The [http://contact-conference.org Contact Conference] describes itself as "a unique interdisciplinary conference which brings together some of the foremost international social and space scientists, science fiction writers and artists to exchange ideas, stimulate new perspectives and encourage serious, creative speculation about humanity's future." At the 2012 event, I ([[Ben]]) got to meet the three best-known SETI researchers and a leading science fiction writer, as well as listening to a number of other fascinating speakers, and seeing some amazing futuristic art on display. But much of the time I was distracted from thinking about humanity's future, because I was busy working out the future of an alien "species" along with several other participants in the conference's most exciting component, Cultures of the Imagination.
== Cultures of the Imagination ==
=== Participants on my team ===
* Randall Hayes
* Michelle Merrill
* Chad Rohrbacher
* Ben Sibelman
* Anthony Weston
* Mara Williams
=== Setting ===
We were given a semi-fictional triple-star system to play with, designed by engineer and science-fiction author Gerald Nordley. With one noted exception, all quotes below are from the packet describing this system. The stars, Gliese 667A, B, and C, are real, and there are known planets around star C. However, both teams ended up focusing on the fictional planetary systems around stars A and B.
The other team, which consisted of students from a nearby high school, ended up on a Mercury-sized tide-locked planet orbiting star B (though our team didn't know that, or anything else about the other team's aliens, until the last day of the conference). My team decided that its organisms would originate on the third moon of a gas giant orbiting star A. Nordley described this smallish moon as having "a subterranean ocean under a deep ice crust," presumably kept liquid by tidal stresses from the gas giant.
=== Details of my team's aliens ===
What follows is a fairly brief summary; more details can be found in Anthony's epic poem, [[Graxes Rock]], to which I contributed a few sections.
==== Origins ====
Our alien microbes evolved in a tidally heated ocean, but a few of them ended up adapting to the harsh conditions on the airless surface. We decided the third moon was similar enough to Saturn's moon Enceladus that we could postulate geysers that would periodically launch some of our microbes into orbit.
These organisms, already able to survive in hard vacuum, ended up colonizing the first two moons of the gas giant, both of which were described as having surface oceans. We chose to focus most of our story on the second moon, a tidally locked "warm Titan" most of whose dry land area "is the rim of a huge impact crater," which gave us two separate oceans to play with, one inside the crater and one outside. This, in addition to the occasional impact of more spaceborne microbes from the third moon throughout the following eons, gave us the rationale for our evolutionary story.
==== Evolution ====
Randall, our team biologist, wanted to try a thought experiment in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection group selection], a controversial theory in which evolutionary fitness may be determined by the ability of a group of organisms to survive and reproduce. Even more controversially, we decided to blur the concepts of "organism" and "species" by having multiple distantly-related colonies of cells form alliances in which they would physically join together into a larger entity, which would have the abilities of all its component "species."
The mechanism for the formation of these alliances can be summarized as "evolution through indigestion." Because aquatic organisms in the two oceans (actually three, if you count the third moon) would evolve on radically divergent paths, when organisms from different oceans were somehow thrown together, they might well not have the ability to eat each other due to using different types of proteins or amino acids. If organism A swallows organism B but fails to digest it, we hypothesized that A might have to find a different way to relate to B, specifically forming an alliance. A real-world example of this, described to me by Kathryn Denning, is the way some sea slugs on Earth consume algae and then use their chloroplasts to gain the benefits of photosynthesis.
We borrowed a term with a rather dubious source to describe this. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/what-is-the-meaning-of-111111/2011/11/11/gIQAH3FWCN_blog.html Astrologer Caroline Casey wrote] on "Guest Voices" at WashingtonPost.com that "'Grax' is a biological term that, according to Rupert Sheldrake, describes the action of individual bacteria, or slime mold or anything coming together as an intelligent community to address a challenge that cannot be resolved alone." So without endorsing the worldviews of Casey or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake Sheldrake], we decided "Graxians" would be a reasonable name for our composite alien beings.
==== Anatomy and technology ====
As colonies of cells form alliances and exchange genetic material, they gradually learn all kinds of tricks that can be performed by changing the overall shape of a colony. In other words, Graxians are shapeshifters, and form tools out of their own substance rather than directly manipulating materials in the environment. But since we were tasked with drawing a picture of a typical Graxian, we decided that a fractal body plan would dominate, consisting of "modules" of various sizes with three tentacles each. Shapeshifted appendages would appear on the ends of some of these tentacles, while others would simply link to the hubs of smaller fractal modules.
Given the Graxians' diverse evolutionary heritage, we also added a second, fernlike fractal structure, which would appear in some Graxians before the advent of intelligence and astronomy. But once they start studying the skies, Graxians quickly decide that the bilateral symmetry of the fern structure makes it profane and destroy most of those structures in a kind of religious war.
==== The religion of Three ====
From the surface of the second moon, now known as Grax, there appear to be six particularly interesting objects in the sky: the other three moons, the gas giant they orbit, and the two nearby stars. Three moons orbiting a central planet seem to the Graxians to match the structure of their own trilateral modules pretty well. Then, as their shapeshifted telescope organs improve, the Graxians realize that the gas giant exists as one corner of an equilateral triangle with other planets at the other two points, and Gliese 667A at the center -- an even closer match to the Graxians' own fractal structure. (This was all in the description we got from Mr. Nordley.) Finally they discover the nature of the more distant companion star, Gliese 667C, and although they can't see anything at the barycenter of the triple-star system, they nevertheless conclude that fractal hierarchies with three entities orbiting a larger central entity must form a basic organizing principle of the universe -- leading to the decision to destroy all bilateral fractals.
Even discovering that they live on a moon themselves, bringing the parent gas giant's moon count to four, doesn't seriously challenge the Graxians' faith, as science quickly verifies that the fourth moon, a small "irregular satellite in a loose retrograde orbit," is just an interloper captured from the local equivalent of the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt Kuiper belt] and therefore doesn't really count. It doesn't even have any life, in contrast to the other three moons, which the Graxians study in detail, even sending an expedition to the first moon using a simple launch tube to "spitball" a small hard-shelled Graxian out of the second moon's weak gravity.
=== The other team's aliens ===
The aliens based on the tide-locked planet, as we eventually learned, are reptile-like beings known as Luters. They have two legs, four arms, and a heavy tail, whose primary means of perception is echolocation. Their language consists of the same kind of high-pitched sounds they use for building up a sonar map of their surroundings, interpreted via rows of earholes along the sides of their heads. Their society used to be patriarchal, but this led to overly aggressive behavior including wars and overhunting, using up the scarce resources of the habitable belt between the planet's sunlit and shadowed hemispheres, so they ended up transitioning to a more peaceful matriarchal culture. One unusual aspect of this culture, resulting from the scarcity of resources, is that when a Luter dies, all parts of its body are put to use, including consumption of the edible tissues.
=== The contact scenario ===
We were asked to create characters to play in the contact scenario, so five of the six team members invented cultures to represent. Randall and Mara chose to be land-based, with Randall on the crater rim and Mara on an island on the opposite side of Grax. Michelle and Anthony chose to inhabit surface waters, Michelle in the intertidal zone on the outer shore of the crater, Anthony in the open water inside the crater. My character comes from a culture based around a cluster of hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor.
Anthony's and Randall's cultures had built radio receivers to search for the "music of the spheres," while Mara's culture specialized mainly in light-based astronomy (largely infrared, since visible light likely wouldn't penetrate the cloud cover on a "warm Titan" like Grax). The COTI organizer, Israel Zuckerman, told us that the radio receivers were getting a signal from a planet orbiting star B, so Anthony and Randall got to establish initial communication, with some help from Mara (since the signal would be hidden from the crater side of Grax half the time). After an initial interplanetary "jam session," we got down to business and worked out a way to send encoded images, allowing us to receive images of the other team's aliens (in reality this involved Israel carrying drawings from one room to the other).
Next we had to describe the process of developing the technology and plans for a space mission, since the other team's aliens weren't advanced enough to attempt one. We had Mara's culture develop rocketry to enable the flight across a distance of somewhere around a billion miles, and packed the small vessel with "seeds" capable of reproducing individual Graxians from each of the five cultures we had invented. This is what we did, after landing our probe in a remote area of the tide-locked planet close to the sunward edge of the habitable zone.
This is where we went on stage and started role-playing for the larger audience of conference attendees. First we formed a circle to act out the process of rolling across the land as a tumbleweed-like ball. Then we apparently rolled onto a Luter ranch and encountered its owners, played by four high school students. At this point, naturally enough, things got very confused. We offered bits of ourselves (represented by different colored M&Ms) to the Luters to eat, based on the our principle of "evolution by indigestion," but the bits never reported back. We made a brief effort to decode their language but failed. We tried the time-honored shapeshifters' strategy of forming a simulacrum of the Luters' physical form, but this didn't go far toward establishing mutual understanding. Finally, in desperation, we reached through one of the Luters' ear holes and grabbed a piece of its brain, which didn't help either since the piece of brain wasn't capable of independent life (as any part of a Graxian would be).
At this point we decided to give up on the group of Luters represented by the high school students, and headed off toward one of the Luter cities where their radio broadcasts had originated. Israel declared this to be beyond the scope of the exercise and closed out the performance. Although this wasn't a very satisfying conclusion, contact of a sort had certainly occurred.