Loving the Alien (David Bowie)

Also Sprach Zarathustra (Richard Strauss)

Two Little Men in a Flying Saucer (Ella Fitzgerald)

Intergalactic (Beastie Boys)

Subterranean Homesick Alien (Radiohead)

Men in Black (Will Smith)

Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois (Sufjan Stevens)

Motorway to Roswell (The Pixies)

Exo-Politics (Muse)

Moonlight Sonata (Beethoven)

Texas Man Abducted by Aliens for Outer Space Joy Ride (Jad Fair & Yo La Tengo)

Fracking is a process of cracking rock formations (mainly shale) with high pressure water mixed with chemicals to release natural gas and oil deposits trapped inside. The hydrocarbons can then be extracted at low cost. The amount of gas and oil that has become accessible through fracking is impressively large. Reserves of natural gas, which had been falling for most of the last four decades, have increased for the last several years.

Proponents argue that because of fracking natural gas will be the fuel of the future, providing energy to everything from home hot water heaters to power plants to automobiles. It will, they claim, lower consumer energy costs, provide greater energy security while at the same time reducing carbon emissions. In fact, low cost natural gas has replaced coal in some applications and as a result, overall U.S. carbon emissions have fallen to a level not seen since 1992.

But fracking remains controversial.  A documentary film, Gasland, which won various awards, was highly critical of fracking.  It argued that groundwater contamination was a possible, if not likely, result of fracking. In a dramatic moment, a local resident in a natural gas production area lit the water flowing from his kitchen faucet on fire.  The inference was that a fracked well had leaked natural gas into the water supply. Because of publicity of this sort, several states have halted fracking operations pending further study.

Fracking may also lead to emissions of natural gas into the atmosphere. If a well is not carefully controlled, there can be a gas leak.  This gas is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and one analysis by a team of researchers suggested that gas emissions from fracked wells could actually do more damage to the climate than coal.

All of the purported dangers of fracking have been rebutted by other studies and analyses.  The famous burning faucet was not in an area where fracking had taken place and indeed, commentators noted that methane gas has been found in ground water near natural gas deposits—whether fracked or not.   Also, the leakage problem was challenged by another group of scholars who argued that for a number of reasons natural gas from fracked wells will be, on balance, beneficial to the climate.

Of course there remain uncertainties with respect to hydraulic fracturing and many analysts agree on the need for careful monitoring of emissions and groundwater quality near these wells.  But it is likely that fracking will continue and that in the short run it will reduce carbon emissions and lower some energy costs.  It is important, however, not to expect that fracking or any other technological development will “solve” America’s energy problems.  As my new book U.S. Energy and the Pursuit of Failure shows, policymakers have sought panaceas that would make energy problems go away. Fracking is sometimes touted that way. But fracking is no cure-all; there are no simple answers to the complex questions surrounding energy technology and society.

Peter Grossman is the professor of economics at Butler University. He is author of U.S. Energy Policy and the Pursuit of Failure and co-author of Introduction to Energy and The End of a Natural Monopoly: Deregulation and Competition in the Electric Power Industry. His scholarly articles have appeared in such journals as Energy Policy, Economic Inquiry, The Journal of Legal Studies, and the Journal of Public Policy. For seven years, Grossman was a regular columnist on economic issues for the Indianapolis Star, and he has contributed commentary to many magazines and newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal and The Christian Science Monitor.

What inspired you to write Alien Life Imagined?

I’ve always been fascinated by the link between science and culture. In a previous life as a professor at university, I had set up some pretty unusual courses which looked at the link between science and science fiction. One was a “Life in the Universe” course and the other was a full degree course in “Science and Science Fiction.” Much public understanding and interest in science and technology begins with science fiction. Alien Life Imagined is the result of teaching and research on such courses over a dozen or so years!

What is the key point you hope readers take away from the book?

I think the key point I’d like people to take from the book is that, more often than not, those who have had inspiring and imaginative ideas about alien life have been certain kinds of thinkers and workers. They’ve been creatively open-minded and radical about their science and philosophy. They’ve seen science and society from below, rather than above. In the book I refer to them as materialists. Materialism is the philosophy at the root of science itself, it’s all about matter in motion, and change. Those who have resisted change, those who have supported the contemporary established order, have tended not to be at the forefront of imaginative thought.

Can you suggest an example of an alien encounter in popular culture that changed the way scientists think about the search for extraterrestrial life?

I think it has to be HG Wells’ War of the Worlds. For the most part, depictions of alien life before Wells tended to be rather benign. Wells’ Martians were red in tooth and claw, Darwin’s survival of the fittest made flesh in the minds of all who read the book. It was the first alien menace from space. An imperial power bent on destruction and conquest. But interestingly for scientists, Wells’ Martians were also the men of the future. They were what we may one day become, a force of evolution. And Well’s depiction influenced whole generations of scientists in the years after this wonderful tale.

Tell us a bit about what’s on your bookshelf—which imaginations of alien life do you recommend?

I might have given the game away on this question! When you write a book like Alien Life Imagined, you tend put in all the best bits, all your favourite stories from each age. Later in my book, after detailing centuries of stories, I talk about the way in which writers and directors became far more subtle about their aliens. One of my favourites is Solaris, by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem. In Lem’s book the alien is a sea, and the sea is a whole planet. Men try to understand this creature as best they can. Truly alien. Another is Roadside Picnic by the Russian Strugatsky brothers. We get hints of the aliens, their technology and culture, and yet we never meet them. Finally, a very sophisticated treatment of the topic is the Ender’s Game series of books by American author, Orson Scott Card. Look out for the much anticipated movie version of the first book in the series, as it’s due out later this year!

When I was five years old and every other girl in my kindergarten class wanted to grow up to be a princess, an actress, or a figure skater (it was a Winter Olympics year), I wanted to be an astronomer. And after an entire childhood of countless nights glued to a cheap backyard telescope, a stellar attendance record at the Griffith Observatory’s planetarium shows, and dozens of books on stars, planets, asteroids, and black holes, I’m pretty sure I would have climbed the ranks at NASA, if I’d just been able to pass that pesky obstacle known as “high school physics.”

Even today, I can’t write an equation to save my life, but I still love space. With Comet PANSTARRS passing through the northern hemisphere this month, I can hardly contain my excitement—living in New York City limits my stargazing options considerably, but that hasn’t stopped me from scaling the fire escape to the roof my apartment building to scan the evening horizon for a dim burst of light and its barely perceptible tail.

The summer I was nine and learned about comets at Astro Camp, my instructor explained them as huge chunks of ice, gas, and dust hurtling through space. She made her own comet by packing dirt and dry ice into a compact ball and then launching it across the lawn of the Los Angeles Natural History Museum. Tearing through the air, with a fog-like gas trailing after it, her terrestrial comet was magnificent.

No images of me making my own comet survive, so I rely on this Google Image search result to convey how cool it was.

I was thrilled to make my own comet, which I preserved carefully in a plastic sandwich bag. I still recall the look of horror on my mother’s face when she picked me up that afternoon and I announced I’d need to store it in our freezer. But the next morning, I was disappointed to find only a bloated bag of slushy dirt.

I think the discovery that my comet had vanished overnight was the lesson. Comets are fantastic yet fleeting, never to be relied on, only briefly visible from Earth as they streak through the sky. The few months, weeks, or even days we can see a comet in the sky, we’re watching an object that may be as old as the universe itself race past our solar system onward, tracing a path that will take it through galaxies lightyears from our own. PANSTARRS will not pass by Earth again for over 100,000 years. You don’t even have to do the math to appreciate that.

So I’m not living my childhood dream of searching for deep space objects through high-powered telescopes. But as I wait for PANSTARRS on my roof—looking for an object that reminds me of the depth of the universe, its past and its future, and our own infinitesimally small place in it—that seems pretty close. While I wait for the next comet to pass through (ISON will be here in November), I get to work on Cambridge University Press’ amateur astronomy list. And that seems pretty close, too.

Comet PANSTARRS will be most clearly visible in the northern hemisphere on Sunday, March 10. Look toward the western horizon in the evening, and don’t forget your camera! Submit your photos of PANSTARRS to Cambridge’s photo contest to win $125 worth of astronomy titles. Guidelines are here.

I went to Hartwick College, a private liberal arts school in Oneonta, New York and a really great thing about Hartwick was the January Term program. Between the fall and spring semester, students can sign up to take one class on campus, take one class abroad, or just stay home for an extended winter break (if you had enough credits!). I had the opportunity to travel to the semi-deserted island of San Salvador in the Bahamas and complete a biology honors challenge during my junior year. I only had a vague sense of what island biogeography actually was (I sort of paid attention in intro to biology class, guys!) and I was ready for an adventure.
Believe it or not, I actually learned a lot about Darwin in one particular class on 1890’s British literature. I learned about his philosophies, his “bulldog”—Thomas Henry Huxley—his criticisms from the religious community, and his overall affect on society, from literature to music to (DUH) science. So it was with this knowledge that I began my adventure to San Salvador. And, you know what? Even though I knew, abstractly, about Darwin’s time with the finches on the Galapagos Islands, I never really put it together that THAT was island biogeography until I was doing it myself. (Or maybe it was just because I have a deep and inexplicable loathing for birds and I didn’t think beyond the finches.)

Islands, particularly those that are mostly uninhabited like San Salvador (due to the lack of fresh water), are great for studying biogeography because they represent  the extremes of evolution, making patterns much clearer, especially for un-sciencey people like myself. So, you’re probably wondering how my class actually got to see these patterns of evolution if we were on one island the whole time. Well, we swam to different cays and islands that surrounded San Salvador, that’s how! We took note of the small variations in plants from land mass to land mass, and how the little seedlings are able to travel from island to island in order to take root (on the backs of birds! Bats! Sea turtles! Other animals that aren’t as cute! Through the waves! In the wind!).
Every morning, we went hiking on different parts of the island, taking great care to notice the similarities and differences in the vegetation as we got further and further from the ocean. Every afternoon, we snorkeled at different beaches so we could see how the coral reefs, fish, sea turtles, sharks, crustaceans, and even the shape and feel of the sand differed from one side of the island to the other. We did a night swim where we saw creepy bioluminescent creatures, a couple of days later we swam over the continental shelf (we couldn’t see anything! Nothing but blackness!), and on the last day, we got to swim in the multi-colored world that exists beyond the barrier reef.

I have to admit, while I was there, I didn’t feel like I was learning much. It seemed like a really strange vacation where we stayed in an old naval base (the Gerace Research Centre), complete with old metal beds, communal showers, and DELISH (or not, you know) meals of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, lasagna with corn in it (yea, corn) and Kool-aid. I came away with a deeper appreciation for nature, an understanding of the extreme diversity in the plant and animal kingdom, particularly that diversity that exists under the sea, and a real grasp on the studies that Charles Darwin presented to the world during the fin-de-siècle before our most recent fin-de-siècle.

His 1871 study On the Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex is just filled with Hallmark-worthy sweet nothings, so we’ve put his words into cards you can send your Valentine! You’re welcome.

For over 150 years, Charles Darwin and his work have influenced the fields of science, religion, politics, gender, literature, philosophy, and medicine. With a view in 2013 of the innumerable changes he has sparked across a number of disciplines, what should be considered Darwin’s most important contribution?

Here’s what they had to say:

“Charles Darwin’s most important contribution, made in his Origin of Species (1859), was to establish the fact of evolution—common descent from primitive ancestor(s)—and supply the chief mechanism, natural selection.  It can be argued that the effect of this in the wider domain, challenging religion for instance, is more important overall, but it begins with the science and it is for this that we celebrate Darwin.”—Michael Ruse, editor of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Darwin and Evolutionary Thought

“In a word, contingency. Darwin disabused humanity of our vainglorious conceit that we were destined to rule this planet. Like every other species that ever lived, Homo sapiens arose through a long chain of improbable—and unrepeatable—events. Darwin proved this beyond the shadow of a doubt for any unbiased thinker who reads his Descent of Man, arguably as great a masterpiece as his Origin of Species. Descent reads like a legal brief, and rightly so, because Darwin knew that he was pleading a tough case in the biased court of public opinion. In the first chapter Darwin presents the human embryo as Exhibit A. Then, like Sherlock Holmes, he uses details to deduce the history of past events. More exhibits follow, leading inexorably to an inconvenient conclusion: we are only one frame in a long movie, stretching back to the dawn of life. The narrow escapes that our ancestors managed from events beyond their control were as legion as the hair-raising challenges that Harrison Ford faced in the Indiana Jones movies. We should celebrate Darwin not only for giving us an antidote for our hubris but also for bequeathing to us what Richard Dawkins (our modern-day Darwin) has called The Greatest Show on Earth. Contingency and endless entertainment: these are Darwin’s greatest legacies.”—Lewis Held, an evolutionary-developmental biologist and author of Quirks of Human Anatomy

“No one has influenced our knowledge of life on Earth as much as Charles Darwin. His theory of evolution by natural selection, now the unifying theory of the life sciences, explained where all of the astonishingly diverse kinds of living things came from and how they became exquisitely adapted to their particular environments. His theory reconciled a host of diverse kinds of evidence such as the progressive nature of fossil forms in the geological record, the geographical distribution of species, recapitulative appearances in embryology, homologous structures, vestigial organs and nesting taxonomic relationships. No other explanation before or since has made sense of these facts. In further works Darwin demonstrated that the difference between humans and other animals is one of degree not kind. In geology, zoology, taxonomy, botany, palaeontology, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, literature and theology Darwin’s writings produced profound reactions, many of which are still ongoing. Yet even without his evolutionary works, Darwin’s accomplishments would be difficult to match. His brilliantly original work in geology, botany, biogeography, invertebrate zoology, psychology and scientific travel writing would still make him one of the most original and influential workers in the history of science. Darwin’s writings are consequently of interest to an extremely wide variety of readers.”—John van Wyhe, director of The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online

“Darwin showed us that we’re animals. He showed us that there’s no fundamental distinction between us and any other critter on the planet. The most important implication of this Gestalt shift may be ethical. As soon as we accept that the human-animal distinction is not fundamental in nature, it becomes difficult to accept a moral code that privileges the wellbeing of human beings but is indifferent to the wellbeing of any other animal. It becomes hard to resist extending our moral concern to any creature capable of suffering, human or not. If present trends continue, the main beneficiaries of Darwin’s great idea may not be human beings. Ultimately, the main beneficiaries may be the other animals we share the planet with.”—Steve Stewart-Williams, author of Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life

“Theories of evolution were around long before the Origin of Species, and natural selection became fully accepted within science only after decades of work by others in the laboratory and field. Why then does Darwin matter? As the philosopher John Dewey said over a century ago, Darwin is important not because he gives the right answers, but because he asks the right questions. His writings possess the tact, humility, and literary skill to convince readers that evolution, including that of humans, should be the subject of scientific inquiry. Readers are encouraged to think, observe, experiment, and explore for themselves–to share Darwin’s passion for understanding the laws that govern the natural world.”—J.A. Secord, director of the Darwin Correspondence Project

The ancient Greeks were not evolutionists (Essay 1, “Origins and the Greeks”). It was not that they had an a priori prejudice against a gradual developmental origin for organisms (including humans) but that they saw no real evidence for it. More importantly, they could not see how blind law – that is to say, natural law without a guiding intelligence – could lead to the intricate complexity of the world, complexity serving the ends of things, particularly organisms. This need to think in terms of consequences or purposes, what Aristotle called “final causes,” was taken to speak definitively against natural origins.

It was not until the seventeenth century – what is known as the Age of the Enlightenment – that we get the beginnings of evolutionary thinking (Essay 2, “Evolution before Darwin”). This could have happened only if there was something, an ideology, sufficiently strong to overcome the worry about ends. Such an ideology did appear, that of progress: the belief that through unaided effort humans could themselves improve society and culture. It was natural for many to move straight from progress in the social world to progress in the biological world, and so we find people arguing for a full-scale climb upward from primitive forms, all the way up to the finest and fullest form of being, Homo sapiens: from “monad to man,” as the saying went (Fig. Introduction.1). It was not generally an atheistic doctrine, being more one in line with “deism,” the belief that God works through unbroken law. But it did increasingly challenge any biblical reading of the past, and it went against evangelical claims about Providence, the belief that we humans unaided can do nothing except for the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.

Radical claims like these did not go unchallenged. Critics, notably the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and his French champion, the comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier, continued to argue that final causes stand in the way of all such speculations. Moreover, particularly after the French Revolution, many thought the idea of progress to be both false and dangerous. For this reason, evolution was hardly a respectable notion. It had all of the markings of a “pseudoscience,” like mesmerism (the belief in bodily magnetism) or phrenology (the belief that bumps on the skull give clues to psychological traits). It existed as an epiphenomenon of a cultural ideology; it was valued because it was value laden through and through. This is not to say that it was an unpopular idea. As we see in our own day, manifested by such pseudosciences as homeopathy (the belief in the curative power of small doses of the poison that in quantity kills), pseudosciences can be very popular. But enthusiasm lay generally with the public and not with the professional community.

The Origin of Species (1859) set out to change all of this. It is important therefore, from the beginning, to get Charles Darwin right. And as a start on this, we must recognize that the autobiography that he penned toward the end of his life, although captivating and very informative, is in many respects highly misleading. Darwin characterizes himself as a charming young man, not terribly directed or motivated, keenest of all on the country sports of shooting and the like, who almost by chance backed into one of the greatest discoveries of all time. This is simply not true. We must keep balance and perspective and not let the English penchant for self-deprecating modesty cloud the story. As an individual, Darwin was genuinely warm and friendly, loyal to family and friends, a good master to his servants, and for all that he was very careful with his money, good at managing it, and generous to those in need. He was loved and with good reason. He was also hard working, even to the point of obsession. He did not have the kind of mind that is good at doing things that impress schoolteachers. He was not that gifted at mathematics, nor was he a brilliant success with languages, dead or living. That put him at a disadvantage, given that back then these were precisely the talents needed for formal academic success. But he was clearly very intelligent; moreover, older people (especially when he went to Cambridge) saw this and almost rushed to be his friends and mentors (see Fig. Introduction.2 and Plate III). Above all, Darwin had an oversized, inventive and discerning eye for a good theory or hypothesis. Added to this is the fact that he was ruthless in his pursuit of an idea and the supporting facts, using others (particularly by courtesy of the penny post introduced in 1840) to gather information for his speculations. He was indeed sick – possibly a psychological sickness but even more possibly purely physical – but he used this sickness to avoid distractions and other commitments. One of his biographers has written of Darwin as having a sliver of ice through his heart, and never were truer words written.

Read or download the entire excerpt here

The awakening
I can’t think about that right now . . . I’ll think about that tomorrow.
-Scarlett O’Hara, Gone with the Wind

In January 1949, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) held a seminar on radioactive waste. In his opening remarks, AEC Chairman David Lilienthal cast the problem of waste disposal as part of “learning to live with radiation.” According to Lilienthal, this learning curve was the same as how we humans learn to live with anything else unfamiliar. The Chairman of the AEC acknowledged that radioactive wastes could become “a subject of emotion and hysteria and fear . . . [but] we do not believe those fears are justified provided technology applies itself to eliminating the troubles.” The previous year, Robert Oppenheimer, Chairman of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee, had dismissed the waste problem as “unimportant.”

In spite of these pronouncements, dealing with radioactive waste gained greater urgency upon passage of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, making possible the widespread use of nuclear energy for civilian purposes. As such, the nuclear industry would now be close to major cities and towns. And dilution was not the solution. Given the anticipated size of the US nuclear industry by the year 2000, it would require a volume equal to about five percent of the world’s oceans to dilute the dangerous waste to recommended safe levels. This exceeded the volume of freshwater stored worldwide in lakes, rivers, groundwater, glaciers, and polar ice caps.

Daniel A. Beard

Biological systems are complicated. In fact, they are so complicated that researchers often must turn to computer simulation to examine how living systems function. For example, it is increasingly recognized that common medical problems such as heart disease, diabetes, and obesity arise from interaction between genetic and environmental factors, and physiological systems. The only feasible approach for gaining a predictive understanding of such complex interactions is through computer simulation. Yet because they typically are not exposed to the tools and techniques of the trade, computer simulation can seem inaccessible to many students trained in the biomedical sciences.

To help students and researchers understand and access simulation techniques, the Virtual Physiological Rat Project has posted an introductory video tutorial illustrating how to analyze data from a biological system using simulation. The tutorial allows viewers to follow along in analyzing data related to the relatively simple and familiar example of filtration in a home aquarium. This video represents the first in a planned series of hands-on tutorials drawn from the recently published text book, Biosimulation: Simulation of Living Systems.