The Science of Aliens
Film and television have given us plenty of ideas of what alien llfe might look like. Now, a new exhibition imagines how the denizens of strange new worlds – and their ecosysytems – might appear. Jen Ogilvie paid a visit to London’s Science Museum to make first contact.
All images: Channel 4 / Big Wave
On a world far, far away, a skywhale glides serenely through dense, green-tinged air, past floating photosynthetic bladders and on to a forest where, were it not completely blind, it would be able to make out its reflection in the water pooled in giant saucer-like leaves below. Suddenly, from the dark tangle of branches beneath the canopy flaps a bug-eyed, viciously clawed stalker. The docile skywhale’s time is up. Within minutes, it is surrounded by hundreds of the nightmarish creatures. They descend in a great squawking mass, ripping at its wings with their long, curved, razor-sharp beaks and, once it has fallen, gorge on its flesh before returning with choice morsels to their queen.
Of course, it’s highly unlikely that this exact scene is being played out anywhere in the Universe right now, but the point is that it is scientifically possible that it might be. That is, according to the team of scientists who have dreamt up the alien ecosystem as part of a new exhibition at London’s Science Museum. The unhappy skywhale meets his bloody end on a place called Blue Moon, where air density three times that of Earth keeps his species’s enormous bulk airborne. Meanwhile, over on the red dwarf-orbiting Planet Aurelia, organisms compete for light in a temperate ‘Twilight Zone’, a zone separating two hemispheres, one hot, light and storm-lashed, the other locked in perpetual wintry darkness.
In fact, these two invented alien worlds are more than just part of the exhibition, they are its entire raison d’etre. The other zones are clearly secondary, tacked on to flesh out the ‘experience’. The first explores the use of aliens in popular culture, and its most obvious purpose is to show off a full-size model of Aliens’ Alien Queen. Assorted exhibits – a Dalek, an illustration from Red Riding Hood, cute kids’ toys, an abstract sculpture entitled Are we not the same, you and I? – are chucked together with little regard for chronological or thematic coherence, and while the alien as societal construct is clearly an interesting subject, it feels out of place here, and its treatment half-hearted. A more appropriate angle might have been to trace the history of scientific thought on the extraterrestrial, but one suspects the curators felt this would be a little dry for the 7+ age group they hope to attract, who would presumably rather try on a Ming the Merciless moustache or kill on-screen aliens by stamping on buttons than explore Giordano Bruno’s cosmology.
Next comes a section on weird terrestrial creatures, much of which will be familiar to readers of FT’s ‘Alien Zoo’ column. Given astrobiology’s reliance on our understanding of evolution on Earth, this is far more relevant, and helps warm up visitors’ sense of the possible before their arrival at the mocked-up alien worlds in the next zone. Oddities include the sea spider weedy seadragon, vampire squid and fangtooth, and a table on extremophiles.
The sense of incoherence, however, lingers, as valid points are again muddled in with desperate wooing of the shorter-than-ET generation.
The final zone looks at communication with other worlds, and aside from a “What would you ask the aliens?” machine there’s a round-up of previous messages sent into space and a guess-that-sound apparatus featuring solar flares, pulsars and vibrations on the surface of the Sun.
But, to return to the meat of the exhibition: the idea was to create scientific blueprints of two worlds which could theoretically support life, and then work out what kind of lifeforms might thrive in such environments (see panels). Thus, you have creatures possessing a third ‘eye’ able to detect UV radiation, hydrogen-filled ‘balloon plants’ which explode and release their seeds when they drift into fire, and enormously heavy animals like the skywhale able to fly thanks to a dense atmosphere and high oxygen levels. These were modelled and animated, and the results presented in a two-part Channel 4 programme and on two interactive, multi-user tables in the Science Museum. The tables represent the planet surface, and their touch-sensitive covering curls up the wall and edges overhead to form the sky; digitalised beings move around this skin and, if pressed, reveal the secrets of their existence in text-filled pop-up panels.
Despite their evolutionary particularities, the scientists’ creations are not wildly different from life on Earth. Aqueous worlds support carbon-based organisms which closely resemble those on Earth, because the scientists assume that convergent evolution here shows us attributes – eyes, wings – which bring obvious advantages and thus must be replicated throughout the Universe. Such an approach has much to recommend it – notably its solid foundations in observational evidence – yet it feels rather timid. It’s difficult to ignore the suspicion that the just-different-enough worlds were designed with one eye on winning over an audience. The science isn’t likely to overwhelm the layman (or laychild), and the flora and fauna take on forms and characteristics that we can recognise, thus making us feel we can understand, even sympathise, with the creatures, while finding their worlds visually seductive. “See?” the scientists seem to be saying, “This isn’t so fanciful. Alien worlds are just like the Earth, except more fun and colourful. And aren’t the mudpods cute?”
The problem is not that Aurelia and Blue Moon are particularly flawed, or that the argument that, should life appear, it will develop along certain predictable paths is not entirely legitimate. What is frustrating is the lack of any significant exploration of the alternatives. Where is the summary of the biological and astronomical arguments over whether aliens exist – a discussion of the Drake equation, say, or the Fermi Paradox? Is there not room for a more detailed discussion of where alien life might be found – what kinds of planets, satellites, even stars? What about the possibility of non-carbon-based life – silicone-based, perhaps, like Star Trek’s Horta, or cyborgs, or something utterly beyond our ability to imagine? Without the background material, this is essentially ‘hard’ SF in an unusual medium and without a plot. Aside from giving scientists who’ve spent most of their lives studying fossisciencemuseum.org.uk/aliens, what’s the point?
It’s an understandable question, but unfair. While, to an FT reader, the rather limited scope of the exhibition might be frustrating, the concentration on demonstrating that aliens might really exist has obvious benefits. The knee-jerk sceptics – those who instinctively dismiss aliens as an unenlightened, embarassing folk superstition – might at least concede that the subject is worthy of rational debate; the uncritical consumers of culturally-generated images may be disabused of their notions of little grey men and pointy-eared humanoids; and kids might be persuaded not to bracket aliens together with Father Christmas and the tooth fairy. Though it’s rather perturbing that in many cases such things will be achieved because the Science Museum (or television) says so, rather than through persuasive argument, from a fortean point of view any promotion of a critical stance must be encouraging. For readers planning a visit, however, bear in mind that you could save yourself £8.95 and a trek to South Kensington by borrowing a load of kids, packing as many as possible into a small adventure playground (with adjacent gift shop), and sitting in the middle with an Arthur C Clarke novel.
Blue Moon
Pagoda trees, for example, can grow to over 1,000m (3,280ft), and have huge leaves, or ‘sky ponds’, supported by a strong, interlocking network of branches. Kites cling to the pagodas with muscular feet at the bottom of long tethers, and dangle tentacles down into the water collected in the sky ponds, while skywhales (below) – 600kg (1,320lb) grazers – glide over the canopy on thermals and trawl for plankton-like organisms.
Skywhales are blind, use sonar to navigate, and are hunted by stalkers, which live in colonies in the trunks of the pagoda trees, and have excellent smell, three tongues, sharp beaks and four legs complete with talon-like claws. They also have three large compound eyes giving them 360-degree vision and allowing them to detect polarised light, and they fly at 30mph (50km/h). About five per cent of stalkers are scouts, searching out skywhales and marking them with a chemical that leaves a trail the workers can follow.
Aurelia
Aurelia is an aqueous planet orbiting a red dwarf. Because of its sun’s intense gravitational pull, the planet does not rotate – one side is always dark, the other always light, and life thrives in the temperate zone between the two. Much of this temperate zone is covered by forests of stinger fans, 8m- (26ft-) tall animal-plants topped with large photosynthesising fans which can be closed during UV flares. They have slimy, muscular tentacles to pull them along the ground, and poisonous cells at their base. Mudpods (below) are immune to the fans’ stings, and eat them or use them to build dams.
Mudpods are amphibians with six legs, eyes on stalks, brightly coloured fins on their backs which they raise to signal danger, and bony plates in their mouths to help them dig the burrows they use to hide from UV flares and gulphogs, which look rather like large terrestrial flightless birds. These gulphogs are speedy 4.5m- (15ft-) tall bipeds, with horny serrated toenails used to dig for prey – which, thanks to a dislocatable jaw, they can swallow whole – and teeth that can detect vibrations through the ground. Two camera eyes give them excellent vision, a third ‘eye’ is sensitive to ultraviolet, and they have baboon-level intelligence. Both gulphogs and mudpods are eaten by hysteria, a tiny organism that lives in ponds. Normally solitary, when food is scarce over a million can swarm slime-mould-like into one super-organism which uses poison to paralyse its prey and then floods over the victim’s body and eats it from the inside out.
The Science of Aliens runs til 26 February at the Science Museum, Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London SW7 2DD. Tickets cost £8.95 for adults and can be booked by phone at 0870 906 3890, online at sciencemuseum.org.uk/aliens, or by texting GO ALIEN to 85080.
forteantimes.com
Film and television have given us plenty of ideas of what alien llfe might look like. Now, a new exhibition imagines how the denizens of strange new worlds – and their ecosysytems – might appear. Jen Ogilvie paid a visit to London’s Science Museum to make first contact.
All images: Channel 4 / Big Wave
On a world far, far away, a skywhale glides serenely through dense, green-tinged air, past floating photosynthetic bladders and on to a forest where, were it not completely blind, it would be able to make out its reflection in the water pooled in giant saucer-like leaves below. Suddenly, from the dark tangle of branches beneath the canopy flaps a bug-eyed, viciously clawed stalker. The docile skywhale’s time is up. Within minutes, it is surrounded by hundreds of the nightmarish creatures. They descend in a great squawking mass, ripping at its wings with their long, curved, razor-sharp beaks and, once it has fallen, gorge on its flesh before returning with choice morsels to their queen.
Of course, it’s highly unlikely that this exact scene is being played out anywhere in the Universe right now, but the point is that it is scientifically possible that it might be. That is, according to the team of scientists who have dreamt up the alien ecosystem as part of a new exhibition at London’s Science Museum. The unhappy skywhale meets his bloody end on a place called Blue Moon, where air density three times that of Earth keeps his species’s enormous bulk airborne. Meanwhile, over on the red dwarf-orbiting Planet Aurelia, organisms compete for light in a temperate ‘Twilight Zone’, a zone separating two hemispheres, one hot, light and storm-lashed, the other locked in perpetual wintry darkness.
In fact, these two invented alien worlds are more than just part of the exhibition, they are its entire raison d’etre. The other zones are clearly secondary, tacked on to flesh out the ‘experience’. The first explores the use of aliens in popular culture, and its most obvious purpose is to show off a full-size model of Aliens’ Alien Queen. Assorted exhibits – a Dalek, an illustration from Red Riding Hood, cute kids’ toys, an abstract sculpture entitled Are we not the same, you and I? – are chucked together with little regard for chronological or thematic coherence, and while the alien as societal construct is clearly an interesting subject, it feels out of place here, and its treatment half-hearted. A more appropriate angle might have been to trace the history of scientific thought on the extraterrestrial, but one suspects the curators felt this would be a little dry for the 7+ age group they hope to attract, who would presumably rather try on a Ming the Merciless moustache or kill on-screen aliens by stamping on buttons than explore Giordano Bruno’s cosmology.
Next comes a section on weird terrestrial creatures, much of which will be familiar to readers of FT’s ‘Alien Zoo’ column. Given astrobiology’s reliance on our understanding of evolution on Earth, this is far more relevant, and helps warm up visitors’ sense of the possible before their arrival at the mocked-up alien worlds in the next zone. Oddities include the sea spider weedy seadragon, vampire squid and fangtooth, and a table on extremophiles.
The sense of incoherence, however, lingers, as valid points are again muddled in with desperate wooing of the shorter-than-ET generation.
The final zone looks at communication with other worlds, and aside from a “What would you ask the aliens?” machine there’s a round-up of previous messages sent into space and a guess-that-sound apparatus featuring solar flares, pulsars and vibrations on the surface of the Sun.
But, to return to the meat of the exhibition: the idea was to create scientific blueprints of two worlds which could theoretically support life, and then work out what kind of lifeforms might thrive in such environments (see panels). Thus, you have creatures possessing a third ‘eye’ able to detect UV radiation, hydrogen-filled ‘balloon plants’ which explode and release their seeds when they drift into fire, and enormously heavy animals like the skywhale able to fly thanks to a dense atmosphere and high oxygen levels. These were modelled and animated, and the results presented in a two-part Channel 4 programme and on two interactive, multi-user tables in the Science Museum. The tables represent the planet surface, and their touch-sensitive covering curls up the wall and edges overhead to form the sky; digitalised beings move around this skin and, if pressed, reveal the secrets of their existence in text-filled pop-up panels.
Despite their evolutionary particularities, the scientists’ creations are not wildly different from life on Earth. Aqueous worlds support carbon-based organisms which closely resemble those on Earth, because the scientists assume that convergent evolution here shows us attributes – eyes, wings – which bring obvious advantages and thus must be replicated throughout the Universe. Such an approach has much to recommend it – notably its solid foundations in observational evidence – yet it feels rather timid. It’s difficult to ignore the suspicion that the just-different-enough worlds were designed with one eye on winning over an audience. The science isn’t likely to overwhelm the layman (or laychild), and the flora and fauna take on forms and characteristics that we can recognise, thus making us feel we can understand, even sympathise, with the creatures, while finding their worlds visually seductive. “See?” the scientists seem to be saying, “This isn’t so fanciful. Alien worlds are just like the Earth, except more fun and colourful. And aren’t the mudpods cute?”
The problem is not that Aurelia and Blue Moon are particularly flawed, or that the argument that, should life appear, it will develop along certain predictable paths is not entirely legitimate. What is frustrating is the lack of any significant exploration of the alternatives. Where is the summary of the biological and astronomical arguments over whether aliens exist – a discussion of the Drake equation, say, or the Fermi Paradox? Is there not room for a more detailed discussion of where alien life might be found – what kinds of planets, satellites, even stars? What about the possibility of non-carbon-based life – silicone-based, perhaps, like Star Trek’s Horta, or cyborgs, or something utterly beyond our ability to imagine? Without the background material, this is essentially ‘hard’ SF in an unusual medium and without a plot. Aside from giving scientists who’ve spent most of their lives studying fossisciencemuseum.org.uk/aliens, what’s the point?
It’s an understandable question, but unfair. While, to an FT reader, the rather limited scope of the exhibition might be frustrating, the concentration on demonstrating that aliens might really exist has obvious benefits. The knee-jerk sceptics – those who instinctively dismiss aliens as an unenlightened, embarassing folk superstition – might at least concede that the subject is worthy of rational debate; the uncritical consumers of culturally-generated images may be disabused of their notions of little grey men and pointy-eared humanoids; and kids might be persuaded not to bracket aliens together with Father Christmas and the tooth fairy. Though it’s rather perturbing that in many cases such things will be achieved because the Science Museum (or television) says so, rather than through persuasive argument, from a fortean point of view any promotion of a critical stance must be encouraging. For readers planning a visit, however, bear in mind that you could save yourself £8.95 and a trek to South Kensington by borrowing a load of kids, packing as many as possible into a small adventure playground (with adjacent gift shop), and sitting in the middle with an Arthur C Clarke novel.
Blue Moon
Pagoda trees, for example, can grow to over 1,000m (3,280ft), and have huge leaves, or ‘sky ponds’, supported by a strong, interlocking network of branches. Kites cling to the pagodas with muscular feet at the bottom of long tethers, and dangle tentacles down into the water collected in the sky ponds, while skywhales (below) – 600kg (1,320lb) grazers – glide over the canopy on thermals and trawl for plankton-like organisms.
Skywhales are blind, use sonar to navigate, and are hunted by stalkers, which live in colonies in the trunks of the pagoda trees, and have excellent smell, three tongues, sharp beaks and four legs complete with talon-like claws. They also have three large compound eyes giving them 360-degree vision and allowing them to detect polarised light, and they fly at 30mph (50km/h). About five per cent of stalkers are scouts, searching out skywhales and marking them with a chemical that leaves a trail the workers can follow.
Aurelia
Aurelia is an aqueous planet orbiting a red dwarf. Because of its sun’s intense gravitational pull, the planet does not rotate – one side is always dark, the other always light, and life thrives in the temperate zone between the two. Much of this temperate zone is covered by forests of stinger fans, 8m- (26ft-) tall animal-plants topped with large photosynthesising fans which can be closed during UV flares. They have slimy, muscular tentacles to pull them along the ground, and poisonous cells at their base. Mudpods (below) are immune to the fans’ stings, and eat them or use them to build dams.
Mudpods are amphibians with six legs, eyes on stalks, brightly coloured fins on their backs which they raise to signal danger, and bony plates in their mouths to help them dig the burrows they use to hide from UV flares and gulphogs, which look rather like large terrestrial flightless birds. These gulphogs are speedy 4.5m- (15ft-) tall bipeds, with horny serrated toenails used to dig for prey – which, thanks to a dislocatable jaw, they can swallow whole – and teeth that can detect vibrations through the ground. Two camera eyes give them excellent vision, a third ‘eye’ is sensitive to ultraviolet, and they have baboon-level intelligence. Both gulphogs and mudpods are eaten by hysteria, a tiny organism that lives in ponds. Normally solitary, when food is scarce over a million can swarm slime-mould-like into one super-organism which uses poison to paralyse its prey and then floods over the victim’s body and eats it from the inside out.
The Science of Aliens runs til 26 February at the Science Museum, Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London SW7 2DD. Tickets cost £8.95 for adults and can be booked by phone at 0870 906 3890, online at sciencemuseum.org.uk/aliens, or by texting GO ALIEN to 85080.
forteantimes.com