Exoplanets

Section IV: Exoplanets

Suddenly Nadia felt a breeze swirl through her nervous system, running up her spine and out into her skin; her cheeks tingled, and she could feel her spinal cord thrum. Beauty could make you shiver! It was a shock to feel such a physical response to beauty, a thrill like some kind of sex. And this beauty was so strange, so alien. Nadia had never seen it properly before, or never really felt it, she realized that now; she had been enjoying her life as if it were a Siberia made right, so that really she had been living in a huge analogy, understanding everything in terms of her past. But now she stood under a tall violet sky on the surface of a petrified black ocean, all new, all strange; it was absolutely impossible to compare it to anything she had seen before; and all of a sudden the past sheered away in her head and she turned in circles like a little girl trying to make herself dizzy, without a thought in her head. Weight seeped inward from her skin, and she didn’t feel hollow anymore; on the contrary she felt extremely solid, compact, balanced. A little thinking boulder, set spinning like a top.

—Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

Shikasta

by Vandana Singh

Chirag:

This is the first time I am speaking to you, aloud, since you died. 

I’ve learned by now that joy is of two kinds—the easy, mindless sort, and the kind that is earned hard, squeezed from suffering like blood from a stone. All my life I wanted my mother to see her son rise beyond the desert of deprivations that was our life—she wanted me to be a powerful man, respected by society—but so much of what she saw were my struggles, my desperation. So when the impossible happened, when our brave little craft was launched—the first crowdfunded spacecraft to seek another world—the unexpected shock of joy took her from illness to death in a matter of months. She died smiling—you remember her slight smile. You were always asking her why she didn’t let herself smile more broadly, laugh out loud. “Auntie,” you’d say, “smile!” That made her laugh, reluctantly. You were always pushing at limits, including those we impose on ourselves. 

For months after you were killed, I would wake up in the morning, wondering how I was going to live. But we kept going—your absence, a you-shaped space, was almost as tangible as your presence had been. And now, nearly 12 years later, we celebrate in your name the arrival of our spacecraft on another world. A homemade, makeshift craft, constructed on the cheap with recycled materials by a bunch of scientists and scholars from the lowest rungs of a world in turmoil, headed to a planet that of all the nearby habitable worlds had the least chance of finding life.  

It was soon after the time of launch, over a decade ago, that our moment of fame got eclipsed. The world’s mega space agencies’ combined efforts found life on Europa. Suddenly ice algae were the thing. Six years ago the discovery of complex life on the water world of Gliese 1214b had the international press in a frenzy. Those of us who had dreamed up our space mission, and made of the dream a reality, were forgotten, and almost forgot ourselves. The wars and the global refugee crises took their toll. Now the first signals from our planet have catapulted us once more into public view, although some of the news reporting is critical. Why spend so much time and effort on a planet like Shikasta 464b, when the water worlds appear to be teeming with life? Yes, Shikasta 464b is a lot closer, about four light-years away, but it is a hell of fire and ice. A poor candidate for life—but we are dreamers. We want to think beyond boundaries, to find life as we don’t know it. 

You helped me see that I could be more than I’d imagined. You took my bitter memories of classmates laughing at my poor English, my ignorance, my secondhand clothes, and gave me, instead, Premchand and Ambedkar, Khusrau and Kalidasa. You taught me that a scientist could also be a poet. 

So we are making this recording, for you and for posterity. 

Sometimes, I practice a game I used to play when I was younger. I pretend to be an alien newly arrived on Earth, and I look at Delhi with new eyes. The dust-laden acacia trees outside the windows, the arid scrubland falling away, the ancient boulders of the Aravalli Hills upon which the squat brick buildings of the university perch like sleeping animals. In the room is the rattle of the air conditioner, the banks of computer monitors. That slender, dark woman in the immersphere—she is here, and she is not here. She is in this room, the modest control room for the mission, and she is four light-years away with her proxy self, the robot you and I named Avinash, or Avi for short. She is Avi. Despite the light delay time, she is there now, on that hellish world. The immer’s opacity clears, and I can see her face. For just a moment her eyes are alien, unfocused, as though she does not see me. What does she see? If I speak to her she will become the Kranti I know, but before that she is, for just that moment, a stranger. 

Kranti: 

I will describe the planet to you, because you will never see it through Avi’s eyes. It is a violent place. Imagine: a world so close to its sun that they face each other like dancing partners. That’s how Annie first described it to me, when her group found it. The light curve signature was subtle but it was there. Shikasta 464’s only known planet, a not-so-hot Jupiter, had a tiny sibling. Two Earth masses, a rocky world too close to its sun to be in the habitable zone. But between its burning dayside and the frozen night, there was the terminator, the boundary.  

Nobody actually believed we would get there. I say “we” but really I mean the spacecraft, the Rohith Vemula. 

How hard were those early years! Now we have our reward: the signals, first from the spacecraft, and then from Avi! I can see through his eyes, as you should have been doing right now. I know what he knows, even though the knowledge is more than four years old. My grandfather is in Bhubaneswar, celebrating with palm beer. He says that because I am a kind of famous person now, all will work out for our people. But I know and he knows it is not that simple.  

From faraway Arizona, Annie is looking at the pictures on her screen. The substellar side of the planet, always facing its dim red star, is all lava seas. But in the terminator, what you called the Twilight Zone, the temperatures are less extreme, and the terrain is solid rock. For this reason you and Chirag designed our proxy to be a small, flat climbing robot, with very short legs, There he is, up on the cliff face, like a crab. 

I am used to boundaries. Ever since my exile from my people’s ancestral home, I have lived in in-between places. Living on a boundary, you know you don’t belong anywhere, but it is also a place of so much possibility. 

Through Avi’s eyes, the planet’s terminator has become more and more familiar. 

Annie:

For my people the number four is sacred—four directions, four holy mountains. It always felt right to me that this project began with the four of us on a rock, stargazing. We’re still figuring out what it means to be together again after all this time, without you. 

Let me begin with the old question: How do you know when something is alive? 

I grew up on the rez. Red dust and red rock, mesas and buttes against the widest sky you’ve ever seen. I grew up lying on boulders with my cousins, watching the constellations move across the sky, and the stars seemed close enough to touch. During the winter, when the snow still fell, we little ones would huddle inside the hogan, listening to our elders tell the stories of how Coyote placed the stars in the sky. My plump fingers would fumble as I tried to follow my grandmother’s hands deftly working the string patterns—with one flick of the wrist, one long pull, one constellation would turn into another. The cosmos was always a part of our lives; even in the hogan there was Mother Earth, Father Sky. Now we live in boxes like white people. My uncle is a retired professor and a medicine man. He says our rituals and ceremonies keep us reminded of these great truths, even in this terrible time for our people.  

Growing up, I thought I’d follow his footsteps—my Uncle Joe, the professor of Futures Studies at Diné University. But I took freshman geology to fulfill a science requirement, and ended up hooked. I remember the first time I realized that I could read the history of the Earth in the shapes and striations of the rocks, the mesas, and the canyons. I ended up going to the State University as a geology major, hoping to do something for the Navajo economy, which relied at that time on mining operations. I was naïve then. Luckily I got distracted by exoplanet atmospheres—late-night homework session, too much coffee, my boyfriend at the time—so here I am, planet hunter, all these years later, looking for biosignatures in exoplanets. 

I’ve been looking at the images and puzzling over a few things. After several thousand exoplanets, we still don’t really understand how planetary atmospheres originate. Earth is such a special case that it only tells us of one narrow band of possibilities. With the exception of the noble gases, nearly all the gases in our atmosphere are made by life. I’m thinking about my grandmother’s story of the holy wind—life is breath, breath is life, literally and in every other way. 

Shikasta 464b is too close to its star to do more than graze its habitable zone. Which is why it is last on everybody’s list for habitability. But my argument is that (a) the thin atmosphere (only 0.6 atm) is nevertheless more than what we’d expect of a planet that ought to have lost much of its atmosphere long ago, so what’s causing it to persist? Could be geology, could be life. And (b) the terminator between the magma pools of the dayside and the frozen desert of the nightside is actually relatively temperate in places, with temperatures that might allow for liquid water. There are trace amounts of water vapor in the upper atmosphere, but—let’s not get excited—likely not enough to create oxygen by photolysis—nah, if you want an oxygen atmosphere you have to look elsewhere. There is hydrogen, methane, and carbon dioxide, but that is hardly surprising on a world with active geology. 

So Kranti and I have been going back and forth about how we would actually know something is alive. We decided that since we both come from tribal cultures we should ask our elders the question. My Uncle Joe, who is a hatałii, says that life is a property arising from connectedness; the universe, being whole, is therefore alive. Don’t dissect things so much, he says, professor and medicine man all at once. See the entirety of things first. It is only through the whole that the parts come into being. Kranti’s grandfather comes of a hill people of lush tropical forests—they call themselves the People of the Waters—and he says that rocks, stones, and mountains are alive, they are gods. 

Anyway, getting back to the point about the terminator—all those years ago some of us broached the idea that there are worlds where life is (a) different from what we recognize as life, (b) not widespread over the planet; in fact the planet might well have only a few habitable regions on it, and (c) it is theoretically possible to find pocket regions even in such inhospitable places as Shikasta 464b where some kind of life thrives, and (d) that life could well be complex life if the pocket habitats are (despite the name) deep enough, large enough, last long enough to have these forms of life evolve. Which is one reason I like red dwarfs—Shikasta 464 is a beauty, brighter and heavier than average, but still, a red dwarf: small, resilient, and very, very long-lived (as I, too, hope to be). Long-lived enough to up the possibility of life on one of its planets. I hope. 

Our little rock is quite a mystery. It shouldn’t have as much atmosphere as it does, tenuous though it is. Considering how close it is to its star, the solar wind ought to have stripped much of it away. Plus the frozen antistellar side is so cold that some of the gases in the atmosphere should have rained out as snow. So why so much atmosphere? Perhaps outgassing—Shikasta b is a happening place, lots of active geological processes churning up the surface—but our models don’t give us the numbers we need. So—life? 

I like it when we are surprised by the universe. 

Chirag:

It began from a single discussion in a certain university in Delhi. The four of us—Annie, Kranti, myself, and you—talked all night. 

You were witness to the great shaking-up of civilization in the 2020s—the wars and civil strife, the wave upon wave of refugees fleeing the boggy, unstable tundras, the unbearable heat of the tropics. You saw the anoxic dead zones of the ocean—you hung the “I can’t breathe” banners over the bodies of the refugees floating among the silvery carcasses of dead fish, the photograph that made you briefly famous. From the shaking of the world arose little groups that came together the way sand gathers in the nodes of a banging drum: fiery intellectuals and dispossessed tribals, starving farmers and failed businessmen. We saw it grow —little groups around the world, islets of resistance, birthplaces of alternate visions, some of which became the solidarity circles from which our dreams emerged. We witnessed the collapse of things as we knew them, saw the great world-machine sink to its steel-and-chromium knees, threatening to drag us all down with it. We saw the paradox of life carrying on through the mayhem, in the big cities and small towns, even as our peoples fought the killing machines all around the globe—the small rituals of breakfast on the table, sleepovers for one’s children, bringing your lover chocolates on her birthday.  

It was a mad idea, in the midst of all this, to dream up a crowdfunded cheap space program, to send an experimental robot as explorer on another world. So many friends left us in outrage, accusing us of turning our backs on the real struggles. Those of us who remained launched the worldwide solidarity circles, the crowdfunding. Dissent was the spice and oil that moved us forward. The circles formed offshoots, generated ripples of their own, they birthed art movements, films, new university departments, even the growth of independent city-states around the globe, as long-existing boundaries wavered and re-formed. Then, during the spacecraft’s journey, we scattered, were lost, some claimed by strife, others by the sweeping pandemics of the last decade. It is a miracle then that some of us have been able to return to the project, now that the signals are coming in thick and fast. 

But of the four of us who first talked the whole thing into being, that night on the boulder under the unusually clear Delhi sky—only you have not come back. You gave yourself to this perhaps more than any of us, and then you were taken down, flung back into the earth from which you rose. I can still see your hands caressing the chassis that was to be Avi, muttering your strange AI spells, the grin lighting up your face as the robot came alive. You had no defense against the pain the world inflicted on us—you were Annie’s uncle dying of radiation poisoning in the Navajo desert, you were Kranti’s younger cousin shot by the police, you were my newborn sister laid outside a school in the hope that someone could feed her. Ultimately they came for you, and you knew in that moment what it was to be all the peoples of the world who have lived in hell. Each time I think of what you must have gone through, I die with you and for you, and I live for you, again and again. 

I live for what the four of us represent. We are the idea of the destruction of caste, class, and race come alive. Together we are walking alternate paradigms, irrefutable counterarguments to the propaganda of the powerful, to the way of life that is accepted as the norm. We live in dangerous times, and because people like us threaten the established order, we are dangerous, and therefore in danger. I don’t really know who the men are who guard us, but it is part of S.R.’s promise to me. S.R. approached me himself with the offer of protection for our project. Accepting it made me feel uncomfortable because his god is Money. Money, he says, is what will set Dalits free, and indeed it has freed him. So much that he can walk the streets (that’s a euphemism for his armored car) surrounded by bodyguards and impunity. I am grateful for his protection, and for his support, although we only took a small fraction of what he offered. But his is not the kind of freedom I seek. I am uncomfortable around power, I suppose. Or maybe I am more of an idealist than I admit to Kranti and Annie. 

You see, I remember what it was like when I was a child. Before we came to Delhi, my mother cleaned houses in Patna. She always pushed me to go to school, and she would ask me to repeat my lessons to her in the evenings, so she could learn to read too. I remember her repeating the letters after me, and sometimes she would be so tired, she would fall asleep before I had finished. Once when I came home crying because the teacher had pushed me to the back of the class for being a Dalit—she told me why she had named me Chirag. I remember her eyes burning in her face, saying, in the darkness of my life, you are the light. What use is suffering if it doesn’t make you stronger? Much later I came across the poetry of Om Prakash Valmiki, who could have been speaking in my mother’s voice. Here’s how I translated his words for Annie. 

That wound
Of the hammer-blow
On the rock
Births sparks

That night in Delhi, we started thinking about how we would explore space, and why. We were in a climate funk—the West Antarctic ice shelf had collapsed faster than predicted. Sea walls had been breached in Miami and Mumbai and Boston; fish were swimming in the streets of Kolkata. We’d thought to escape from grim reality by going to a movie, but they showed one from the tweens that pissed us off, called Interstellar. Lying on the cooling rock, you said, suddenly: “Trash, burn and leave. Yeah, I’m going to be a space colonizer now. That’s my motto. Having fucked up the only world we have, I’m going into space to fuck up a few more.” You laughed, bitterly, and started singing “Trash, burn and leave” to the tune of some pop number I don’t even remember. “Shut up,” said Kranti and Annie together. “Or at least sing in tune,” I said. We laughed, drank a little more, and wept a little too. That was the start of one of those passionate discussions you have in college that goes on all night: How would we—those on the other side of colonization—do it differently? We couldn’t have known then that the answer to the question would take our whole lives.  

We look for life on other worlds because we want to deepen what we mean by human, what we mean by Earthling. As our own atmospheric and oceanic oxygen levels fall and species go extinct like candles winking out, year after year, we want to bring attention to the wonder that is life, here and elsewhere. It is an extension of our empathy, our biophilia. Build your approach, your business model, your way of thinking around that paradigm, and you’ve already built in respect for every human regardless of race or class or caste, connection between all life, and an enhancement of the collective human spirit. Back in the early years of the twenty-first century, one of my people—Rohith Vemula—was driven to sacrifice his life for a vision of a better world. I had suffered from depression for some of my college years, and in the days following that first late-night conversation, I reread what he had written before he died, how he’d wanted to go to the stars. It felt as though he was speaking to me across time and history, urging me to live and dream, reminding me who I was, “a glorious thing made of stardust.” I can live for this, I told myself that night. 

Now I wish I could tell him: Brother, you did it! You took us to the stars. 

Kranti:

I’ve been spending more and more time exploring Shikasta b. Chirag tells me that it is not wise to spend so much time immersed. But I can’t help it. When I am in the immersphere, I feel all relaxed, all tension goes away. I explore the Twilight Zone in Avi’s little body, sampling data. It is becoming a place to me. Every night we look at the images, locate features on a grid, and name things.  

Here’s the description Annie posted on our Citizen Science website: 

Shikasta b’s sky is clear and filled with stars. Looking sunward, the star Shikasta 464 is a dull red sphere, bathing the planet with its inadequate light. Most of its radiation is in the infrared. Avi is standing at the eastern edge of the terminator, atop a cliff some 10 kilometers high. The view of the dayside is spectacular. Here the ground falls away in sheer vertical walls down to a redly glowing plain, where large pools of magma hundreds of kilometers across are connected by lava rivers. Near the cooler terminator region the surface lava in the pools crusts over, and enormous bubbles of noxious gases break through it at irregular intervals, popping like firecrackers that would be louder if the planet had much of an atmosphere. Fine droplets of molten rock rain down from these explosions. Behind Avi the top of the levee is a cracked and fissured plain, dark and shadowed, with a few odd rock formations. On the nightside the images beamed from our orbiting satellite show a frozen terrain cut through by fissures and canyons on a much larger scale. Perhaps deep in the cracks tidal friction from the interior warms the place enough for life to have a tenuous hold. We don’t know yet. But the terminator between the two extremes is our best bet. 

Today Avi has begun exploring a small canyon that we have named Shiprock. It is a maze of narrow gullies between jagged rock walls about 40 meters in height. Avi has already mapped it from the air; now he is methodically mapping details from the surface level, moving up the walls, along the canyon, poking his antennae into holes and cracks. 

I am remembering, as I clamber up and down the terrain with him, the time I spent with my grandfather during summer holidays in my final year of college. He had returned to our tribal lands the year before. The refinery had ruined the land in the 20 years of his exile, and now the mining company wanted to extend the open-cast mines. My grandfather’s village, my people, were all scattered by the initial displacement, but they had come together to fight for their land. The police brought the company goondas with them, looking for the agitation leaders. This is what they call an “encounter killing”—cold-blooded murder that is reported as a killing in self-defense. Four people, including my cousin brother Biru, were killed the week before I arrived.

I can’t talk about it still. I have been insulated from the troubles of my people for so long because my mother took us children away when the refinery displaced us. Most of my childhood was spent in Bhubaneswar. I was good at studies, so she got me admitted to a Corporation school, even though my grandfather was against it. They had such arguments! But my mother won. She had seen too much violence and death in the war against our people; she wanted me to be safe, to get a modern education. My grandfather didn’t speak to her for three years. Then he was forced to come to Bhubaneswar to find work. It proved my mother’s point, that we could no longer live the way we had for thousands of years, so why fight and be killed? When she realized my grandfather was still active in the struggle she shook her head and said he was a fool. I never paid attention to all that, only to my studies. Only when I went to Delhi for university I realized what it meant to be Adivasi. I was so integrated into modern life that I had forgotten my native language and customs—but with my black skin and different features I was seen as backward, someone who had come to a top university because of the reservation system. I joined an Adivasi resistance group, and slowly began to unlearn the Corporation propaganda and learn again the language and history of my people. 

That summer I went back to Odisha to see my grandfather. I still remembered the green hills and the clouds that would sit on top of them, and the plain, which used to be crisscrossed by small rivers and streams. But so much had changed. I stood in the dust and heat of the foothills and hugged my weeping aunt, as the bodies of the “junglee terrorists” lay before us. Biru lay on his side as though sleeping. Blood had seeped from the gunshot wound on his head into the ground. That day I understood for the first time the reality of being on the receiving side of genocide. 

In the terrible days that followed the raid, our relatives, the hill tribes, hid us from the police. I went with the fugitives into the cloud forest. The narrow trails were filled with the calls of unfamiliar birds and beasts. Up there under the shadow of the mountain god, eating wild mangoes from the trees while a light rain fell, I had a strange experience: belonging. I looked at my grandfather’s face, lined and seamed from decades of suffering, and laughing so defiantly despite all our sorrows, and I finally understood why he fought for what was left of our home.

In those days my head was filled with all kinds of grand ideas. I was a budding intellectual, all the worlds of knowledge were opening before me. I was writing a thesis on extensions of Walker Indices, which are a set of parameters that try to tell how alive something is, from a rock to a mountain goat. My grandfather was proud of me, and always wanted to know what I was studying. In his village he had been a man of wisdom and power; in the city he was an activist by night, and a gardener for hire by day. 

But he was the one who taught me to see in a different way. My vague ideas of semiotics grew sharper and more vivid during that time in the forest. I didn’t put it all together until some years later in my first academic paper—but what the forest taught me was that Nature speaks, that living and nonliving communicate with each other through a system older than language. In fact, physical law is only a subset of the ways in which matter talks to matter. When my grandfather went foraging for medicinal plants for the injured people, I saw him come alive to all the life around him. I had never seen him like that. I realized there is a way of being alive that we have lost by becoming civilized. I published my first paper in my final year—a very technical one on extensions of Kohnian semiotic theory—but the basic ideas, they all come from that trip.  

What I am trying to do now—immersing myself in this alien environment—is because of those long-ago forest treks with my grandfather. Whenever I used to ask him how he knew something about the forest, he would say that he just paid attention. At first I used to get irritated. Now I understand better what he meant. He practices a kind of radical observation, in which he opens all his senses to information flow without preconceptions, and simply waits until something crystallizes. This sounds ridiculous to Chirag: “just the kind of mumbo-jumbo that people associate with the ‘mystical savage,’” but I think this radical, unfiltered immersion can lead to alternative ways of understanding the world. For example, all the emerging discoveries of animal language—the monkey species in Australia, the bowhead whale in the Arctic—the scientists in each case spent so much time with the animals, getting to know them, listening to their recordings day and night. 

That is what I am doing here, on Shikasta b. And I want to understand Avi, whose Walker Index is 7.8, in between life and non-life. This is the first time he has been on active assignment in an alien world. He can learn. On an AI scale, he is a genius. In what ways will Shikasta b change him?  

Annie: 

This radical observation thing of Kranti’s—as she says, it’s nothing new—indigenous people have been practicing it for millennia. She was afraid Chirag would scoff—but I think she has a point. She thinks we should go even deeper. Let’s tell ourselves Shikasta b’s stories, she said, stories about this place. Maybe in assuming everything is alive, and giving each thing a certain agency, different degrees of aliveness will become apparent. What she’s saying, I think, is that if you are looking for a pattern and don’t know what it is, it makes sense to invent patterns of your own, semi-randomly. This Monte-Carlo-like shaking up of patterns and paradigms can throw up notions that you might not have reached through logic alone. This goes against conventional wisdom, which says—hey, we humans like patterns, so beware: the patterns we find are likely simply in our heads, as opposed to real patterns. The thing is, when it comes to “real”: what we recognize as patterns and connections are neither purely cultural (or anthropomorphic) nor purely “natural.” As Kranti says, “What is culture but a specific kind of contextualizing with the rest of one’s environment?”  

Well, it could all be a waste of time. But we have that—time, I mean. What’s to lose? 

Actually Chirag didn’t scoff when we suggested it. He was about to—I know the signs well: the way his left eyebrow starts going up, and the deep sigh—but his poetic side saw an opportunity. It was funny how his face changed, you could see that internal struggle. He has declared himself the official scribe, collecting our story ideas and rewriting them. 

Once there was a planet too close to its star. They shared a vast and complex magnetic field, and their proximity made a beautiful world of extremes, separated by a circular boundary. In the boundary world it was neither too hot nor too cold, but it was always windy. Various species of hot beings lived on the dayside, and they wanted to know what it was like on the other side of the world, where the star’s heat and light did not fall. So the forces that shaped them—heat and pressure and magnetic forces—turned them into huge molten balls that rose from the lava seas and were flung at the sheer walls of the boundary, where they fell apart, crashing back down into the molten ocean. But the tiniest of them cooled and solidified into lava dust motes, and were able to ride the wind. 

The Great Eastern Highlands, where Avi is exploring, is my favorite place on this planet. Imagine looking down into the magma pools of hell from such a height. I’ve never had vertigo—spent most of my childhood clambering up cliffs—but the vids from the edge of the great levee make me nervous and excited. I can hear the wind blowing at Avi’s back, a constant dull, muted roar—the cold surface current from the frozen nightside. Higher up, hot air from the substellar side swirls in the opposite direction.  

We’ve gridded off the highland plateau on top of the levee. The dramatic temperature difference at the terminator makes for a fissured, tortured landscape. Lots of crevasses, passageways, mazes, all bathed by the dim, angry grazing light from the red dwarf star. Avi has made progress on his ground-based survey of Shiprock Canyon, which winds between sheer basalt walls on the plateau. His headlights reveal a maze of passageways, rocky arches, and bridges. At first I thought there was something wrong with his optics, because when he looked up, the stars didn’t look so clear at about 30 degrees around the zenith. Dust? The atmosphere is very thin, but I can imagine solidified lava bits from the molten rock fountains in the plains below, being swirled around by the wind. 

Could there be dust devils on Shikasta b? Kranti’s message read. And as I sipped my coffee in the glowing sunrise of the high Arizona desert and looked at the newest image, I thought: Nilch’i. I remember my grandmother explaining to me when I was very little that the whorls on my finger pads and the little vortex of hair on my head were signs of the holy wind that animates us. There’s Nilch’i on another world, raising dust into a vortex, making this being, this Dusty Woman. Now that I know what to look for, I can see her form, faint but discernible against the backdrop of rock and sky, a dust devil composed of lava dust. She is whirling along the canyon like a live thing. 

Dusty Woman danced through the narrow passageways of Shiprock Canyon, shaking her skirts and looking into the caves and hollows. 

“Who is tugging at my skirts?” 

But the wind took her voice away, and when it died she had to lay down to rest and wait until the wind picked her up again. 

Kranti is making up a story about Saguaro, a creature that lives in the fissures and passageways of Shiprock Canyon. Chirag declares we are silly, but has joined the fun: his contribution is Balls of Fire (the semisolid glowing lava balls that are sometimes hurled up from the magma pools, hitting the levee wall with a splosh). We also came up with lindymotes (after my sister Lindy) for the little solid bits of lava that are blown over the magma pools toward the great cliffs. These have left their mark on the tops of the canyon walls, which have been roughened over millennia of constant battering by these windborne particles. 

You should see Avi scuttle after the lindymotes like a little dog. He’s been doing some odd little dancing steps. There’s something we can’t yet see or sense that he can. It occurred to me that we should plot his movements, just in case they give us some kind of clue. Avi’s certainly been behaving weirdly. I wish you were here to see this, because more than anything, he is your baby. 

Our pictures are being analyzed the world over by scientists and amateurs and nutcases via our Citizen Science Initiative. We hope someone will find something. But the far more exciting pictures from a major mission to a water world are eclipsing ours. As is, need I mention, the latest cluster of wars. 

Still, we have some traffic. When we discover something it immediately goes to our site, becomes global and public. Our reports are clear and contextual—they lack the aloofness of scientific papers, but they’re plenty rigorous. Then the world gets to dissect, shred, and analyze what we have to say. Like our finances, everything is public, everything is transparent. I like to think we are changing the culture of science, from the margins, a fringe bunch of scholar-activists in little circles around the world. I’ve realized after all these years that what’s bothered me about Western science is that there is no responsibility. No reciprocity. You just have to be curious and work hard and be smart enough to discover something interesting. The things you discover, you have no relation to, no responsibility for—except through some kind of claim-staking. I grew up in two worlds—the world of conventional science, and the world of the Navajo. I used to think there was an insurmountable wall between them. But looking through Avi’s eyes, I’m beginning to see whole. I’m feeling more complete.

Of course, there really is no such thing as a complete person. That’s another Western concept, isn’t it? We are open systems, we eat, we excrete, we interdepend. We feel your absence like a three-legged chair. 

Chirag:

The lindymotes did not belong here. They had been forged in the lava beds, and here it was cold, so cold! Some of them were swept by the currents past the great cliffs of the boundary into the fabled nightside, where they nucleated tiny snowflakes as gases condensed around them, snowing on the frigid, tortured landscape. But others managed to stay in the boundary lands—flung against the canyon walls, they left their tiny footprints on the surface, only to slide down into sheltered gullies. Here they found that the wind was not as strong, and they could perceive the twists and turns of invisible pathways, magnetic field lines. They felt the pull and tug of these, and aligned themselves so. The invisible pathways changed, sometimes slowly, sometimes at random, but the lindymotes followed them like little flocks of sheep across a meadow. 

I know metals and money. I went into metallurgy because I wanted to see if there was a way around extractive industries like mining. And I went into money because I wanted to kill that god, Money. Nothing against money, but Money? No. I know what it does to people. 

Actually I wanted to jump-start an economy based on retrieving metals from waste, so that we didn’t have to destroy lands and peoples for ore. In our college days, I promised Kranti on more than one drunken night that I would change the world. But I’ve been sober since, drunk only on the tragic poetry of life. 

And here we are, on the verge of discovery. Kranti suspects that we have discovered a form of life so alien that we can barely recognize it. She gave me some technical stuff about orthogonal Walker Indices and negative subzones of phase space—but what it boils down to is that there are, possibly, at least two life-forms on Shikasta b. 

One is Avi, or what he has become. 

How to explain Avi? It is a task nearly as impossible as explaining you. To explain Avi—and Bhimu—to explain them is to go back in time to you and me, but where to begin? Perhaps it should be the time you lent me your battered copy of Jagdish Chandra Bose’s Response in the Living and the Non-Living. It was somewhere between Ambedkar and Darwin, I think—you had been pushing books on me, my English and Hindi were both improving, my head was singing with ideas, a magnificent incoherence within which my slowly awakening mind wandered, intoxicated. From my mother’s simplistic dreams for me, which I had unconsciously adopted—a good job and reasonable wealth, freedom from want, your usual middle-class unexamined life—from that, you took me to a place that whispered, “the universe is larger than this.” I remember the exact moment I opened the book and Bose’s dedication leapt out at me, “to my fellow countrymen,” as though the great scientist had himself touched my hand across time. I knew already that he was anti-caste, that he had the ability to walk away from fortune, and that his contributions had only been recognized decades after his death. But it was because of that book that I got really interested in metals. I decided then to go into metallurgy, even though the engineering program’s chief objective was to produce mining engineers. Why not get to know the monster intimately? My real interest was in the mining of landfills, in reclamation of metals from electronic waste—but what caught my poetic imagination was the possibility that metals were alive, in some metaphorical sense, if not the literal. Bose’s experiments on plants and metals under stress elicited similar responses—he had made some conceptually audacious suggestions that were laughed off or politely dismissed. Only in recent times, with the greatly increased understanding of plant sentience and communication—man, he would have loved mycorrhizal networks—have some of his ideas gained credence. But metals—we know that metals are not alive in the usual sense. Metals in their pure form allow for flow, just as living systems do. That we are all electrical beings, that life is electricity, is true enough, but not all electricity is life. Still, when I first started to learn about metals, I saw in my imagination the ions studded in an ever-surging sea of valence electrons, the metallic forms so macroscopically varied, silver and pale yellow, sodium, soft as butter against the hardness of steel, the variations in ductility and malleability, the way rigid iron succumbed to softness under heat—I saw all this and I wanted to know metal, to know it for its own sake as much as for its practical use. That’s how you really know anything, anyway. 

Between your mind and mine—yours trained in artificial intelligence, mine in metallurgy—Avi’s predecessors were born, starting with Kabariwallah, made to find metal waste in trash dumps. Celebrating over daru, we began to argue about ethics—Frowsian models of value emergence in technological development, if I remember correctly. Somehow the notion came up of AI sentience, hotly debated for over a decade before us, as network intelligences started to pass the lowest-level Turing tests. The AI Protection Clauses started to be invoked and applied. You said, “to restrain a being, any being that is capable of sentience, is to put a baby in a maximum-isolation prison cell because you are afraid it will grow up a criminal.” I argued that artificial intelligence was not like the baby, not human at all. It was alien, despite its human parents. Wasn’t that why there were laws against the development of free AIs? For any AI system there must be a balance between the freedom of complexity and the necessity of control. You looked at me with that intent, dark gaze and sighed. “Don’t you get it? The restraint protocols are about slavery, not ethics. The question is not whether or not we should build free AIs. The challenge is—having built one, how do you teach it how to be ethical? For whatever we mean by ‘ethical?’”

Thus Avi’s precursors came about: experiments in the university’s frigid AI development labs while the air burned outside. Finally you came up with the idea that an AI capable of learning could only acquire an ethical compass the way children do. So you and I became parents to the robots that would eventually give birth to Avi. The final development took us from pre-Avi-187 to Avi and his conjoined twin Bhimu. They were our babies. But you were the one who took Avi-Bhimu home with you every night, took them to work, to classes, to demonstrations, to children’s birthday parties. 

Avi-Bhimu’s Walker Index earned each of them an Electronic Person identity chip, but an EP is only the lowest common denominator among the top-class AIs. What we’ve done, what you did, really, is to create a new class of artificial intelligence altogether: an ultrAI. Whether ultrAIs are sentient in the way we understand it, we don’t yet know. They are free to learn and grow, yet grounded in years-long ethical training resulting from close contact with the same group of humans. There are only two ultrAIs in the entire universe, Avi and Bhimu. You might say the great worldnet AIs, the distributed Interweb intelligences, are just as complex and unpredictable, but Avi and Bhimu are so much closer to us, bound as they are in their metal-ceramic bodies, with bioware networks rather like our nerves. AIs are indeed alien; we know now we cannot download human consciousness into an AI because the physicality matters—but I have to admit that one of the reasons I can’t spend more time in immer with Avi is because every step he takes up a rock wall makes my heart jump like an over-worried parent. 

Now—I say now, despite the four-year time lag—Avi’s been behaving oddly. The reports he sends back are cryptic and terse. He is sending us images and data, but he’s stopped chatting, and his tone has changed. No explanation as to the odd dancing steps, no streaming feed of his thought process as he makes hypotheses and tests them, which he’s designed to do. I can’t quite put my finger on it but it feels as though he is preoccupied. His neural activity is faster and more intense than we’ve ever recorded, which means he’s learning at a prodigious rate. We’ve sent queries of course, but we won’t have the answers for another eight years. So we must draw our own conclusions. 

I wish we had Bhimu with us to help us understand him. 

Kranti:

Have we really discovered life on Shikasta b? 

One thing we know about life is that living things have a larger phase space of possibilities. A stone falling down a cliff is limited by gravity. But a mountain goat can step to the side, he can go up or down. 

That is why one of the things Avi has been doing is looking for apparent violations of physical law. This is not at all easy. He has found crystalline formations inside some of the caves and tunnels—but you cannot look at entropy alone. Order is also found in nonliving things. In my field we say information inscribes matter. But when something is alive, the information flow is top-down causal. So we need to see whether flow of information becomes—alive—when its causal structure is determined by the largest scale on which it can have a distinct form. 

What Avi found was a mat of lindymotes, the lava dust that—now we know to look for it—is everywhere in Shiprock Canyon. The recurring dust devil we call Dusty Woman leaves layers of dust on the rocky surfaces as she dances. The dust is everywhere, even in the caves and tunnels. It is basically silica dust, crystalline fragments with hydrocarbons mixed in. 

Avi found a mat of this stuff on the base of some of the rock formations. During a lull in the wind, it moved up a rock face, very slightly. That could just be some small-scale atmospheric vortex, but he’s recorded the same thing multiple times, in different wind and weather conditions, from dead still air to gales. The vortex event was the strangest. I was there, looking through Avi’s eyes, and I saw the Dusty Woman start dancing. Avi was recording the wind speed and gradient, and I saw the Dusty Woman pause—yes, pause, in the middle of the dance. Imagine it, in the light of Avi’s headlamps: the wind still blowing, but the dust formation holding. 

There are so many possible non-life scenarios for this phenomenon. The first thought in my mind was liquid helium II—in spite of its peculiar behavior, it is not alive. So we can’t discount the possibility of a non-life explanation.

We have been discussing all this nonstop until we get tired. In the evenings we sit with bottles of beer or cups of chai and watch the city skyline. There are the searchlights arcing through the polluted air. In the distance are the Citadel towers like multicolored candles. Chirag plays our stories back to us.  

The lindymotes lay on the rock face to rest. They felt the stirrings, small and large, and rearranged themselves. They were flung into a dance by great vortices of air, and they went whirling. When the whirling stopped as the wind died, the lindymotes felt the magnetic field lines shift and change, and held their place for a moment before falling slowly down on to the surface. 

“We are playing!” said some of the lindymotes. 

“We are being played with,” said others in wonder. 

“We are becoming something,” said some of the lindymotes. 

“We are making something,” said others. 

And so they knew they were themselves, tiny and separate, but together they were Dusty Woman. 

One of the things I learned from my grandfather is that you cannot separate life from its environment. Understand an environment well enough, and you will understand what kind of life might arise there. Environment is the matrix that works with the life force to generate life-forms. That is how the environment becomes aware of itself, when it intra-acts at different scales. So I try to keep my mind open to possibility, even when my imagination comes up with something fantastic, so later on I can apply the constraints that are needed. Imagination has an even larger phase space of possibility than life. Sometimes in the immersphere I feel I am slipping away from Earth itself. It is scary but also exciting. 

Annie:

Today I am a little shaky. I was stopped by a cop last night. I was walking back through campus at close to midnight when it found me. Its swiveling eyes locked on me, and the voice, gravelly and machine-like, said: Stop. Do Not Move. It scanned me top to bottom with the blue light. The cops can make mistakes. But it found me in its database and I was released. Some of my friends are convinced that the so-called mistakes are deliberate, used as a cover-up to kill leaders of the resistance. My colleague Laura was one of the “mistakes.” Nobody was punished for her death. The AI tribunal pronounced the cop guilty of an interpretation error, and it was wiped. And that was the end of it. I’ve heard drone killings are better because they are swift—you have no time to be afraid. The drones are so small that you only notice them, if at all, when you are about to die. 

Okay, deep breath. I am alive, I am alive. And what about life on Shikasta 464b? 

I think a non-life explanation is the most likely. Magnetism is the most obvious thing to consider. Shikasta 464b has a roughly octupolar magnetic field that doesn’t do much to protect it from its star’s solar wind. The peculiar magnetic field, I believe, is due to the extreme heat of the dayside, which causes magma to upwell from the interior onto the surface, dragging with it denser magnetic minerals in long wisps and tendrils. This also causes the local variations in the magnetic field in both space and time. 

I’ve looked at Avi’s analysis of the dust fragments. Lots of silica and basalt grains, and—magnetite crystals! Not surprising that the dust moves around in response to the variations in the local magnetic field. There is so much magnetic material churning close to the surface of Shikasta b that the local fields must be shifting all the time. This would result in magnetic dust moving in weird ways, like Avi has observed. A relatively mundane non-life explanation for Dusty Woman’s behavior. Of course, as Kranti points out, the environment shapes the possibilities for life. It would hardly be surprising that if life exists on this world, it would take advantage of the peculiar magnetic field distribution. 

So. How would life adapt to magnetism, especially to complex and ever-changing magnetic fields? We have magnetotactic bacteria on Earth, and birds that migrate based on the little crystals in their skulls. But navigation wouldn’t be much use when the magnetic fields are so weirdly distorted, when they change all the time. 

The three of us have been talking about a new idea that is beginning to take shape. Our old questions: (a) What separates life from non-life? (b) Why is it that so many indigenous cultures regard the universe itself as alive? I think of my grandmother’s string games during winter nights. Her fingers working. The constellations shifting from one to another. My favorite is Two Coyotes Running Away From Each Other. Her fingers and the strings between them hold the cosmos in a way I can’t articulate. 

This is what we are thinking: that there is no clear boundary between life and non-life as biologists define it. The answer to “what is life?” depends on your context. My people, like Kranti’s people, knew long ago that the universe is connected, every bit linked with every other bit, and even the bits changing form and purpose all the time. This is not mere mysticism—it is consistent with science. If science had not started as a reductionist enterprise through an accident of history, this idea would be familiar. Over the last few days the three of us have been mapping “information channels” or “communication pathways,” although we are not certain these are the same thing. We started with a diagram of a human—there are stabilizing negative feedback loops within each organ for homeostasis, but from organ to organ these pathways connect, forming even larger meta-loops. But because humans are open systems, the pathways connect outside us, to the biosphere itself. They connect with the negative and positive feedback loops of the ocean (breathable oxygen, thank you, phytoplankton) and climate as a whole, as well as human-human interactions. Zoom out beyond the biosphere and the density of connections thins out, but the threads are still there—solar irradiation providing light and heat, cosmic rays influencing mutations, magnetic fields, gravitational fields reaching out through space between planet and star, planet and planet. Zoom in, into the human body, down to the cells, down to the protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei, and the pathways are there, tangled and dense. There may be some kind of fractal self-similarity governing the scale change. If we draw this “loop diagram” for a part of our biosphere, what do we see? The densest loops are those within living organisms, because they must have stabilizing feedbacks to allow for steady states, for homeostasis. “But even rocks have these,” I told Kranti and Chirag exultantly. Rocks “communicate” through the laws of physics and geology—they sense gravity, they are subject to heat and pressure, they participate in cycles at long and short scales, from weathering to the carbonate silicate cycle, for example. “Their loops are just not as dense.” 

So then what is life, and what is not-life, depends on what cutoff choice you make in communication loop density. There is no a priori distinction between life and non-life. 

Still, it would be nice to have life that will talk back to us! Or at least to Avi. If we truly find life on Shikasta 464b, Avi’s position will become delicate. He will no longer be a highly sophisticated measuring instrument, but an alien communicating with potential native life-forms. We have spent years talking about the ethics of the situation, considering how we represent peoples at the receiving end of colonization. You designed Avi’s protocols for what he should do if we were to find life. But you also put in enough leeway for Avi to develop in his own way—I am beginning to recognize some of your fierce independence in Avi’s strange behavior. 

Of course we wonder about Bhimu all the time. The twins, one on Shikasta 464b and one on Earth, each developing according to his environment. You took Bhimu away for safekeeping; it’s what cost you your life. 

I’m taking advantage of the armistice and a plane trip voucher to fly out to Delhi. But first I’m going home to Window Rock for a few days. There are places where life on the rez has become impossible because of the heat and the advance of the sand dunes, but we’ve found pocket habitats, we’ve learned to adapt. The coal mines have closed. We are working toward 100 percent renewable energy. Life is rough and difficult, due to the long drought in an already dry land, but adversity has brought the old ways to the surface again. The heat madness has not erupted among us as much as in the world outside our borders. The Southern Federation wants us to join them but many of our people are resisting. There have been incursions from the west, skirmishes on the borders. Refugees coming in from the south, they say, tore down the old Wall between the United States and Mexico with their bare hands. With bleeding hands they moved up in a wave through El Paso, and were turned back with gunfire. 

It’s been a year since I visited, and in that time so much has changed. Cousin Phil is involved in the Resistance, working on disabling drones. He tells me his DADS can get several of them in one sweep. They drop from the sky like flakes of ash, he says. Uncle Bill’s new wind farm is taking off. Lindy’s working on a desert farming project. I need to see them; I need a Blessing Way ceremony. I need to remember what it means to call a place home, before I leave. 

Kranti:

Are you listening? Are you listening? 

I hear that voice in a dream. Like a bird calling, again and again. It is me. Are you listening? I cannot remember if I have dreamed that dream again and again, or if it is just a memory of the first time. Who is speaking to me? Is it you, or someone else? What is it I have not listened to? 

There is so much I do not know. I feel awkward when people praise me. Actually sometimes I feel angry. It is like they are saying, how surprising that you know so much, Adivasi girl. An embarrassed laugh—I thought Adivasi girls could only be maids. Very good ones, no offense. But a Ph.D. scientist. Well, genius can appear at random, anywhere. Besides, she went to a Corporation school. They should put all tribal children in those schools. Look at what the illiterate terrorist junglees are doing …. 

They used to hold me up as an example of what a good Adivasi should be like. They stopped when I started supporting my people’s fight against the corpocracy. Then I was called ungrateful, hypocritical, and worse names. But there are more interesting things in the world than angry, ignorant people, so I turn away from them and I think: everything in Nature communicates, whether through language, or signs, or signals. Even matter, dead matter speaks through physical law, the interrelationships of variables. I have tried to listen, that is why I wonder about the dream. What is it I have not listened to? Is it Avi speaking to me? Is it you? 

When I told Chirag and Annie about my dream, Chirag was quiet for a bit. Then he said: 

“Do you think it was Bhimu?”

I was surprised. Bhimu, calling me in a dream! Chirag looked embarrassed, then admitted he has had recurring dreams that Bhimu is calling him. In the dreams he is wandering through mountains and deserts, following her voice, convinced she will lead him to you. When he is awake he thinks of her lying in pieces deep inside some forest, her bioware torn apart. 

“Just as likely,” Annie says, “that she is growing up somewhere in the hills, or in a desert among nomads, perfectly safe.” We have been waiting, listening for Bhimu, all these years.

Some weeks ago, Annie and I had made up a story about Dusty Woman writing in dust on the canyon walls—Shikastan graffiti. Recently we have been seeing dust patterns, both dynamic and stationary, that seem to be telling us something. I know humans can deceive themselves—hubris is powerful. So I learn humility; as the indigenous peoples have always known, humility before Nature tempers our delusions. We junglees don’t have a word for Nature—that is a foreign word, a separation word. But you know what I mean.

What is Shiprock Canyon telling us? Its shapes and passageways, its corridors and caves are all mapped now, and we are getting a sense of how strongly the winds blow over it, and the thin vortices that form in certain areas. There are dust ripples like writing on sloping walls, what Chirag calls “the calligraphy of the wind.” This inorganic material cannot by itself be alive.  

Avi has also been doing flybys. He will rise suddenly over the canyon, turning slowly, scanning and sensing the magnetic fields, wind speed, visibility. I have realized that he has been increasing the range with each flyby, mapping the larger terrain within which Shiprock Canyon is embedded. And the data he’s collecting—if we are right—could mean something spectacular. 

Saguaro lived deep beneath the canyon, in the darkest places. He was slow, sleepy with the years. Time flowed for him like cooling lava. He could not see, but he had visions. He sensed rivers and pools of fire, and the deadly cold beyond. The heat below and the cold above fed his body, which was shot through with long cables of exobacteria, sipping electrons and passing them along. The passageways in which he lay had been shaped by magnetism and geological forces, so the biocables that were artery and vein, nerve and sinew for him, were likewise arranged in response to the ambient magnetism. He lay and dreamed. 

Annie:

What we are beginning to notice is that superimposed on top of the ambient magnetism are smaller-scale variations, like signals riding a radio wave. Where are those variations coming from? Here, up high on the great terminator ridge, the subsurface temperature is too low for rocks to melt, and it is too far for the dense, ionized heavy metals to extend from the planet’s core. We expect spatial variations due to the way magnetic ore is distributed, but we don’t expect the magnetic field to vary in time so delicately. It’s as though there are magnetic beasts in the subterranean caverns and passageways of Shiprock Canyon that, through their movements, create these fine magnetic signatures, ever-changing with time. The response of the magnetic dust is consistent with this hypothesis. So Dusty Woman twirls, the wind dies down suddenly and the dust, for a fraction of a second, changes pattern in a way inconsistent with the fluid dynamics. Now that we are thinking along these lines, we can see in Avi’s data the gap between the observed motion of the dust and what we’d expect with only the wind and the ambient magnetic fields as factors. 

Maybe Saguaro, or something like it, really does exist in the depths of the canyon. I can’t avoid thinking that Dusty Woman is not merely a dust devil. We’re going a little nuts, I think. 

Amid all the excitement we are trying something new. Outside the mission room is a small patch of arid scrubland dotted with acacia trees. It slopes up to the observation post on top, where there’s a sentry. But on the way up there is a side path into a bunch of trees. It leads to a small clearing, ringed by large boulders. Rainwater forms a small pool here, and the trees are hung with the woven nests of baya weaver birds. This is a nice little place to sit. You can barely see the city spread out below us, due to the haze. The air is warm and thick, and the little birds sing and dart about. An ecologically impoverished place, but one where we can practice the idea of radical immersion. 

Chirag has the greatest difficulty with this. He is not used to sitting still; he says it makes him nervous. Chirag is letting his determination get in the way—have you ever seen anyone pushing themselves to relax? But he’ll get there, once he stops trying so hard. As for me, all I have to do is to hold my corn pollen bag in my hand, and take myself back home in my memory. I hear the singing, I smell the corn. I see the dancers, feel their rhythms in my bones. Uncle Joe’s voice in the background, deep and slow. As I breathe myself into receptivity, I become aware of the world around me—there’s a flash of bright yellow, a little male weaver bird darts from the top of a rock to the hanging nest, an insect in his beak. There’s the water gleaming, a muddy brown in the afternoon light. A ripple breaks the surface; a tiny frog, whose pale throat goes in and out as it breathes. We breathe together and I smell moisture in the air, just a hint, as though the monsoons may be sending us some rain after all. The weavers go chit-chit in the underbrush. Clouds pass overhead in small flotillas. Later, when I’ve come out of this, I will remember that I forgot myself in my immersion. I forgot my separateness, I became part of the cosmos, from the frog at the edge of the water to the clouds and beyond. Inside the control room, I say the Hózhó prayer, the word so inadequately translated as “beauty,” and everything seems touched by the sacred, even to opening the fridge to get my lime soda. Later Chirag will ask me what it was like. His imagination fills in for experience, and he will give me his poet’s words to speak into the recorder. 

Kranti is already in the immersphere, going straight from this world to Shikasta 464b. I don’t know what she sees when she practices immer—immer on this world, I mean. She never talks about it. 

Chirag:

Avi is increasingly following his own ideas. Of course we can’t send him commands and expect him to comply immediately—we are separated by four light-years, after all. But he has a communication protocol that is clearly being violated. He is modifying his own algorithms, ignoring, for example, the need to add commentary to his reports, or to explain what he is doing. I have seen him move lumps of magnetic debris in a way that looks like an attempt at communication with whatever it is he thinks he sees here. I think he has crossed the blurry boundary between non-life and life. We are estimating that Avi’s Walker Index is probably around 8.3. 

There’s one more strange thing. It’s to do with Bhimu. When she and Avi were separated, literally made two, they had already laid the foundations of a new communication system. A private language analogous to what identical twins sometimes make up, but one that makes no sense to us. I’ve started to look at their old transcripts again. In the patterns I am finding similarities to some of the signals from Avi. In Avi’s transmissions, what seems like random noise overlaying the signals is revealing regularities astonishing in their subtlety. Am I deceiving myself, seeing what I want to see? Or is this a hint that Avi is trying to reach Bhimu—that perhaps she is still—alive?

We have been listening for Bhimu all these years in vain. It is strange that Avi’s twin, who was to stay with us on Earth, was the one we lost. After the raid you escaped with her. For her safety you didn’t tell us where. They captured you—but not Bhimu—in a remote region of the eastern Himalayas. You were at their mercy how long, none of us can bear to think. How long before the picture of you was circulated, lying on the forest floor with gunshot wounds to your chest? They dressed your body in the uniform of one of the insurgent groups, and circulated your picture as a triumph of the progressive state versus the terrorists. Allegedly you had been hunted down after days of tracking you through the forest, yet the uniform was recently ironed, with its creases intact. Later we tried to find Bhimu among the tribals of the Northeast, and then, among the new hunter-gatherer anarchist groups. There are so many of the new groups, so many different philosophies: in the West, the gun-toting Savagers and the peace-loving Edenites, and here in India the Prakrits of MadhyaBhum and the Asabhyata movement’s adherents in the East. I hope that wherever she is, Bhimu is well. And that she’ll forgive us for separating her from Avi. 

If Avi’s Walker Index is up to 8.3, what might Bhimu’s be? We have no way of knowing. 

And if Avi is talking to the aliens—what is he saying?

Kranti:

Living things, always they contextualize. That is what adaptation is, a constant conversation with the surroundings, a contextualization intended to maintain life as long as possible. Ancient systems of medicine like Ayurveda talk of life force, what we call prana. It is called chi by the Chinese, holy wind by the Navajo. There are complex paths through which the life force flows in the body, and in Ayurveda the prana flows are part of a greater network, the cosmic prana. Could it be that life force inside living beings is a kind of metaphor for the communication channels? With the difference that in living beings beyond a Walker Index of 8, the information flows are top-down causal, shaped by the constraints and demands of the highest scale at which an organism exists ….

Living things have boundaries and sub-boundaries. But there is no absolute boundary because we are all open systems. In that sense what you define as life depends on the cut you make. Ancient peoples, forest dwelling people, desert tribes, they have always made different cuts in the world than scientists. Sometimes I make the cut as a scientist, sometimes as an Adivasi. I can slip from one world to another very quickly.  

Chirag: 

Kranti’s not being concrete, of course. Her mind has always moved faster than her words can keep up with. What she is trying to say is that if this is a life-form, it is communicating via local magnetic fields, and it may actually be morphologically distributed. She is saying that perhaps its body is here, there, and everywhere. Maybe the universal constructor, the control unit, is distributed too. Either that, or we have a superorganism of some sort. There is, after all, no a priori way of telling the difference between an individual and a community of individuals. And there are life-forms on Earth, Kranti points out, like slime molds, that can exist as individuals as well as collectives. Those survey flybys that Avi did, if we are interpreting them correctly, are like the view you get when you rise up in an airplane over a city at night. You see nodes and structures, grids and symmetries. What he’s seen—what we’ve seen through his eyes, converted to visuals—is absolutely breathtaking. Magnetic field lines swirling and shifting, field variations that are too dynamic and too widespread to be explained by mere geology (that’s Annie scoffing at me in the background for using “mere” and “geology” in the same breath). In the dark spaces between the glowing lines, in the gradations, there are suggestions of long, sinuous shapes that move, and starfish-shaped exclusions that rotate slowly in place. Something lies deep within the fissures and canyons of the terminator plateau. Through its magnetic senses it knows the high escarpment, and the magma seas far below. And—another speculation here—since the magnetic fields of planet and star are constantly interacting with each other, how astonishing if this beast—if it is a beast indeed—is also sensing the storms and moods of its parent star! 

Saguaro lived deep beneath the canyon, in the darkest places. He was old and wide, branching like the forks in a tree. Lying nearly still, he sensed the deep, fiery places beneath him, the pulls and tugs of the magnetized lava surging below, rising up like incandescent lace. Overhead he sensed the great cold, the more distant, yet larger, grander pull of something unfathomable, enormous beyond comprehension. The tugs from the star surged and varied, so although he could not see the red dwarf, he came to know its moods, its storms and meditations. He felt the tugs mediated by cold rock, the rock within which he lay like a many-armed god, but above that he had a sense of space, of motion. Here, in this tenuous region, he sensed the flow of magnetized material as dust, smaller bodies that moved differently, as though free of the grasp of the earth below. And a longing rose up in him to stretch toward that intermediate space between the star and the planet, neither of which he could see. But he knew their deep hearts, their veins of fire. Stretching, moving, he sensed he could make the lindymotes (for that was what the dust was) move in response. Through their resistance he knew the wind, and he thought: there is someone other than me in that clear space above the rock. I must speak to it, he said, and in that moment of recognizing another, he also knew loneliness. So he shifted his massive, coiled, many-branched body, and the wind, through the motion of the lindymotes, knew him too. So he danced with the wind, and Dusty Woman said: who is shaking my skirts? 

Annie: 

Kranti had a sort of breakdown last week. I don’t know what to call it. She collapsed just after a session in the immersphere. We got her through the barricades to the university hospital. Chirag and I were terrified. She is stable now, somewhat annoyed at all the fuss, which is heartening. I’m so glad I’m here with the two of them. Together we four are something that deserves a name of its own. So far Chirag’s only come up with AKCX, which is kind of clunky. 

Kranti’s mother and grandfather came to be with her. Her mother is a stern woman, very focused on the care being given to her daughter. Her grandfather is a character. He’s very old, wiry and thin, with a bright and irreverent gaze. He reminds me of my great-uncle Victor. I could stay up trading stories with him all night. Grandfather, as we call him, tells us how his foothill tribe is trying to create a hybrid lifestyle, an alternative economy based on their old ways but “internet-savvy.” If only the rest of the world would let them be! They are sitting on huge veins of bauxite, which are needed to feed the world’s demand for aluminum, and for staying on their land they are treated like terrorists, under attack by drones and paramilitary forces. And they still have not given up. Listening to Grandfather’s somewhat broken English, I am homesick suddenly, for the high plateau. 

Update (a): Kranti’s been told that she can get back to work in a couple of weeks. She’s not sick in any way we understand—but I think it is a lot to take: all those hours spent looking through Avi’s eyes! The neurologists tell us her EEG shows irregularities that were not in her baseline data. Chirag has this wild idea that the apparent irregularities are actually patterns, similar to the so-called noise in Avi’s signals, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the as-yet-undeciphered private language of the twin ultrAIs. If it’s happening with Kranti, is it a matter of time before this process, whatever it is, starts to happen with Chirag and me? What are we becoming? Could ultrAIs like Avi can achieve a connection across the gulf of space-time, resulting in the formation of a being that is morphologically distributed over such vast distances? Maybe I’m being fanciful.  

Update (b): We received a message on a secure channel today. Point of origin not yet traced. Chirag ran his decrypting program and the result was a scramble of pairs of numbers. We had the brilliant idea that these were (x,y) coordinates. We got a plot that didn’t make sense—a fuzzy pattern rather than a recognizable function. Then I happened to see the printout from a distance. “It’s a picture,” I said, and Chirag looked and said, “That’s Avi.” Why would there be a picture of Avi on a secure channel, and a pointillist one, for heaven’s sake? Then it hit us both. Bhimu. It was a fuzzy picture of Avi’s twin, but with sharp protrusions like wings. Wings?  

That got us excited, and scared. The only ultrAI left on Earth, the one that got you killed. Is the message from her? From her protectors? Where is she? Chirag’s trying to trace the point of origin of the message. It can only be from someone in our inner circle (which includes Bhimu)—unless security’s been breached. 

In Kranti’s hospital room we had a whispered consultation. But there is nothing really we can do but wait, and make sure security, cyber and otherwise, is as tight as hell.

Later the tension got a bit too much for us. Chirag and I went off to the old campus and found the boulder on top of the hill where we used to stargaze as college students. We lay there talking and drinking tea from a local tea shack. After we had exhausted the subject of Bhimu, we were silent for a while. This is where it all began, all those years ago. 

After a while Chirag said, “You know we are shaped by the cosmos. Cosmic rays are raining down upon us right now. Causing mutations in our cells, affecting evolutionary pathways. All those distant cataclysms light-years away, determining whether I end up a monkey or a man!”

“Can’t tell the difference,” I said, expecting a rude retort, but he just sighed. Chirag the poet. But the mood had taken me over too. I couldn’t see Shikasta 464b’s dim old sun with the naked eye, but I knew what he meant. I thought back to the old stories I’d heard as a child. When the nights were mild, we would sit around a campfire and look up at the constellations as the elders told the stories. Every once in a while a coyote would call from the sagebrush, as though joining in. Through all the years of my scientific training, I lost that feeling of belonging in a great old universe. Modern science is a shattered mirror—you see bits and pieces in each shard, sometimes in great detail, but never the whole. I nearly gave up the old way of knowing for the new way. But I’ve felt it more and more lately, and under that sky I felt it again.  

Kranti:

I came back from the hospital just in time for the evening newscast—two more official mammal extinctions as of today. The strangest is a species of whale that was only discovered three years ago. They found the bodies on the beaches of Siberia. When the sea ice went, ice algae went also. That caused a catastrophic ecosystem collapse, leading to anoxia, which killed all the fish. Now this whale is extinct. I think of the forest I would have grown up in that also is no longer there. I am filled with so much sadness.  

On the positive side, we have received two more messages on the secure line. They are almost the same as the first one. But when we plot them, the images are larger and larger. 

Chirag says that Bhimu is coming home. 

If she comes home, if we all survive, it will be very interesting to see how far she has come. AI intelligence is quite different from that of animals, and so it must evolve differently. How will an ultrAI on Earth interact with other Earth species? We are only just starting to figure out Avi’s interaction with Saguaro on a planet four light-years away. Humans have learned to communicate with three other animal species. We can speak a little bit of Gibbonese, and a very rough Bowhead, and some dialects of Dolphin. What Bhimu could contribute to our increasing therolinguistic abilities, we don’t know. 

Even with the heat madness and the terrible things people do to one another, and the long lines at the refugee service centers, the old solidarity circles are coming up around the world. Like small ecosystems, they are emerging wherever new ideas and old ones have the freedom to develop. People are meeting in their houses, solving their problems together, discussing alternatives. Even some bastis have developed their own currency. What is the critical density of these kinds of pocket ecologies, beyond which we can have system change? When will we change our ways en masse, in time to immer inside our own biosphere, so we can heal with the Earth systems that maintain life on this planet? 

When our project first started, I had a lot of arguments with my cousins. They said: why don’t you raise money to help our people? I did not have a good answer to that and still that is so —but actually our crowdfunding initiative ended up putting money into the community. Annie is funding an alternative school on her reservation, and Chirag has started a scholarship for Dalit scientists. My part of it has helped the tribe hire the best lawyers for the big fight. And you gave us the DADS, Drona’s Apology Defense System, the most intelligent drone-destroying system ever designed, keeping us safe from Arizona to Indonesia. But I know that we would not have collected so much money if the projects had only been about community transformation. People are much more willing to fund space exploration projects. 

We have a dream, the three of us—no, the four of us, because you are here in your own way—a dream for an alternative university, one distributed across the world, that includes the best of indigenous knowledge practices and explores a new kind of science, just as rigorous as the one we know, but it goes beyond the shattered-mirror model, the one Annie described.

Another thing our way has shown us is that our practices, like radical immersion, allow certain values to emerge that then feed back to affect the practices, illuminating Frowsian value dynamics in a new way. See, how you practice science is a function of your values. Normally, you design experiments or observations based on distance and so-called objectivity. But you lose information in the process. When you change the practice, it also changes what you value. Chirag always says I am too idealistic. Probably that is true. 

We are the shadow people, the broken people emerging from the cracks in the collapsing structures of the world. For so many generations, we have been told we are primitive, backward, in need of help, in need of uplifting. Sometimes we have even been invited to what Chirag calls “the smashing, burning, drinking mega-party that is modern civilization.” We have been pushed from one world to another, wondering who we are, where is our place, never really able to move out of the shadow zone. And now we know: we have something necessary to give the world, we have visions of how we might live differently. We have answers to the destructive loneliness of modern civilization. 

Ultimately our aim in starting this project was not to escape from Earth. The big space agencies justify their existence by saying it is natural for humans to wander and explore. That is true. But it is also true that only a tiny percentage of the world’s people have left their homes through much of Earth’s human history. People also like to belong someplace. Trash, burn, and leave is not our way, as you said so many years ago. I am thinking of the pictures the first astronauts beamed back to us: the Earth seen from space, the pale blue dot. We should always look back toward home, no matter how far we go. 

I come from a people who know how to belong in a way that civilization has forgotten. I feel a need to return to the terminator of Shikasta 464b, where Avi has gone native—life beckons to life, and to mystery, too—but I also have another deep desire: to practice immersion among the green hills, the cloud forests of my people. There are things we still have to discover about life here, life on Earth. There are things Bhimu will help us learn, if she comes out of hiding. What we find will not leave us unchanged, and that is how it should be. I have always walked in multiple worlds. What is one more? 

Message received on secure channel, encrypted. 

Message Extract: 

Calling AKCX. Are you listening? 

As I made the being aware of the universe beyond its planet and its star, I became aware myself. I send this to let you know that although I can’t come home, I am home. Here, and there with you and Bhimu.  

Prepare to receive data file with magnetic field map in real time. Somebody has a message for you.

Acknowledgments: For their generosity in sharing their time, experience and expertise, I am indebted to Shelly Lowe, Raja Vemula, Sujatha Sarvepalli, and Sudhir Pattnaik. Thanks also to Rebecca Hawk and Ashish Kothari for inspiration, and to Emma Frow, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, and Sara Walker for sharing their considerable expertise. The author is, of course, solely responsible for any shortcomings in the story.

The New Science of Astrobiology

by Sara Imari Walker

Astrobiology seeks to address one of the most difficult open questions in science: Are we alone? This question is not only hard because of technological limitations on our ability to explore other worlds, but more fundamentally, it is hard because we do not yet have an answer to the question “what is life?” We cannot address whether we are alone until we understand what we are. Over 70 years ago, the quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger, in a highly-cited series of lectures titled What is Life?, conceded that “living matter, while not eluding the ‘laws of physics’ as established up to date, is likely to involve ‘other laws of physics’ hitherto unknown”^[1] …. As Albert Einstein once admitted in a letter to fellow physicist Leo Szilard, “One can best feel in dealing with living things how primitive physics still is.”^[2]As it now stands, we’ve made little progress in the decades since Schrödinger and Einstein wrestled with the question in understanding what exactly life is. Despite advances in astrobiology and other disciplines in the twentieth century, scientifically we understand more about the seemingly intangible atoms in your body than we do about you as a (somewhat paradoxically more tangible) living thing. 

Could life be explained mathematically in the same way as the laws of physics explain gravitation or quantum phenomena? Surely this is what Schrödinger and Einstein hoped for. Importantly for astrobiology, a mathematical theory for life could allow us to unambiguously identify life on another world. Vandana Singh explores this idea in her short story “Shikasta,” where alien life is discovered on an exoplanet, Shikasta 464b (Shikasta b, for short). This world is so different from our own Earth that it raises the important scientific question of whether we would actually be able to identify alien life if it existed on such a world, even with the advanced science and technology necessary to send a robotic mission there. 

Shikasta b is exotic, stretching our imagination of what is possible on other worlds. But importantly it is also realistic, informed by what we know from recent exoplanet detection missions such as Kepler. Scientists have been surprised by the plurality of worlds discovered in recent decades, and just how different they can be from any worlds in our own solar system—even ones we previously thought were pretty bizarre. Examples of worlds found in other solar systems with no analogs in our own include water worlds, massive rocky planets (several times more massive than Earth), and small ice giants. It seems these days that every month, yet another planet previously thought to exist only in the annals of science fiction is discovered.

Unusual even by science fiction standards, Shikasta b would be deeply inhospitable to life from Earth (not just us but probably our cohabitant extremophile microbes too). Notably, the planet is tidally locked to its parent star, with a scorched surface on the side that permanently faces the star and frigid temperatures on its far side. It is not surprising that government-funded research programs in Singh’s story have ignored Shikasta b, in favor of pursuing more Earth-like worlds. This parallels our current approaches in the scientific quest to find life beyond Earth, through missions funded by NASA and other space agencies around the world. 

In Singh’s story, there is a small group of scientists courageous enough to envision the possibility of life on this planet of extremes. They hypothesize that at the boundary between permanent day and permanent night, conditions could be just right to support living things—but not as we know them. It is this untraditional group of young scientists, pursuing an unconventional high-risk mission, who persevere to discover alien life in the unlikeliest of places. 

Currently, nearly all research into signs of life on other worlds —so-called biosignatures—would overlook Shikasta b as a candidate for an inhabited world: we only know how to look for life as we know it. This does not imply we are looking for aliens who like to spend Saturday nights at the movies. Rather, what astrobiologists mean by “like us” is alien life that shares common biochemistry with life on Earth. We look around us and see a huge diversity of living things—trees, puppies, moldy cheese—but all of these things (and any example of life discovered so far) share the same basic biochemistry (DNA, RNA, proteins, etc.). This is incredibly limiting for astrobiology. As far as biochemistry is concerned, we have only one example from which we must draw conclusions about what life is like on other worlds. Imagine attempting to draw general conclusions about universal properties of movies, after watching only one film ever. What would you assume the general properties of movies are? Their length? The actors or characters? The plot? The location? Would you expect the movie to replay the same exact way if you watched it again? To answer these questions, we might leverage knowledge of human culture (e.g., the structure of plots). For astrobiologists the problem is more challenging. Astrobiologists have no contextual knowledge for what alien life could be like. And, in the famous words of Stephen Jay Gould, we do not even know what would happen if we replayed the evolutionary “tape of life” again.^[3] 

Given that the only life we know is life on Earth, it is no surprise that our best guesses for what life might be like on other worlds are thought experiments, transplanting what we know of Earth life to alien environments. In the absence of a universal theory for life with quantifiable metrics for “aliveness,” our best candidate is a combination of methane (CH₄) and oxygen (O₂)—two atmospheric gases that appear in abundance here on Earth as a direct result of biological activity.^[4] Atmospheric O₂ on Earth is a direct product of photosynthetic activity and is not produced in abundance abiotically. It therefore excited many astrobiologists as a possible “smoking gun” biosignature, meaning if we saw it in the atmosphere of an exoplanet we could be sure that life existed on that world. But, with recent advances in exoplanet science we now know detection of atmospheric O₂ could mislead us into a false-positive detection of life: we might detect O₂ and assume life is present when it is not. Water worlds with global oceans, à la Kevin Costner, provide one example scenario: these worlds can produce an oxygenated atmosphere through the nonbiological process of photolysis, which splits water into its constituent atoms of hydrogen (H₂) and oxygen (O₂). This false-positive signature also means we have to contend with the possibility of false negatives: even if O₂-producing life existed on a water world, we might never be able to unambiguously identify it due to the competing abiotic signal from photolysis.^[5] The most remotely observable biosignature of life on Earth, atmospheric O₂, may not be a useful biosignature on some exoplanets at all, even if inhabited by “Earth-like” photosynthetic life. 

Despite complications arising with biosignatures, like the example of O₂, looking for Earth-like life on Earth-like worlds remains the low-hanging fruit: we simply do not know what else to look for. It is therefore the favored search strategy of national space agencies such as NASA. But we do not know if Earth-like life is common or rare. By focusing on life that is like known life, we may be missing some of our most promising opportunities to discover life beyond Earth. We will, for example, never discover the kind of exotic life inhabiting Shikasta b (if it exists) with our current search strategy. We need to get creative about envisioning the next steps to move beyond the limitations of the one “tape of life” played out on Earth, if we are to succeed in a discovery of the magnitude of what happens in “Shikasta.”

NASA and other agencies are already aware of the need to seek creative new directions to expand our search for life beyond our anthropocentric biases. This is exemplified by the NExSS coalition, short for Nexus for Exoplanet System Science. The goal of NExSS is to bring an interdisciplinary group of scientists together to provide an integrated approach—including astronomy, planetary science, climate science, and biology—to the search for life in other solar systems. NExSS has held a series of workshops to foster discussions on new directions in exoplanet science and how we might understand life in planetary contexts very different from that of Earth. As an example, a workshop held in the Seattle area in summer of 2016 brought a diverse group of scientists together with the express purpose of brainstorming new approaches to the search for life to provide recommendations to future missions.^[6] Among the ideas discussed were generating lists of all possible abiotic and biologically produced small molecules to identify new biological targets, utilizing network theory to characterize the influence of biology on atmospheric chemistry, and looking for surface biosignatures such as biological pigments. A workshop of similar scope, sponsored by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, was held in December 2016, furthering discussions of next-generation biosignatures for exoplanets.^[7] Such collaborative integration of new perspectives is invaluable to our pursuit of knowledge, and to answering the questions that space raises for us. However, in the absence of guiding principles for what life is, or a motivating theory to describe life from first principles, these ideas remain conjectures based on properties of life on Earth. We do not know which may or may not apply to life on other worlds, or which will bear fruit as successful search strategies.

We need to think out of the box and anticipate the unexpected. This is what the team in “Shikasta” does, by hunting for alien life where all our current criteria suggest we should not and where the “world’s mega space agencies,” as Singh’s character Chirag puts it, would not. Can astrobiologists increase our chances of finding alien life by taking similar risks? 

The “Shikasta” team chooses a nontraditional target for their mission, and fund it through crowdfunding. They rely on a mathematical understanding of life for inferring its presence on Shikasta b, and use advanced AI to detect life. These examples represent boundary-pushing aspects of their approach and suggest paths forward for advancing the science of astrobiology. 

Crowdfunding has become a popular method for funding small projects, e.g., via Kickstarter, but it is harder to envision how this could successfully be implemented to fund something as expensive as a mission to another world. Despite public enthusiasm for space, a space mission has not yet been successfully funded this way. The ARKYD mission, a “space telescope for everyone,” was nearly successful—raising $1.5M to launch a space telescope—but ultimately it failed because it did not get buy-in from more traditional funding sources.^[8] Nonetheless, crowdsourced science is gaining ground. SETI@home is a great example relevant to astrobiology. The SETI@home project aims to utilize internet-connected computers (with permission from their owners) to analyze astronomical data for signs of intelligent life. Searching for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) is a long shot: we don’t have any evidence for ETI, and we don’t know where or how to look for it (again, due to our lack of a general theory for life, or more specifically for intelligent life). Distributing the needed computational investment over the home computers of a large number of volunteers distributes the time and resources required to search existing data for signs of ETI. It also has the added benefit of educating the public about SETI and our own place in the cosmos. Imagine if it were your desktop that discovered E.T.! The innovation of SETI@home is the low overhead for potentially high-impact science that is too “risky” for mainstream scientists to invest their money or time in, due to the perceived low probability for success. This is the same challenge the “Shikasta” team faced in choosing Shikasta b for their mission: Shikasta b is a target assumed by much of the astrobiology community to be too unlikely to harbor life to be worth the time or resources needed to explore the world. 

It remains an open question what role crowdfunded science will play in advancing astrobiology. Large private investments may be the key to bridging the gap between what can be accomplished directly with public buy-in and what, so far, only government agencies have been able to accomplish. A relevant example is Yuri Milner’s pledge of $100 million to fund the Breakthrough Listen project to search for ETI, and more recently a pledge of another $100 million for the Breakthrough Starshot initiative to send a space probe to the nearby Alpha Centauri star system (the closest star system to Earth, which in 2016 was discovered to host an Earth-like planet). Currently, federal funds cannot support SETI research, and NASA has no plans to send a mission to another star system in the near term. Milner’s investments therefore advance important areas that are outside the scope and diversity of federally funded projects. Broadening the scope and diversity of funded projects to include untraditional funding sources could enhance the way we are doing science and the questions we are asking because it allows for innovation and risk-taking that traditional funding sources, such as government agencies which must report to taxpayers, cannot support. 

But the question remains: what other life could be out there? Will we entirely miss our chance to discover alien life by taking an anthropocentric viewpoint? And can we leverage untraditional sources to advance our search? 

Shikasta b has no oxygen in its atmosphere and does have some methane, which is likely produced by volcanoes. It would not be a target for any of our current methods for searching for life, with our focus on oxygen. Nonetheless the team in “Shikasta” is successful in identifying life there, because they have a mathematical means by which to quantify it. A very alien kind of life composed of dancing magnetic dust is discovered on the surface, along with a second life-form. This second life-form is perhaps more surprising—it is the team’s own AI, Avi, who was sent to Shikasta b as an autonomous robot to explore the surface and communicate with the team back home. The search for “life” in this story reveals two very different alien species found on one planet, neither expected—and one is originally from Earth. 

It is anyone’s bet whether we will make life (in vitro or in silico) like Avi before discovering it on another world. In our current state of knowledge, pursuits to create life in the lab are hindered by the exact same deficiency we face in our search for alien life—we simply do not have an answer to Schrödinger’s question, “what is life?” In “Shikasta,” the researchers have confidence in their discovery because they have concrete mathematical criteria with which to evaluate possible living things that applies to anything, including Avi, the rocks on Shikasta b, and the exotic life-forms that inhabit it (so that life can be distinguished from the rocks). 

Avi’s transition to the living state is particularly compelling. In the story, Avi does not qualify as “alive” when it departs Earth. Only through interaction with a life-form we as humans might never fully be able to comprehend does Avi achieve a quantifiable level of what we would call aliveness. 

Currently, the communities of researchers searching for life on other worlds and those that are seeking to build it in the lab (either synthetic cellular life or artificial intelligence) do not cross-pollinate. Avi’s story suggests that perhaps they should. Both the artificial-life and origins-of-life communities include researchers thinking deeply about the nature of the living state and how it might manifest in a variety of physical media. Similarly, astrobiologists looking for alien life have thought long and hard about the kinds of environments and conditions in which life could exist. Perhaps Avi’s story is best viewed as a metaphor for how these communities might succeed in their quest through deep and sustained interactions between their parallel perspectives. 

In light of the challenges we face due to our anthropic vantage point, it seems critical that addressing the question “are we alone?” will require understanding what we mean by we. Today, we have one key advantage over Schrödinger’s time—we have several scientific communities poised to address a fundamental understanding of life and an international community of curious humans that could be mobilized if sufficiently motivated. And through creative funding efforts, we may have the resources to galvanize these communities toward a common goal that would otherwise be impossible. We are thus poised for a new era of science to address some of the most profound questions of human existence. Our great leap forward demands a reimagining of what is possible, motivated by advances in fundamental theory. It may be that in order to find other selves in the universe, we have to consider a “self” that is radically different, and to get there we need to imagine entirely new ways of doing science.

Notes

^[1] Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). First published in 1944. [back]

^[2] Quoted in Robert Rosen, “The Schrödinger Question: What Is Life? Fifty Years Later,” in Glimpsing Reality: Ideas in Physics and the Link to Biology, ed. Paul Buckley and F. David Peat (New York: Routledge, 1996), 170. [back]

^[3] Stephen Jay Gould, “The Genomic Metronome as a Null Hypothesis,” Paleobiology 2, no. 2 (1976). [back]

^[4] Abundant in this context means relative to expected abiotic values—for methane this abundance is still quite low relative to other atmospheric gases such as N₂ and O₂. [back]

^[5] In fact, life on Earth was not remotely detectable for much of its history, in particular before the Great Oxidation Event that led to a rise in atmospheric O₂ 2.45 billion years ago. [back]

^[6] Learn more about the summer 2016 NExSS workshop in Seattle, “Exoplanet Biosignatures Workshop Without Walls,” at https://nai.nasa.gov/calendar/workshop-without-walls-exoplanet-biosignatures. [back]

^[7] Learn more about the December 2016 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine workshop, “Searching for Life Across Space and Time,” at http://sites.nationalacademies.org/ssb/currentprojects/ssb_173278. [back]

^[8] See https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arkydforeveryone/arkyd-a-space-telescope-for-everyone-0. [back]

Negotiating the Values of Space Exploration

by Emma Frow

“Shikasta” stands out as a tale that celebrates diversity in ways of knowing and doing, across science, engineering, and other cultures. By drawing us into the lived experiences and personal trajectories of her protagonists, Vandana Singh opens up a host of important questions about ways of understanding life, culture, and approaches to (space) science. It is no surprise that all scientists have their own personal stories and experiences—often ones that profoundly shape the questions they are interested in and the work they do—but we also know that these narratives can become marginalized in the excitement of reporting the details of scientific findings. “Shikasta” celebrates the many narratives that are part of science, while simultaneously showing us how challenging it can be to seamlessly integrate personal and cultural experiences with modern scientific ways of understanding the world. Our three protagonists—Chirag, Kranti, and Annie (together with their unnamed, departed colleague)—are liminal characters, each straddling different worlds and all sharing a feeling of not fully belonging to any one place. They are “insiders” to space science in terms of having formal educational pedigrees, yet “outsiders” in espousing a different set of values and approaches to doing their science, and choosing to pursue nonstandard strategies for accomplishing their work. Their experiences shed light on a critical topic for twenty-first century space exploration and for science more broadly: how to orient our scientific investigations and expeditions so as to further our social and cultural values, alongside our scientific priorities.   

Futures of Space Missions

Our motivations for exploring space have always included a wide variety of pragmatic and more philosophical perspectives.^[1] In the future envisioned in “Shikasta,” dominant motivations driving space exploration seem explicitly focused on colonization and resource exploitation. The idea of going into space simply to “look for life”—as our protagonists wish to do—is presented as seemingly radical and subversive compared with what has become a dominant commercial and exploitative approach to space exploration. This raises a provocative question: by 2035, will the search for life in the universe—an age-old question for humanity—become subsumed by more instrumental aims? Will finding life just be a step along the way to finding possible alternative planets to Earth, particularly if our own world becomes less habitable or uninhabitable? With growing threats from climate change and natural or human-induced disasters, some scientists are already suggesting that space exploration should be seen as an “insurance premium,” with goals of colonization being necessary “for the long-term survival of the human species.”^[2] 

Singh’s story offers us a clear example of how different values might shape the search for life in the universe. For example, if the search for life is part of an instrumental wish to find new sites for possible colonization, then Shikasta 464b (Shikasta b, for short), with its geographically small “terminator” zone, would not seem to be a leading candidate. But if the goal is simply to find life, wherever and however it might exist, then casting as wide a net as possible and exploring a range of candidate planets with smaller or larger, more plausible or less plausible habitable zones, could be a potentially valuable strategy.

Because the 2035 space mission being run by Chirag, Kranti, and Annie is motivated by a different set of core values from the space science establishment, they turn to a different model for funding their work: crowdfunding. Scientists working in different fields are increasingly pitching their projects on crowdfunding websites to seek private donors who identify with the project goals. Space missions are no exception; for example, Lunar Mission One is an international crowdfunded initiative launched in 2014 to send a lunar lander (and digital time capsules) to the Moon.^[3] By 2035, more such missions certainly seem plausible. There is also a growing commercial spaceflight sector, operating within a different institutional context to more traditional space R&D. Over the next 20 years, will we see a proliferation of smaller groups embarking on space missions? Or is the funding, expertise, and coordination required to develop and execute missions so significant that it will continue to be concentrated in the hands of a small number of government agencies and large private companies?

Chirag, Kranti, and Annie present their search for life as purely curiosity-driven, and expressly not about an attempt to colonize another world. Indeed, they actively reject the “trash, burn, and leave” approach, based in part on their personal and cultural experiences of colonization. Annie discusses her distaste for the lack of responsibility and reciprocity in Western science, with its focus on the ownership of frontier lands (be they metaphorical or physical). One senses that her research collective draws on the virtue of curiosity as a means of trying to distance themselves—even just a little—from the more instrumental, economically and politically entangled nature of contemporary science. At the same time, our protagonists are unashamedly socially and politically active citizens, and have developed a funding model that allows them to invest resources and support back into social justice and educational initiatives in their communities. 

What responsibilities might even a “pure,” curiosity-driven search for life come with? Are there ways that the research collective might express responsibility through the design and structure of the space mission itself? For example, what will happen to Avi at the end of the mission? Will he be switched off and left on Shikasta b, adding to an already-significant collection of human-made space debris? Or does the team’s desire not to colonize space extend to an ambition to leave no trace of him on Shikasta b, and even to bring him back to Earth? Has the mission set aside sufficient funding for this extraction? Considering the full life cycle of the mission is just one example of how an entire project might be structured around particular values—in this case, being explicitly concerned with not colonizing, exploiting, or polluting other planets. 

Moreover, this story reveals an important tension regarding human activity in space. Our protagonists adamantly wish to avoid accusations of colonialization, but is it possible to identify or observe life without interfering in it? The very practice of science revolves around “taming” nature, trying to bring it into our realm of understanding and categorizing or managing it in some way. As he roams the terminator zone, we see Avi’s behavior start to change. If there is life on Shikasta b, Avi may be interacting or engaging with it. As such, he is not practicing the “radical observation” approach of the rest of the project team, who are seeing at a distance, but rather is intervening in and perhaps influencing the course of life on this planet. How does the research collective grapple with the notion that in their search for life they are inevitably intervening in that life? A cosmology that does not separate an individual from the world they inhabit might not see this as a particularly problematic tension, but can the research collective in “Shikasta” completely distance themselves from the idea of “colonization” when they have sent a robot to investigate another planet? In exposing tensions of this nature, Singh’s story offers a springboard for open discussion around identifying and reconciling the different values inherent to space exploration. This is complex terrain, worthy of collective consideration as we continue to search for life beyond Earth. 

Defining and Looking for Life

Singh’s tale offers a number of tantalizing complications to our understandings of “life.” First, at the local or individual scale: In the character of Avi we have a robot whose “intelligence,” ability to adapt to his environment, and visible changes in behavior on Shikasta b seem to place him in an ambiguous state—is he a living organism or a nonliving machine? Current technical understandings of “life” seem to be primarily the territory of natural scientists—life is a natural phenomenon “out there” to be found, studied, explored, using a variety of possible lenses (biological, chemical, physical, etc.). But ownership over the definition of “life” may become increasingly problematized as our ability to build and engineer systems becomes ever more sophisticated. As synthetic biologists develop the ability to precisely engineer or even rewrite the genetic code,^[4] or as engineers build systems like Avi with increasingly sophisticated abilities to learn and display “intelligent” behavior, will we see growing debates over definitions of life? Will terms like “natural life,” “synthetic life,” and “artificial life” be used to delineate different kinds of life,^[5] or to carve out new claims of ownership over life-forms, or to stake particular political positions? One can imagine the boundaries between living and nonliving, and different definitions of life, becoming increasingly salient policy issues by 2035, with implications for funding, rights, and responsibilities based on where these lines are drawn (and who gets to draw them). 

“Shikasta” also encourages readers to consider a more expansive set of discussions about life—for example, focusing not just on living beings (on Earth or elsewhere in the universe) but also living systems, and actively pursuing different methods and techniques (at different scales) for trying to identify and understand life. The alternative approach espoused by our protagonists seems to be less about starting from a checklist or set of theories about what constitutes life, but rather practicing a form of “radical observation,” and searching broadly for “apparent violations of physical law” as signs of where and how life might be manifest. 

Furthermore, the lines between beings and their environment become increasingly blurred in “Shikasta,” promoting what we might call a more holistic understanding of life—an understanding that draws both on scientific ideas (for example, the Gaia hypothesis) as well as different cultural understandings of life (such as those held by the ancestral peoples of Annie, Kranti, and Chirag). The idea that “life” cannot be separated from its environment is a way of understanding the world that has implications for contemporary reductionist practices in genetics, including species conservation, and recent genomic efforts to resurrect extinct species^[6] or to determine the “minimal” genome for life.^[7] That individual beings can somehow exist “independently” of their environment is implicit (and troublesome) in many of these ongoing efforts. 

The astrobiology community seems acutely aware of how definitions of life impact the search for life—looking for life in the universe is inescapably tied to knowing what to look for. We have seen this tension played out in the public spotlight, for example around the Viking missions.^[8] As Steven Dick points out, “the Viking landers in 1976 embodied implicit ideas about the nature of life as a metabolic process in order to build and undertake the biology experiments.”^[9] The types of experiments designed to be taken up on spacecraft are necessarily linked to expectations about what forms of life might be found. The astrobiology community openly acknowledges “the possibility that ‘weird life’ might exist with signatures dissimilar from those produced on present-day Earth.”^[10] Much attention is thus given to trying to identify what kinds of factors might render planets habitable, and honing in on what key biosignatures then become most plausible to search for. This is an explicitly interdisciplinary endeavor, but one that in practice adopts a relatively reductionist lens, identifying possible biomarkers and developing tests to search for the presence of those markers.  

In contrast, with Avi, we get the impression of a robot carrying relatively little equipment—life is literally being “looked for” through the camera lens. The “experiments” underway are not ones that test for chemical or atmospheric biosignatures based on hypotheses about the chemical composition of life, but experiments in testing whether cultural narratives developed by Chirag, Kranti, and Annie could potentially align with and help make sense of patterns visible on the terrain of Shikasta b. In this case, our protagonists seem to be exploring narrative as a way of testing hypotheses and knowing the world. We might say they are looking for societal or cultural biosignatures instead of chemical ones. Singh’s story challenges us to think of culture as integral to the pursuit of astrobiology—in this case, as defining the very terms by which one might search for life. 

In their 2015 Astrobiology Strategy, NASA identifies “technosignatures” (“biosignatures that indicate a technologically advanced civilization”) as one of ten broad categories of biosignatures that might be searched for.^[11] Intriguingly, when we as humans have sent out explicit signs of our own existence to the universe, we have often focused on sending out technological and cultural artifacts to represent who we are—photographs, musical recordings, toys. We celebrate and characterize human civilization by showcasing our cultural and artistic achievements. The Voyager’s Golden Record is a prime example. Yet our search for life on other planets typically looks for very different signs of life—based on atmospheric and geological conditions, the presence of water, chemical signatures of metabolic activity. 

The protagonists in “Shikasta” show us how diverse ways of conceptualizing life and relationships with the environment, drawing on perspectives that might not be mainstream (or may indeed be actively marginalized), can open up different ways of doing science. Throughout her narrative, Singh encourages us to think about life at multiple scales and through a variety of lenses, prompting reflection on what we gain and miss with each. Different perspectives fade in and out throughout the story, showing us powerfully how they can be simultaneously present but not necessarily seamless to reconcile with one another. As readers, we are invited to see how actively grappling with diverse standpoints and the tensions between them can prove generative in terms of opening up the possibilities for finding life on other worlds. With diversity increasingly understood as bringing strength to scientific research teams and company boardrooms, so too might there be benefits to designing space missions that encompass diverse ways of investigating and valuing life.  

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Vandana Singh, Sara Walker, and Zach Pirtle for stimulating and most enjoyable conversations over the course of this project.

Notes

^[1] William Sims Bainbridge, “Motivations for Space Exploration,” Futures 41, no. 8 (2009). [back]

^[2] Michael J. Rycroft, “Space Exploration Goals for the 21st Century,” Space Policy 22, no. 8 (2006): 160. [back]

^[3] See https://lunarmissionone.com/what-is-lunar-mission-one.html. [back]

^[4] Jason W. Chin, “Expanding and Reprogramming the Genetic Code of Cells and Animals,” Annual Review of Biochemistry 83 (2014). [back]

^[5] Lindsay Hays, ed. NASA Astrobiology Strategy 2015. (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 2015), 156. [back]

^[6] Carrie Friese and Claire Marris, “Making De-Extinction Mundane?” PLoS Biology 12, no. 3 (2014). [back]

^[7] Clyde A. Hutchison III, Ray-Yuan Chuang, Vladimir N. Noskov, and Nacyra Assad, “Design and Synthesis of a Minimal Bacterial Genome,” Science 351, no. 6280 (2016). [back]

^[8] Linda Billings, ed. Astrobiology: The Story of Our Search for Life in the Universe, vol. 2, Missions to Mars, (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 2011). [back]

^[9] Steven J. Dick, “Critical Issues in the History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Astrobiology,” Astrobiology 12, no. 10 (2012): 911. [back]

^[10] Hays, NASA Astrobiology Strategy, 143. [back]

^[11] Hays, NASA Astrobiology Strategy, 102. [back]