Alien Guest Post and European Video

I have another post up at Science in My Fiction today, so there isn't going to be a long, intelligent one up here as well. I'm saving up my brains for Wednesday, when there'll be a rant, of sorts. Hopefully. Maybe.

I should mention that the SciInMyFi post is a reworked version of something I posted on this blog back in January. I … may have lost track of time. But the new version is much, much better than the original, so that's good, right?

But because I'm loathe to post anything that doesn't have some new content… a video! Of European history! I didn't realize there were so many states in central Europe back in the day.

Possibilities for Aliens

It's been almost a month since I did a post about aliens, and I'm sure you'll agree this is a travesty. Today, I present two opposing viewpoints, for sheer food for thought.*

In the "not like us" camp is Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society:

Joining him is the History Channel, though I don't count them as a highly creditable source.



In the opposing camp of "possibly quite like us" is Simon Conway Morris, professor of paleobiology at Cambridge, who has been quoted by The Guardian as having said, "Extra-terrestrials … won't be splodges of glue … they could be disturbingly like us, and that might not be a good thing – we don't have a great record."

The article was about a two-day lecture series at the Royal Society, and goes on to state that

Conway Morris will argue that alien life is most likely to occur on a planet similar to our own, with organisms made from the same biochemicals. The process of evolution will even shape alien life in a similar way, he added.

"My view is that Darwinian evolution is really quite predictable, and when you have a biosphere and evolution takes over, then common themes emerge and the same is true for intelligence.

"If you have a planet much smaller than ours, the gravity is so weak it loses its atmosphere. If the planet is much bigger, its gravity is so strong that everything crawls around on the ground, because you don't have to fall far to break everything. It's fantastically dull."

io9 has a post-conference article, and there are, of course, Youtube videos:



And finally, here's Michio Kaku on whether or not aliens are out there, and whether or not they want to contact us. Please ignore the weird kaleidoscope transitions.



* Just to make this absolutely clear, the people quoted below aren't the only people to hold their opinions. There are masses and masses of people that take either stance, and masses more who don't think there are aliens at all.

Life in the Solar System

I don't think a month's gone by lately without some major revelation in the Wild And Wacky Solar System department, and excitingly, a lot of those revelations seem to have to do with life—as in xenobiology or the possibility thereof. It's probably redundant to say there are some very, very cool novels in the following:

• Europa probably has enough oxygen in its ice-covered ocean to support complex life.*
• The methane in Mars's atmosphere may be a by-product of life.**
• There is water on the Moon. No, really. 
• There may be life on the Moon too.***
• There may also be water (and life?) on Saturn's moon Enceladus.

And finally, even though the Orion nebula isn't part of the solar system, there are life-enabling molecules there, too.****

*io9

**io9

***io9
**** @sandykidd

Alien Miscellany

Everyone knows that governments collect stories of UFO sightings, right? And that they occasionally release their documents to the public? Well, I found out that there's been another release*, this time of six years' worth of British sightings. The documents are currently free, but will be charged for after a month.

I also found a video on io9 in which there is real-time commentary on a UFO video. WARNING: there is swearing, so it's probably not safe for work unless you have headphones. Also, I'm willing to bet that the witnesses didn't contact the proper authorities.

io9 also has an article and video consisting of expert advice on removing alien implants, and another one on a vehicle patent that's essentially a UFO. Yes, really. They're really kind of the main source of links today, because there's also a Nazi UFO fighter plane, a uranium-mining UFO, a glowing sky jellyfish, and a floating pyramid. (If you're really into conspiracy theories, they've also posted an article recently on the secret Mars colonization program.)

If you don't believe in UFOs, Boing Boing has an article (on an article of the Fortean Times which you have to register to access) on what else those sightings could be of—pie plates, dogs, hallucinations, etc.**

* link taken off this article, which also links to other cool stuff
** That sentence could probably have been more convoluted, but I'm not sure how.

We Need More Exciting Aliens

It occurred to me the other day that there are a lot of fictional alien species who conform to a very small number of molds: humanoid, insectoid, feline, robot, and reptilian. There's a huge amount of creativity in appearances and cultures, and I'm willing to make a bit of an exception for film because hey, they do have a budget, but print media? Online? We could try pushing the envelope a little more than we have.

(If you're interested, now would be a good time to scan the Wikipedia master list. I'm sure they haven't gotten everything, since I don't see any record of the Quintaglio on it, but it gives a nice overview, at any rate. Note that Star Trek, Star Wars, Farscape, Babylon 5, and Doctor Who are responsible for a lot of the species.)

I remember being intrigued by the idea of the Quintaglio. Far-seer was the first time I'd encountered sentient non-humanoid aliens, and let's face it, a book featuring a dinosaur civilization? Pretty darn awesome. The Prawns in District 9 hit me the same way: "Holy mother of Asimov, they did that?"

Thing is, I want to be wowed more often. I want every book/movie about aliens (or every other one, I'm generous), to give me the same feeling. I want more creativity! Humanoid aliens are sooo last century.*

Alien molds that haven't been done, that I know of:

• Fish
• Sharks**
• Marsupials
• Rabbits
• Octopus (real octopusses octopusi ones, not aquatic things with tentacles)
• Parrots
• Bacterial hive-minds
• Trilobites
• Elephants
• Slime molds
• Moss

Or we could follow the route laid down by Stargate, and go with deities. A race of satyrs, perhaps? Trolls? Chinese dragons? Western dragons? The Hindu pantheon? The Mayan gods? There are an awful lot of folkloric and mythological monsters, not to mention the ones that popped up in medieval travelogues and the like.

Let's not forget that our minds are influenced by our experiences and cultures. Some writers have created beings that don't match neatly to an Earth-based lifeform or concept, but most build on what we know about the natural world already. What if we went beyond that? What if we built a planet or environment first, and then evolved a species to survive in it? After all, there are some very extreme lifeforms on our own planet. 

One possible environment, "close" to home: the diamond oceans of Uranus and Neptune.*** This would be a rather hot, very high pressure place to live. There probably wouldn't be a lot of gas mixed into the diamond, let alone oxygen, so either the aliens wouldn't breathe, they'd use a system like photosynthesis where they'd break down carbon for energy, or they'd be like whales, surfacing to breathe hydrogen, helium, or methane (those being the abundant gases). The aliens would almost certainly be carbon-based, and would consume other carbon-based life for energy. They'd likely evolve something like fins or flagella to propel themselves. Maybe they'd use jet propulsion.

I doubt that these aliens would achieve buildings, because short of building on the solid-diamond floes, there'd be nothing solid, and the caps probably wouldn't be all that stable. However, they could still have a civilization, of sorts. Dolphins and whales have proto-languages. Octopuses use tools. 

Actually, I can see floating, roundish structures tethered together into cities, provided the aliens had something to build with. Perhaps after millennia of them using these structures, they'd adapt to them, becoming more amphibious than aquatic or losing the flippers and gaining something more like hands.

Perhaps not. They'd still be cool.

What about aliens living in nebulae? Black holes? Asteroids? Stars? It's not entirely impossible. Think of what our descendants (or even ourselves) could discover!

* Just my opinion. Go ahead and prove me wrong.
** Yes, yes, they're technically fish, sue me, a civilization of sharks would be wicked†
*** Boing Boing
† I just dated myself, didn't I?

Humano-Alien Evolution

Given that the decade is over (or about to be, depending on where you are and when you're reading this), I should be doing either a recap post, a prediction post, or a resolution post. Then again, I don't like following convention, so I'm going to stick with the aliens-to-humans post. Who knows? Maybe it will end up being predictive and I'll become famous for having called it before anyone else.*


I've hooked you with the aliens, right? Good, because I'm not starting there. You need background info! (Which is being taken from an article by Discover**, by the way. And there is controversy that the humanoids in the article even existed as a separate group. Caveat lector.)


Once upon a time in Africa, there lived a group of Homo sapiens with large skulls and small faces. These people are known as the Boskops, named for the South Africa town where the first skull fragments were found in 1913. These are about the only fragments we've got, so calling them a separate group of hominids might be erroneous. They (he? she?) might just be someone with a really big head. For the sake of this post, I'm going to assume that the Boskops were a subspecies of human.


Or maybe they were aliens? After all, the classic image of an alien is the Roswell Type, right***? Short, greyish, slanting dark eyes, and giant heads that are mostly brain. More on this in a sec.


Boskop brains were about 25% larger than ours, at least. According to Discover:

Expanding the brain changes its internal proportions in highly predictable ways. From ape to human, the brain grows about fourfold, but most of that increase occurs in the cortex, not in more ancient structures. Moreover, even within the cortex, the areas that grow by far the most are the association areas, while cortical structures such as those controlling sensory and motor mechanisms stay unchanged.

Going from human to Boskop, these association zones are even more disproportionately expanded. Boskop’s brain size is about 30 percent larger than our own—that is, a 1,750-cc brain to our average of 1,350 cc. And that leads to an increase in the prefrontal cortex of a staggering 53 percent. If these principled relations among brain parts hold true, then Boskops would have had not only an impressively large brain but an inconceivably large prefrontal cortex.

The prefrontal cortex is closely linked to our highest cognitive functions. It makes sense out of the complex stream of events flowing into the brain; it places mental contents into appropriate sequences and hierarchies; and it plays a critical role in planning our future actions. Put simply, the prefrontal cortex is at the heart of our most flexible and forward-looking thoughts.

So, basically what they're saying is that Boskops would have remembered more about places and would have had more ways to associate one thing with another. They'd have been able to process memories faster as well. (The article even speculates that they could have processed memories and retrieve memories at the same time, and that they'd be able to predict outcomes better than us.) Finally, we can probably assume pretty safely that most if not all Boskops had genius-level IQ. They certainly had superhuman brains.


Sounds like they were better evolved than us, doesn't it, so why did they die off? Discover speculates that their ability to predict outcomes of actions would have paralyzed them, that larger brains equalled more trouble in the birth canal, or that there wasn't much advantage in having big brains back in the day, that being about to outthink regular humans didn't actually help. To this, I'd like to add the (sane) suggestion that the larger brains used up too much energy and the Boskops weren't able to acquire enough food in the long term to keep their brains working properly along with the rest of their bodies.**** Our brains need a massive amount of energy as it is.

And then there's the insane suggestion: they were aliens. I mean, there's the whole Chariots of the Gods theory, and all the urban legends and Hollywood films. (The image of a Boskop man has to be in the collective unconscious for a reason.) And if aliens are studying humans today, why wouldn't they have been studying us in the past?

Or perhaps the Boskop aliens were stranded on Earth, forced to use Stone Age technology to survive? Perhaps they interbred as an added survival measure. The last few paragraphs of the Discover article seem to indicate their genes didn't die off completely. This would mean we're at least partly alien (or some of us are).

One last thing: If we're going Chariots of the Gods here, why not go to an extreme and posit that the Boskop aliens selectively bred humans, created humans, or something along those lines? Why assume that since we've found all these other hominids and have fossil evidence of humans existing before the Boskop fossils died, that Homo sapiens came first? Maybe we just haven't found the super-ancient alien fossils yet.

*Hey, it could happen.
** io9
*** A.k.a. the Asgard from Stargate.
**** And here's where someone with more knowledge of hunter-gatherer societies, foraging, and the amount of food in ancient South Africa refutes me.

Theories of Santa

This year is the first year since I've had an email address that I haven't gotten that Santa Claus vs. physics email meme. You know the one: Santa would have to travel so quickly he'd burn up, no reindeer team could possibly lift a sleigh carrying one doll for every Christian/secular/Christmas-celebrating child in the world, etc. etc. etc.

I'm choosing to see not getting this email as a Good Thing, except for one small problem: I had to get creative with Google with find a decent article that talked about the physics. Or a copy of That Email (scroll down to the second item).

I'll wait for you to read those.

Done? Good. I shall now pick up the science fiction-y aspects of each, and extrapolate.

From the article:

• Santa uses an ion shield - As we currently do not have widely available ion shield technology, this leaves us with four options. 1) Santa has stolen and elaborated on state-of-the-art technology. 2) Santa is secretly a physicist. 3) Santa comes from a civilization that has perfected the ion shield, i.e. Santa is an alien. 3a) i.e. Santa is a time traveling philanthropist.
• Santa uses the frictionless environment of space to improve on his travel time - Santa's sleigh is equipped with artificial gravity strong enough to maintain an atmosphere, or Santa and his reindeer all wear spacesuits and carry oxygen tanks. If artificial gravity, see the ion shield explanations.
• Santa makes use of more than four dimensions - Again, Santa is an alien or a time traveller, as we currently have no way of accessing more than four dimensions (consistently, at least. Who knows what the LHC really does?). Alternatively, Santa can do magic, a fact supported by Christmas folklore and literature, and by the fact that he routinely employs elves. The use of 5+ dimensions would also explain why Santa's workshop is invisible.
• Santa is Einstein - see: time traveling philanthropist
• Santa causes global warming - An argument against the philanthropist idea. Perhaps Santa's trying to make the North Pole warm enough to live comfortably and save on the heating costs?
• Santa uses wool hats as thought-monitoring devices - This is evidence of a massively advanced technology, as there is nothing about wool that makes it useful for monitoring thoughts. Additionally, there would need to be a way to transmit the information over massive distances (such as radio waves) and again, there's no evidence of a transmitter in any wool hat I've ever seen. See: time traveller; alien.
• Santa's reindeer use vacuum energy to fly - Further advanced technology. Possibly evidence of a) mutant reindeer or b) alien lifeforms that bear a strong resemblance to Earth reindeer.

From the email archive:

• Santa's reindeer are a new species - This is entirely possible, given that we've discovered a number of species in Papua New Guinea and the Himalayas, but is made less plausible by the extent of exploration that's taken place in the world's arctic regions, the reindeer's natural habitat. Perhaps Santa uses the North Pole as a wildlife preserve. Possibly these reindeer have evolved to resemble robots (strong skin, flight, ability to withstand massive heat, weights, and speeds). Possibly they are, in fact, robots (or cyborgs).
• Santa's faster-than-light travel slows down time - This presupposes that Santa can travel faster than light. Since he can't be teleporting (there's documented evidence of him and his sleigh flying, landing on roofs, etc.), he must be using advanced technology again.
• There are multiple Santa Clauses - Cloning! Or the theory from the archive, that there's actually a family of Clauses. This would mean that there are multiple teams of reindeer, which would give support to the wildlife preserve idea.
• Santa realizes all possible quantum states, or exists as one "particle" spread over a great distance - a) alien b) transhuman c) magical d) Schroedinger's Santa. There's no other way he'd be able to reestablish himself in one place, at one time, without one of the above. As various people in the archive point out, this also accounts for his invisibility while visiting houses.
• Santa uses guided-missile type technology to drop presents down chimneys without landing - I personally don't believe this, because there's too much documented evidence of him going down chimneys. However, if you want to go with this idea, what parameters would Santa need to key the homing tech to, to land the gifts under the tree without hitting anything? Does it go for anything green, big, and triangular? Do we even have the ability to guide missiles without using a heat signature as the target? I call advanced technology again.
• Rudolph's nose is not actually red, but is red-shifted during flight - Plausible, given the speeds he'd be moving at.
• Santa is dosing his reindeer - Perhaps it's the hour I'm writing this, but I'd say this is possible. Not particularly nice of Santa in the long run, though. The reindeer would have massive burn-out or withdrawal symptoms come Boxing Day. Continuing the routine year after year would also likely shorten their lifespans.
• Santa's reindeer fly in the same way that Arthur Dent flies, i.e., they just forget to hit the ground - This is so silly it has to be true.
• Santa's workshop is situated at a wormhole nexus - If so, what else is coming through? And how can we make use of this remarkable resource?

I would also like to add that Santa has a personal cloaking device, a larger one for his sleigh and reindeer, and an even larger one for his workshop. He must. We never see him, do we?


I know I've put forward a few theories about Santa's origins—alien, transhuman, time traveller, elf—and the technology available to him. You can choose any of them, or none of them, or a combination (time traveling elf from another planet). I won't be hurt if you do.

Me, though? I'm going with "alien". Santa is totally an alien.

"ology" means it's science, right?

I've come across a few articles and blog posts lately regarding ufology and cryptozoology, and since they're both kind of fantasy, kind of science, and slightly more than kind of cool, I'm going to wrap up this week of non-science fiction science by dumping the articles/posts on you. Nice of me, huh?


Under Ufology, we have the recent recurrence of cattle mutilations in Colorado.*

Four calves, all killed overnight. Their innards gone. Tongues sliced out. Udders carefully removed. Facial skin sliced and gone. Eyes cored away. Not a single track surrounding the carcasses, which were found in pastures locked behind two gates and a mile from any road. Not a drop of blood on the ground or even on the remaining skin.

There are more descriptions of the mutilations in the article, along with words like "laser" and "I do believe it was UFOs". Whatever's killing cows, it's not a predatory animal (like a cougar). That's a given, because of the nature of many of the injuries.


And while we're on the topic of potential aliens, a mysterious spiral** was sighted over Norway about the same time, although it turned out to be a failed Russian missile launch.*** I was disappointed.


On to cryptozoology now. In case there's anyone out there not familiar with the word, cryptozoology "refers to the search for animals which are considered to be legendary or otherwise nonexistent by mainstream biology." **** This includes Bigfoot, Nessie and other lake monsters, chupacabras, jackalopes, living fossils, and any animal of extreme proportions or which is reported to be somewhere it doesn't belong—like big cats in Australia.


For a bit more of an overview, with a twist, see Boing Boing's interview with Loren Coleman, founder of the International Cryptology Museum, and a video tour of Coleman's collection, also done by Boing Boing. Coleman is also involved in the Cryptomundo blog, if you feel like reading daily posts related to this topic.


That's all cool, of course, but not near as cool (to me, anyway) as this next little tidbit, which I got from io9 and also by perusing Cryptomundo: we may know where to find Bigfoot bones, should such things exist.


Apparently porcupines the world over horde bones so they can knaw on them later (kind of like squirrels and acorns), so if we track down these caches of bones, we might get lucky with a Bigfoot bone or two. Or we might not, because Bigfoot might not be real.*****


I'm almost tempted to get into camo gear, push my way into the wilderness, and start following random porcupines. Almost. I have pathetically few wilderness survival skills, so this is something I'm going to have to leave for the experts.


Bigfoot might be one of the most famous cryptids (as evidenced by his memoir), and Nessie might be another, but did you know Nessie has an extended family? One of his/her relatives, Champ of Lake Champlain, Vermont, was captured on a camera phone back in May.***** I came across the video on Boing Boing and you can see it here. Embedding's been disabled due to popularity, unfortunately, or I wouldn't be making you click that link.


And as you might expect, Cryptomundo's done a couple posts on the subject, one as breaking news and one with a stablized video and more coverage of the spread of the story.


That's it for me for today. Next week, because it's almost Christmas, expect a winter/holiday theme. After that, I suspect it'll be back to the regular programming.


* io9
** linking to the Gizmodo post, because the originals are in Norwegian.
*** linking to Gizmodo because they don't give me originals, plus they have a video
**** Wikipedia
***** Maybe. You always have to be cautious about these things, because of the debunkers.