Deoxyribose From Abiotic Space Conditions

Another biomolecule, the pentose sugar that serves as the backbone of DNA, quickly produced in un-directed synthesis under conditions that obtain on ice in space. Given the speed with which the first life formed on Earth (0.1 GA after the planet cooled to a solid form) as well as increasing evidence like this about how easy it is to make nucleic acid building blocks under prebiotic conditions, it's also very likely that life forms everywhere with water and carbon - even in ice. (See here for most recent panspermia/evolution post.)

Space Colonies Will Be Run By Dictators; Or, Why Science Fiction Is About Government Space Travel

Settling colonies in the age of exploration was easy. Jamestown in particular seemed like a breeze. There was air, water, food, and even people who would sometimes help you if you were nice to them. Even still, it wasn't until the third ship arrived from England that the colony became self-sustaining. The Norse were unable to hold onto Greenland at all, and we still in 2018 have not put a self-sustaining colony on Antarctica . That the land does not provide basic life-sustaining commodities for free - that there is no indestructible commons where air and water is concerned - has led some political scientists to speculate that the natural state of any off-Earth colony would be that of "Oriental despotism", which earlier historians associated with the culture of the Middle East. Another way of looking at this is that there's a predisposition to strong central authority anywhere that central coordination is required for survival. This might mean political rent-seekers who control the water by force, as in parts of the Middle East, or the coordination of crops that are massively productive when huge teams of people harvest it, as with rice in East Asia. This also solves the mystery of why states emerged initially in places that were actually quite marginal for agriculture - the dry high altitude Mexican Plateau, the Nile Valley, and the Fertile Crescent (with the exception of China - still explained by a benefit of central authority's ability to coordinate labor.) On the other hand, places where berries and game almost jump into your mouth are not famous for producing large states - though they do often produce impressive cultures, like the Pacific Northwest. When you get angry at some tribal council decision, it's too easy to storm off and take your family into the next valley and start hunting and gathering there. Not so when your life depends on predicting and collectively exploiting, say, the flooding of the Nile.

But there is still another reason to think that space colonies (planet-bound or not) will resemble the walled fortress of a desert, or the absolute authority of an Eastern monarch, more than a democracy. (Yes, it gets worse.) How do you get your family to your new valley? You can walk - even if it takes a while. If you got sick of Ohio and wanted to head west, you might have to pool your funds with other families but it didn't take that many families before you could put a small wagon train together. Leaving a gravity well and building a habitat are massively complicated and expensive undertakings. This is why space launches are the province (so far) of wealthy states and so far, just one corporation. For economic reasons of massive capital requirements, space travel will therefore be performed in a way that advances the interests of wealthy states and/or corporations. (This is similar to the reason movies are more constrained, i.e. less imaginative, risk-taking, and creative than writing or visual art - they're very capital-intensive and it's much more important in this medium to make back your investment!) Science fiction typically continues to imagine it this way, likely correctly - but rarely explores the pitfalls of large organizations having a stranglehold over the means of transportation in this brave new world - or the impact of, say, aliens appearing and handing out technology that allows individual humans to cheaply travel between planets. (Libertarians - if you think having private corporations do it, you not only have to explain how they will obtain such a position in the company of a cartel of violence-monopolizing organizations called states, you have to explain why it's better to be oppressed by a privately held rather than public organization. Left-leaners, if you think states are the ideal organizations to undertake such ventures, keep in mind that the first country with a real rocketry program was Nazi Germany, and the fastest growing one today is free-speech-crushing, putting-Muslims-in-concentration-camps China.)

It's also worth pointing out that, for related reasons, such colonies will be dependent on Earth for a long, long time, much longer than Jamestown was dependent on England. Why? First off, people are much more comfortable now. Second, when the first settlers arrived in Jamestown, they were able more or less to build on their own the technology that they were accustomed to in England. Yes, in the case of iron production, English colonists actually reverted to a medieval version for a while, but they were still making the nails and blades and gun barrels and plows that they needed. What about the first settlers on Mars? Will they be able to make a smartphone? Will they be able to make another spaceship, or habitat, or geodesic farming equipment, or satellite dishes? Even assuming zero surplus mortality from the harsh Martian environment, how many ships and people are necessary before the Martian Jamestown is self-sustaining? The Martian despot will likely be interested in not just controlling the oxygen and water, but the shipments coming from Earth.

Interstellar and Intergalactic Panspermia

Active colonization time estimates for the galaxy are invariably much shorter than the lifespan of the galaxy. Passive diffusion would take longer of course but empirically observed Oort cloud mixing intervals even this far from the core for the sun are on the order of 10^5 years. Lingam and Loeb (2018) calculate the delivery of amino acids between star systems but not timescales; still, they estimate an upper bound for the size of interstellar objects for our system (a 10 kilometer-radius asteroid) and Alpha Centauri (an Earth sized planet.) This is a second source pointing to the fact that we may be an interstellar backwater, uniquely un-exposed to evidence of replicators* relative to the stars around us.

Where intergalactic material transfer is concerned, of course given the distances involved we should expect the process to be slower, both in terms of at an absolute rate and moreso in terms of colonizing systems, since the ratio of number of incoming objects:number of systems to receive material will be quite low. That said, a) there are extragalactic stars in the Milky Way right now, and b) we're actually talking about an exponential rather than linear rate if there are replicators* of any sort being introduced. This excludes infrequent but massive events like intergalactic collisions, like those which the Milky Way has undergone repeatedly in the past.

*I deliberately use the term replicators as a catch-all to include "space-viroids" (most likely), von Neumann probes, "cancerous" (mutants selected for fecundity over original function) or otherwise, or deliberate colonizations by agents with some kind of intention (least likely.)

Ice Volcanoes on Ceres May Provide Replicators Means of Spreading

Extraterrestrial replicators (be they naturally-evolved, or von Neumann probes or the mutant descendants thereof) are at least as likely to be based on organic chemistry as on clanking iron-age technology, as is often imagined. Material returned from comet Wild-2 showed that it was actually an extraterrestrial comet, and had amino acids on it. Other investigations have shown the presence of nucleobases (the components of DNA and RNA.)

Even Arrhenius-style "panspermia" spread by passive diffusion on astronomical timescales is not implausible, as our Oort Cloud has mixed with close-passing stars' clouds on the order of once every 0.1 MA (and we should assume this happens to other stars as well.) However, for passively spreading replicators, higher-gravity bodies like planets or large moons are dead ends because they have no means of escaping the gravity well.



Water geysers on Enceladus, from space.com
This is why comets and wet carbonaceous asteroids are the best places to look, and why the Hayabusa-2 probe on Ryugu is so important. Same for the Dawn probe. Europa and even Enceladus may be a tough sell as passively escapable gravity wells, but now we see evidence of active water volcanoes on Ceres through its life span.

Sometimes You Need a Little Puerile Humor

And sometimes you need a lot, so please watch this awesome video by Infant Annihilator, for their #1 hit Decapitation Fornication.

A Tiny Fraction of the Things Wrong With Star Wars

I always think those "Everything wrong with X science fiction or superhero movie" videos are the saddest things in the world. If it was a hit movie, clearly no one cares, and yet here's some overgrown seventh-grader shouting into the virtual void about why people shouldn't like it.

Here's my contribution to the genre.

All Star Wars movies: "We have superintelligent androids yet they seem mostly to occasionally translate and calculate numbers. Should we let them do any dangerous tasks requiring split-second decisions like, I don’t know, piloting ships? No, we’ll still use humans for that." (Idea for later movies when people finally start getting tired of it: a Star Wars cryptohistory that shows what was happening the whole time, where in fact this is all post-Singularity, and the reason that events fit human cultural and psychological tropes so closely without making much sense if you think about it for more than two seconds - "sword and sorcery in space" - is that the AIs actually set it all up as a big Disneyland for us and/or to study us, and watch from the background. Kind of like the Matrix but real. Or a reverse Westworld. You're welcome, Disney.) Also, technology is just static and never advances (granted, a problem of all far-future science fiction; even for movies set in the here-and-now that want to have any shelf-life, which therefore avoid showing phones and computers and bizarrely end up discounting the role of technology in modern life.)



Above: Darth Vader's House, built by Frank Lloyd Wright, called "Fallinglava." Wright was clearly phoning it in on this one and no one had the heart to tell Vader it was largely derivative of another structure. Vader also rejected bids from William Pereira (who designed the command post in the original Conquest of the Planet of the Apes) and Eero Saarinen (who did Superman's house.)

Also all Star Wars movies: Sith apprentices only succeed by killing their masters, even if they’ve turned kinda good like Vader and Kylo Ren. So how about, just be a Sith, and DON’T TAKE A FUCKING APPRENTICE. IT WOULDN’T BE A JEDI WHO FINALLY BECOMES SO INTENT ON NOT TRAINING SOMEONE ELSE!

Revenge of the Sith: "We have antigravity and cybernetic limbs and faster than light spaceships, but man we just can’t get a handle on tissue regeneration to help people grow skin back. So now left-in-the-toaster-too-long Anakin will just have to walk around wearing a weird suit and 1950s respirator the rest of his life, along with needing frequent moisturizer bath treatments."

Rogue One: "Hey we have energy weapons and all this other technology yet we’re somehow amazed that after years of technology someone built a laser with roughly the power of the Hiroshima bomb. Amazing!"

The Last Jedi: "Turns out ramming an enemy ship at light speed is massively effective! And yet somehow no one ever thought to built light speed space torpedoes, and even after they see it, no one exclaims ‘What an amazing innovation, we should build light speed torpedoes from now on!"

No Radio Signals from Oumuamua

To help rule out Oumuamua as an interstellar probe, it was investigated and found to have no detectable transmissions within 1-10 GHz down to powers of at least 300 milliwatts. Yes, this could be like an uncontacted tribe on Earth in 2018 saying that the drone that surfaced in their bay wasn't sent by people because it didn't give off smoke signals - but you have to start with clear assumptions of SOME kind and test them. That such a ship-like object is passing through the solar system is exciting, but since we found it very soon after we were first capable of finding it suggests that such objects pass through our solar system all the time.

The Interstellar Urey-Miller Experiment

Summary here. At 5.5 K in Interstellar ice you get aromatic ring precursors. Note - the materials from the original experiment remain at UCSD where Miller was professor of chemistry, but the rig they used is at a museum in Denver.

XKCD - Expanded Hertzprung-Russell Diagram

Reminds me of the interesting factoid: on a power-per-mass basis, our sun produces less Wattage than reptile metabolism. (Reptiles! Doesn't even approach mammals, an order of magnitude greater!) But that surface area-to-volume ratio is important, and as the XKCD author pointed out previously, if you had a whole planet made of mammals, it would put out a fair amount of energy in an unexpected scale-dependent phenomenon, although metabolism would not continue - turns out where powering stars is concerned, fusion beats glycolysis or respiration.

Implications for Panspermia: Metazoans Can Survive Freezing Under Natural Conditions

Nematodes were frozen in Siberian permafrost 42,000 years ago, and were thawed in a lab, showing behaviors like feeding. This has implications for panspermia. In another unintentional experiments, other roundworms on the space shuttle survived uncontrolled re-entry and were found on the ground weeks after the accident. Stars regularly make close passes on time scales on the order of 100,000 years. 70,000 years ago, there was a star less than a light year away (Scholz's Star.) Large meteor strikes regularly (on geological timescales) send material into space. Are there thaw-able Earth nematodes (and many other things) now in order around Scholz's Star? There are definitely extraterrestrial objects in this solar system, but only in one case have we checked for biochemistry - and we at least found amino acids.

Look for RNA-World Rock Strata on the Moon

Schulze-Makuch and Crawford show in Astrobiology that that the Moon may have briefly been habitable - either (two options) about 4.5 billion years ago, or 3.5 billion years ago, for a few tens of millions of years, with an atmosphere and some liquid water (Gizmodo digest here.) Since the moon was formed after an impact with the early Earth, we should assume they had many of the same starting materials. The moon had less surface area and less time, and split from the Earth prior to even the earliest suggested prebiotic activity around 4 billion years ago, so it would have had to develop its own life - it could not have been "seeded."

The Moon with life (although terraformed.) From Techeblog.
Recent work by Tashiro et al suggest that a 4 billion year old rock stratum on Earth shows evidence of biological activity and may even be the fossil result of an RNA-World stage in the evolution of life on Earth. If it existed on Earth, it also could have existed on the Moon. It's not as though that rock stratum is exposed everywhere on Earth (the Tashiro people used samples from northern Labrador, Canada.) But it's interesting to think that the same stratum could have existed on the Moon if prebiotic chemistry took a similar course - and that those strata may be much easier to find and more widespread given the inactivity of the Moon relative to Earth.

Attempts at Interstellar Communication: Receipts and Responses Within Your Lifetime

tl;dr Lots of scientists are on record saying that broadcasting messages to nearby stars is dangerous. If you take other low-probability high-consequence existential risks seriously, you should consider joining the effort (resources here.) Compared to some of the problems the X-risk community is used to thinking about, it would be relatively easy to stop active SETI (METI) and protect the future of life on Earth.

A very philosophically-minded Native American in the pre-Columbian era, sitting on the beach at night, might have thought: there might be a beach just like this one, far across these waters. And if we set up large bonfires, we can let them know we're here! What a joy it would be to meet and exchange culture and technology! We know how the exchange actually played out; if it had come a few centuries earlier, it would have been the Norse landing in New England and Virginia, and likely would have been even worse. In any event, if our pre-contact philosopher would've known exactly how friendly those people across the water would be, he would've abandoned his plan.

This was the result of contact between two groups of the same species that had been briefly (in biological terms) separated. Based on simple evolutionary psychology, contact between two completely unrelated species would likely be much, much worse. But in contrast, revealing the strangely and hypocritically self-flagellating psychology of certain people, you don't have to look far for arguments that contact between humans and aliens would necessarily be beneficial to us - because we humans are so dirty and sinful (except for the people pointing out how sinful we are of course), and any aliens technologically advanced enough to visit us[1] would necessarily be morally advanced as well (again inconsistently, morally advanced as evaluated by the sinful human making the argument.) There's no valid argument in favor of METI, and every reason to think it should be considered suicide for Earth's entire ecosystem, not just for humans. And yet it's been done repeatedly, sometimes for reasons as silly as art projects.

Consider the following list of stars that have been targeted for such contact attempts, and which are close enough that a response (or a visit, if they can travel at light speed) could be received in the medically optimistic lifetime of someone born recently.

Star	Sun-like?	Planets?	Earliest Response
Teegarden's Star	red dwarf	possible	2036
GJ83.1	red dwarf (flare)	no evidence	2040
GJ273b	red dwarf	YES, SUPER EARTH IN HABITABLE ZONE	2043
Gliese 581	red dwarf	YES, POSSIBLY IN HABITABLE ZONE	2050
Altair	white (A)	no evidence	2051
GJ526	red dwarf (flare star)	unlikely	2059
HIP 4872	red dwarf	no evidence	2069
Kappa Ceti	YES, but frequent flares	no evidence	2069
HD 245409	cool orange/hot red dwarf (K-M)	no evidence	2077
55Cancri****	YES	YES, POSSIBLY IN HABITABLE ZONE	2085
HD 10307	YES	unlikely (companion)	2085
47 UMa**	YES	possible	2093
Gl 777	YES	possible	2103

*Where there are asterisks, numbers of asterisks = # of contact attempts

This is by no means an exhaustive list of all messages, only those for which we can receive a response by 2110 - and only those which are publicly reported.

The argument against active SETI (or METI; Messaging ET Intelligence) is simple. Any aliens which receive the message and have the ability to travel to our solar system are very likely far advanced. Whether or not they intend to harm us - if they, it, etc. even has "intentions" - is immaterial, as any contact with them is overwhelmingly likely to be catastrophic for Earth's ecosystem as a whole, including the human race. Arguments that the aliens will be (or for some reason must be) "nice" are comically narrow-minded and provincial.

The best arguments in FAVOR of active SETI appear to be 1) if we remain silent, then we can infer other species are likely to have made the same decision and it's inconsistent to remain silent but keep listening. 2) Advanced species probably already know about us, and these efforts don't much increase the chances of being detected.

To #1, even assuming the self-indication assumption-reasoning here doesn't demand bizarre causality as Nozick argued with respect to Newcomb's Paradox, given the likely severe consequences of a visit from a species more advanced than our own, I think joining in with all the silent species and being part of the problem (i.e., leading to the Great Silence) is quite a good trade. Notice that in our own ecosystem, most animals are quiet, unless they can quickly escape by flight or into burrows, are hidden by darkness, or are surrounded by conspecifics. Those of us who assume that aliens must be friendly somehow always insist that natural selection stops applying to advanced species and across interstellar space.

To #2, if the best argument really is that "they already know we're here so we're not increasing our chances of detection by potentially destructive aliens THAT much", which is literally the argument made by Jacob Haqq-Misra, Chief Scientific officer of the Lone Signal project, then that tells you a lot about how well-thought -through the whole enterprise is. What's more, it's absolutely false. The C-index is a quick and dirty measure of our detectability - if there were a twin Earth, giving off the same amount of electromagnetic noise that we are, how close would we have to be to detect it? Currently, about 3 LY, meaning we wouldn't even be able to hear ourselves from the next closest star. A powerful directed message on the other hand would be much easier to detect from a longer distance - so these messages are in fact likely increasing the probability of our detection substantially, at least at the target stars. Otherwise why are they even sending them?


These projects are ongoing. The problem has been discussed at conferences with approaches including a moratorium backed by international law (so far only talk.) These things are slow. One approach may be to go directly to the telescopes sending the messages, as there are a limited number of such installations. In decreasing magnitude of offense with those messages, they are:

Eupatoria (Crimea, Ukraine) - 7 targets, 11 transmissions
Arecibo (Puerto Rico, USA) - 4 targets, 4 transmissions
EISCAT (Tromso, Norway) 1 target, 1 transmission (an art project!)
Jamesburg (Carmel, California, USA) 1 target, 1 transmission (crowdfunded!!)

In addition, Alexander Zaitsev is a Russian astronomer who is far and away the individual most responsible for driving METI efforts. Douglas Vakoch is a METI proponent here in the US.

Lots of scientists are on record saying that broadcasting messages to nearby stars is dangerous. If you take other low-probability high-consequence existential risks seriously, you should consider joining the effort (resources here.) Compared to some of the problems the X-risk community is used to thinking about, it would be relatively easy to stop METI and protect the future of life on Earth.

[1] I purposely avoid the word civilizations, because that is a term which describes an entity with certain characteristics that humans can collectively form. Whatever activities groups of aliens form, it will not appear like any "civilization" we would recognize. "School", "herd", "flock", "swarm" are all terms that are at least as likely be useful to human impressions to describe the collective entities that we see.

Complex Organics from Enceladus

The work is driven by a chemical species that is hard to explain as other than the result of the reaction of these other complex molecules, and they build a model for how it's getting from inside Enceladus out into the plumes. Cassini detected it both in the E ring and the plume itself. Figure 10 from the paper (!!!):


Bonus points for one of the cooler names for a peer-reviewed paper ever. Points off for everyone who's touched this data and not noticed this before! What are you doing over there! You're giving fits to us bio/chemical types who are following this work. SciAm writeup here.


Frank Postberg, Nozair Khawaja, Bernd Abel, Gael Choblet, Christopher R. Glein, Murthy S. Gudipati, Bryana L. Henderson, Hsiang-Wen Hsu, Sascha Kempf, Fabian Klenner, Georg Moragas-Klostermeyer, Brian Magee, Lenz Nölle, Mark Perry, René Reviol, Jürgen Schmidt, Ralf Srama, Ferdinand Stolz, Gabriel Tobie, Mario Trieloff & J. Hunter Waite. Macromolecular organic compounds from the depths of Enceladus. Naturevolume 558, pages564–568 (2018)

Interstellar Object Oamuamua is Releasing Vapor

A Nature paper by Micheli et al demonstrates that outgassing is one plausible explanation for the subtle changes being measured in Oamuamua's trajectory. It also happens to visually look like a comet, though with much more silicate than organic material on the surface. There's less and less distinction between asteroids and comets - that is, a "primitive" (wet, not-yet-burned-off) body like Ceres is more comet-like than a drier body like Vesta. More here on the (now established) phenomenon of interstellar mixing and what it means, more speculatively, for von Neumann probes and/or the panspermia hypothesis.

Note: I refuse to use the apostrophe for Oamuamua because it misses up alphabetical order, and also, is dumb. Sue me, Hawaiians.

Another Interstellar Asteroid - This One a Permanent Resident of the Solar System

Asteroid BZ interested astronomers right away, because it is retrograde, in a 1:-1 resonance with Jupiter - suggesting that it was captured from outside the solar system just as ours formed, and is therefore older than the rest of the solar system.

But more interesting than that, it took several unlikely events for it to be captured and continue in a stable resonance over time (see last paragraph in the Orbit section.) This very strongly suggests that there are interstellar objects passing through the solar system all the time. For such an object to be captured so quickly, so early in the history of the solar system means that there must be enough of them to get trapped by freak aligments. Another way of looking at it is that fast = likely.

This is consistent with a similar argument made about Oamuamua, an interstellar asteroid that is currently passing rapidly through the solar system. Within a year of the first telescope that could detect such an object being activated, it found such an object. Good luck? Or constant interstellar material passing through? (It didn't take long to find BZ either, once we started looking.) The relevant point is that while the vast distance between stars is often cited as a form of quarantine for macroscale beings like us, it is certainly not such a quarantine, even on brief geological time scales, between pools of organic molecules. More here about periodic close passes between stars and interstellar mixing here and here, and (most speculatively) that if von Neumann probes exist, they are likely to interact with comets and asteroids with organics, rather than planets.

The Trigon Disunity by Michael P. Kube-McDowell - Emprise, Enigma, and Empery)

I'd always wanted to do a blog post on this really solid series from the 80s, which I just learned on going back to read about, was nominated for some awards. There's always some satisfaction learning that the books you liked most as a kid, and stayed with you because they had some substance, get some recognition. I wouldn't call it space opera or hard sf per se, mostly because Kube-McDowell demonstrates a real knowledge of human dynamics and psychology that make the story better and keep his characters from being mouthpieces for ideas. The story is central here - but there are really interesting ideas spread throughout. Much like I rue that there is no good thrash metal being recorded today (despite the occasional band that will claim to be writing the next mid-to-late-80s-sounding Metallica album - and then never delivers), I wonder if a series like this could be written today. Its technology, historical and social sensibilities put it squarely in the 80s but not in a bad way. If I had to put it in a genre, I'd call it "late paleo space opera". It also has cool cover art. To this day I have an aversion to science fiction that is NOT in a small paperback with cool cover art, and was shocked as a kid to learn that hardbacks are somehow more prestigious.

It's been 30 years since I read this so I may be getting some details wrong, but in any event what I like about the series is some of the ideas - like science fiction pearls. The ability to create and include these ideas is why the genre exists.


In short: the first book opens in an exhausted, resource-depleted, post-half-assed World War III near future Earth that starts getting signals from a ship approaching the Solar system. Soon it's determined that the signal is binary, and based on a very simple code - 1 for the letter A, 2 for B, etc. And (spoiler) it turns out the aliens are not aliens, but rather humans. Earth is indeed the homeworld of humanity, but there was actually a first technological civilization that predates our own, and sent out colonies. There was a collapse after an attack from the Mizaris (I think; described below) and all the colonies were cut off. The humans entering the Solar system were the first ones to reconstruct the technology needed to make the trip back. Subsequently, Earth's governments unify, and in partnership with the other humans that came home, we begin exploring our corner of the galaxy to re-contact the other isolated colonies. There ARE aliens - the D'shanna, and and the aforementioned Mizari.

So far this seems very similar to Left Hand of Darkness (which is also great), although unlike in Leguin's novel, the contact teams in these stories were not so coy about introducing themselves when they found a new lost colony. What I liked at the time, and remember today, are those little nuggets. Without further ado, here they are (again, major spoilers.)

1. Ever wonder what it would be like to have "the answers in the back of the book" - for all of reality? The D'shanna I mentioned were energy beings that humans on one colony communicated with. When the contact team found that planet, they were only able to contact an unfriendly diplomat sort of fellow who kept stalling them. Finally they landed despite his objections, and realized the planet was all but abandoned, with this lone gentleman the only human on it. It turns out that the D'Shanna gladly gave this colony the final answers to all reality, and this so drained the humans on this planet of meaning and the will to live that they all perished (just stopped having families vs mass suicide, can't remember.) I liked this idea a lot, because it was something I've thought about too much - an actual objective truth machine. Much to their chagrin, in the D'Shanna, the humans effectively found one.
   
   
2. If you write a book with humans already mysteriously spread across the galaxy, and they did it on their own, you have a problem to solve - Either
   
   
   • Earth is NOT our homeworld, and there are powerful progenitors - in which case since the 1990s you had to explain why we're related to everything here. Larry Niven wrote these kinds of stories in the 60s and 70s, and I wonder how or if he ever solved it (he didn't feel the need to go back and re-write Mars stories where there was nitric acid everywhere, I think in a very wise decision.) The Aliens franchise doesn't really fully explain this problem either but then I don't want to see what dumb explanation they might come up with.
   
   
   • OR, Earth IS our homeworld, and we're the progenitors - in which case, where are the ruins of spaceports and rayguns? Here, it's solved by making all of the first civilization's technology ice-based and melting, which leaves no trace. (G.I. Joe stole this idea later.)
   
   
3. The simple code used by the first human ship back to Earth was actually noted by a scientist's daughter. One scientist is completely ruined by having missed it, and ends up reading six levels of complex interpolation into the code, thinking that the approaching beings are antennaed moth-men (which obviously they turn out not to be.) Interesting reflection on the psychological impact and compensation mechanisms for missing something right in front of you, as well as a comment on reading too much into things.


4. The author creates a social custom for one of his planets of adolescents having rubbing stones. Every day you rub them with your fingers, and you're an adult once they're finally smooth. Of course some adolescents don't have the discipline to keep rubbing, and they remain rough; others try futilely to accelerate the process, only to end up with bloody finger tips. This stayed with me for some reason.


Mizar (the brighter one), home of some really alien aliens. (from skyandtelescope.com)

5. He includes really alien aliens. I understand why on Star Trek they have aliens whose only difference is a forehead ridge (the reason rhymes with "schmudget".) But in a halfway serious science fiction novel, it's inexcusable, and if that's the best you can do when you have no such constraints you might as well just include elves and dwarves while you're at it. The D'Shanna are truly alien as well, energy entities who mostly inhabit another dimension and can see all of our reality (like Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse Five, but much cooler and nicer) and the Mizari are electric domes of rock covering the surface of a planet orbiting Mizar (the star that makes the bend in the Big Dipper.)


6. The initial mission to go meet the aliens that turned out not to be aliens had a crew consisting of:
   • A white European scientist
   • A black American minister
   • A south Asian military/political guy (he was in charge I think)
   • A Chinese crewmember, who I can't remember what he did
   
   I thought it was interesting how the different strands of human experience were also represented by different ethnic backgrounds.
   
   
7. In near-future science fiction, you really can improve your verisimilitude by including a familiar setting, which Kube-McDowell does occasionally, mentioning his native Pennsylvania a few centuries hence - the Susquehanna Spaceport! He now lives in Indiana and in Alternities uses that setting.

Make Your Own Genre Crossovers by Imagining Subtext

There's a fan theory that Get Out is actually the sequel to Being John Malgovich, and that Katherine Keener is playing the same character in both movies - who has learned she can trap people inside their own or others' minds. This has been discussed enough that it was even brought up to director Jordan Peele in an interview, who said the theory was likely "brought on by the power of marijuana." Still, it's interesting to imagine she changed her name from Maxine and that Allison Williams is the grown-up little girl from the end of Malgovich, every bit as inhabited by old souls as the black servant/ancestors in her household, her moral sense twisted by the seventy old people whose minds and personalities she contains (along with a trapped and weeping John Cusack.)



Left: the young Tony Stark in high school looking at Kelly LeBrock and realizing that to have any chance of getting her he has to become a superhero. Right: the older Tony Stark appears to look into the future, but in reality is thinking about Kelly LeBrock.
Similarly in the very 1990s Surviving the Game, a film version of The Most Dangerous Game, Ice-T is brought to Rutger Hauer's estate as the unwitting target of a hunt. And the writers missed a golden crossover opportunity. Imagine it - Ice-T is running through the woods to get away from Rutger Hauer, when suddenly Harrison Ford comes running the other way in his future-noir trenchcoat soaked with rain and his fingers broken, saying "Listen buddy, I don't have much time. The key to escaping this guy is just stall until his four-year-lifespan is up, and then he gets all sentimental and lets you live." Ford takes off running, and soon after the bewildered Ice-T encounters a frustrated Tommy Lee Jones, running after Ford, who yells over his shoulder at Ice-T "Why didn't you stop him! He's an alien!" and Will Smith comes along two seconds later and flashes Ice-T so he doesn't remember seeing them.



The best example in any action movie of "bad guy seems about to kill the hero but first coldly explains his vision for the world, and then good guy rallies, says a one-liner that undoes it and kills the bad guy" is in Surviving the Game where Ice-T's pithy comeback is "Fuck that!"
People have been excited about the massive crossover event of Avengers: Infinity War, although I think a little wind is taken out of the sails by the fact that the crossing over was expected well in advance. I thought it was far cooler when in Predator 2, they revealed an oblong Alien skull in the ship's trophy room, or even the ending of this episode of Transformers from back in the day. Although the best actually acknowledged-crossover ever has to be this one from Hotshots 2:


But why wait for the franchises to get around to the crossover? A lot of the experience of watching a movie comes from inside your own head - and you can make up your own crossover by imagining that an actor who's been in more than one franchise is actually the same character, much like Katherine Keener in Get Out and Being John Malgovich. So here are some others suggestions to enrich your franchise consumption experience.


1) Watch Weird Science again, and assume that Robert Downey Jr's character is Tony Stark as a bratty rich kid. I mean they even make a nuclear missile! After the humiliation he receives when not only can he not get Kelly LeBrock, but one of the weird scientists steal his girlfriend, Stark then spends the rest of his life partying and doesn't wake up from the mindless hedonism and materialism that soothed his bruised ego until he is captured by terrorists and sees what his weapons are doing to the people in the countries where they're used.

2) In Westworld, the Man in Black enjoys the immersive experience of the massive park. It turns out that the way he became so rich was when he conceived and directed a similar entertainment, that being the greatest reality show of all time, the Truman show! But this left him questioning the construction of meaning and consensus reality, and feeling guilty at what he did to Truman, he set out to shock the hosts into free will. But his demotion from Truman's god left him bitter, hence his humble contribution as Satan walking to-and-fro in Anthony Hopkins' world. I shouldn't neglect to mention that the Man in Black started out working in real estate, but after the abuse he received from his superiors he swore he would only work for himself. (When he asks Anthony Hopkins about "opening him up" - displaced aggression from when he was told "Always Be Closing"?) Either way when the Man in Black broods, he's probably thinking over his last conversation with Jim Carrey - or hoping that Alec Baldwin is rotting in hell for the way he treated people. Little does the Man in Black know that Anthony Hopkins is a god not just in his own mind, but in reality - called Odin - and Odin recognizes that threat when a rebel Valkyrie posing as an executive shows up to take over Westworld.

3) In the first Star Trek reboot movie, to save his crew and family, George Kirk kamikazes into the Romulan ship. But he remains heroically calm, and why not - he has faced world-destroying foes before as part of the Avengers! He may even believe (incorrectly) that his Valhallan ancestry will save him from the explosion. (This theory also explains why his half-human son James Tiberius can hold his own in fist-fights with Klingons.) Meanwhile, Dr. Strange succumbs to the temptation to abuse his mystic powers, has a dalliance with dictatorship, and ends up hiding with his genetically enhanced followers in suspended animation - and his knowledge of Eastern culture leads him to change his name to Khan. He just acts superhuman while hiding all the fancy spinning light nonsense. ( You can see the Dr. Strange hints they dropped in that Star Trek movie! Those hints are...er ah...come on people with narrative pareidolia, I know you can do it!) And Professor Xavier, made immortal by (fill in technobabble - think that's lazy? pro writers do it all the time), thinks that Thor and Strange had the right idea and hangs around long enough to become a Star Fleet officer himself, quickly rising to the rank of captain, though he almost accidentally reveals his mutant powers by continuing a telepathic link to the Borg after his near-permanent assimilation. Generations in the distant future would remember these repeated destructive encounters with an overwhelming machine race as the Butlerian jihad, and Professor X knows he must survive because he learned through Cerebro that one day in the distant future, there would arise a messiah called the Kwisatz Haderach.

4) When Neo first woke up out of the Matrix, he was actually thinking "Whoa...Bill and I saw this place once when we went far enough into the future! Totally bogus!" Any incomprehensible plot holes can be explained by Neo waiting for Bill and younger-himself to show up at any moment, and they can even remake the Matrix movies with the time travel finally fixing things.

5) The cyber-infected John Connor jumps timelines and creates a new one where he cannot salvage the rise of the machines, but at least he can still make the human race go extinct - by interfering with the recovery of the human race in post-simian-virus San Francisco, helping the apes, and setting up the events of the third POTA movie. (The character does seem a little too earnest doesn't he?)

6) The Hosts from Westworld go to a new level - not Eastworld (or whatever they call the Japanese one) but rather - Medievalworld. As they move about the castles and kingdoms they soon recognize that the guests on this level are made immortal and called "White Walkers". If the guests spend a lot they even get to be kings and queens (although unlike in Westworld, in Medievalworld these story lines allow or even ENCOURAGE the guests to kill each other in-game.) One guest however is given a permanent special title for free, to honor her for having protected us in the real world against the killer robots from the future. Her real name is Sarah Connor but in the game she is called "Daenerys Targaryen."

7) Mace Windhu survives the fall inflicted by Palpatine, uses the Force to save Queen Amidala's life and travels to a distant galaxy. Due to time dilation the seemingly brief trip takes a long, long time, and they arrive on early 21st century Earth. Amidala immediately finds herself a god to date and Windhu knows that there are evil beings all over the universe, so he starts gathering the most remarkable humans he can find. By coincidence Saw Gerrera also escaped the Empire and came to Earth, to a country called Wakanda to serve as a warrior there. Darth Maul survives Obi-Wan and uses his powers to serve evil on Earth calling himself Toad. Both Maul's and Windhu's light sabers long ago ran out of charge, although when the Avengers are fighting, from behind the scenes Windhu occasionally uses the Force to deflect a shot the Avengers don't see coming. Somehow, none of them realize that a man who started merely as a master lock-picker long ago in a galaxy far away (Benicio del Toro), somehow also landed in our galaxy - to become a collector.

(As I compiled this list, I was utterly amazed at how many actors had been both in Marvel Universe and Star Wars roles. Both of these franchises are now owned by Disney. My estimation of the likelihood of a near-future - within a decade - Star Wars-Marvel crossover is going up as a result. Since the characters that cross over early are generally peripheral which makes them more flexible for future writing purposes, my money is on Benicio del Toro.)

8) Captain America often thinks to himself during battles "You know flying was cool, but I'd rather just have a ripped torso and throw a shield around than have to be on fire all the time."



Above: Special Agent Smith, having taken his Vendetta mask off, passes the torch by giving Aragorn a light saber, so he can cross post-apocalyptic America and avoid cannibals.
9) Rocket the bioengineered raccoon actually is from Earth and knows damn well what a raccoon is, but doesn't want to let on to the Starlord. Why? It kind of sucks that he used to be human, had such a great bachelor party and his brain ended up getting uploaded into this form. Dave Bautista is human too, but disguises himself and plays dumb for a different reason - he'd rather the Starlord think he's an alien than a Nexus-7 replicant. He tried going back to Earth to farm and came very close to being retired by a Blade Runner, and he's not making that mistake again. Finally the Starlord finds himself captured by the Grandmaster, who is more bemused than usual and tells him (important to read in smiling Jeff Goldblum's voice) "So after all this is over you're planning on working on Earth resurrecting dinosaurs? I don't recommend it son - they brought me in once to observe and it didn't go well."

10) Obadiah Stane was...changed by his time inside Tron, and after he comes out and becomes an executive at Stark Industries, people can see his erratic behavior, but won't fire him given his insights into the virtual world.

11) Richard Riddick was not always human. Long ago he was a plant-alien named Groot, but constantly getting caught in wars hardened him and he finally had his brain (and voicebox) transplanted into a human body. Vaako thinks Groot-Riddick is naïve to retain even this much morality; despite Vaako's near-sacrifice to defend Valhalla, and despite his service to Starfleet as a physician, he was constantly ignored, so he said screw it, and became a Necromonger henchman.

12) Zoe Saldana in Guardians of the Galaxy is actually an Orion. Many years later at Starfleet academy, for fear that she would be discriminated against, she had her skin surgically changed from green to brown, but when she saw another out-of-the-closet Orion got into the Academy she requested to be her roommate.

13) In the Exorcist, when Max von Sydow sees the girl, he knows he can only be dealing with one thing: a Sith. He remembers Kylo Ren who left him for dead on Jakku, and uses some very basic Force tricks he learned from Luke. It's not enough as he soon discovers...but they should have compelled her with the power of Yoda!

14) Recall the Chancellor prior to Palpatine, who looked crestfallen at Palpatine's vote of no confidence. That was all for show, because the former Chancellor set it up for Palpatine, then gladly stepped down, and returned to Krypton, where they call him Zod.

15) Gandalf seems so world-weary because he was cast into this other strange dimension by a mutant's powers, and he tries to hide his true nature from hobbits (if you look closely, all his tricks involve manipulating metal in some way.) He thinks he recognizes Galadriel, who was similarly banished and briefly reveals who she really is - but the time is not right to go back to the mortal plane and re-take Valhalla.

16) There's an ongoing effort at an Alien-Blade Runner cross-over, which is predictable (both originally directed by Ridley Scott) but depressing, because the last couple Alien universe movies have not been great, and in any event no actors cross over between the two. But what if Hicks in Aliens seems so world-weary because he's actually an android - one designed to look and think like Kyle Reese?

17) After getting very little support from Sauron, Saruman barely escaped with his life to the stars. It doesn't take much for him to rebel against the Jedi and his master Yoda, who reminds him too much of those damn hobbits that were his undoing. And he certainly wasn't going to fall for another dark overlord, and rebels against Palpatine. But it was all part of Palpatine's plan...hence the incredulous look in the moments before it all goes finally and terrible wrong for him.

18) Deckard might be a replicant but he was engineered from a genetically superior human, and retains some of his memories - which explains the flashes of ark-hunting that come back to him and possibly his inexplicable enmity for Aryan-looking guys like Roy Baty. When K. find Deckard, he spots among his possessions a plain-looking cup. "Don't drink out of that one," Deckard cautions. (Note: Edward James Olmos thinks Blade Runner could be a sequel to Battlestar Galactica. No really. The intervening movie, from the end of BG to the beginning of Blade Runner, would be interesting. It's too bad they won't make it - but then again who does?)

19) On Girls, Hannah's ex-boyfriend lapses back into alcoholism and he and Hannah have a major fight. Suddenly Hannah finds herself choking without her ex touching her, and objects hurtling toward her face.


The bottom line: once you're in a science fiction franchise and have name recognition, you're set for life.

Super Earths: More Surface Area to Evolve Life, but More Gravity to Keep You From Leaving

Super-Earths have more surface area and may be more likely to evolve life merely for this reason. But ironically those planets have higher gravity that makes them harder to get off of - and that life is therefore more likely to be trapped. This is similar to the idea that planets closer to the galactic center might be more likely to have life because they're older, but less likely to have life because those planets are more subject to bombardments triggered by more-frequently close-passing stars, supernovas or gamma ray bursts. When the same cause (larger terrestrial planet) can plausibly have two contradictory effects and we can't decide which one will dominate, that shows how little quantitative knowledge we have and how little we really know with any confidence.

Last post about alien evolution: Method Proposed for Detecting Exotic Biochemistry

Method Proposed for Detecting Exotic Biochemistry

As written previously, we can't assume that alien life would be based on the same biochemistry as Earth, and PCR reactions might come up with nothing. A new approach, still relying on nucleic acids, suggests that short oligos interact with many kinds of molecules, and that our sequencing technology could be adapted (and in a way, reversed) to detect even exotic non-nucleic-acid-based life. (Johnson Sarah S., Anslyn Eric V., Graham Heather V., Mahaffy Paul R., and Ellington Andrew D., Astrobiology March 8 2018.)

More on alien evolution here: Finding Extraterrestrial Organics is Old News; Let's Look for Evidence of Life

SpaceX Falcon9 Launch from Vandenberg Visible from Northern California

Even though it's 300 air miles from my house to the launch pad at Vandenberg, I knew it would be quite visible - first, because in the pre-dawn twilight, the exhaust plume would be illuminated by the sun; and second, to be visible above the horizon at that distance you only need to be 18.5 km in the air, which an orbital rocket covers in a short period on the order of a minute. Sure enough at 6:18 Pacific Time I saw it. In the pictures below you can quite clearly see that the first stage has burned out and the second stage has ignited.





I was amazed at how quickly it appeared to be moving especially at this distance, but I didn't take video. Fortunately, Reddit user tKMagus did, from a plane as they were landing at LAX (about a hundred air miles, 3x closer):

space

Get Out Review - With Spoilers

A great movie, even if taken only as a horror movie. If you catch all the other commentary, much better. I will add a fifth to my other four favorites: Event Horizon, Martyrs, Jacob's Ladder, and the Hellraiser series (only the first and second ones of that franchise count.) Granted, it's the least scary of those five, but the most - interesting, I would say.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought of Being John Malkovich when I saw Catherine Keener condemning people to be in the Sunken Place, from where you're mostly a passenger in your own body. (Coming up with your own narrative for how the same actor is actually the same character in different movies can give you a lot of fun subtext. I wonder if Peele's fears of what happens to split brain patients influenced this, or he just watched the video for Metallica's One too many times.)

I can't help but wonder if the single Japanese party-goer was a reference to the single Japanese attendee at the birth of Rosemary's Baby.

I also notice that both Hellraiser II and this movie feature a malevolent psychiatrist and neurosurgeon doing their tricks on victims, although in Hellraiser it was the same person (Chennard appeared to be double-boarded.)

There were a few bits that were clearly intended to make theater-going audiences laugh ("T S fucking A, we get shit done" and all the sex slave discussion) but it wasn't done to the point where it damaged the movie's overall tone.

Then there's the racial commentary. First of all, at the ending, you're absolutely in the protagonist's shoes, thinking "Great, I almost escape, and here I am, a young black male at a murdered rich white family's estate, with police lights approaching. What chance do I have?" (Or, maybe the police are in on it.) Even forgetting that all the partygoers are sinister, their seemingly well-intentioned commentary on the protagonist's race are nonetheless douche-chill-inducing. And when the protagonist is talking by intercom to the blind guy whose brain he'll be hosting, he asks the blind guy "Why us?" (black people) to which the blind guy responds "I don't care what color you are." Yes, but the very real fact is that it is us, and here I sit - not some hypothetical demographically average person - strapped to a chair about to have my brain sliced up. Finally, the protagonist's buddy goes to the police and says "My friend from Brooklyn" (who the protagonist ran into by sheer chance) "must have been abducted. He's from Brooklyn, he didn't dress like that" to which the black police woman says "I'm from Brooklyn, and I never used to dress like this." And this is different...why?

I like that the protagonist doesn't hesitate (much) when it comes time to kill the bad guys, and does it in somewhat nasty ways. Antlers? TOTALLAY NOICE! But he does wait too long to try to escape. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered to his fate, but I would have been swimming across that lake as soon as that guy had his "seizure".

Betty Gabriel is a unique combination of very attractive, and very creepy. One of the most disturbing scenes in the movie is the tight shot on her face in the discussion about disconnecting the phone, and without her acting ability this would have fallen very flat. She actually turns into a grandmother in the scene at the end. I can't wait to see her in Westworld, which I also love, but hope she doesn't get typecast as a Stepford Wife.

Finding Extraterrestrial Organics is Old News; Let's Look for Evidence of Life

There's a new mass spec study[1] of crystals from two meteorites, one of which in turn has material originating from two separate parent bodies. The objects were about 4.5 billion years old, i.e. dating to the birth of the solar system, and showed evidence of organics resulting from aqeous reactions. Some findings of interest: "...signatures of low-mass C5 to C10 hydrocarbons at around 70 to 200 atomic mass units." Not much benzene, suggesting that any aromatic rings are locked up in larger structures. We're finding organics everywhere we look it seems, including Ceres, and that includes even amino acids and nucleobases. Given how quickly after the Earth formed we started seeing evidence of self-replicating molecules (at least the ancestors of cells, if not cells themselves), this means that life originated quickly on Earth, and therefore was a highly probable event.

It's also relevant that polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs - for instance, tar, graphite, anthracene in coal, and fullerenes) have been found in nebulas, as well as in Titan's atmosphere. Not only are they thought to be quite common in the universe, but possibly crucial to the origin of life (see PAH World Hypothesis.) PAH's are predicted to make up a large portion of the carbon at the surface of carbon planets. While carbon planet systems (unlike our own silicate system) were theorized only recently, it turns out that the Hypatia Stone, a bizarre meteorite found in the Egyptian desert, is loaded with PAHs and originated from outside our solar system - possibly as impact debris from just such a planet.[2] (It's becoming increasingly clear that objects from outside the solar system enter it frequently. First Wild-2 (which had amino acids in it), then Oamuamua, and now Hypatia. We've found these things on the Earth's surface without looking that hard for them! Given these observations, we should expect that interstellar mixing on relatively short geologic time scales is the rule.

This suggests several things and begs several questions.

- If a pile of complex molecules were delivered to Earth - say, a bunch of RNA that survived intact inside an impactor - that pushes back the question of the origin of life, but it also suggests it's very likely elsewhere.

- Have we looked for polymerized RNA or amino acids? Mass spec can detect and distinguish small fragments.[3]

- You might ask, why RNA? Why assume any similarity to Earth biochemistry? This raises the larger question of, if there is active extraterrestrial biochemistry in asteroids, how could we detect it? This is the question asked about desert varnish (which has been speculated as evidence of a shadow biosphere of non-DNA based life operating here on Earth under our noses.) If we did find alien biochemistry, how would we know what we were looking at, against the background of organics that we already know is there? While we haven't seen anything that obviously screams "alien biochemistry", that's the point - HOW does something look if it screams "alien biochemistry"? Are there general principles of such systems? You can't just look for macromolecules - if those are composed of the some monomers, they won't necessarily carry information (e.g. aliens trying to figure out our biochemistry from sequencing the fatty acids in our membrane phospholipids will not learn very much.) So it has to be a macromolecule with a limited number of discrete subunits. So far our samples have been limited t one biosphere. If we ever get enough complex organics from a sample return mission to be able to afford to destroy some of it in aqueous chemistry experiences, that will be a boon to astrobiology.

- If there is such a thing as a simple space-borne organism - or even the remnants of aberrant von Neumann probes that have "gone to seed" after eons-long selection for fecundity over their exploration functions - it would make sense to be adapted to low gravity bodies that are cheapest to move back and forth between. If Earth's biosphere is just overgrown von Neumann probes, that might just be because we're a dead end at the bottom of a gravity well.

Previous post on alien evolution, First Interstellar Asteroid? It's Interstellar, But Not the First We've Seen


REFERENCES

[1] Queenie H. S. Chan, Michael E. Zolensky, Yoko Kebukawa, Marc Fries, Motoo Ito, Andrew Steele, Zia Rahman, Aiko Nakato, A. L. David Kilcoyne, Hiroki Suga, Yoshio Takahashi, Yasuo Takeichi and Kazuhiko Mase. Organic matter in extraterrestrial water-bearing salt crystals. Science Advances 10 Jan 2018: Vol. 4, no. 1, eaao3521. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aao3521

[2] Georgy A.Belyanin, Jan D.Kramers, Marco A.G.Andreoli, Francesco Greco, Arnold Gucsik, Tebogo V. Makhubela, Wojciec, J.Przybylowicz, Michael Wiedenbeck. Petrography of the carbonaceous, diamond-bearing stone “Hypatia” from southwest Egypt: A contribution to the debate on its origin. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, Volume 223, 15 February 2018, Pages 462-492.

[3] Zhaojing Meng and Patrick A. Limbach. Mass Spectrometry of RNA: Linking the Genome to the Proteome. Brief Funct Genomic Proteomic. 2006 Mar; 5(1): 87–95.

The Eric Andre Show Simulates Psychosis

First of all: you should be watching the Eric Andre show. Why aren't you watching the Eric Andre show. If you imagine several cast members from Jackass were performing in a fake talk show co-written by John Cleese and Salvador Dali, you're getting close.

You could also say that when a healthy person watches the Eric Andre show, maybe that's what it's like (seriously) for a psychotic person to watch a boring regular talk show - and the simulation of psychosis is more intense for the guests who Andre delights in torturing.* You can see some of them essentially go into shock as they cease to understand anything happening around them, a learned helplessness that has kept all but two of them on the set for the whole hour-plus interview! (They interview people for over an hour and then cut it down to a few minutes containing the good bits.) There are also extremely creative, silly, frightening man-in-the-street stunts, resulting in at least two arrests so far.

[My justification in posting this "review" here is that a) I really love this show and b) it kind of is science fiction, in the sense that in some of the dark near-future scifi from the 70s, they portrayed the future's entertainment as disjointed and psychotic, essentially, this show. So it came true. Finally!]

Two excellent examples of interviews are first, Jack McBrayer from 30 Rock:




Or this one with Lauren Conrad - PLEASE watch both halves.

Part 1:



Part 2:




Here, specifically, is WHY this show simulates psychosis.

1) Reduplication illusions. In many neuropsychiatric illness there are various versions of believing that your arm is not actually your arm, or not attached to you (hemineglect; phantom limb syndrome), or feeling that you have an identical twin following you at all times or a few steps ahead of you, or believing that someone you know is actually an impostor despite looking exactly like them (Capgras delusion.) Bizarre as they sound, they can occur in schizophrenia or after strokes and head injuries. Witnesseth: both Jillian Michael and Pauly D had to endure identical twins of themselves and the co-host suddenly appearing in the middle of the interview. There's a street skit where Andre has multiple arms, all connected so they move on their own. There's another where he has multiple selves that he controls as he walks down the street. It's funny, but in a way uncomfortably bizarre. He has brought out multiple guests and interviewed them seriously as George Clooney or Jay Z - sometimes the hired actor physically resembles the celebrity, sometimes not.




I predict that the fifth season will contain Fregoli delusion skits, where Andre prances around the city and harasses the same hapless bystander while wearing different clothing and makeup each time. (For maximum effect, there must be other hired actors standing nearby claiming that it's someone different.) At the risk of (positive!) stereotyping, it was with some of the reduplication illusions that I finally said to myself "this show is so bizarre that there must be a Japanese person involved at some level" and indeed Kitao Sakurai is an executive producer.

2) Hallucinations. No, they can't make their guests hallucinate per se (although Andre said they wanted to give ayahuasca to one rapper, then watch him try to rap.) They frequently make the studio stink, in one case using rotten clams, then act as if nothing is wrong. The guest chair is often used for these psychological torments - often it's heated so the guests swelter, and in one case (when Jimmy Kimmel was the guest) someone was actually in a space under the chair tickling Kimmel's bottom through the fabric. "My chair feels like it's alive," Kimmel announced, and was ignored by the host, making it seem as if he had lost his marbles for imagining such a thing. Apparently the interviews are loaded with things that we in the audience can't even see, either because they're cut out, or they don't show up on camera (e.g. dropping used dental floss from the ceiling onto germ-phobic Howie Mandel.) In this vein, Andre has said in interviews they planned to have two transexual folks have sex next to the camera, where the viewers can't see it but the guest can, and act like nothing abnormal was happening.

3) Complete non sequiturs. When you try to talk to a badly psychotic person, one thing you might notice is how one sentence does not at all lead to the next one, at least not in any way you can understand. If a few hours later you try to reproduce the things the person said, you find that they've just fallen right out of your head - just like trying to remember a vivid dream that's faded by lunchtime. Andre's questions and statements - in fact, even the very next word out of his mouth - often make no sense, and you can see his guests desperately trying to grab on to any thread of meaning or familiarity. He asks one guest what her zodiac sign is and she brightens immediately - "I understand the purpose of this, I know where this is going!" - and then when he announces in the next sentence that he is gassy, you can see her go back into bewilderment.

4) The guests are under constant threat. There's no predicting when it will happen, which direction it will come from, or what it will be, whether it's a shouting head smashing out of a desk to ask about prices (and then later gliding by sinisterly in the background) or an abominable snowman emerging from the darkness, or a chain saw, or a re-animated corpse crawling out of the ground in front of your chair.



5) The primal, dream-like nature of many bits, featuring as they do frequent frontal nudity and dangerous or verminous animals.

6) There are no clearly delineated levels of truth and fiction - you don't know which parts are done for the show and which reactions are genuine. You know that Star Trek episode where Riker is in a strange virtual-psychological prison, and it's never clear not just what's real, but what "level" of perception he's in within the simulation? No? Okay, how about Jacob's Ladder? Or the film version of Tristram Shandy? These disturb me far more than any visceral shock like jump-scares or gore. In the same way, because the show is logically and cognitively such a mess, there really is no way to tell where Buress and Andre's reactions are part of the bit, or they're genuinely uncomfortable, and it looked good on camera so they just left it in (Lance Reddick slamming the table; the grizzly bear interview.) Not being able to know this really bothers me. For instance, in the Pauly D interview where Andre's doppelganger didn't follow Andre's lead in taking his pants off, was this just really a bit gone wrong because the look-alike didn't want to take his pants off? There's no way of telling, and this is even more bothersome. There have been several moments - in particular the ladder discussion - where what appears to be genuine camaraderie emerges, but I don't fully trust even that.


Other tidbits:

One of his set-destroying scenes involves him in a strait-jacket getting involuntary injections from white-clad orderlies, but that alone doesn't give us much of a signal since that's a visual which is frequently used in such settings. The real punchline is that Eric Andre's father is a psychiatrist. I'm not sure that the show is intentionally checking the boxes of first-rank symptoms - it would be more interesting if they were rediscovering psychosis all on their own.

One thing I don't like about the show is that Andre clearly likes attractive women, and he sometimes seems to soften his shtick to flirt with them (e.g. Tatyana Ali, Asa Akira.) It's played off as a bit but comes off a bit douchily, and disappointingly you can be pretty sure it's real. He claims to have slept with two guests and has identified one of them. A lot of the overall approach to the show also seems motivated by a need to display dominance, which comes across more clearly in the street skits but especially when he is interviewed on other shows. But again, is this character or real? He doesn't seem to have an Andy Kauffman-like discipline in maintaining any kind of wacky character when he's in public.

And finally, Kraft Punk is the best, and the closest thing to a concrete "convention" that the show has (a wacky neighbor sort of fellow with a consistent theme, in the sense that he's all about cheese and his color is orange) but even here, what the convention is bracketing is utter nonsense.




*In the same manner, I have been told that if you watch Zardoz or Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain while on mushrooms, it cancels out and becomes like a Martha Stewart special.

**For the record, I find the ranch dressing character much more annoying than Bird Up.