Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (10 page)

What was “I” thinking? Where was “I” going with this? Well, apparently back to the beginning, because the essay ends:
Topologically the self has no homuncular inner self but comes
 . . . thereby beginning the sentence with which the essay starts.

The effect of calm intellectual self-annihilation was complete. “I” had proved to “my” own satisfaction that there are no absolute borders around the self-referring, operationally closed but multiply constituted self. If God, as Meister Eckhart said, is a being whose center is everywhere and whose periphery is nowhere, so the self was not a skin-encapsulated ego separate from the rest of the universe.

I guess this also included separate from one’s former self. I shrank from the auto-onslaught, but there was nowhere to go in the auto. The effect was worsened as Natasha alternately told my mother to turn the sound down and shrieked with delight in the backseat at my anticipatory self-destruction. The irony was that the self on the CD was deconstructing the older-me listening even as it embarrassed me with its jargon bomb of jejune enthusiasm. If the old young me was right, the new old me was wrong.

I thought of Nietzsche’s comment about how juvenile his earlier writings seemed until he got older and considered that critique juvenile. Not only did Ward’s reading of my essay embarrassingly reproduce Natasha’s side of the arguments we have over “epistemological relativism” and “postmodern jargon,” but my younger self argues
against
the notion of stable biological identity (the “rectilinear self” in that essay’s jargon!). It was a one-two punch I gave to myself, and there was nothing much I could do but stay slumped in the front seat, pummeled in part by my own embarrassed laughter. Of course my mother still wanted to know what was so funny, as she thought the essay was “just great.”

So, who are we?

I believe we are distributed identities, Möbius strips (okay, younger self, don’t gloat) that turn back on ourselves to see that we are not the isolated simple identities we thought we were. We are members of families, tribes, nations, age groups, sexes, trades, and classes that may and are in complex conflict with one another. Navigating these multiple assemblages is an invitation either to contradiction or to denial; political coherency becomes impossible.

The multiple alliances go still farther. You are not just a political animal but a differentiated clone of nucleated cells, a collection of microbes. You are a lineal descendant of the first life, recycling a water-based chemistry full of hydrogen-rich compounds, like methane and sulfide, characteristic of the inner solar system four billion years ago at the time of life’s origin, soon after the Sun turned on.

Atomically, you contain elements like carbon and oxygen, made not here but on the inside of distant stars that ultimately exploded. Your lineage escaped several serious mass extinctions, not including the global pollution crisis precipitated by the first water-using photosynthesizers that toxified the entire planet, but whose air you now breathe. Physically, you may only be a tick in time and a speck in space, but ultimately you are part of the evolving universe itself, much bigger than humanity and its current crop of madmen.

If you look on the Internet you will see that Julian Assange’s last name is that of his stepfather, a theater director his mother married when Julian was one, and that several years later she married a musician who Julian himself says may have been part of the identity-destroying Santiniketan Park Association, a bizarre Australian cult run by Anne Hamilton-Byrne, who fed her children LSD, starved them, provided them with a rigid regimen of yoga and early rising, and made them repent for their sins as well as call her God. The children’s hair was dyed platinum blond, the boys were given bowl cuts, some of them disappeared, their names and birthdates underwent capricious changes, and they often had multiple passports. Julian’s mother was so intent on escaping her second husband that she took Julian and his half-brother into hiding, and by the time Julian was fourteen, they’d moved thirty times.

It has been suggested that the cult was an MK-ULTRA operation, a covert, illegal CIA human research program, run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence, and that WikiLeaks is a “limited hangout” in CIA jargon, that is, something that seems bad but is really good (for them).

I would like to suggest that the Department of Defense created a monster in helping form the Internet (in the late 1950s, partly to have a decentralized communications network that could survive a nuclear war) that they can never stuff back in their Pandoran box; that our complicity with the military industrial complex, reinforced whenever we drive down the street or use a MasterCard, seems to be under control of the paranoiac-conspiratorial-realistic “They”—some of whom really do fashion themselves to be in control—but that if we look farther into the future, complicity with THEM pales next to the power wielded over us by nature.

The biosphere has other plans for the Internet, a kind of global neuronal intelligence, that even the criminalocracy can’t stop or control. Even billions of military dollars could not reproduce something as simple and lovely as Smith College’s greenhouse across from Paradise Pond because that greenhouse is a very specific growth form, produced not just by humans but by plants in interaction with them for over 150 years.

We are complicitous with the forces we detest, but those forces are complicitous with still greater powers we may admire. The great heterobiographies of our protean selves have yet to be written. We are all triple agents now.

CHAPTER 7

OF WHALES AND ALIENS

The Search for Intelligent Life on Earth

HALF MY LITTLE LIFE AGO
, under the influence of
P. cubensis
—aka psychedelic mushrooms—I, and two of my reprobate friends, found ourselves among a sea of tourists in Quincy Market. After overhearing a mini Sopranos-style imbiber declaiming loudly upon the niceties of female lace, frilly clothing, and all things that tied, we shambled on through the colorful commerce toward nature, or what was left of it down near the harbor.

We found ourselves noses to Plexiglas at the outdoor tank of the Boston Aquarium, attempting to make “Hoover,” the great bull seal and for us the aquarium’s main attraction, speak. Hoover was a character: After diving and holding his breath, he’d release spiral swirls of air bubbles like rustling aquatic theater curtains, building suspense for the performance just to come.

Then he would emerge and bellow such gems as “urgh-urgh-urgh hell-hell-Hell-HELLO How AH ya?” or “Guh-guh-guh-GUH-GUH-GUH-GEHT-outta-HEAH.”

This time, however, although we would dearly have loved to have seen the best free show in town, the talking seal, despite our loud imprecations, did not respond, preferring apparently to wait for a larger audience or to slumber amid his substantial and slippery harem.

Our efforts did not go unnoticed, however. A drunk on his bench awoke from his slumber. “Hey-ya,” he yelled, “get offa ThEAH!”

While Hoover got his Boston accent not from that drunk who slept on a bench near the tank but from the Swallows, the Maine couple who named him for his vacuumlike capacity to down fish—and then, when he grew too big, gave him to the Boston Aquarium—there was something enchantingly kindred about him, so much so that he received a human-style obituary from the
Boston Globe.

With such intelligent mammals in the oceans that cover two-thirds of this watery orb we land animals have christened Earth, I wonder why, for the first time in twenty-four years, the International Whaling Commission has found it necessary to attempt to roll back the ban on commercial whale hunting. Even the hunters of whales realize they are tempting fate. 
Moby-Dick
tells us of the Nantucket legends of the first indigenous harpooners, rowing toward the legless Leviathans of the deep. By Herman Melville’s time, the industry had become both lucrative and romantic, attracting young men from across the continent to the urbane port of New Bedford, then a most cosmopolitan city itself coursing—with a questionable captain—through the greater ocean of space. Before setting off, Ishmael takes in a sermon for sailors delivered by an ex-harpooner priest. As he listens, the wood of the pulpit reminds him of a ship’s prow:

Unlike our oceangoing legless cousins, we landlubbers are good at killing with our hands. Before their smiling visages became a fixture at SeaWorld and on the face of
Flipper
in the 1960s TV show, dolphins were disparaged as “herring hogs” for their tendency to rob fishermen’s nets. Sea mammals were hunted for lamp oil, for meat, and for “superior lubricant for precision timepieces.” While alive they could be feared, but in the main they were treated as resources, not beings. A member of the “toothed whales” (Odontoceti), which also include narwhals (Melville’s “sea unicorns,” which have big tusklike teeth jutting out of their foreheads) and beluga whales, in the suborder Delphinidae, which also includes “killer whales” (or “orca”), and beaked and pilot whales, dolphins—largely because of the militarily funded, brilliantly creative, and somewhat unhinged researcher John Cunningham Lilly in the 1960s—came to captivate the human imagination.

I HAVE A VERY EARLY MEMORY of being with my father, Carl Sagan, who was trying to talk to a dolphin as another man walked about. It was probably Lilly.

My mother, Lynn Margulis, who would have been divorced from my father at the time, suspects I did meet Lilly, although not in the Virgin Islands at his main lab, but in Boston or Cambridge or Florida. She herself met Lilly once through my father and instantly thought Lilly was “clever and self-centered, much like Timothy Leary.”

In his biography, William Poundstone writes of how my father, at a restaurant with Lilly, asked their pretty waitress out. Although she declined, she agreed to one of Lilly’s crazy experiments, sharing a special flooded living quarters with a dolphin—who happened to be one of the five that played Flipper on the TV show.

Apparently Flipper had needs. (He was not alone; according to Princeton University’s D. Graham Burnett, these “powerful sea mammals with fixed grins [that] now and again . . . rake, butt, and sodomize each other . . . have presented challenges to their keepers from the earliest days of captivity.”) The waitress-cum-interspecies-experimental-subject found herself following a path of least resistance that included acquiescing to Flipper’s relentless sexual advances, satisfying him with her hand. The dolphin was not, according to Poundstone, so lucky with my father, who in turn rebuffed the TV star.

Perhaps dolphins are not as smart, noble, or linguistic as we’d like to project. Dolphins, Burnett says, “though they can jump almost twenty feet in the air . . . very rarely sort out how easy it would be to roll over the top of an encircling trap.” But is it not also true, as the recent British Petroleum Earth Day oil spill suggests, that we are also in a kind of trap, one not confined to a little net in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean but extending across all the continents and the seven seas, into the groundwater and the atmosphere, a trap that may spell the demise of ourselves as well as the dolphins and whales we cavalierly kill?

The cosmologist Stephen Hawking has recently blitzed the media with warnings not only that aliens probably exist but that when they find us they’ll probably want to eat us. To me this also sounds like projection. Coming here for food is not like the harpooners setting sail to procure whale oil. Interstellar spaces are far greater, and the proteinaceous rewards far more meager. Distant aliens coming here for dinner makes about as much sense as flying a supersonic jet to Morocco for a garbanzo bean.

The physicist Michio Kaku counters Hawking’s surmise that aliens may prove as destructive as Christopher Columbus and company when they wiped out Native American populations. If aliens arrived, Kaku opines, it might be more like the United States’ experience during the Vietnam War, with the aliens wanting to get out ASAP.

To me, Hawking’s Columbus and Kaku’s “Vietnam” scenarios seem, to quote Friedrich Nietzsche, all too human. They relate our hypothetical meeting with aliens to other examples of human encounters within the history of our own dangerously self-absorbed species. Indeed, Hawking, bless his cosmic book-selling heart (in an interview on
Larry King Live,
he told King it was nice to see him after these ten years and closed by saying he hoped to see him again when his book came out), advised Larry that the invaders will “have a mouth opening because they will have to take in nutrition . . . and they will probably have legs because they will need to move around, and they will have eyes—but don’t expect them to look like Marilyn Monroe.” Whew—that
would
be scary—being eaten by an army of Marilyn Monroes from outer space!

Seriously, though, what is this obsession with hypothetical aliens when we are living among some of the most fascinating sentient beings in the universe and have only just begun to establish contact with
them
?

What does it mean to communicate with an “alien” when we barely have the first idea of how to understand the intricacies of rain forest plant communications, nuclei-trading mycelial networks, and ultraviolet light–detecting superorganisms of bees, let alone the conscious or unconscious minds of a humpback, great blue, or white whale—whose mathematical, philosophical, aesthetic, and perceptual abilities may, for all we know, far outstrip those of our greatest geniuses (whose intelligences we also don’t judge by their skill in bloodshed)?

In 2008, at a conference in Basel, the ethnopharmacologist Dennis McKenna characterized psychedelic drugs as “molecular messages sent by Gaia,” one of whose messages is that we—like monkeys excitedly trading glowing bits of a mysterious crashed starship found in a jungle—are not so smart. Indeed: Why should we worry about hypothetical interspecies communication (even Hawking says intelligent aliens are unlikely to exist within one hundred light-years or we would have detected them already) when we do not even understand the local “starship” of Earth’s many species?

Burnett may be right that dolphins are not that smart. But we may not be that smart either. Nonetheless, if brain size has anything to do with it, some individual whales may be far smarter than individual human beings. Considering how much extra intelligence goes on beyond the level of conscious rational awareness—in our immune system, in our physiology, and in our intuitions—it’s almost overwhelming to consider the capacity of a white or blue whale’s unconscious mind. Despite their size (which you’d think would make them easy for our scientific sleuths to track)—the biggest ever in evolution, weighing two hundred tons each, their hearts as big as a car, their brains ten times more voluminous than ours—we do not even know where the blue whales go to breed.

If such whales with whom we share this oceanic planet remain deeply mysterious, intelligent aliens in our midst, the same may also be true of a far larger being, even closer to us. I speak of the planetary biosphere of which we humans seem to be minute parts, not unlike some of the cells of our own bodies that, if they are sentient, which some may well be, likely have zero conception of the coffee-sipping, car-driving wholes of which they are part.

Fossil and mass spectrometric evidence strongly suggests that Gaia—the visionary scientist James Lovelock’s name for this systemic, cybernetic, intelligent-acting nexus of life-forms at Earth’s surface taken as a physiological whole—regulates the chemistry and temperature of our planet’s surface in the unconscious manner of a living being. Whales are mammals with whose sentience we can empathize, even if we can’t understand them or they us. But, conscious or not, the living biosphere appears to be a far bigger fish, so to speak, one whose existence we’ve barely divined.

If we are to worry, we should worry about this complex beast of a planet with whose vast, mostly unconscious living intelligence we have been seriously meddling. Compared with the possible actions, which may soon be visited on us by this leviathan, the alien of which we are a metastatic part, the concerns voiced by our charismatic physicists are distracting at best, irresponsible at worst.

The media-grabbing headlines about being detected and eaten by distant aliens seem histrionically misplaced. The cosmological worrywarts are not providing a public service so much as displacing our local guilt over degrading and killing off whole species of our own very real and close relations. I’m not laughing, and I signed the petition to keep alive the ban on whale hunting. But it would be a rather fitting bit of cosmic irony if this giant intelligence, this greater leviathan of which we are part, this Brobdingnagaian body we are feeding on, this living surface of Earth whose physiological abilities still remain unknown and thus in a sense alien to the majority of people on Earth, itself turns out to have an immunelike system capable of regulating us out of existence, and does so, without us ever having truly established communication with it, while we twitter on about the man-eaters in the stars.