In "Semiotics" Beagle5 is found in the Triangulum Galaxy cataloged as Messier 33.
Here AL identifies plant life forms. Being able to identify forms of life from a distance may not be so unlikely.
A new tool invented by a group of researchers from the University of Bern makes it possible to take a first, important step forward in this direction. It is a brightness detector able to recognize when the light that is passing through it has been reflected by an organic molecule; it does this by exploiting a unique property of living matter called chirality. The study describing the experiment was published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Semiotics is a tribute to Semiosis. Semiosis is a 2018 science fiction novel by American writer and translator Sue Burke. Semiosis is about colonists starting a new life on the planet Pax and their alliances with sentient indigenous plant species. The title of the book refers to semiosis, a communicative process using signs.
In "Semiotics" and in "Just plants" there is a reflection on alien life, on the forms it could take and how it could evolve. If we only take into consideration how many forms life has taken on planet Earth, we can get an idea of how far it could be from the classic alien with two eyes, mouth, two arms and two legs.
Could intelligence and consciousness evolve from beings similar to terrestrial plants? What do we know about our plants? Do they have a communication system? If so, how does it work?
To talk about communication we must start by asking ourselves: can plants respond on a sensorial level to an external event in a period of time compatible with that necessary to formalize a communication system? Between cause and effect, therefore between sender and recipient, can a relationship be defined such as to validate a form of bidirectional information transfer?
A first answer can be obtained by observing Mimosa Pudica, a plant belonging to the Mimosaceae family that has this bizarre behavior: if you touch it, it retracts its leaves in real time.
There are also the classic carnivorous plants which in another way and through their spectacular snap mechanism, make us assume that at least one channel model on the basis of which to establish any communication may exist and act on a time scale proportionate to ours.
In fact, if we think about it, these plants seem more alive than others because of this compatibility in cause-effect relationships.
Let it be clear that we are not talking about a behavior similar to that of any brain in the animal world, also because as we know they are not provided even at the level of a single neuron. That is, plants certainly don't think and don't feel, or at least they don't do it as we understand it.
However, the thing that brings us together and that makes the discussion more interesting is that even in that realm the mechanism of action potentials is exploited, which we can describe in a very superficial way as those signals of stimulation and the birth of a behavior.
Several studies have been conducted in this regard through which, for example, an answer has been given to phenomena such as those that see some plants connect some fringes of their roots in the subsoil, inducing similar plants to arrange themselves so as to grow by wrapping in a circle a plant not of the same species to stop its growth.
These are phenomena that would suggest that a communication system is present.
The action potentials I was talking about are obviously different from those generated by the neurons of our brain, since if the latter are the consequence of an electro-chemical process produced by the sodium-potassium pump, that of the plants instead arose from the movement of ions of calcium, potassium and chloride as well as differing because they are much slower than ours (a few tens of milliseconds instead of a few seconds of the latter, for example in the case of the carnivorous plant we are on the order of 3 seconds).
A good source for deepening the mechanism of the carnivorous plant and its electrophysiological mechanisms can be found in the publication Active movements in plants: Mechanism of trap closure by Dionaea muscipula Ellis. where the due considerations are also made on the fact that the trap does not close by muscular action (since it does not have any) but by rapid osmotic change.
We have come to talk about this because it is clear that although different, at least an internal communication mechanism exists, so much so that there is an entire field of study called plant electrophysiology.
It is interesting, for example, that a recent article in Nature describes the discovery of a propagation of the electric potential along a plant in response to lesions on a leaf.
But is there any experiment that can concretely highlight a communication between plants?
Yes, many, and to close the circle, I report this presentation by Greg Gage, a well-known neuroscientist who has dedicated himself to the more didactic aspect of this science with the aim of making it known even to the little ones in schools around the world.
In his experiment, Greg connects the two plants I mentioned initially through a simple bi-amplifier and stimulating them, makes them interact through that artificial communication channel thanks to which it is also possible to have fun by making some more precise measurements.
Yes, according to a recent Swedish study, plants have an underground communication system!
Electrochemical signals are sent and received through the roots, so they can communicate with each other about what is happening in their surroundings.
A kind of cooperation is created between the plants, the neighbors warn the others of the dangers and the latter react by activating their own defense system.
Indeed, according to some studies, it is said that they are able to understand if the neighboring plant is of the same species or if they have family ties. In short, the trees are interconnected like a vast internet network! According to some experiments they suffer if treated badly, react to touch, remember past stimuli and stresses.
Still in "Semiotics" AL quote the famous phrase of the Apollo 13 astronauts.
"Houston, we have a problem" is a popular but erroneous quotation from the radio communications between the Apollo 13 astronaut Jack Swigert and the NASA Mission Control Center ("Houston") during the Apollo 13 spaceflight in 1970, as the astronauts communicated their discovery of the explosion that crippled their spacecraft.
The words actually spoken, initially by Jack Swigert, were "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here". After being prompted to repeat the transmission by CAPCOM Jack R. Lousma, Jim Lovell responded, "Ah, Houston, we've had a problem."
Since then, the erroneous phrase "Houston, we have a problem" has become popular, being used to account, informally, the emergence of an unforeseen problem, often with a sense of ironic understatement.
"Just plants" takes inspiration from Yuval Noah Harari’s book: “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”, wherein he deconstructs the prevailing narrative of the Agricultural Revolution as history’s biggest fraud:
"Scholars once proclaimed that the agricultural revolution was a great leap forward for humanity. They told a tale of progress fuelled by human brain power. Evolution gradually produced ever more intelligent people. Eventually, people were so smart that they were able to decipher nature’s secrets, enabling them to tame sheep and cultivate wheat. As soon as this happened, they cheerfully abandoned the grueling, dangerous, and often spartan life of hunter-gatherers, settling down to enjoy the pleasant, satiated life of farmers.
"That tale is a fantasy. There is no evidence that people became more intelligent with time. Foragers knew the secrets of nature long before the Agricultural Revolution, since their survival depended on an intimate knowledge of the animals they hunted and the plants they gathered. Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.
"Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa."
"Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometers of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous?"
"Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water, and nutrients with other plants, so men and women labored long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was defenseless against other organisms that liked to eat it, from rabbits to locust swarms, so the farmers had to guard and protect it. Wheat was thirsty, so humans lugged water from springs and streams to water it. Its hunger even impelled Sapiens to collect animal feces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. "
"The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks, and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped disks, arthritis, and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word “domesticate” comes from the Latin domus, which means “house.” Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens. "
"How did wheat convince Homo sapiens to exchange a rather good life for a more miserable existence? What did it offer in return? ... It offered nothing for people as individuals. Yet it did bestow something on Homo sapiens as a species. Cultivating wheat provided much more food per unit of territory, and thereby enabled Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially."
“The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes. Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of the species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA. If no more DNA copies remain, the species is extinct, just as a company without money is bankrupt. If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is a success, and the species flourishes. From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are always better than a hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions."
“Yet why should individuals care about this evolutionary calculus? Why would any sane person lower his or her standard of living just to multiply the number of copies of the Homo sapiens genome? Nobody agreed to this deal: the Agricultural Revolution was a trap."
Imagination it's a quote from John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, british geneticist and evolutionary biologist.
In Panspermia talk about panspermia, the hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by space dust,[1] meteoroids,asteroids, comets,and planetoids as well as by spacecraft carrying unintended contamination by microorganisms. Distribution may have occurred spanning galaxies, and so may not be restricted to the limited scale of solar systems. Panspermia studies concentrate not on how life began, but on methods that may distribute it in the Universe.
Just as iconic as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is the floating fetus born in a luminous placental sphere at the end, floating in space and staring at the Earth with its alien eyes. The famous director used this image as a metaphor for our species emerging from the cosmos and evolving into interplanetary creatures. Similarly, the seed that appears in Panspermia represents the conquest of space by plants.
Deep space noise reminds us that there is no noise in space. There is no means that could serve as a support for sound waves, therefore no propagation of vibrations is possible. Therefore silence reigns in space. When in science fiction movies we see space shuttles moving in a deafening roar through space, it's not realistic! Just as you can't hear explosions or the sound of laser weapons! At the end of the episode AL plays "Space Oddity" by David Bowie. Perhaps the most famous song ever among those inspired by space. An extraordinary piece, an absolute masterpiece of music history, was inspired not only by the space travel of those years, but also by the many science fiction films and short stories written in that period. Among all also the aforementioned 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick.
As I write this post, I discovered that in "Solos", season 1 episode 3, titled "Peg" the woman played by Helen Mirren travels in a micro spaceship talking with an artificial intelligence. At the end of the episode the AI puts the song "Space Oddity" by David Bowie. You may think that it was inspired or that it is a tribute but it is not.
Have fun finding references and quotes in the next few episodes! feel free to write your ideas in the comments.
Have a good space explorer trip...
References:
Harari, Yuval Noah (2015). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harper.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2637513/
