Post Life

Selecting the title for blog posts.

At the end of my previous blog post I mentioned Nirutam's pet cat. Why should an alien visitor to Earth have a pet? In this case, Nirutam has been constructing her Selfie during the course of her entire life.

On Nirutam's home world, it is common practice for each person to have an artificial life companion that slowly develops into a cognitive copy of that person. While on Earth, it was convenient to disguise her Selfie as a pet cat.

Stranger Than Truth

an imaginary life form (source)

I previously blogged about Richard Feynman's famous 1959 lecture "Plenty of Room at the Bottom". Feynman entertained a room full of physicists by talking about miniaturization. As an example of encoding information in a small space, Feynman mentioned the idea that a DNA molecules can hold a bit of genetic information in about 50 atoms. It is common practice for physicists to trace the idea of encoding genetic information in molecules back to people like Erwin Schrödinger who in 1940 described the stability of covalent bonds as providing a physical basis for holding biological information (see What is Life?). However, since the early 1900s, biologists knew that chromosomes are composed molecules of some type and those nuclear molecules held the genetic instructions of all living things on Earth. After 1953, it was pretty clear that DNA was the important genetic molecule.

1958 "Parapsyche"

Anything Goes
Before the development of molecular biology and the discovery of the structure of DNA, the nature of life was quite mysterious and science fiction story tellers wrote a lot of nonsense about it. For example, there is a long tradition of uncoupling human consciousness (or "souls") from physical bodies.

In his 1936 story "Liquid Life" by Ralph Farley, he imagined a scientist having a conversation with a liquefied cat. Even without its normal solid physical structure, the cat's consciousness persisted. Raymond F. Jones still had a liquid protoplasm alien in 1944.

In selecting the first alien to introduce to readers of the Exode Saga, it only seems fair to get right to the task of exploring my view of the issue of artificial life forms and possibilities for life after death.

Consciousness Set Free

Original cover art by Edmund Emshwiller

"The Mind Thing", published in 1960 by Fredric Brown, illustrates the type of alien life forms that can be imagined when you are flexible in how you link life, mind and consciousness to the material world. Brown wrote about an alien "mind creature" that could be teleported to Earth and move itself inside a mouse then to the mind of a dog and even take control of a human's mind (after a brief struggle) as easily as we might change our clothes.

Here, 60 years later, many people still prefer to believe in some form of mind-body dualism by which their own consciousness can exist without the support of their physical brain. However, I'm a materialist and I can't write stories about magical minds that exist as migratory non-material entities. Sill, I love the idea of stories in which the minds of biological creatures can survive after death.

Post Life

fun with robots

I've previously blogged about Jack Vance's 1958 story "Parapsyche" in which he seemed to take seriously the idea that human consciousness lives on after death. Here, I want to contrast that view of consciousness with the alternative materialistic approach that was described by Arthur C. Clarke in a 1958 essay called "Of Mind and Matter".

In his essay, Clarke assumed that miniaturized computers would some day have vast information storage and processing power. He went on to suggest that in the far future it might be possible to "reincarnate" human minds in other forms, the details of which are currently beyond our imagination. But when has lack of imagination ever slowed the science fiction story teller? Clarke went on to write about the transformation of Dr. David Bowman into a new form of life, a "Star Child", by making use of advanced alien technology.

Future science: hierions and sedrons.

In 1940, it was easy for a chemist like Isaac Asimov to imagine a future time when the artificial mind of a robot might replicate human thought processes. In 1950, Alan Turing predicted that by the year 2000, it might be possible for computerized systems to be approaching the level of human cognitive abilities.

Asimov and Turing were both restricting their imaginations to the use of hadronic matter as the physical basis for information storage in both positronic robot brains and electronic computers. However, in his 1958 essay, Clarke allowed his imagination to include possible future scientific discoveries that might go beyond human understanding of matter as it existed in 1958.

In my fiction, I image that in addition to hadronic matter, there is also as-yet-undiscovered hierions and sedrons that allow for forms of matter at sub-nanoscopic scales.

Rooms have been added to the bottom (source)

For the Exode Saga, I imagine that the pek have access to zeptite technology which allows for sub-nanoscopic artificial life forms. It is the common practice of the pek to implant hadronic life forms with zeptite endosymbionts. For a biological organism like Nirutam, it would be convenient to keep a "backup copy" of their mind. Such a backup, or Selfie, should reside in another physical body. While on Earth, Nirutam's "backup" takes the form of a cat. Actually, all of the critical information encoding Nirutam's mind is stored in the zeptite endosymbiont of that cat.

International Scientific Investigation Organization

Maturin is not interested in the food.

When two ISIO agents arrive and start searching for Nirutam, the alien is three days in her grave, but they get to meet Maturin, the Selfie. Nirutam was endowed by the pek with an ability to make use of the Bimanoid Interface. Nirutam can link into Nora's thoughts through their shared connection to the Bimanoid interface and Maturin shares this special linkage to Nora.

Maturin does not mind revealing to Nora that she is the "remnant" of Nirutam, but Maturin does not want to do so while the meddling ISIO agents are present. As soon as Nora and Rylla arrive, Maturin goes into hiding. Also, knowing that the ISIO agents are likely to search the premises for Nirutam, Maturin hides the remaining evidence that Nirutam is dead: she left behind her phone and her severed finger is in the freezer in the guest house. The Editor has been planning to perform some alien DNA analysis.

Nirutam's Phone

After the ISIO agents depart, Maturin makes sure that the phone is destroyed along with Nirutam's finger. No physical evidence that an alien was on Earth can be allowed to remain.

The zeptites that hold a copy of Nirutam's mind pattern slip through the hierion tube that connects Earth to Observer Base. The body of Maturin the cat, which is composed of hierions, remains on Earth.

Next: Technology-assisted telepathy

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