macabre PR stumbles, including a 1994 scandal in which a Riverside county coroner ruled that an Alcor client was murdered with barbiturates before her head was removed by the company's staff (yikes!). Alcor contends that the drug was administered after her legal death, and I believe 'em, because of the inevitably rampant misconceptions about this kind of thing, and because of this devastating quote from the much-misunderstood Alcor's website: "sincere idealism is not fraud. While reading the many articles by physicians and scientists on this website, we ask you to remember one thing: We mean it."

Important Mythbust #1: Cryonic preservation is not "freezing." Freezing a human body damages it irreversibly, as ice crystals form between cells, causing straight-up mechanical destruction. What Alcor and CI perform is a process called vitrification: the replacement of more than 60% of the water in human cells with protective chemicals, which can reach sub-zero temperatures without forming any ice crystals. The chemicals involved in the process, called "cryoprotectants," aren't perfect, either, and cause significant biochemical damage while retaining the structure of the tissue. It's sort of a win-lose, but cryonics organizations seem dead-set (again, no pun indented) on the viability of repairing this damage in the future.

Important Mythbust #2: Although the prospect of immortality plays a large part in the decision-making process, cryonic preservation is considered by devotees to be a forward-thinking medical practice more than anything else, a chance for the terminally ill to benefit from therapies still unknown to the current medical establishment. The majority of people who undergo preservation consider it to be a sort of extended coma from which they will one day emerge, ripe for the skilled hands of advanced doctors.

Gory Reality #1: Although they tread lightly on the issue, cryonics institutions often do preserve just heads. These are referred to in cryo subculture as "neuros," and Alcor's clientele is about 2/3 heads, one of which belongs to baseball great Ted Williams (although his got a little banged up in the process). After all, our brains are the only part of our bodies that are absolutely essential to personhood. Everything else is just noise and limbs. If nanotechnology progresses to a point where vitrified human bodies can be resuscitated without brain damage, then perhaps we will also see massive advances in cell regeneration. Alcor firmly enthuses the possibility that "future technologies developed for healing trauma victims will someday regrow an entire new body around the brain." Why the fuck not? It's the future! Is there anything more vast?

The place that cryonics holds on the crackpot-scale all hinges on your definition of death. You hear terms like "legal" or "clinical" death thrown around all the time on TV, but, as an increasingly unfuckwithable amount of research shows, those things aren't really dying. In a way, the declaration of legal death is just a certification that there's nothing more contemporary medicine can do for a dying patient. See, cardiac arrest is one thing, but the death of all the cells in your body is something completely different; I know it's hard to swallow, but honestly -- even if your heart has stopped, you are technically and biologically still alive for a couple more hours, or until all your cells die. This is medical truth. What's arguable is the cryonics angle: that if a team of surgeons gets your head chopped off and vitrified in time, you might one day return to consciousness.

Robert Ettinger, the father of modern cryonics and author of the surprisingly readable Prospect of Immortality, explains it thusly: "a man does not go like the one-horse shay, but dies little by little usually, in imperceptible gradations, and the question of reversibility at any stage depends on the state of medical art."

I'm not going to waste our time together here in the blogosphere trying to convince you that cryonics is a plausible, or, worse, reasonable practice. What scientific evidence there is pretty much speaks for itself, and the rest just depends on the amount of trust you're willing to place on the future. Disclaimer: I'm almost entirely convinced we'll all be telepathic techno-immortals by the time I'm 60. And I love crackpots with a profound tenacity.

The philosophical questions raised by this relatively simple idea are almost overwhelming. If cryonics can be used to secure treatment for persons suffering from currently untreatable maladies, is the medical establishment barbaric not to practice it? Can our identities be preserved after our frozen brains are thawed out? What right do we have to impose our degenerate bodies on our descendants? Who will want us? Who will debrief us, help us adapt to an undoubtedly isolating future? Will our cowardice cause disastrous overpopulation? Robert Ettinger argues that the weight of a human life transcends these sorts of questions, and that thawed patients "will not find themselves idiot strangers in a lonely and baffling world, but will be made fully educable and integrated," by virtue of the human responsibility to others.

I hope you're right, dude.