COULD ALIEN LIFE FORMS BE HIDING UNDER ANTARCTIC ICE?

Photo credit - Subglacial aquatic system. By Zina Deretsky / NSF (US National Science Foundation), via Wikimedia Commons

First let me say that the word ‘alien’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘not-of-this-planet’. Under the kilometres of ice on the Antarctic continent there could be forms of life that have a better claim to belonging on Earth than we do, having been here millions of years longer, yet are entirely foreign to our experience.

In central Canada, where I live, the landscape is dotted with thousands of lakes where ancient glaciers ground hollows in the rock, and water has accumulated in the lowest points. The land surface of Antarctica is shaped by moving ice as much as four kilometres thick. Naturally, there are bumps and hollows and, thanks to the immense pressure of all that weight, and possibly the heat of the earth beneath, there are lakes of liquid water. Nearly four hundred of them, in fact, with more still being discovered, and good evidence that water flows among many of the lakes through rivers and streams. You may have read about Lake Vostok, Antarctica’s largest such lake, which made headlines in February of 2012 when a team of Russian researchers managed to drill down to the lake’s surface and collect samples. News came this week that a new sub-glacial lake, just a little smaller than Vostok, has been found near the eastern rim of the continent. If confirmed by penetrating radar, the site is bound to draw a lot of new activity because it’s only about one hundred kilometres from an existing research station—a lot more accessible than remote Lake Vostok.

These lakes get scientists so excited because they may have been hidden away from the world for twenty-five million years. That doesn’t mean the water is that old—there’s evidence that a constant process of old water freezing while new ice melts refreshes the lakes every thirteen thousand years or so. But the lakes could contain life that old—life that’s been sheltered from all of the changes on the Earth since then, and especially sheltered from we humans. Not to mention life capable of surviving under tremendous pressure, isolation from new sources of nutrients, and serious cold (actually about -3C, but kept liquid by the pressure).

Very alien life, from our perspective.

Unfortunately the Lake Vostok samples from 2012 were contaminated when lake water rushed up the bore hole and mixed with kerosene used to keep the hole open. Scientists still checked it out and found forms of microscopic life that appeared to have DNA different from anything we’ve seen before, but those results are suspect. The Russians made a new, cleaner hole in January 2015 and collected more water, but there hasn’t been much news about the analysis of that sample (dang secretive Russians) and the funding for more research there has dried up. This new lake, if confirmed, should be easier to study, and the world at large might finally get some meaningful results. Considering that we’re still learning new things about the history of our planet by constantly-improving analysis of fossils and geologic deposits, a body of water containing life that’s been isolated for millions of years could be a real treasure trove of knowledge.

Of course, with a science fiction writer’s imagination, we can speculate about any number of sensational outcomes:

• New drilling releases a deadly organism that threatens the whole human race.
• An ancient life form is much more efficient and prolific than modern Earth life and begins to take over the planet.
• A life form is discovered that can’t have originated on Earth, proving that space aliens have visited here in the distant past.
• Live aquatic aliens from another world are hiding out until other members of their species return for them.
• Elvis is found alive and well! (OK, only if he’s become a mer-man).

And that, my friends, is how a new lake under four kilometres of dense ice has the potential to affect your world. Never let it be said that there’s nothing left to be discovered. Otherwise some of us wouldn’t have anything left to blog about.

HOW MUCH OF THE TIME ARE WE REALLY CONSCIOUS?

Photo credit: jgmarcelino via VisualHunt.com / CC BY

You land on a web page, and you watch as the page fills in piece by piece—maybe a coloured section appears before a banner image fully loads, then text re-aligns, a sidebar populates itself one article at a time. You wish it were a little faster, but it’s only mildly annoying.

Now imagine if all of the things you see, touch, hear, taste, and smell came into your awareness the same way—gradually, a bit at a time. If you moved your eyes much the constant reloading could drive you crazy. Gradually becoming aware that your hand was on a hot stove burner could have unpleasant consequences. Yet, surely the brain has to take some amount of time to process each of the sensory signals it receives: translating a light wavelength into the colour blue, or a certain vibration in the air as a musical note. So why aren’t we aware of the process—why don’t we experience the partial results? New research from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland suggests the reason is contained in a new explanation of consciousness.

For all of the things we’ve learned about our brains, there’s still no clear understanding (and a lot of controversy) about how consciousness works. We seem to experience the world in a continuous stream of sensations, but researchers have found many ways to trick our brain and those tricks provide insight into its processes. For instance, an unexpected sight, immediately replaced by an expected one (say, the sight of a clown face for a fraction of a second while looking at a landscape) can be completely edited out by the brain before it reaches the level of consciousness—the person is never even aware they saw it. Optical illusions often show that the brain makes adjustments of colours and shapes in objects according to the object’s surroundings, based on what the brain would expect from that object in the natural world. An example of that is this shadow illusion (you can have lots of fun with other optical trickery here...after you’ve finished reading!) Obviously our conscious minds aren’t witnessing everything. So what’s going on?

According to the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne studies, the processing of sensory input happens in a state of unconsciousness, with no perception of time, and when the steps are complete we become conscious of every aspect of the stimulus all at once—the “final picture”. This seems to suggest that we’re not actually conscious all of the time we think we are. The EPFL researchers claim these intervals can last up to 400 milliseconds, or four-tenths of a second for visual stimulus (they haven’t tested the other senses). That’s a fair bit of time when you consider how quickly things happen in the real world. It doesn’t mean our brains can’t react to partial data—we just might not be conscious of it yet, which could explain how you hit the brake pedal without thinking when the brake lights of the car in front of you light up. Or how your eyelid flicks closed just in time to protect your eye from that badminton bird you didn’t even see coming.

Yes, they’re saying that we experience consciousness in chunks, sometimes only every 400 milliseconds (though the intervals can be shorter if less processing is involved). If it helps, think of how we watch movies and appear to witness a continuous stream of action though we’re really seeing 24 still frames per second.

Where can we take this new understanding?

• If we could assist our brains to process stimuli faster, would we experience a kind of hyperconsciousness? (Maybe that’s what certain mind-altering drugs do.)
• If we could discover what brain signal triggers the unconscious and conscious states, we might be able to use that for everything from anaesthesiology to refreshing ourselves with micro-naps during the day.
• The more we learn about this process the more ways we might discover to trick the brain. And if we can trick the brain, we can control what a person sees, hears, and feels. Perfect virtual reality, for good and for bad. (Cue the SF scenarios where some evil force—alien or government—enslaves the population by creating a perfect illusion for them to live in! Like The Matrix.)
• This concept of consciousness also has ramifications for the idea of “uploading” our minds into computers. Would we need to build in digital delays equivalent to these unconscious intervals to keep our minds from going insane?

It’s early days when it comes to this research, and I’m sure there won’t be consensus about the mechanisms of consciousness anytime soon. But every thing we learn is useful, and if it creates more questions than it answers…isn’t that the real fun part of science? I know it’s the fun part of science fiction, so bring on the brain teasers—I have stories to write.

WHO'S REALLY PROTECTING US?

The most recent battle over government access to personal information vs. the individual’s right to privacy didn’t have a clear winner.

In order to learn the contact information of one of the shooters in the San Bernardino, California terror attack of December 2015, the FBI wanted Apple to create a way for the security features of an iPhone to be defeated (including a way to input the unlock code electronically instead of only manually, to allow computers to speed things up). Apple refused and the case went to court, with the FBI claiming they were only interested in one phone, but of course a backdoor method to unlock one iPhone would make all of them vulnerable. Apple stood its ground. Then the FBI withdrew their case, announcing that a third party had helped them crack the phone.

Did they both win? Apple stuck to its principles and the FBI got the information it wanted.

No, I would suggest that we all lost. Again.

Governments now seem to have an insatiable appetite for the personal information of their citizens. They claim it’s all about keeping us safe from criminals and terrorists, despite the fact that terrorists and their victims number in the thousands while law-abiding technology-users number in the billions. Do criminals take advantage of secure devices to commit crimes? Certainly. They also meet in private places and dark corners, but I wouldn’t want surveillance cameras in every room. The principle of the court-approved property search or phone wiretap by law-enforcement agencies is a long-established one, yet we know that personal surveillance by government agencies like the American NSA goes so far beyond such practices as to be like spraying acres of farmland with herbicide to kill a dozen dandelions. Is it really about protection, or about control?

When did the citizens of democratic countries become OK with this? When did we forget that government is supposed to serve us, not the other way around?

Believe me, I’m a pretty boring guy with no juicy secrets to hide, not an anti-government radical, and the last person to cry “conspiracy”, but it alarms me to see how far we’ve come down this path since the terror attacks of 9/11, and how the politics of fear have begun to win out over our concerns for individual rights.

There are good reasons that so much science fiction has portrayed totalitarian governments, from 1984, to Fahrenheit 451, to The Hunger Games, and dozens of other novels and movies. The loss of individual identity and rights is a huge fear, and therefore ripe for drama. An already-slippery slope is made even more slippery by the progress of information-sharing technologies. Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. The stories write themselves. Unfortunately, it isn’t just fiction—the process happens in the real world all the time, and SF writers feel compelled again and again to warn us about what we’re getting ourselves into.

For more of us every day, our lives play out online through our computers, tablets, and smartphones. There will come a time when our devices will interact directly with our brains, and the potential privacy issues are the stuff of nightmares.

I’m not trying to paint governments as the bad guys and tech corporations as white knights either. It would be disingenuous of Apple and other tech giants to portray themselves as the guardians of our privacy when corporations’ appetite for our personal information is at least as voracious as governments’, creating the most invasive marketing practices society has ever seen. What I am saying is that access to personal and private information is getting out of hand and will only get worse as technology progresses. Who should have access to our individual information, and how much? That’s a choice we can’t leave to others to make for us.

I was interested to read about a new foray into the battle by the makers of the app WhatsApp (a company, incidentally, that chooses to charge for their app rather than mine your personal data in order to throw ads at you.) They’ve just provided their users with encryption that even WhatsApp employees can’t get around. They not only won’t give government agencies access to what you do with the app, they can’t.

It’s possible that no encryption is truly unbreakable, but for now that sounds like a door with a good solid lock.