Cabbie Philosophy

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, astrobiology, cab drivers, philosophy, speculation

The idea for the book gelled when Dr. Charles S. Cockell was asked by a taxi driver in London, "Are there alien taxi drivers? People like me elsewhere in the universe?" The conversation, held during a taxi ride between King's Cross railway station and 10 Downing Street, Westminster, is recorded and enlarged upon in the first chapter of Taxi From Another Planet: Conversations with Drivers about Life in the Universe.

The book's 18 chapters deal with similarly searching questions the author discussed with various taxi drivers over a period of a few years (he rides a lot of taxis). I'll touch on a few of my favorites.

Ch. 4: "Should We Solve Problems on Earth before Exploring Space"? This is a common question, and the discussion ranged over several topics, such as the utility of weather forecasting aided by satellite data, resource discovery and conservation, and the numerous products that had to be developed just to get people into orbit and keep them alive and useful (think fountain pens and more secure ways of sealing diapers).

My father was once asked after a speech about the Apollo program and the Moon landings, "The astronauts left millions of dollars worth of machinery on the Moon. Of what use is that?" Dad replied, "Do you know where those millions of dollars are? Right here on Earth! Every dollar spent on the space program eventually wound up in someone's pocket: from technicians to miners to metal workers to computer programmers. Those dollars circulated in the economy, as space industry workers bought houses and groceries, paid workers to mow lawns or remodel kitchens, and bought fuel for their cars."

The author's discussion, on a taxi ride between Paddington station and Heathrow airport, eventually settled on defense from asteroids. The author mentioned the 10km asteroid that drove most dinosaurs extinct 66 million years ago; those not wiped out became birds. It would be scientifically accurate for a chicken-burger joint to label their wares "Dinosaur Burgers". He went on to tell of Barringer Crater in Arizona, where a smaller meteorite blasted out a mile-wide crater a lot more recently, about 50,000 years ago. He called it "a tiny rock"; for the record its size was about 150 feet (45 m) and it weighed something like 200,000 tons. Its velocity upon impact was about 20 km/s, or 70,000 km/hr (12-13 mi/s or 45,000 mph). NASA and other space agencies are spending significant amounts of money on telescopes, both on land and in orbit, to locate all the asteroids big enough to wipe out cities or states or continents. The DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) project was to learning how hard it is to deflect a small asteroid. Just for the record, those "significant funds" are a small fraction of the various "stimulus" packages perpetrated by the US government in reaction to the pandemic. That's where the cabbie's question should be aimed!

Ch 10: "Will We Understand the Aliens?" In Glasgow, a discussion ensued about whether we and aliens would be able to communicate. Consider this: Without the Rosetta Stone, it might still be impossible to decipher early Egyptian hieroglyphics. There are a few dozen scripts that are still unknown, and until about 20 years ago Mayan was one of them, until my brother's mentor, Linda Schiele, cracked the code. It helped that there are living Mayans, who still speak the language. Even though the written script fell completely out of use about a thousand years ago, the linguistic characteristics of spoken Mayan led Dr Schiele and her collaborators toward the right path. Also, what of dolphins and other vocal whales? Only recently has it been learned that sperm whales seem to have names. It's a start. But alien-human linguistics will be really hard. Dr. Cockell thinks that, because the scientific method has to be the same everywhere, and the basic scientific laws are universal, that scientific and technical terms will be the first terms we and aliens will be able to share, and much can then be derived from that.

Ch 17: "What is the Meaning of Life?" There is no person anywhere who has never asked this question. In the author's estimation, the answer, if there is one, depends on how rare or how abundant life is, particularly life with sufficient consciousness to ask the question. I'd put it in reverse: Live has meaning of we live a meaningful life. If there is no life, there is no need for anything to "mean" anything. We are defined primarily by the quality of our relationships. You or I may be a wonderful person; this will remain unknown unless we are wonderful to or for someone. Or if a person is evil, that is only manifested when he or she is evil towards others (even if the "others" are frogs being stomped "for fun" or flies getting their wings pulled off).

This delightful book is full of meaningful insights about "life, the universe, and everything", with no trace of the whimsy of  Douglas Adams. The author has the privilege of thinking about these things for his day job as an astrobiologist and an adviser to NASA. His humility and grace, relating to taxi drivers from sundry backgrounds, come through and confer wisdom to us, his readers.

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Coda: While persuading various generative art programs to produce the image above, generated by the Stable Diffusion engine in Playground, I kept a couple of others that I particularly liked, that were "almost there". The first was drawn by Dall-E3, the second by Playground 2.5.