Confront the alien within to be ready for the alien without

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, SETI, speculative musings

Did you ever play the Birthday Game? If you have a gathering of 23 or more people, ask them, "What are the chances that at least two people here have the same birthday?" You'll get all kinds of responses, and perhaps someone who knows this already will say, "Better than half." If you're comfortable with analytical math, this website shows how the probability with 23 people is just over 50.7%. This article from Scientific American is a bit more accessible.

More generally, if you have a large number of possibilities (N) and a much larger population to sample from—for example, millions of balls numbered 1 to 10,000—, how many items must you select (S) from the large population to have a 50% or greater chance of having two of them that are the same? If you select 90 balls from the example, is there a better-than-half chance that two of them have the same number? It turns out that the crucial factor is the square root of the number of possibilities divided by about 1.2. That is:

S > (√N)/1.2

For the example, where N = 10,000, S is at least 83, and is probably 84. I said above "about 1.2" because the divisor ranges up to 1.25 as N increases into the millions or more.

This is pertinent to the question of DNA compatibility between Earth life and any life that may be found on a faraway planet, assuming that the alien life is also DNA-based. 

We can analyze it thus. The DNA codon-to-amino acid coding table has 64 DNA 3-letter codons that select among 20 amino acids, with three of the codons used for a Stop signal to the ribosome. Clearly, many or most of the amino acids are selected by at least two codons. The number ranges up to 6 for Leucine, an amino acid with a specific shape that is apparently "most dissimilar" to the others. Seven other amino acids are selected by 4 codons each.

Here is how the table looks, for most Earth life: 

What might it happen if it were rearranged? We must assume that the translations were arrived at by random processes via natural selection (or by careful design by God).

As it happens, this table is used by all eukaryotic life and nearly all prokaryotes…but not all. An article I read listed 16 minor variations used by certain rare bacterial species. This is evidence that various minor changes to the table don't automatically produce "incompatible" organisms; the 17 known DNA variations all exist on the same Earth. What of larger changes?

Some time ago I calculated that the number of possible rearrangements of this table, keeping the DNA codons in the order shown, but moving the amino acids about freely, is about 10⁷⁰, a number with 70 or 71 digits. If we keep the codons in groups of the same size as those shown, effectively rearranging just 20 grouped items, the number of possibilities is closer to 20!, or 2.43x10¹⁸. That's 2.43 billion billion. A lot.

Now let's play the birthday game with 2.43 billion billion. Its square root is 1.56 billion; divide by 1.25 to get 1.25 billion. Simply put, we would need to collect DNA from DNA-bearing species on more than a billion planets in order to have a 50% chance that some pair of them would have compatible DNA coding tables, and we'd need to sample about 10³⁵ species to have a 50% chance at an exact match. I wonder how many aliens (if there are any) use reproductive machinery that doesn't depend on DNA?

For those who think space aliens in UFO's (UAP's) are kidnapping people for genetic experiments, I suggest it'll be a long time before the aliens find a compatible species to ANY of those that might be "out there." Human-alien hybrids are out of the question.

The above represents my own musings, based partly on prior research, as I read The Alien Perspective: A New View of Humanity and the Cosmos, by David Whitehouse. Mr. Whitehouse doesn't get into any of the stuff above; that's all "me". What he does get into is a longish history of the precursors of SETI, of SETI itself, and of its successors that are ongoing. SETI, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, is (was?) a radio telescope-based search for radio signals emitted by intelligent beings in stellar systems close enough to our Solar system that we can receive the signals and recognize them. More recent programs look for laser signals and possibly gamma-ray signals.

The historical portion of the book is followed by increasingly speculative discussion of what might occur upon First Contact; it's nothing like what Carl Sagan had in mind, almost certainly. To my mind, a gigantic cover-up is most likely, and the author leans in that direction to a lesser extent. Unless, of course, First Contact is more like the early part of Independence Day, globally obvious. In that case we're toast anyway; no teen hacker would be penetrating the security protocols of an alien computer that is running an alien version of Windows 9,127 or (more likely!) Linux 7,704, with help files in an alien language. Let's remember, there are a few dozen human writing systems we have not yet deciphered. What kind of script could encode Dolphin or Elephant or Squid language? Alien will be far less "obvious".

The author seems to waver between the views that aliens will be benevolent or malignant. However, he then considers that we tend to project our own fears and hopes and dreams (and nightmares) upon our anticipation of First Contact and continuing contact. This portion of the book is of real value. It clearly indicates to me that we need to get our own mental house in order, or we'll be so unprepared for First Contact, whenever it may occur, that we'll destroy ourselves before any malignant aliens could do so, and with more finality than any benevolent aliens could restore. You got it, folks: In my view, First Contact will be a portent of Doom, no matter what "they" are like.

That said, I found it hard to read the book. Not philosophically, but because the poor writing kept distracting me. Run-on sentences abound, as do partial sentences. It's almost like the placement of punctuation was frequently chosen at random. Don't authors employ copy editors any more? Maybe that's considered too expensive, but it's a false economy. I know I'd charge a helluva lot to edit text I find so disconcerting. Call me a glutton for punishment; I read the whole book through anyway.