From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Sun Jul 18 2004 - 15:51:57 PDT
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From: daviddarling123<mailto:darling_at_uslink.net>
To: DarlingsSpace_at_yahoogroups.com<mailto:DarlingsSpace_at_yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, July 18, 2004 4:46 PM
Subject: [DarlingsSpace] David Darling's Newsletter #23
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DAVID DARLING'S NEWSLETTER
Issue #23
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Contents
1. Meanderings
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1. Meanderings
I had a phone call a couple of weeks ago from Ted Rubenstein, a
Music has always been important to me in my work. I play my guitar
My first major book, Deep Time, was based partly on the projected
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/V/Voyagerisrecord.html and you can read the opening chapters of Deep Time here:
http://www.daviddarling.info/works/DeepTime/DeepTime_front_2.html After the book was published I was sent a couple of music CDs by
My next book, Equations of Eternity, has an even weirder musical
http://www.metal-observer.com/articles.php?lid=1&sid=4&id=4517 And still on the subject of heavy-metal, I was contacted by a UK
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/N/neutronium.html and has a link to it from the company's site (as, incidentally, does
Most bizarre of all, following my latest appearance on Coast to
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2. Alien Intelligence
In a recent newsletter on the new findings from Mars, I questioned
"If microbes are discovered on Mars, I don't think it will be
I'd love to hear other people's opinions on this. Would the
But do we share the universe with other intelligence? I'm open to
We may have a longer wait for this discovery. I think we'll know
Having said this, being a scientist, I'm all for SETI, both in its
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3. Bookends
Hitting the shelves next month will be the third of my encyclopedias
http://www.daviddarling.info/works/Mathematics/mathematics.html Check out the front page of my website for availability of my other
http://www.daviddarling.info In May 2005 comes my next book - Teleportation: The Impossible Leap.
Have a great summer everyone!
All the best,
David Darling
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July 18, 2004
e-mail: daviddarling_at_daviddarling.info<mailto:daviddarling_at_daviddarling.info>
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2. Alien Intelligence
3. Bookends
producer at CNN, which linked (in a roundabout sort of way) a couple
of topics I wanted to touch upon in this newsletter - music and
aliens. Ted is putting together a one-hour special, hosted by Miles
O'Brien (the CNN news anchor, not Star Trek's chief engineer!), on
the search for life and intelligence in space, to be aired this
fall. He had some questions for me on SETI but then the conversation
turned to the locations where they'd been shooting and the people
they'd been interviewing for the show. One of these was Steve
Squyres, much in the public eye recently as the principal
investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers. Ted said that one of
their biggest regrets was that they hadn't been able to persuade
Squyres to run off a few licks on the Fender electric that he keeps
in his office. When I mentioned that I also had a Fender plugged in
within arm's reach we got on to the subject of our favorite music,
concerts, etc.
as a complete break from writing. Having started with an acoustic (a
12-string of all things) as a teenager, I moved on to classical, and
now play electric through this amazing little gadget that lets you
synthesize every guitar sound imaginable. It's tremendously
therapeutic. Then, while I'm actually writing, I listen to a wide
range of music depending on mood and what I'm actually doing. If
it's highly original writing - like the first draft of a new book -
then I can't do with any kind of organized sound: it's just too
distracting. The music comes in when I'm redrafting, trying to make
things flow better, or searching for another way to express myself.
Then I use music almost as a thesaurus, to suggest alternatives or
new possibilities, or to put me in a different frame of mind. One
day it might be Pink Floyd, the next Samuel Barber or Stravinsky - I
like a broad spectrum.
future adventures of the Voyager 2 probe and so, appropriately, took
its chapter titles from the names of pieces of music carried on the
Voyager phonograph. You can read about the record here:
none other than ... David Darling! One of my namesakes happens to be
a superb improvisational cellist (he nabbed www.daviddarling.com<http://www.daviddarling.com/>
before I became Net savvy!). I still listen to his albums while
writing, and occasionally flash the disks in front of unsuspecting
guests in a, usually futile, attempt to persuade them that I have
hidden talents.
connection because it inspired the lyrics for the song "From Dust to
Life" by the heavy-metal band, Hell's Destiny. More on this, and the
scary-looking band members, here:
concert organizer whose company goes the by the name of Neutronium
(heavy metal - get it?). He pointed out a Star Trek reference to add
to my encyclopedia page on neutronium:
Marathon Computers, which boasts that its desk mount for the Apple
G5 can attach to any material - even neutronium!
http://www.marathoncomputer.com/deskmountg5.html
Coast AM, Charles Maxey, an experimental recording artist, got in
touch to ask if he could use a 5-minute sample of my voice from the
show on one of his new tracks. How this is going to turn out is
anyone's guess. But speaking of alien concepts...
how big an impact the discovery of simple life on another world
would have. Of course, it would make headlines and create a lot of
excitement for a while. But would it affect us deeply in the long
run? I doubted whether it really would and used the seven-days
wonder of the Martian "fossils" announcement by NASA scientists in
1996 as an example of how the impact might be short-lived. In
response, Rob Schleifer wrote to me with some interesting and very
valid observations. Said Rob:
anything like the ephemeral excitement over the alleged 1996
fossils. First of all, the fossil theory was challenged almost from
the outset, and of course nothing was ever proved. So the initial
reaction was a response to the POSSIBILITY of the fossils being
genuine. But far more important, at best the fossils were an
indication that life may have existed in the remote past on Mars,
something that most people have difficulty relating to. [A]ctually
finding (and seeing) living microbes TODAY on Mars is a completely
different situation.... If life is detected on Mars, college
students at every university in the world will be talking about this
for decades...; and everyone else ... will also be overwhelmed by
this. The implications will reach into every phase of life. And even
when the initial headlines pass and people are not thinking
specifically about this discovery, the knowledge will always be in
the back of their minds that WE ARE NOT ALONE. And, unlike the
fossils, every time people think about it ... they will realize that
at the very moment they are thinking about it, these microbes are
reproducing and multiplying on another planet and, by extension,
throughout the universe. The comparison, then, of finding fossils
from a long lost eon to observing living creatures today is, in my
opinion, a very distant comparison."
confirmation of the existence of any kind of extraterrestrial life
permanently change us? Obviously, it would revolutionize
astrobiology. But would it affect us deeply - culturally,
psychologically? I think Rob is right to argue that the fossils
announcement wasn't a good test of this. (Was the Orson Welles
broadcast of "War of the Worlds" in 1938 a good test of how we'd
react to a "first contact" situation?) In any event, we'd better
prepare ourselves mentally for the big announcement because it may
be just around the corner. With the discovery of ammonia in the
atmosphere of Mars, on top of the earlier news that methane had been
found, it's getting more and more difficult (though not impossible)
to find ways to explain these data that don't involve life.
Personally, I think we're on the very eve of confronting the fact
that we have cosmic neighbors - even if they are only microscopic.
being persuaded that finding microbial life out there would alter us
profoundly. I don't need any persuading that the discovery of alien
minds and civilizations, especially if they were more advanced than
us, would change us permanently and beyond recognition.
definitively about life on Mars, if it's there, by the end of the
decade. (We may be 99% sure by the end of this year, the way things
are going.) But high intelligence is bound to be rarer - perhaps
very much rarer - than low life. And high intelligence will almost
inevitably be many thousands or millions of years ahead of us. We've
only had powered flight for a century, and radio for not much longer
than that. We're already talking about such esoterica as quantum
energy drives, quantum computers, antigravity, and so forth, that
may alter science and technology beyond description. Five hundred
years from now we'll have moved into a different technological phase
that will make us seem like super beings by today's standards. A
race even 10,000 years ahead of us will not, I would contend, be
trying to communicate by electromagnetic signals or sub-light-speed
probes. Their technology and means of comunication and travel will
be essentially invisible to us, just as cell phone messages are
undetectable to a primitive rainforest tribe. In fact, I'd argue -
and I hope you'll argue back at me - that most intelligence in the
universe will (a) not be interested in engaging us in a dialog (any
more than we're interested in communicating with ants), and (b)
intentionally avoid making their presence known to us (having
adopted something like Star Trek's "prime directive"). I think we'd
be overwhelmed and possibly destroyed by close contact with
sufficiently advanced beings, however benign their intentions.
conventional and unconventional forms. I applaud the work being done
by the SETI Institute, the SETI League, and other groups around the
world who are doing their darndest to seek out signs of alien
intelligence and technology. I'm happy to be a participant in Alan
Tough's "Welcome To ETI" project, which uses the Internet to open up
an alternative line of communication for whoever might be out there.
I think the proposals for searching the solar system for various
types of alien probes and artifacts are particularly intriguing. And
who knows? Perhaps we are being closely monitored by stealth probes.
Perhaps alien anthropologists are mingling freely amongst us at this
very moment, studying our customs and culture. (Any ideas for how we
might spot them, if they are?) The fact is, none of us knows; we're
all guessing, experts and layfolk alike. And the only way we can
move any closer to understanding what varieties of life and mind
populate the cosmos is to go out and look. My greatest optimism for
rapid progress is with the bottom-up, astrobiological approach,
where we look for life in general and then refine our notions of
more complex life based on those findings. It's my belief that we'll
identify Mars as being biologically active in the very near future.
And I'd be surprised if our interferometric searches of other
planetary systems don't turn up many more signs of extraterrestrial
life within the next two decades. Beyond that I'm much less certain
and perhaps less optimistic. There is intelligence beyond Earth, I'm
convinced of it. But whether we'll be able - or allowed - to detect
it, is another matter.
for Wiley, The Universal Book of Mathematics. Read about it here:
books and for the latest events in the universe at large:
More on this in the weeks ahead.
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