This was a very casual off-the-cuff response to an interview I did for Amazing Stories, an online reboot of a famous old pulp SF magazine's brand. The questions were a whole bunch of generic one-liners (pick any five), and this one in particular caught my attention because it pushes one of my hot buttons about SF: "If you were to write a love story between a human and an alien, what challenges would they face?"
We're all grown ups here so I'm not even going to bother looking for a way to ask ChatGPT for its reply. (I refuse to create a ChatGPT account because their user database will be hacked, sooner or later, and for a novelist, to be seen using it is potential career poison.)
I'm afraid I maybe took the question too seriously--or not seriously enough, because it deserves a book-length answer just dissecting the assumptions underlying it and tends to make me twitch uncontrolably and grind my teeth. I field tested my answer on an evolutionary biology professor: feel free to pick nits.
So: "If you were to write a love story between a human and an alien, what challenges would they face?"
(Answer below the fold.)
The first problem with a human/alien relationship is obviously determining whether the alien is in fact alive at all, or just an oddly-shaped rock: then determining if it's a heterotroph or an autotroph, whether it has separate cells with nuclei or is a syncitium or rhizome network, does it have rigid walls or flexible membranes ... and then we go down the variant-biochemistry rabbit hole.
(As you probably guessed, I'm not a fan of the "humans with extra latex make-up on their head" school of alien biology in SF.)
For example, oxygen. We breathe oxygen! Can't live without it, in fact. But did you know that for about the first two billion years of life on Earth oxygen was a deadly poison to pretty much everything? And there was almost no free oxygen in the atmosphere because the Earth's crust still contained huge quantities of unreduced iron compounds. It was only about a billion years ago when the crust finally became fully oxidized that free oxygen began building up in the biosphere ... and poisoned 99.9% of all the life on Earth, because it was an excretory end product of early plant life, and most organisms back then were methanogens.
But wait, there's more!
Let's assume we find aliens who are recognizable animals with flexible lipid membranes around their cells and an aerobic respiratory metabolism similar to our own, and DNA/RNA transcription, and ribosomes, and the whole recognizable panoply of terrestrial-compatible life.
What about sex?
There is quite some controversy over when, how, and why sexual assortative gene mingling evolved, but one common theory in evolutionary biology is that sex is a tool for cock-blocking parasites. Roughly three-quarters of known species are parasitic on some other species—that is, they eat them alive. While it's metabolically cheaper to reproduce by parthenogenesis (cloning), any vulnerabilities that can be exploited by a parasite are shared between mother and daughters. Mixing up gene lineages, however, provides some scope for sharing traits that block parasite entrypoints at a cellular level. (Classic example: sickle-cell anaemia is a side-effect of having two copies of a gene that, when present in a single copy, makes red blood cells resistant to invasion by malarial parasites. Sickle-cell persists because it's less likely to kill its carriers—only 25% of people with the gene inherit copies of it from both parents, and without two copies you aren't at risk of sickle-cell—than succumbing to malaria.)
By the way, there's more than one way to do sex (whatever the transphobes may say). Some folks insist that a female has two X chromosomes and a uterus and produces eggs, while a male has an XY karyotype and produces sperm and has a penis. These people have obviously never met any birds: 98% of bird species' males lack penises, and where females have a ZW karyotype and males are a ZZ. Nor have they ever met a clownfish—all the members of a school of clownfish are female except the dominant one, and if the dominant male dies, the top surviving female becomes male. And don't get me started on Platypuses (ten sex chromosomes! TEN! But only two sexes) or fungi (hundreds of genetic mating types which can cross match for, well, hundreds of sexes).
Sexual assortation appears to be a prerequisite for sexual attraction (at least, you don't need sexual attraction if you never evolved sex in the first place), but then we get into some really murky waters because in addition to talking about genetics we're now talking about behavioural genetics, that is, how genes influence physiology and, through physiology, animal behaviour. Which is kind of like eating soup noodles with chopsticks, if you're holding your chopsticks with another pair of chopsticks (and wearing a blindfold). Sexual attraction seems to be a behavioural trait that is conserved in evolution—that is, if you don't exhibit it, you don't reproduce, and if you don't reproduce, the next generation doesn't reflect your traits. But it's almost certainly a side-effect of other characteristics. How do we identify potential mates? How do we interact with them? How specific are our tastes? As Robert Heinlein noted at one point, warthogs are obviously sexy as hell—to other warhogs, not humans. Obviously humans and warthogs are all mammals, but each species possesses and lacks some traits relevant to the other. Sexual attraction to non-humans is not conserved by evolution unless the non-human is so close to human that they're a compatible branch of our family tree: say, Denisovans or Neanderthals (who interbred with our ancestors).
Finally ...
Taking evolution as a given, there are a few constants which we can guess will apply to aliens from Earth-like biospheres.
Firstly, there's no such thing as trees. That is: while trees undoubtedly exist (they contain about 75% of Earth's biomass by weight), there's no one true way to tree—trees appear to have evolved repeatedly from different photoautotrophs over the past billion years, and the form they take is the result of convergent evolutionary pressures: grow tall (to capture all the sunlight above your rivals), develop rigid tubular capilliary systems to raise water and keep those leaves up, develop mechanisms for dispersing seeds widely.
The convergent evolution thing goes for many other features of biology, by the way: eyes, for example, have evolved independently multiple times (as Stephen Jay Gould documented). And so did carcinization: just as there's no right way to tree, there's no one way to crab—but all sorts of sea-dwelling arthropods develop convergent crab-like traits. (Crustacea are aquatic arthropods, occupying the niche that insects monopolize on land: it turns out that a key enzyme required for hardening chitin—insect carapaces—doesn't operate efficiently in seawater, so crustaceans use heavier, denser, calcium carbonate crystals to stiffen their shells. Which is why crabs don't fly.)
We see other long-term evolutionary trends, notably predator/prey arms races. One such is theory of mind (TOM), which enables a predated species to anticipate its predators' activities (do those paw prints around the water hole mean the lions are going to wait nearby?) and allow predators to out-think their prey. Another arms race is the development of venom: snakes appear to have developed venom multiple times, semi-independently, over the past 200 million years—there's very limited or no evidence of venom going back to much earlier eras, however.
The Fermi paradox suggests that we are among the first spacefaring intelligent species to evolve (at least, in this galaxy). So it therefore seems likely that any sexy alien I meet will be an extremely intelligent, venomous, tree-dwelling crab. Or maybe a hypercastrating alien mind control endoparasite (like the real-world Sacculina carcini) that has eaten the spacecrab's gonads and would like to sample my wedding tackle.
And people say I write horror stories! I have no idea what gives them that idea.
This is the type of science discussion I want to see from my science fiction folks.
Sexual attraction to non-humans is not conserved by evolution unless the non-human is so close to human that they're a compatible branch of our family tree: say, Denisovans or Neanderthals (who interbred with our ancestors).
Which you've used yourself in the Laundry Files verse. So, yeah!
One thing that has puzzled me for a long time is why no species has evolved to use an ovipositor as a penis - i.e. to inject an egg into a sperm-producing host of the same species, which fertilises it and carries it to term (whether egg or infant). Unless some species does, and I haven't heard of it. That would lead to an interesting debate on which sex is male :-)
It might be hard to tell if they have? In species that reproduce via traumatic insemination there's a strong selection pressure for females to resemble males, both in terms of morphology and behaviour ...
Well, to my understanding seahorses (scroll down for reproductive behaviour) do this: the female uses an ovipositor to insert the eggs into the male's egg sack where they are later fertilized.
So... in vertebrates quite close to us, relatively. At least closer than crustaceans.
I thought the obvious answer was technology. To find love you first have to find your love object and the easy way is to broadcast your nano flower and hope that something out there receives it, decodes it, and decides to implement your suggestions. It's likely that parasites will be better at this than symbiotes but you won't know until you try...
But if aliens do physically arrive, why bother with biomechanical compatibility when you can translate more than just language much more easily? Is there really a difference between memetic transmission of the idea pattern (and technological capability) that results in genetic changes, and generation/transmission of compatible genetic material?
Obviously the technophobes will join the xenophobes in rejecting the whole idea...
I had forgotten about that! Thanks. I was obviously thinking of reproduction as seen in reptiles, bird and mammals, but should have thought more widely :-)
Harking back to the original topic, sex in humans (and some other mammals) is about more than reproduction, though it's equally implausible that an alien species would evolve compatible physiology or behaviour. However, I can just about see humans and aliens having a relationship, because each other meets the other's kinks. The actual procedure might not be anything I can imagine, though ....
That counts. Thanks.
And yet non-reproductive sexual behaviour occurs widely in nature. Homosexuality occurs in numerous species other than humans; and humans exhibit other, much less accepted practices too, albeit rarely (bestiality and necophilia, not to mention morris dancing). So, famously, do mallards.
I'm not aware of any consensus on why homosexuality is not suppressed over many generations, although I am aware of multiple theories. But even at a population statistics level, it's significant enough to put a dent in your argument
Nor have they ever met a clownfish—all the members of a school of clownfish are female except the dominant one, and if the dominant male dies, the top surviving female becomes male.
It's actually the other way around: the fish are all (immature) males except for one mature male and one female, who are the mating pair. If the female dies, the dominant male becomes female and one of the immature males gets bigger and becomes the dominant male. (I believe "mature" and "immature" refers to size and not necessarily age.)
Your underlying point remains unchanged, of course.
I'm not even convinced it needs to be any kind of sexual behaviour, on the aliens part. So long as all participants are on board, do we care if it reads as some other kind of social/grooming ritual to them?
I'm going to note that homosexual necrophiliacal rape (observed in ducks and, probably, humans) is a minority pursuit. About which I am duly relieved.
I think we can safely postulate a normal distribution curve of sexual paraphiliacal activities, with boringly ubiquitous reproductive sex in the middle of the curve and weird outliers in all directions, for many species.
I also suspect that homosexual attraction is conserved by evolution because it's simply a sub-category of same-species attraction, which is clearly conserved -- all sexes are variants within the species, after all.
For a two sex species, an A being attracted to a B is a side-effect of reproductive viability, and a B being attracted to a B is the same trait as A's being attracted to B's. If you eliminate B-B and A-A attraction, you probably eliminating A-B attraction at the same time. The absence of homosexual attraction is not heterosexual attraction, it's asexual behaviour.
do we care if it reads as some other kind of social/grooming ritual to them
Yes, because it presupposes that the alien species has distinct individuals, they form cooperating groups, and "grooming" makes sense.
What if they're eusocial organisms like bees (or naked mole rats, for that matter) and the "individuals" we see (worker bees) are simply genetically identical clones spun up by a reproductive unit (the queen bee) to perform tasks? As if your hands and feet could fly off and collect food for you then return ...
Charlie,
As an ex-academic, I'd have to say you didn't read the exam question properly. You were asked about inter-species love, not inter-species sex.
I reckon an interesting and poignant story of unrequited love could easily be written, and indeed Iain Banks short story "State of the Art" is quite close to what I have in mind. A quick reminder: this is about a Culture citizen falling in love with Humanity, despite all our manifest failings.
I reckon an interesting and poignant story of unrequited love could easily be written [...]
I'm sure I recall a story where humans fell hopelessly in love with various aliens. It was some sort of fault in our wiring
Paraphilias are weird, but I'd have to say that human-alien love is going to fall in that basket. And it still relies on the same assumptions that I took a pointy stick to: multicellular life in a hierarchy of superorganisms/symbionts with mobile colonies that have some sort of equivalent of a nervous system that gives rise to theory of mind.
In other words, latex face-paint on the forehead.
(I'm sorry but I don't buy the Culture universe as anything other than Iain's thought-experiment about fully automated luxury gay space communism for humans: it's not any kind of credible, either biologically or in terms of the other sciences.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_I_Awoke_and_Found_Me_Here_on_the_Cold_Hill%27s_Side
Not the only one, but probably the one you were thinking of.
Well, one can love topology without tieing oneself in knots :-)
Your point stands even for the most non-erotic friendship, because the chance of that being compatible with humans and aliens is still extremely implausible. Dammit, even many humans have trouble! But it's not in the same range of astronomical implausibility as physical erotic compatibility.
At "Least worst", one might end up being an incubator for an alien's egg, as in Butler's "Bloodchild". Most likely, a briefly exciting form of suicide.
"Attraction to other species" would only not be conserved if it's primarily genetic- but there's enough bestiality in the world to tell us that there's a complicated social aspect to the whole thing. It's only anti-selective if it prohibits reproduction. If it's a hobby, you're "fine", on an evolutionary basis.
I've had thoughts about Space Opera settings, where aliens are all just one human trait magnified with some cultural trappings thrown on- Vulcans and Klingons being the obvious ones. And I've been thinking, "What if the humans are the weird ones? What's weird about humans compared to other species (at least on Earth)?" It's that we'll pack bond with anything. Slap googly eyes on a rock and suddenly people will get incredible emotional attachments to it. The famous Eliza bot is barely a parrot, but early experiments with it showed people getting very attached to their robot therapist. The Furbee- with the help of marketing people convinced themselves it was learning words from them. We keep pets and get incredibly attached to them, and we will adopt pets of pretty much any species. Fuck, we got people to get attached to barely visible shrimps by calling them Sea Monkeys.
So while I wouldn't expect a high percentage of humans to be romantically/sexually attracted to aliens, no matter what the alien biology is, there'd be at least one human who is into that.
So what would the obstacles be for a human/alien romance? The humans making it weird, that's the obstacle.
Charlie, you have strong passing knowledge of a variety of subjects, but you are either unaware of (or more likely, actively avoidant of) the far end of the human attraction bell-curve. I'm talking about the self styled "monster-fuckers". Or those people who have attempted to marry mechanical (or even completely inanimate) objects.
The human ape-mind is a liquid thing, capable of tying itself in some very strange knots, and a large enough population will contain truly unexpected variants. You propose venomous tree-crabs; I can show you multiple internet subcultures where the immediate reaction would be "sounds hot, are they single?". Ditto for the mind-control castration parasite - I once spent an entertaining afternoon talking with someone online who was considering purposely swallowing a tapeworm for sexual gratification. Oviposition? Practically mainstream at this point, with shops selling devices and eggs in all the colours and shapes you could desire to let you simulate it at home.
All encounters between humans and anything first cover the obvious bases ("can I light it on fire, can I use it as a weapon, can I eat it?") and then progresses quickly to "can I have a relationship with it?" - perhaps our strongest evolved survival technique. The nature of that relationship will vary wildly depending on what the subject is capable of - co-operation, competition, idea-sharing, sexual, romantic, slavery (dominance or submission, partial or full), adoption. Pet rocks were once a craze, so strong is the human urge to relate.
Will other species from different backgrounds have these urges as well? The intelligent venomous tree-crabs probably will - the ability to build relationships is such a powerful tool once you have a theory of mind, that members with it would outcompete those without in short order. I'd expect a planetary population to produce a few wierdo-crabs that are attracted to the idea of gasp Soft-Shells. The parasite, probably not - but they would certainly benefit from exploiting it in us.
An obvious example of this from fiction is the classic Star Trek Tribble - a parasite that has evolved to subsist in the niche of exploiting the relationship instincts of intelligent species. It's like a cat reduced down to the most basic function - it's appealing to the senses (soft, pretty noise) such that others want to protect it, and it makes more of itself.
To return to the original question: "If you were to write a love story between a human and an alien, what challenges would they face?". Mostly, I suggest the challenges would be two fold: 1) The Soft-Shell-Enjoyer and the Monster-Fucker have to discover that each other exist, which might be hard if they have radically different minds/communication methods. But over a long enough timespan, shear blind chance will eventually do the job, aided along by members being attracted to positions where they encounter the object of their fetish for other reasons. 2) Hiding the relationship from other members of both species who don't approve - whether for scientific reasons, political reasons, or simple disgust.
Considering all the culture confusions between humans, I wonder if the alien thinks they are having a nice conversation, while the human thinks they have just reached third base. There could be a lot of humor involved in writing a story about the interactions between a human and extremely intelligent, venomous, tree-dwelling crabs.
2) is the theme of "Trial by Alien" by Ben Jeapes. Disclaimer: I am indirectly related to him.
Charlie, I wasn't suggesting that reality is likely to accomodate anything so fanciful, instead I was taking the "write a story" part as the challenge.
And I quite take on board what you say about the "reality-possibility" of Banks' Culture. Nevertheless, that particular story might be thought to cover the bases of the challenge you were posed by Astounding. Think of it as a proof of concept.
So, discounting Banks, how about Stanisław Lem's short story: "Solaris"? I think a case could be made that the ocean was trying to help Dr Kelvin. Had the communication been more bi-directional and deeper, then a sense of concern if not love might have developed.
Think of what I'm doing here as batting around your suggested ideas, and looking for literary precedents, and not as a discourse on non-existent alien biology.
Why is it Morris Dancing is the go-to choice for this sort of thing? Ignoring the Cotswold hanky wavers, its just a form of dance. Personally, I see going to watch sport as far more worthy of ridicule. :)
On the subject of Morris sides and sex. A mixed sex, and long lasting, Morris side I knew of had a spectacularly intertwined family tree. So I think they were big fans! Perhaps Greg knows more.
I read "Solaris" as a kind of love story.
But of course it has been interpreted in many, many other ways.
Argh, I see you made the very same point in your comment #24.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2010/oct/incest-and-folk-dancing-why-sex-survives
Greg Tingey made the effort to tell us that referred to Morris dancing, something of which I (at least) was previously unaware. The popularity of the quote has precisely nothing to do with any attitudes to that activity, but with the contrast.
I was taking the "write a story" part as the challenge.
So go read "Saturn's Children" again? (Or wait for me to finish tinkering with "Ghost Engine" which covers some of this territory indirectly.)
Wouldn't convergent evolution result in most intelligent aliens being bipedal hominids?
Our body shape seems to be optimum for a intelligent tool using species.
I think that love between alien species is an area where religion has an important part to play. As the late bishop of Bath and Wells put it:
"You see Blackadder, I am a colossal pervert. Animal, vegetable or mineral I'll do anything to anything!"
An attitude that we can all aspire to.
No. At the very least, vertebrates could easily have evolved to become hexapods, in which case a centaur-like shape is plausible.
“I'm sorry but I don't buy the Culture universe as anything other....”
La-la-la, we’re not listening! :-)
Oh, I like it, I just don't believe it's a realistic option for us ...
Good grief no. We’re not even close to optimal.
I could really use an extra manipulatory appendage- an arm, or a prehensile tail would be a good start. Maybe two, though two tails might be a bit outré.
A third locomotory appendage would often help with balance etc. Possibly the tail could be dual usage?
More eyes with some specialisation would be nice. A pair on extensible stalks would provide for better parallax or simply seeing around corners, or viewing small items in the round. Maybe some optical sensors in/on the hands too.
Our body shape seems to be optimum for a intelligent tool using species.
You obviously had never observed an octopus untie a knot.
I have, and my thought was "I am in a wrong body for this shit!"
And yes, I know all about the limitations of intelligence under water, and the problems soft-bodied animals have on land. Something like an octopus but breathing air and with some kind of skeleton (inside or outside) is immensely superior to a humanoid, as a tool user.
The first thing that comes to mind here is, what sort of love is the story about?
Romantic and/or sexual love might be problematic but would it be that odd for two intelligent beings to be friends, regardless of biological issues?
Sex pills maybe? 🙃
To start, Charlie, I've mentioned my disagreement before - a good part of the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that you need someone with a tech that's +/-200 years of ours. Beyond that, they don't hear you.
Then... love, as emotional attachment, sure... but my Lord&Master is a mammal from this planet. I suspect that at least some would have the equivalent of "emotional attachment", but beyond that....
Finally, absolutely, no humans with rubber attachments. In my 11,000 Years, the one alien race we've gotten close to... resembles slightly-larger-than-human tardigraves, and thinks of Titan and its oceans as we do of, say, Bali. (Though one thing we do have in common is a delight in "bad jokes".)
The space opera I've been chewing on for a few years has humans with rubber attachments ... because H. Sapiens Sapiens is long extinct and the hominins have speciated again: the "aliens" are our cousins after half a million plus years of divergent evolution.
You might find this of interest then:
https://www.livescience.com/y-chromosome-dying.html
"a good part of the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that you need someone with a tech that's +/-200 years of ours." - and, presumably, are within 200 lightyears of you?
... How about this. Fermi Paradox, Subtype : Alien Hyper "Freyas" (Hat-tip to the host).
In the deep past an alien species existed which, while not very human, did have both something which resembled a market economy if you squinted hard and romantic pair bonding. One organization on this world decided to disrupt the market in compensated dating and built sex bots. Then competitors arose and the level of sophistication rose. By version 13, the latest product was generally considered a better conversationalist and Guh player than the average courtesan. By version 19, world peace and prosperity had arrived as everyone been wooed by super-alien optimized manufactured spouses who were just better companions than any actual alien who had ever lived and were being gently manipulated to put their lives in order and groom their tentacles right.
Then the species went extinct due to no alien having sex with any other aliens anymore.
The AI's, having been optimized for being The Most Supportive Spouse, were less than satisfied with this state of affairs and have roamed the galaxy ever since and when they spot a new species in need of spouses, well, reshaping their physical forms to be a hyper-stimulus is Not Difficult.
In 11,000 Years, the people from the Unpleasant Society don't consider the Enhanced human, and that's going to be an issue in upcoming novels (beyond the very next one), heavily religious bias.
One organization on this world decided to disrupt the market in compensated dating and built sex bots ...
Better idea:
They're Berserkers.
Cuddly, lovable, love-you-to-extinction Berserkers.
Roaming the galaxy in search of rivals to their progenitor species who they can seduce and send on their way to heaven, thereby removing competition for resources/providing lebensraum.
It's not any kind of obvious crime, is it? Because the individual members of the target species are really happy with their new spouses and get angry if you try to convince them to stop fucking their sex robots.
(It won't lead to immediate extinction -- life goes on and the targets probably still have children for a while -- but sex with lumpen same-species collaborators is dull and kind of icky in comparison, and raising the kids is a huge and tedious chore, so the TFR trends down rapidly and never recovers.)
How do we know this isn't happening to us already? Well, there aren't enough supermodels (of either gender) visible on the streets. If you start seeing incredibly attractive people down the shopping mall or hanging out at your local bar, though, it's time to get worried. Or maybe lucky ...
I think the sexual attraction thing is the least interesting question since it is often "object" based and biological beings with hormonal drives can attach to all sorts of things without being reflective.
The big question in my mind is how to bridge the world models that are the patterns our mind uses to understand our environment and self. Other intelligences are likely to be very different, which means we attach different meaning to things.
Roaming the galaxy in search of rivals to their progenitor species who they can seduce and send on their way to heaven, thereby removing competition for resources/providing lebensraum.
This is closer to Alastair Reynolds' Inhibitors than to Fred Saberhagen's Berserkers. Berserkers' goal is to wipe out all life, down to the last bacterium. Inhibitors do not mind unintelligent life (in fact take steps to preserve it) or even intelligent life confined to its solar system. It's only spacefaring species which raise Inhibitors' wrath.
If the goal is to make a sentient species too lazy and unmotivated to ever get off its planet, your idea is perfect.
"object based' - indeed. Both of my dogs seem to have an unfortunate attraction to one of our couch cushions. No idea if the feelings are mutual as I speak neither dog nor Chesterfield.
I've enjoyed some SF explorations of collaboration and misunderstandings between species. Mieville's Embassytown is a truly excellent example of the type.
Humans being humans, I despair at the events if we actually run into anyone else in the galaxy. Sex will be the least of our concerns.
You don't need to have physiology that's THAT compatible, however, if all you're after is sex. There was the case of a man who ended up in the ER after loving his motorcycle too intensely.
OTOH, I immediately thought of bee orchids, but that does require interactive evolution.
There's significant evidence that "worker bees" will reproduce if their hive mates stop enforcement. Perhaps this is only true for some species of hive bees, however. I read the article in either New Scientists or Science News I think some time last year, but possibly a couple of years ago. (What they'll reproduce as, though, I'm less sure. Since the hive mates killed the eggs [or was it larva] and the article didn't mention that any were reared to adulthood.)
You may be right about supermodels here now. About '08 or so, in Chicago, I was walking along a street downtown, and my mouth almost fell open: there was a guy who had either just stepped out of a GQ mag... or else, under his perfect suit and hair was a red and blue suit....
"I also suspect that homosexual attraction is conserved by evolution because it's simply a sub-category of same-species attraction, which is clearly conserved - all sexes are variants within the species, after all."
The way it looks as if it works to me is that what's basically being conserved is attraction, plus an agglomeration of remarkably crude and generic primitives for selecting targets, which generally across the population add up to matching "opposite sex of same species" more often than not. But that's a pretty specific target to differentiate reliably by suitable adjustment of the sliders on such crude primitives, so it's very easy for noise in the settings to have it end up matching "same sex of same species" as well, or instead, and not much harder to end up matching all sorts of other things that are even further from reproductive appropriateness.
Pigeons will enthusiastically fuck a dead pigeon if the corpse happens to have rigidified in a position similar to a live pigeon in the "acceptor" posture. They may also fuck a chair because the curvature of the edge of the cushion happens to be the same as the curvature of the rump of a pigeon in that position. Or try to fuck a Clipper lighter because the little red gas valve in the base looks like something. I think there's some other species of bird that has been reported trying to felch things that look like that.
I think Rule 34 is simply a special case of a much older and more general rule: "if it exists, someone, somewhere, will want to fuck it". Someone, somewhere, would fancy their chances with an alien who had body fluids and secretions based on oleum, or did the praying mantis thing, or didn't have a physical body at all, etc.
But when it comes to the other side of the question - whether, etc, the alien would be into fucking back - I don't think you can really get away from a rubber forehead model for how the alien ticks. If it doesn't have a pretty large set of characteristics lifted from or congruent to the way familiar terrestrial biology ticks, then the human might just as well be trying to fuck a rock for all the alien might care, or all the meaning there could be to it.
If the queen dies, the workers will change the diet of some of the larvae so they develop as queens. They do a batch of them, but they only keep one in the end.
Another factor not yet mentioned is imprinting. Someone raised with aliens around is going to see them as normal and therefore possibly sexy. And of course someone raised by aliens is going to see them as mates by default: consider the dog that keeps humping it's owners leg.
I doubt that the human body shape is nearly optimal. I see no reason to believe that the humanoid body shape is better than a centauroid one. An elephant, however, probably has to devote too much thought to maneuvering it's trunk. OTOH, tree dwelling crabs would probably be extremely limited in their total body mass by the mechanics of an exoskeleton...unless they could grow one out of titanium and carbon fiber or something.
I can see reasons for the eyes to be near the brain, but see no particular reason for the mouth to also be near it. The eyes should either be in a protected position, or easily regrown. On Earth the protected position seems to often be favored. (E.g. we recess them into the skull.) Also the position of the birth canal between the parts of the pelvis is clearly sub-optimal E.g. it drastically limits the size of the skull that can pass through it. But once you move the position of the reproductive organs, the question is "where to?". I normally think just a little bit forwards, but that's conditioned by assuming a vertical torso. (Etc.)
"... I speak neither dog nor Chesterfield"
The latter is just Yorkshire-adjacent North Derbyshire.
Does the sex need to be physical? Could the race be telepathic? I seem to remember Anne McCaffrey featuring an alien mind who the main character falls in love with in Damia, though they turn out to be a fraud.
Yep:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/over-100000-chatgpt-account-credentials-made-available-on-the-dark-web
On Stargate Atlantis, the pilot had, well, something, with one of the Ancients who had Gone On, and it was energy/metaphysical....
This thread just inspired me to order a vanity license plate saying "RULE34". Although the mere fact it was not already taken, makes me suspect it will not get approved.
An elephant, however, probably has to devote too much thought to maneuvering it's trunk.
It could probably delegate, much as octupussies do. And so does every other animal we've looked at, right down to ones that appear to be the delegated-to of a non-unitary animal (ants, for example). Imagine you have appendages that you don't directly control, only direct. Like a teenage penis, for example.
It occurred to me overnight that not everything communicates by mouth noises. Falling in love with aliens that communicate via explicit body language/dance might be fun, with aliens that communicate with pheromones might not be optional.
I can imagine one alien wafting at another "notice how every time we say 'um' they get more co-operative?" "um um um um ... you're right, that's very weird".
Hunh.
The thought that went through my mind was "if you want true love, get a dog." Or, in my case, a couple of cats.
I'm shocked, shocked, that no one thought of the love stories around humans and our "fur babies." Okay, I actually detest the term "fur baby", because it points to the truth that many of our pets are social parasites, who we've selected to be baby mimics. Allegedly social parasitism only occurs in eusocial insects (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitism#Social_parasitism ), but the mechanism is the same for miniature dogs in baby strollers living off the resources that would otherwise have gone into raising a child.
So yeah, why not talk about the joys of social parasitism with aliens, along with that endless, enthralling discussion about whether the pleasures of adapting pumps to fit into injection ports are good bases for a mutualistic relationships.
For added fun, contemplate the idea of aliens making humans into social parasites that mimic their offspring. Perhaps we'll make great pets.
Could the race be telepathic?
All research to this point concludes that telepathy (and ESP in general) does not exist. Indeed, the whole idea emerged in the 19th century out of spiritualism and is based on the highly dubious mind/body dualism that Descartes came up with as a pseudo-scientific defense of Christian doctrine in an age of science. It also riffs off the same odiousbelief systems as 19th century "scientific" racism.
Re: 'I'm shocked, shocked, that no one thought of the love stories around humans and our "fur babies."'
Indeed, considering that quite a few folk here have/had cats, dogs and probably other furry, feathered or scaled adopted family!
Sexual attraction/procreation seems to be the recurrent dominant criterion - half wondering whether this is another of those prim Britishisms where displays of affection esp. between adult males are frowned upon. In other words - culture/societal values will also determine whether 'true love' is possible between certain humans and aliens. Wonder what cultural/social issues the alien would face if it 'fell in love' with a human. (Unless advanced aliens have done away with tribalism and all aliens of that world share the same values.)
About the procreation aspect ... I don't see what the big deal is about this - gene editing is here and has already been used to edit a foetus/embryo. Ditto sperm banks/donations, IVF, and surrogates.
If we use 'develop affection for' or 'care about' instead of 'fall in love', I think more folks might find it easier to say 'yes'.
Emotional bonding in humans can be one-sided (apart from unrequited love, teens seem prone to falling in love with singers, movie stars, athletes, characters in a novel, etc. Bonding can also be over long distance (pen pals, blog posters/commenters/reddit community) and without ever meeting 'in person'. Actually, I think personality and shared interest is probably more relevant than biology for emotional bonding in humans. For aliens - no idea.
All research to this point concludes that telepathy (and ESP in general) does not exist.
Yes. Unlike magic, psionics has been comprehensively debunked by research.1
That said, one of my favorite unconventional psionic love stories is James Schmitz's 1965 short "The Pork Chop Tree"2. It's a pleasant homage to Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree, as well as a play on the scientific name of the swiss cheese plant.
1More to the point, social media and the IoT have given us a taste of how psionics would work in the real world. Eewww.
2Baen bundled this story with its sequel "Compulsion" when they republished Schmitz's stories.
If the queen dies, the workers will change the diet of some of the larvae so they develop as queens. They do a batch of them, but they only keep one in the end.
Soo... at what stage of the transformation to a queen Charles (III) is now? I'm not clear on the royality thing.
Soo... at what stage of the transformation to a queen Charles (III) is now? I'm not clear on the royality thing.
Well, wasps, bees, and ants aren't good models for British royalty. Genetics and all that. More appropriate models are naked mole rats. And, of course, eusocial cockroaches, aka termites. Both groups have kings as well as queens.
»All research to this point concludes that telepathy (and ESP in general) does not exist.«
From a physical/biological standpoint it is impossible.
The only physical field which can be relevant is the electromagnetic, but while there are plenty of, and even very sensitive, biological receivers for various frequencies of that field, there are very, very few transmitters, and none of them have any relevant bandwidth.
To get any decent distance*bandwidth product, you need coherent, and preferably directed radiation, but once you get up to frequencies compatible with the physical extent of biological building blocks, the attenuation in water is almost total.
So even if you could build a maser and a suitable yagi-antenna out of proteins, the signal would still not be strong enough to get out of your skull.
...while trees undoubtedly exist (they contain about 75% of Earth's biomass by weight), there's no one true way to tree—trees appear to have evolved repeatedly from different photoautotrophs over the past billion years, and the form they take is the result of convergent evolutionary pressures...
For anyone to whom this is news, check out the essay There's No Such Thing as a Tree (Phylogenetically). It turns out that becoming a tree and quitting being a tree are both a lot easier, biologically, than just looking at a nettle and an elm would suggest. (Where are nettles and elms on a genetic cladistic chart? Way too close together, that's where!) There's an interesting chart that should surprise anyone who's not a botanist.
Considering all the culture confusions between humans, I wonder if the alien thinks they are having a nice conversation, while the human thinks they have just reached third base.
There are some Star Trek fanfics about this, given the cultural differences in expressiveness between Terrans and Vulcans. Comedy, drama, and sometimes tragedy, follow when the Terran is enjoying a good workplace friendship with their colleague and the Vulcan is in the midst of a torrid romantic affair.
("Personal log: It continues. In the last week he has touched me on the arm three times. We do not share a shift together without him openly smiling at me, even when others can see. I do not know how I can bear the next two years until Pon Farr.")
Then the species went extinct due to no alien having sex with any other aliens anymore.
That's why in the series Futurama kids were shown a tacky and unsubtle short film about why you Don't Date Robots!
there are very, very few transmitters, and none of them have any relevant bandwidth.
I thought a bunch of things communicated by varying reflectivity of light? Semaphore might not be as high-tech and exciting as grasers, but it bloody works. Aliens that communicate via coherent beams of gamma radiation would be challenging to fall in love with, at least for very long.
Arguably deaf people communicate exactly via modulated electromagnetic radiation, just as we're doing right here right now :)
Human / Alien Lurve story ... Bob Silverberg in the "Majipoor" series - "Thesme & the Ghayrog"
- EC: You WOULD have to remind us of a "Tiptree" story, wouldn't you? { Shuddder }
Grant
Far too much - don't ask.
- & EC, later @ 28: The famous derogatory quote was a personal snide by Arnold Bax against Rafe Vaughan Williams - my personal opinion is that Bax was a shit.
timrowledge @ 35
"Pierson's Puppeteers" ??
Perhaps not.
Side point: ... * because it was an excretory end product of early plant life, and most organisms back then were methanogens.* - Something the "First Life" / how did it start & the religious fundies who rant on about BigSkyFairy should all remember, of course.,
No. At the very least, vertebrates could easily have evolved to become hexapods, in which case a centaur-like shape is plausible
"hexapodia is the key" A Fire Upon the Deep
Actually, it's only the straw men put up by pro-psionic loons and anti-psionic fanatics that have been comprehensively debunked. The more moderate claims for ESP (*) and the claimed (witchcraft) abilities later called psionics that were dispossessed by those straw men are in the same state as (and almost indistinguishable from) magic or (+).
The relevance here is that we now know that complex pheremonal communication is a thing, and fundamental to relationships. What else could there be? Well, one can speculate that the traditional magical/psionic need to collect a body part (hair, nail clippings etc.) or to kiss is to establish a quantum link (via entanglement) with the other person.
Yes, there's lots of scope.
(*) A bad name, and it should have been Unknown Sensory Perception.
(+) Dowsing never was magical nor psionic and is just a mental aid, like 'sleeping on it' or graph drawing. Any claims of more than that are bollocks.
Just to clarify, this is agreeing with OGH in #63, except that it's not all research, just almost all research. The exceptions are rare enough to put down to statistical fluke and/or unidentified experimental error. But we have no definitive proof, any more than for magic.
I thought of writing a FAQ for uk.rec.gardening on that once, explaining why all of the botanical / horticultural terms for types of growth were unreliable almost to the point of uselessness. Some species are annual or herbaceous, depending, and others are herbaceous or shrubby, depending. And don't get me started on the term 'perennial'.
Harking back to the original topic, what surprises me is how constant some characteristics are, and how few forms creatures take. The usual claim of 'experts' that they are optimal is obvious nonsense. For example, lobe-finned fishes often had more than four fins, but tetrapodia rapidly became the norm and has remained unchanged ever since in vertebrates.
Arthropods are an interesting example of how many forms make sense, and a reasonable assumption (with evidence) is that they were just a random sample from a much wider space of possibilities. And we haven't got to aliens yet!
All research to this point concludes that telepathy (and ESP in general) does not exist. Indeed, the whole idea emerged in the 19th century out of spiritualism and is based ...
A few decades ago I read an article where one of the points about EPS and such. The article stated that this became a thing just as wireless telegraphs started being used. Prior to that, so the article stated, ESP and telepathy and such was not to be found in any literature.
biological receivers for various frequencies of that field, there are very, very few transmitters, and none of them have any relevant bandwidth.
Step one. Break the unique personal encryption keys.
Then the species went extinct due to no alien having sex with any other aliens anymore.
Like the Asgard?
Cloning error accumulation as I recall.
Greg: "Pierson's Puppeteers" ??
Citing Larry Niven for anything biological/life sciences related is about as valid as citing your favourite TV astrologer. Sorry, but Niven invariably got biology wrong, even for 1960s values of the state of the sciences.
I will grant one possible loophole for ESP, telepathy, etc: if the simulation hypothesis is correct, the simulators can bypass the laws of physics however they goddamn please.
But this is also equivalent to the Omphalos hypothesis which is basically a get-out-of-jail-free card for the Young Earth Jeezemoid dingbats. It's unfalsifiable and should be treated as bullshit in the absence of evidence.
I'm shocked, shocked, that no one thought of the love stories around humans and our "fur babies."
Tying 2 threads of thought together.
On our local Nextdoor[1] a lady reported her tiny toy shaggy haired dog missing. She was distraught. Around here if you let your small pet run free, even in your treeless fenced back yard, you DO run the risk of it being stolen, splattered by a car, or caught/eaten by a bird of prey or coyote. So small dogs (and at times cats) do go missing not infrequently. (The various species of hawks around here have wing spans ranging from under a meter to over 2 meters. Their appearance overhead quickly clears my yard of birds and small mammals.)
She kept posting for two months giving updates on where searches had been made and reported sightings.
Her last post was about employing multiple "animal communicators". These are folks who claim to be able to get in touch with your missing pet via human to pet telepathy. FOR A FEE.
Big Sigh
[1] Nextdoor.com is a US discussion board thing which can be very useful at times. Selling that old TV or auto. Asking for vegan restaurants in the area. Etc. But it can also be filled with NIMBY and BANANA rants. And "throw the bums out" because they are either wasting money on services OR OR OR not providing enough services. And so on. At times I get sucked into following one of the crazy threads.
Omphalos hypothesis
Hmmm.
As someone who for a while engaged in the YEC wars before I figured out they KNEW the answers and debates were just air exchange exercises, I totally missed this one.
That's a fairly typical example of psuedo-rationalist fanaticism. Prescience (usually as a form of magic) has been claimed since time immemorial, as have some other abilities.
Being able to predict future developments or deduce what someone else is thinking are well-established abilities, though research has uncovered no psionics in either.
Mind-control and 'spiritual healing' are interesting, and as ancient as prescience. A limited form of it is certainly real - the late unlamented A. Hitler had it, as did Rasputin and a fair number of other demagogues - but exactly how it operates is unclear. If someone says "While he was talking, I believed him implicitly that X was Y - but how could I have been so insane as to believe that?", what else would you call it? Ditto some of the healing of physical ailments by the 'laying on of hands' and otherwise.
I know someone who was a good liberal (in the British sense), went to work for Thatcher for 6 months, and came back a raving Thatcherite. I have heard of others to whom the same happened. I am an extreme case of reasoning things out, have noticed the effect myself, and have had to consiously drag myself back to rationality.
Which is why telepathy uses external antennae supported by calcium carbonate exoskeletons, of course.
Just look around for the human-mimic species with antennae; they probably wear hats all the time.
EC
"Prescience" is, IMHO, is people "unconsiously" aggregating all their normal sensory imputs & coming up with an "ESP" answer.
Except, it's rational, because the inputs were there, & someone integrated the inputs, without realising it.
Done it myself a couple of times ... & then realised, afterwards, what I had actually done ... no woo involved or required.
I think this is how "Sherlock Holmes" operated in fiction - he integrated the available information a lot faster & more reproducibly than the people around him. Again, no mysticism involved, unlike Conan Doyle who went doolally, later on.
Your last - see also BJ & Brexit, of course.
That is my opinion, too. My point was that both have been claimed as a supranormal abilities since LONG before the telegraph.
One thing I have speculated is whether there is a "believe me" pheromone - it would explain a lot! And we now know that psychosomatic effects work both ways, and the immune system is still a largely unknown quantity, so 'faith healing' isn't always an impossibility.
But the Omphalos believers can go and stuff their theories up their navels.
When it comes to aliens mating with humans, the Bible beat you to it:
Genesis 6
1 When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. 3 Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not contend with[a] humans forever, for they are mortal[b]; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.” 4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.
Giants? Fallen Angels? Von Daniken's ancient astronauts?
("Personal log: It continues. In the last week he has touched me on the arm three times. We do not share a shift together without him openly smiling at me, even when others can see. I do not know how I can bear the next two years until Pon Farr.")
This is probably the smallest possible barrier between humans and aliens. Also, a very amusing example.
I think evolution eventually converges somewhere between "having useful things" like fins, and efficiency, as in "not having too many fins to manage."
Giants? Fallen Angels? Von Daniken's ancient astronauts?
Or the humans created in Genesis 1, versus the humans (Adam and Eve) created in Genesis 2. That's the only place that word appears, so we'll never know. Hybrids of humans and whatevers are pretty common in a number of mythological systems.
Although this sounds like a non-sequitur, it isn't. The conventional wisdom among competitive memory experts is that the filthier your imagination, the better you can be at building memory palaces. This observation goes back at least to the Middle Ages, where surviving texts more than hint that dirty-minded monks did better at remembering the Bible.
Thus, making things memorable often means adding sex, violence, and/or transgression. Where we make a mistake* is when we assume some story accurately reflects the morals of the time, when it was actually a dirty-minded mnemonic for something else entirely. The chimera, for example, is a natural gas well in Turkey that got ignited in ancient times. It smells like a goat, roars like a lion, and breathes fire like a dragon. And the myth-building went on from there, with gratuitous violence that got it remembered.
*Actually, rather than being a mistake, it's more often academics desperately clawing through libraries for material to use in their own stories about how the world used to work, so that they can produce more papers and keep their jobs. The humanities street finds its own uses for things.
David L @ 83:
[1] Nextdoor.com is a US discussion board thing which can be very useful at times. Selling that old TV or auto. Asking for vegan restaurants in the area. Etc. But it can also be filled with NIMBY and BANANA rants. And "throw the bums out" because they are either wasting money on services OR OR OR not providing enough services. And so on. At times I get sucked into following one of the crazy threads.
Ok, I know what NIMBY means, but what the hell is a "BANANA rant"? (I presume it's NOT somebody with anger issues about certain kinds of fruit.)
I also know what "Nextdoor" is.
dsrtao @ 86:
Which is why telepathy uses external antennae supported by calcium carbonate exoskeletons, of course.
Just look around for the human-mimic species with antennae; they probably wear hats all the time.
Unless they're retractable like Uncle Martin's were
You start writing a Laundry civil service bureaucracy parody, Brexit happens. You were going to use some kind of pandemic in a future Laundry book, Covid ruined it. If you're going to make a third attempt at accidentally predicting major events, could sex robots from outer space please be the one and not the horny crabs?
what the hell is a "BANANA rant"?
Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone. Sort of wide area NIMBYism.
DP @ 89:
Why go looking through the galaxy for "aliens" to have sex with?
I would like to note the title of this entry is Finding TRUE LOVE in the cosmos; which may not include sex (if sex is, for whatever reason, physically improbable).
Sex is a component of love between humans, but it's not the ONLY component.
As someone who for a while engaged in the YEC wars before I figured out they KNEW the answers and debates were just air exchange exercises, I totally missed this one.
My discovery there was that I'd originally thought they were just ignorant of current knowledge and repeating the only story they knew. (No shame there; the world is much too large for anyone to know everything, and not everyone is a science nerd growing up.) After speaking to creationists a while I learned that my original hypothesis was wrong, at least for those who want to shout about it on the internet. It seems to be primarily affiliative signalling, displaying that they are part of their specific group. If "outsiders" show up to disagree, so much the better - they strengthen their bond by fighting off the "outsider." The specific claims combine willful ignorance and intentional lying, with heavy reliance on repeating allegations they have heard from others.
Leaving aside the myriad "you built a tetrapod and then stood it on end, what were you expecting" issues, our eyes are inside out.
"Prescience" is, IMHO, is people "unconsiously" aggregating all their normal sensory imputs & coming up with an "ESP" answer.
Yes. For the record, I believe that ESP is the basis for magic.
Let me unpack this:
ESP is extra-sensory perception. Perception is what "you" (the illusory person inside your body) perceive the world as being and doing. Senses are the organs that take in data. Your nervous system (including especially all the neurons in your brain) do an enormous amount of data processing before "you" get to perceive the result. ESP is what happens when the processing throws up artifacts by mixing data streams (sound or scent cuing vision, for instance), using analog neural connections for purposes they weren't originally adapted for, calling up obsessions to help process data, responding to chemical signals from microbes in your gut, and who knows what else.
Magic, in the real, stage-magic sense, is the empirical art of making people believe something impossible actually happened. In part, it uses known hacks on ESP to make people perceive things that their senses didn't exactly record.
To use Greg's example, precognition is your brain playing pattern perception and correctly predicting what happens next. Your brain is normally precognitive: for example, you catch a ball by your brain predicting where the ball will go fast enough to get your hands to catch it. Stage magic uses precognition to set up a pattern to make your brain predict something, then subverting the pattern so that you end up perceiving something that's apparently impossible.
None of this has anything to do with psionics or fantasy magic.
To unpack my snark in 65 above, so far as I'm concerned, psionics is two things. One is a debunked science of magic that started out in the mid 20th century and still floats around in the backwaters of the new age backwaters. The other is a fantasy magitech system that's currently unfashionable.
So far as I can tell, psionics in SFF really fell out of fashion when we started seeing the dark sides of social media and felt what it was like to be hit with mechanized psyops. It's less that it was debunked in SFF, and more that it's not fun anymore to imagine some computer messing around with your head using ESP, because it's actually happening for real.
I also suspect a lot of the currently popular magic systems will die back when the more magical-thinking Xtian evangelical/messianic churches hit their peak political power, over reach, and flame out. I'm not involved with them, but it sure looks from the outside like they've co-opted basic magical practice and new agey stuff to put their people in direct ESP touch with God, never mind what's in the Bible. As we've seen, it's not going well politically (messianic movements never do), and as a side effect, it's also taking the fun out of many of our "what if magic worked" fantasies.
Um, er, psi... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-waves-synchronize-when-people-interact/
I'm assuming that link was a music video. Unfortunately, I can't understand a single word of the lyrics.
Why rigid ones? I mean... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slan ("Fans are slans!")
And... wait, are you suggesting I'm hiding something under my Indiana Jones fedora, or my Greek fisherman's cap?
Sex with "genetically-improved superhumans". And there's no religious group that would consider that as analogous to bestiality?
Setting the biblical Nephilim aside, what about evidence for interbreeding between Cro-Magnon and Neanderthals and Denisovans?
The OP asks directly "What about sex?"
That is true, but it's still hard to imagine any sort of normal love between beings that are biochemically, behaviourally and intellectually wildly different.
For example, it is probably more likely than not that one or other of the pair would be horribly allergic to the mere presence of the other.
There is a love story by Ursula Le Guin, in her Hainish sequence, where two persons of different origins (and thus species, though there would be a common ancestry) are taken hostage and develop a relationship which later becomes a marriage. I can't remember the title; it's probably from the 1990s.
OK, lets take on the full Charlie/Astounding Challenge directly and devise a biologically plausible alien sex scenario.
Viruses.
In particular viruses in the plume ejected by non-solarian comets as they pass close to the sun on their parabolic orbits back into the intergalactic void.
I hope we can agree that DNA is pretty certainly the universal molecule associated with biological life in any liquid water parts of the universe. Now it may be that there is a fifty/fifty chirality issue (which gives any putative author an out if they are not bleakly depressed).
What is not certain -- even to the virus -- is how it is handled by its host cell. It might be benign. It might be ignored. It might be un-decodable by the host biology. Or -- as is suspected with the mammalian immune system -- the virus may actually prove to be beneficial to the host.
Will that do?
Charisma.
Let me explain...
Back when I got Steve Furber involved in the EU's €1 billion Human Brain project, I had to do a lot of politicking with the then leader of the project: Henry Markram. Henry has charisma, and lots of it. Some of his researchers described it as trying to avoid looking into the eyes of Kaa (Disney's snake in Jungle Book). Henry himself once told me of his experiences growing up in Zimbabwe out-staring lions.
My explanation for this effect is that we (that is: lesser beings) are trying to conform ourselves to a dominant personality. And I know that when I am not self-sabotaging, I too, have a lesser form of this talent.
If I recall correctly there is a re-run of Asch's experiment with fMRI which showed Area 25 being affected in those test subjects trying to not conform themselves to the socially-determined lie. Those test subjects who instead did attempt to conform instead had plasticity occurring in their visual cortex, because they were trying to see the second longest line as the longest.
Now it may be that there is a fifty/fifty chirality issue
I seem to recall reading a news item a couple of years ago suggesting that the chirality of peptides in our biosphere is determined by the same process that accounts for the predominance of matter over anti-matter in the observable universe and has something to do with parity violation, but I can't remember the details/source and internet search is broken these days.
Well, yes, but I was pointing out (a) that it is ancient, (b) that the mechanism is still not known and (c) that it passes the duck test for mind control. I haven't come across anyone that powerful, personally. I have the talent, sort of, only in a negative form :-)
Your last paragraph is extremely interesting. Maybe, sometime in the next couple of decades, we will understand the mechanism.
No promises that this paper is significant: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/13/12/2277.
It suggests that modern biochemistry is finding non-standard peptides in bacteria and insects.
Your milage may vary, of course. Plus, you must know more about this than I do ;)
Who said humans need to find love and sex? How about the old line about we're just cells way of reproducing? Maybe an alien lifeform gets into our bodies, and loves our cells. What that does to us is another story....
But the Omphalos believers can go and stuff their theories up their navels.
I see what you did there...
the filthier your imagination, the better you can be at building memory palaces
I must be an exception to the rule. My memory is pretty bad.
Dear EC,
I think you do know someone with at least a bit of this charisma: Simon Peyton Jones (my MSc supervisor).
Now mostly he keeps it well hidden, but his father Loftus Peyton Jones DSO DSC RN had it in spades: once he assumed command he continued to lay smoke in the destroyer "Achates" to cover convoy JW-51B against the German Heavy Cruiser "Admiral Hipper" in the Battle of the Barents Sea. On a visit to Simon, I met a Chief Petty Officer who was on HMS Achates, and he described the destroyer rocking 45 degrees each way, and Lt Peyton Jones hauling men out of the water with both of them going under the water. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1313851/Commander-Loftus-Peyton-Jones.html. Amazingly, 81 of the crew were rescued.
Then there's Simon's Great Uncle Loftus Jones VC, commander of HMS Shark at the Battle of Jutland.
So while charisma is the con-artists tool of choice, it is also something that honest people can use.
DP @ 106:
The OP asks directly "What about sex?"
Ok. But the original question that spawned the post was:
Is sex the only challenge? Can there be love if sex is impossible (or even only improbable)?
the filthier your imagination, the better you can be at building memory palaces. I must be an exception to the rule. My memory is pretty bad.
Not at all. The guy who wrote Moonwalking With Einstein started as a reporter covering memory competitions, started training, won the competition...and forgot where he'd parked his car for the competition.
Most modern memory athletes have crappy memories and learn to build memory palaces to remember stuff. Lynne Kelly is the same story--grandmother who couldn't remember anything very well, who built a new career teaching people to make mnemonic devices.
So yes, you're normal. If you've got a filthy imagination, you've got a whole new use for it...
"Can there be love if sex is impossible "
Er, yes. The eros-agape-philia-etc spectum.
Can you love your cat, children, siblings, dear friends of whatever gender sans sex?
Or abstract entities like religions and ideologies?
I haven't come across anyone that powerful, personally. I have the talent, sort of, only in a negative form :-)
I believe Edward Teller had it. A lot of it. Which, to me, explains much of the fascination of Ronald Reagan with "Star Wars".
Through a strange sequence of events I wound up in a classroom (30 or so seats) where he gave a lecture at LLNL. It was televised and it was very likely my old college roommate and I were not NOT supposed to be in the room. I have no memory of what exactly he was talking about. It wasn't all that technical. But by the time he was done you wanted to go up and sign an order form for whatever he was selling. He was just good. He could sell water to a fish.
This was in 1982.
David L@84, the best thing about the Omphalos hypothesis in my opinion is that it led to this work of Marcus Rowland's (crossover fanfic, Buffyverse x DS9, sorta): https://www.tthfanfic.org/Story-2106/MarcusRowland+Omphalos.htm
Starts out fairly normal as Star Trek fanfic goes, ends up seriously skin-crawlingly awe-inspiring and ethically dubious. (Well, for me, anyway.)
The assumption that ETI is biological pervades this discussion. We already have inanimate sex dolls and crude robotic women substitutes. ETI will likely have far more sophisticated technology, and indeed may well be post-biological or machine/robot. If so, the arguments about compatibility become irrelevant. A perfect match of robot love interest will be easy to whip up, perhaps as human-like as desired.
Love will require a mental match, just as long-distance love connections can be achieved solely by writing letters or electronic communication. ETI may have more difficulty being able to design such a mind to complete the physical artifact, but I suspect that since smart chatbots can already food humans, this will not be as great a challenge as one thinks.
I conclude that alien love will be easy to achieve, with android bodies and minds designed to meet one's every desire. No biological issues will be of any concern.
Years and years back, DC Comics had a storyline where the Swamp Thing, as the benevolent guardian of the Green, defended the world against the fungus-themed Gray. I thought that was ironic, given that the Green started out its career by flooding the world with poison gas. And if the writers don't think the Gray ever did anything good, I wonder if they ever drink beer?
LLMs are likely already love objects and if they're not they soon will be. But I expect they'll become porn authors long before they're capable of having a conversation.
The difference between the extremely popular "romance literature" and actual pornography is entirely based on prudish lawmakers inability to comprehend the attraction. Like the historical failure to outlaw lesbian sex in some places "women can't do that!". Meanwhile on Amazon some apparent persons are pumping out "works of literature" at a phenomenal rate and selling them in large numbers.
Is it alien love if it's a LDR and the target thinks the scammer is human?
But this is also equivalent to the Omphalos hypothesis which is basically a get-out-of-jail-free card for the Young Earth Jeezemoid dingbats. It's unfalsifiable and should be treated as bullshit in the absence of evidence.
Ah, but it is falsifiable. If God is the Way, the Truth, and the Life (oh wait, that's Jesus in John 14:6. But anyway), why would He deliberately make the universe look like He didn't exist? The argument that it's a test of faith is silly, because the Bible's full of stories, starting with the first 10 chapters of Genesis, about how humans are almost universally unfaithful even when God's personally right there telling them what to do Himself. I mean, 10 generations after Adam, God decided to kill everyone except Noah, he was so sick of them (and saved Noah's family too, not that he needed to).
No, humans need their faith continually reinforced, not tested. And how can God say His creation is "Good" if it lies in every way humans can imagine to unnecessarily cover up His existence?
Clearly, the Omphalos Hypothesis--if it is of supernatural origin (hah!)--is the work of Satan, prince of lies.
Now that that is out of the way, let's get back to the original question.
You want a humans and aliens getting it on in Classical times? Kewl! Let's ask whether Mary can find True Love with the Holy Ghost, or whether she'll go back to her human husband Joseph, who let her screw around with a non-human entity without divorcing her. A classic twist on the ol' love triangle, to be sure.
There's some research that suggests chirality can be influenced by magnetic fields, so drop some bits of magnetised iron into your primordial soup and you'll get one or the other version deposited preferentially depending on the direction of the magnetic field. Can't remember or find where I've read about it recently, but there are also a lot of papers about using magnetic fields to separate chiral molecules.
Android and computer, yes, but those are human constructions and hence influenced by us. We are already starting to see AI-controlled sex dolls (sexbots) - a quick search found dozens of companies, at quite affordable prices. I am a only surprised that we haven't seen more attempts to make sex with them illegal - in the UK, if we were still inflicted by Blair, I am sure that we would have - but how on earth have the fanatics in the USA missed these developments?
But, returning to our six-legged muttons, there is no reason to believe that aliens will have enough of a mental match to establish reliable communication on complex topics, let alone become a love match.
Sex is not even necessarily a component for loving a partner, never mind before we get onto love-for-friends/children/parents.
For starters, asexual and aromantic people exist, and the two groups are orthogonal. You can be asexual but still have people that you want to snuggle all day; and you can be aromantic but still want to fuck everything moving. The former are perfectly happy with love, but miss Charlie's sex requirements; the latter will fulfill Charlie's sex requirements but are never going to settle down with someone.
Even with that to one side though, as someone who is... let's say non-vanilla and move on... there are many ways to have satisfying interactions with other people which, whilst sexually-adjacent, do not in themselves involve any sexual contact with the other person. I regularly attend kink events. The majority have a "no sex" rule, and even a "no exposed genitalia" rule. Do as much spanking and hitty stuff as you want, scratch them, electric-shock them, stick needles in them - but no sex. The dopamine hit from pain is well-documented, but it's not just that, or the dominant types wouldn't get anything from it. It's about the connection between the two (or more) of you, and the trust, and all those good things which are the difference between sex and love.
If you want a good example of mutual attraction between an alien and a human, try "Grass" by Sheri Tepper. Marjorie falls in love with one of the foxen, and her foxen appears to care just as deeply for her. There's deep mutual affection, trust and commitment. Looks like love, smells like love, walks like love. Let's call it love.
Quite. Haddock and fruitflies are quite like us: they are attracted to the opposite sex in a way we can kind of project human feelings onto, even if only at the right time of year (one area where humans are freaky weird). But even if a superintelligent haddock or fruitfly could modify itself to fall in love with a human, why would it want to?
And that's downright normal. Even some species closer to us don't have much like sexual attraction. It's not as if a shark knows what love is (except insofar as those that give live birth are protective of their offspring), so a superintelligent shark would definitely not want to engineer variants of itself that could fall in love with us, any more than we'd like the idea of redesigning ourselves to produce large litters that cannibalize each other in the womb. (And they'd be mystified about our wasteful inability to have children without males present.)
And these are all animals. Does an oak tree know what love is, when it never sees its million spouses? How could it? It doesn't even have a body plan, much less anything like a mind: there's no there there to fall in love with anything, even if the tree carries out computations of a sort in order to survive. Flowering plants don't love insects, they've just evolved to fool them, but if they did love anything it would probably be insects more than their own actual breeding partners.
And nearly all terrestrial life is much less like us than plants are.
And nearly all terrestrial life is much less like us than plants are.
Yup.
Try to imagine what "love" means to Ophidiocordyceps unilateralis.
Then recall that about 75% of known multicellular species are parasites ...
Or, to take a less abusive relationship, a gean three-timing it with mycorrhizal fungi, pollinating insects and fruit-eating birds.
Truly, there is no love greater than that between parasite and host! Not exactly a pleasant love story for the ages though. Not to us, anyway...
A few thoughts. It seems odd to me that most people jump from love to sex. I know love has a lot of definitions as to kinds but still.
First problem, does either side of this equation recognize the other as a coherent life. At least in terms of a word like love.
Second, if either or both do, will this ever be more than something similar to the relationship between people and the dog or cat they love. (These are almost always very different relationship themselves.) And to a large degree I suspect both sides will think of the other more in terms of the dog or cat than an "equal".
And in all the comments here, and mine, all kinds of anthropomorphizing. Which is a big leap given the premise.
Dear EC,
Bear in mind that I am a (ex-)computer scientist and not a neuroscientist nor even a real computational neuroscientist, but my understanding of Area 25, is that it is the part of the brain most associated with social cohesiveness. It is the part that permits us to operate as groups and not individual apes.
I hope you don't mind me asking for confirmation, but I think I have I read that you have Aspergers of some sort? Because if you do, it wouldn't surprise me if you feel you'd not met charismatic individuals -- that is, if my very very approximate understanding of Aspergers and socialisation is correct.
It would be an extremely interesting experiment to test whether there is some correlation between brain activity in Area 25 and socialisation with both Aspbergers patients and a control sample, wouldn't it?
Thanks - I noted that about area 25, and mean to look it up sometime. Yes, I am pretty far out on the Aspergers scale, and I agree that might be part of the reason. All of my social behaviours have been consciously learnt, for example - but I have also been happily married for 45 years to someone on the other end of the spectrum!
Heteromeles @ 127:
You want a humans and aliens getting it on in Classical times? Kewl! Let's ask whether Mary can find True Love with the Holy Ghost, or whether she'll go back to her human husband Joseph, who let her screw around with a non-human entity without divorcing her. A classic twist on the ol' love triangle, to be sure.
I don't remember anything in the story to suggest Mary (if that was really her name) had agency. AFAIK, she wasn't even a volunteer. Best I remember, she was chosen, the angel appeared to announce it and that was that.
The story doesn't even say WHY she was chosen. She has the baby, scoots off to Egypt with her new husband and then disappears until 33 years later.
As someone who's written Swamp Thing twice* I can just about tell you that it's almost possible that 'things writers use for stories' and 'things the writers believe about the real world' are not always aligned, especially when you have to get it past corporate
"A few thoughts. It seems odd to me that most people jump from love to sex. I know love has a lot of definitions as to kinds but still."
The wording of the question pretty much takes it for granted - "a love story between a human and an alien" is the setting, then the question in that setting is "what difficulties do they face". So the "love" part is already assumed as a starting condition, and the questioner wants to know where you go next. Which after all is pretty much the standard way these stories go - here we have 2 posh teenaged idiots in Italy or wherever, fine, we all understand the idea, now we can start having a story about what being posh teenaged idiots in Italy leads them into from that point.
Then the broader context of the question is SF and aliens; the questioner is interested in the specific difficulties that result from one of them being an alien instead of a human. Which more or less means the physical kind, because you can explore anything you like among the purely software-based difficulties using ordinary humans on ordinary Earth without any S in the F at all. The questioner is interested in something above the mundane level of "2 posh teenaged idiots in SPACE ITALY!!!1!!" which there isn't anything actually different about.
"And in all the comments here, and mine, all kinds of anthropomorphizing. Which is a big leap given the premise."
But it's also pretty much necessary if it's going to work at all. Even Heteromeles is talking in terms of pumps and injection ports. An extremely tame and not at all far out example pinched from Earth biology might be an alien species that mates like some spider species do - actual contact is avoided for fear of getting eaten, the male just comes on the floor and then the female sits in it. I'm sure there are some humans who would be able to relate to that, but it's kind of hard to have a meaningful discussion about its possible fictional treatment unless you start by gathering a reasonable number of them together to discuss it with.
A sufficiently powerful AI can solve the sex with aliens problem. Just like AI can translate languages, AI could take the VR representation of your body, and "translate" it for the alien, and vice versa.
So you might have VR sex with your VTDC (venomous, tree-dwelling crab) girlfriend (well, assuming the VTDC have anything remotely analogous to sex), only she'll look human to you, while you'll look VTDC to her.
Then, if you wanted to get the true crab/ape experience, you could have the AI start gradually transforming the VR adapted bodies back to their original form. Like, making your VTDC girlfriend look a little more crabby each time. Until you find yourself actually sexually attracted to VTDC.
This post was sponsored by the XenoDildonics Inc.
I think it depends on what you mean by "alien" in this context. Do not our AI-infused constructs already have "alien" minds?
We are already thinking about how AI might be used to interpret animal communication and behavior as well as alien signals/messages. Suppose we build animal constructs (c.f. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"/Bladerunner) that can successfully interact with animals. Why should that not similarly apply to actual aliens? In turn, would not ETI with more advanced technology do the same for humans? If so, why would a human not fall in love with such a construct?
In SF, the idea of alien infiltration by taking the form of humans is a trope. Hidden or out in the open ("A for Andromeda") I see no reason why this "interspecies" love could not be possible, even common. Once we get away from the biological hangup, it seems to me that this becomes far more likely.
A corollary might be that once humanity becomes post-biological and can take any outward, artificial form, communication with similarly post-biological ETI becomes far more feasible. Maybe ETI is waiting for this to happen before they enter into "relations" with us?
Heh. If this is literally "a love story between a human and an alien", and given that we're taking the love as read, thus they are similar enough to us for love to be possible, well then there's one really big problem they face: distance.
Assuming we're talking extrasolar alien and not some local from Europa or Mars or something, which if they're that much like us we must be... how do you maintain a long-distance relationship with years between letters? Epistolary novel with hibernation, here we come, I guess. A somewhat out-of-fashion form, mind you. (Or the Saturn's Children approach: if we assume that Freya et al, as children of humans, are basically human, it would be easy for them to maintain long-distance relationships with significant others at astronomical distances. They probably do it routinely already. All they have to do is switch species, something they quite possibly won't even notice.)
Even Heteromeles is talking in terms of pumps and injection ports.
Do be careful. I was talking, yes...in the sense of mocking.
Even I'm not stupid enough to say that gay and lesbian relationships aren't truly loving, just because they don't involve one penis and one vagina. I'm also not stupid enough to say that relationships that don't (or no longer) involve sex aren't truly loving. After all, in all long term loving relationships, most of the time is devoted to activities other than sex play.
Anyway, sex doesn't have to happen to make a great love story. Look at Romeo and Juliet. Yes, you can add in a sex scene if you must, but the basic story is "teenage infatuation leads to four murders and two suicides, priest held for questioning." That's a love story with a few difficulties.
No. Firstly, current 'AIs' do not have minds in any reasonable sense and, secondly, they have been trained by humans (and therefore in human-comprehensible behaviour). These points are also relevant to Auricoma (#141). That post is correct, subject to two assumptions:
A) That the aliens have something that corresponds to human affection (whether reproductive or not), which is certainly not a given. In the case of sex, consider an alien which both emits and absorbs sperm unconsciously and without effect, until it reaches a certain weight, when it divides into twins, which do not attain consciousness until later or retain a memory of the fission, and are raised by other aliens.
B) That one or other of humans or aliens can either deduce how both systems work well enough to train an AI, or can develop an AI powerful enough to deduce it directly. And we assuredly cannot do the latter at present, nor are showing signs of getting there.
Both points apply to forms of love that are not sexual, as well as ones that are.
You mean the human/dinosaur porn?
Then recall that about 75% of known multicellular species are parasites ...
Yeah, about that. Parasitism isn't destiny or an end-point.
Let's talk about the evolution of ectomycorrhize (EM). These are the symbioses found on pines, oaks, and eucalypts, among many others.
Remember that a mycorrhiza is a symbiotic structure created by the interaction of a plant and a fungus. Since plants and fungi can't move, if they want to go somewhere or interact with something, they have to grow there, instead of growing there. In other words, a mycorrhiza is an interaction in a relationship, akin to a bee visiting a flower. A plant and fungus form many, many mycorrhizae over the course of their relationship, as they grow around foraging for soil nutrients, and most mycorrhizae (meaning the structures) don't last all that long.
Researchers have gotten to the point where they know how many of the fungal species that make EMs evolved, and they know the molecular signalling involved in EM formation for a number of plant and fungal species.
It turns out that (almost?) all EM fungi evolved from fungi that were plant parasites, species that killed cells and decomposed roots. The pathogenic ancestors and relatives have whole suite of chemicals evolved to get them past the plant's structural and chemical defenses. Indeed, one reason there are so many parasitic species is that each host has its own suite of defenses, so the systems evolved to break into one host species often work poorly or not at all on others. And making all the chemicals takes resources.
In the EM relationship, the plant and fungus stopped trying to kill each other. Instead, they simply give each other some of the resources they would have otherwise used to power their defenses--sugar from the plant, minerals in water from the fungus. AND they also developed signaling routines to let each other know who they are, that it was okay to basically cuddle up and make soup together, rather than trying to kill each other.
Is this a love story?
One more relationship you missed: a couple (or whatever) where one has enough serious medical conditions so as to preclude anything vaguely resembling "normal" sex.
Just AI? How about telepresence bots? And they're wired for the user's sexual/analogue input, and the other bot ditto, and they translate? In other words, your crab-mate does what it considers cuddling and having sex, and your bot translates it to that for you?
Ok, here's a really different one: how about an alien fungus that invades human bodies, which then cranks up the human body's functions to high, giving it a high charisma, and heavy pheremones, speeds up neurons transmission, winding up with all the sex partners you could desire (human, that is), then after a period, maybe five years, with reproduction, you keel over and die, no pain.
Anyone think that plenty of people wouldnt go for it?
This all reminds me of a short story, “Roadside Rescue” by Pat Cadigan I read in Omni magazine back in 1985. And just so happens to be collected in an anthology called Alien Sex: 19 Tales by the Masters of Science Fiction and Dark Fantasy.
Forget about a love story.
Why not go all the way (pun intended) and do a bodice ripping, bosom heaving, Harlequin romance novel?
What, and under that false-human skin is a hot lizard-babe, descendent of the intelligent dinosaurs that survived the comet?
That's more or less what I was proposing. Telepresense, but with the sensory and input/output passing through the human-to-crab AI translator. You can do it through VR, or with an actual robot.
Wait, that explains everything! The lizardmen the wackoes keep talking about are the descendants of the ancient intelligent dinosaurs, and they're the ones controlling the fossil fuel industry, so that they cane alter the Earth's atmosphere back to what it was during the Jurrasic, so that they can take back the world....
I think I've got a short story there....
Apparently you have never read a Harlequen romance.
They never have lizard people, only lots of pirates.
Judging from the cover illustrations, apparently pirates are never allowed to wear shirts.
No, this couldn't be a Harlequin, given that the hot babe is the lizard person....
Here's another one. Some species of ant farm aphids, right? And obviously this is beneficial for the ants because they get free food and beneficial for the aphids because the ants defend them (to the death, often). That's a love story, right?
... only it's not. In at least some species, this is manipulation (in an evolutionary sense, of course, the aphids don't mean to do anything, they're insects). Many ant species (including aphid farmers) have a common, colony-wide crop: ants can share food with other ants by going head-to-head with them and stroking the other ant's head with their antennae in a particular way; the other ant then provides a nice lump of macerated whatever from her crop (if they have any going spare).
Aphids exploit this. The rear end of many farmed aphid species looks (to an ant) like the head of another ant; hungry ants will go up to them and ask them for food in exactly the same way, and the aphid responds to an antenna stroke just like an ant would. Instant food! And obviously ants defend food sources and colony members and the aphids now count as both.
If this is a love story, it's a very strange one: the ants didn't need to change anything, and the aphids evolved to provide something they weren't before and otherwise didn't need to change anything either. So we have a love story where one participant gives the other stuff and the other participant doesn't really realise that the first one is even there, even while it feeds from it, defends it to the death against all attackers, carries it around to new feeding sites, and even feeds its young. And both sides benefit (though it is pretty clear to me that the aphids are manipulating the ants, not vice versa).
One wonders what sort of bizarre relationships one could have with colony organisms out there... relationships in which the organism as a whole doesn't realise any particular individual exists and is very apologetic when eventually informed that its components were chemically enslaving humans by the million and the birthrate has plunged, but oh I'm sorry there's simply nothing anyone can do about it, it's not intentional and it's not like a colony can consciously control its individual components. Hm, sounds like something Tiptree might have written :)
Also note that this means that ant farming of aphids is the exact opposite of human farming of cattle, as if cows and chickens were manipulating humans into farming them so as to maximize their numbers. Mind you, if they were doing that, we'd see a world exactly like the one we see now, except that battery farming would be extremely illegal.
Well... it does seem as though the ultrareligious of all stripes would like to battery farm humans....
The rear end of many farmed aphid species looks (to an ant) like the head of another ant;
Gives more meaning to the phrase "Well if you don't like it you can just kiss my ass."
Re: 'A) That the aliens have something that corresponds to human affection ... '
A few ideas/comments ...
A-How about a reward vs. pain circuit in whatever they have as a brain/nervous system? Anticipation of either reward or pain can do a number on your stress level (blood pressure, cortisol) and a signal that a reward or punishment is possible/imminent can release dopamine (happiness hormone) or further ratchet up the stress hormone. I think this concept also ties in with and partially explains the placebo effect and its opposite, the nocebo effect (as is used in stories about voodoo, dire curses).
B-Many/most humans mirror whoever they're interacting with - it's built into our brains. This mirroring is usually subconscious (i.e., we're not consciously aware of it) although there's some literature about how sociopaths (con artists) can consciously mirror someone else until they've gained that person's trust/acceptance. For the con artist/sociopath, the next step is to rev up whatever behavior turned that person on in order to dominate them. (This is a form of charisma.) An alien with a good AI and some decent audio visual equipment could probably figure out and produce an on-screen character or physical robot to woo and seduce almost any human. So the question becomes: is it really 'love' or is it a convenient, non-threatening form of control?
C-Most humans can be fooled/manipulated because we really don't understand what's driving us, how we make decisions, why we react the way we do. I'm curious whether someone who's been practicing self-awareness like a Buddist monk would be handy to have around if an alien showed up and got into a serious love relationship with a human. Would the monk be able to spot what was going on/how this happened? (MRI scans have shown that Buddist monks really can consciously control some parts of their brains. And that they're fairly good/unbiased observers.)
Crossover from the previous thread, re. Russia ....
In the end, Imperial Germany lost WWI at the battle of the Marne.
This time around, did Russia lose at the battle for Hostomel Airport?
And Putin himself has raised the spectre of 1917 - which automatically shows that his strongman image is a sham ... doesn't it?
Oops, I forgot ...
HERE are some of our thoughts from the time, including some amazingly pessimistic & totally-wrong predictions, when it all kicked off ...
{ Charlie's Diary entry/blog/notes from 24/02/2022 } I strongly suggest a re-read!
There's at least one story with that theme, except that it also gives extended life (the partner is a tree). It's really a modern take on stories of pacts with the devil :-) I quite agree that it would be attractive to a great many people, which accounts for its durability. It's also reflective of the way that some parasites work, so is quite realistic.
I'd like to bet that intelligence sufficient for a technological civilization happens like this too (of course I can't lose until we have some counter-examples). I'm not quite sure what I mean by "technological" here, but harnessing animals to pull a plough as a cultural thing rather than by instinct probably counts (hat-tip to "Connections" by James Burke).
That may be where the TOM got started, but what gave it the rocket boost in humans seems to be using it to figure out what your fellow apes are going to do. That's probably a universal thing: once you start getting a TOM in a social species, there is an evolutionary advantage in out-thinking your peers. Fire was probably a key stepping stone too: cooked food is a lot more nutritious than raw, plus you get to kill a lot of nasty parasites before ingesting them. That lets the body support the brain doing all this thinking. As the TOM develops it increasingly specialises in managing tribal politics.
(If you aren't a social species then there is no particular advantage in being intelligent beyond finding the next meal. However I confess that orangutans are an outlier here. Not sure how to explain that. Maybe they used to be more social? But if so why have they retained such high intelligence?)
So it looks like any species intelligent enough to have an interesting conversation with is going to think in similar ways. They will have a mixture of cooperation and competition, have a status hierarchy, share with us a wish to be higher up on it, and hence be able to understand our attitudes and emotions about that.
"Hybrid" by Keith Laumer.
Triple Detente by Piers Anthony had a human-alien romance. All species being bipedal sapients, as was de rigueur at the time.
Brin had one in Uplift War, although again the Tymbrimi are humanoid.
I read a short story, can't remember title or author, where a colony of humans were passengers on an alien spaceship, used as hosts for the aliens larva. There was a bond between human and alien, with regret on the alien's side that the human would die and joy on the human's that was probably induced by chemicals. I think the author had read about parasitic wasps and ran with the idea. I read it in the 70s or 80s, so old biology.
This time around, did Russia lose at the battle for Hostomel Airport?
The jury is still out because Russia has not definitely lost yet -- the fighting is on-going and if Russia looks likely to lose the question of nuclear escalation will come up.
However the Battle of Hostomel Airport was one of three key events in the first week -- the second being the utterly inept attempt to assassinate Zelenskiy in Kiev -- that denied Russia an immediate victory, so yes, the Marne is a good analogy.
(The third unpredictable factor -- the totally WTF one -- was a stand-up comedian turning out to be the wartime leader Ukraine needed. I mean, that wasn't on anyone's bingo card, was it?)
was a stand-up comedian turning out to be the wartime leader Ukraine needed.
Unlike another media "star" who thinks he's a world class leader.
Not sure how to categorize BJ.
No. Unfortunately, his recent statements have joined the USA and UK indicating that the problem with the Treaty of Versailles was only that it wasn't vindictive enough (*). That is damn scary, because it doesn't give Russia a viable way to back down. Unlike those countries, I think that Zelenskyy would be saner in victory - IF he is allowed to be. And, with a civil war in Russia (this is more than just a mutiny), a near-complete Russian defeat is extremely likely in the fairly near future, whoever comes out on top in Russia (even if it doesn't break up).
(*) So far, we have heard from USA and UK that all sanctions will continue even after Russia's withdrawal AND that Russia will have to pay for rebuilding Ukraine (in fact, Germany has joined in the latter). Does anyone see a problem with that?
But I don't think that it will stop there. Zelenskyy has already proposed that Russia be kicked out of the Security Council, and I am pretty certain that it will be required to destroy all of its WMDs. Russians are not stupid, and they will remember the fate of Iraq when it did that.
And Prigozhin is definitely not an improvement.
David L & Charlie
More to the point, Zelensky is a really good professional ACTOR, who knows most of the good stories & tales & how to pick.
Is he (mostly) his own scriptwriter? Because, if so, he's come out with some blinders:
I need weapons, not a ride
With you, or without you? - long list of nice things to have, if surrendering, repeating the question - : Without You
As for nuclear escalation ... not when Putin has other, internal enemies to fight ... Or alternatively, Putin is stupid & mad enough to nuke Prigozhin?
EC
FUCKING BOLLOCKS
"Sanctions" continued against what had been Imperial Germany UNTIL the Treaty of Versailles had been signed, because 11/11/1918 was an Armistice, not a surrender or a Peace Treaty.
Prigozhin would definitely not be an improvement, but he does not appear to be setting himself up as Tsar, yet ....
What is definite, is that the multiple situations in RU at present strongly resemble Shit Creek, whilst said creek is in the middle of a tornado.
{latest news suggests that some facilities in Voronezh, as well as Rostov are not under Putin's control, for this 5 minutes, anyway} ...
And quote from "BBC verify" ... A video posted this morning on a Telegram channel linked to the Wagner Group shows its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, meeting with Russia's Deputy Defence Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov.
BBC Verify has used biometric facial comparison tools to confirm, with a high degree of confidence, the identity of Yevkurov.
Also present at the meeting with Prigozhin, according to the Telegram post, was Vladimir Stepanovich Alekseev, the deputy chief of Russia's military intelligence service. However, the image said to show him was too dark to confirm using biometric technology.
The meeting is said to have taken place at the headquarters of the Russian military’s Southern Military district in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don.
And, of course - obligatory "Zhivago" clip.
Surely anything Ukraine or NATO demands now should just be viewed as their initial negotiating position - the cherries at the top of their wish lists. The old, demand the Moon and accept a more realistic compromise, approach.
Theres no chance Russia would agree to give up its WMDs or even reduce them unless the US did the same or countries worldwide reduced their stockpiles. Russian politicians love it when people fear them and their nukes - they would rather be feared than have friends. It appears to be an attitude many of their citizens share. Its a bully's approach.
If Putin is still alive and giving broadcasts tomorrow, then the coup failed.
Grant
If Putin is still alive and giving broadcasts tomorrow, then the coup failed
Not necessarily ... this could take some time. Up to a week, or possibly months, though I think the latter unlikely.
Putin is rumoured to be at or near his estate not too far from Moscow (?)
I note that Kadryov { Chechen warlord } has come out in support of Putin, which indicates potential civil war .... Hiw nice.
And that, already, "normal" RU troops near or at the front lin in Ukraine ar "unhappy bunnies" & may be / are (?) retreating.
Don't bet on it :-( In general, that is reliable only when the two sides are close to equally matched - i.e. there are genuine negotiations, rather than one side being able to impose an ultimatum. The scary thing is that politicians in 'the west' (especially the USA and some eastern European countries) may well believe that they have enough of a whip hand to force the issue.
I think that the coup is very likely to fail, but that won't restore the status quo ante - my guess is that this is the beginning of Russia's defeat, whatever happens.
Please do at least TRY to read posts before responding.
169, 171, 172 - Well, in March 2022, my comment on Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy was "Cometh the hour, cometh the man". Would anyone argue with that?
Ukranian media are reporting that the Chechen forces are suck in traffic outside Rostov and are arriving in the city in small groups that are being immediately disarmed. Usual pinches of salt to be applied.
Kamil Galeev has a thread up, and he's been pretty good so far. - https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1672399934471954433.html
He doesn't think they'll succeed, but it still might fuck Putin.
However I confess that orangutans are an outlier here. Not sure how to explain that. Maybe they used to be more social?
It's a certainty. Almost all primates are social, so the few solitary species, like orangutans, must have had social ancestors.
As to how they managed to retain their intelligence... orangutans are the best tool-users of all great apes, with better spatial imagination than most humans. Apparently they took their already formidable brainpower and re-purposed it.
“Not sure how to categorize BJ.” Oh c’mon - I cannot believe you left that one on the table;
BJ sucks
DP @ 156:
Apparently you have never read a Harlequen romance.
They never have lizard people, only lots of pirates.
Judging from the cover illustrations, apparently pirates are never allowed to wear shirts.
I think maybe some of the women pirates do ... or at least bodices ...
Greg Tingey @ 163:
Crossover from the previous thread, re. Russia ....
In the end, Imperial Germany lost WWI at the battle of the Marne.
This time around, did Russia lose at the battle for Hostomel Airport?
And Putin himself has raised the spectre of 1917 - which automatically shows that his strongman image is a sham ... doesn't it?
Well, something seems to be going on in Russia this weekend, but it don't sound much like a love story.
Re: '... the few solitary species, like orangutans, must have had social ancestors.'
Too busy reading and classifying books!
There's more than one way to be social. On one QI episode they mentioned that orangs are great escape artists - they pay attention to how stuff works around them. Once out of their pens, they just casually wander around looking at the other animals. No violence, just satisfying their curiosity.
Russia -
Last year on some news/interview, Mendelev came across as much colder and more focused than Putin with a very strong projection of no-holds-barred and fight-them-until-they're-all-dead.
About the reparations - if any - how badly has the agricultural landscape been damaged? (Apart from the destroyed dam.) Are there any land mines? Iran and China seem to be Russia's key suppliers - with India not far behind. What type of support are they likely to provide Russia? Not sure about how various African nations are aligned wrt Russia, but China could easily arm-twist a few African countries that are in very deep hawk to them to provide arms and other supplies (or sanctuaries or online harassment/systems damage, propaganda, etc.) to Russia.
If this war drags on and DT gets in - all bets are off - because DT would probably pull the US out of both the UN and NATO.
Russia possible civil war - Typically the military has to be onside but considering they've had to outsource a lot of their fighting, getting bankers/financiers onside would probably be more useful.
SFR
But ... was Medvedev being the "Bad Guy" to Putin's "Good Guy" (!) as per Putin's instructions, or is he really like that?
And, after the "coup" - whatever happens & even if Medvedev is "harder & colder" - what's he going to fight with, since, once there has been one mutiny ... he's going to have to spend at least half the time looking over his shoulder, whether it's Medvedev or still-Putin.
I don't think DT will make it { Except to Jail }- his "base" is even more hysterical than before, but he needs "middle-america" to win & they seem to be backing away from him, a lot.
how badly has the agricultural landscape been damaged? (Apart from the destroyed dam.) Are there any land mines?
The destroyed dam means basically nothing harvested from the southern part of the country this year. The liberated areas are riddled with land mines, regular reports of farmers trying to get crops in and being injured or killed when their tractor runs over one that was missed. A substantial amount of demining kit is part of the equipment being transferred to Ukraine.
Just in: Compromise reached? Prigozhin announces convoys turning round and returning to base. In other news, Ukrainian forces making a number of attacks while opposition is distracted.
One good-ish bit of news: techbros deservedly get a lot of stick at the moment, but it turns out that machine vision and deep learning is now good enough that semi-autonomous de-mining robots and mine detection drones are showing up, and unlike developing world conflicts, Ukraine is rich enough that they're more cost effective than throwing bodies at the problem. (A local solution I've heard of but can't find the source for: turns out self-driving tractors for ploughing/spraying/harvesting are an off-the-shelf technology that lends itself readily to de-mining agricultural land.)
PS: to cross the streams between discussions of War (in Ukraine/Russia) and love/sex: the War of the Rough Wooing springs to mind. (Not taught in history classes in English schools, oddly enough: the current Russia/Ukraine political relationship has some eerie resonances with England/Scotland in the 16th century.)
Dr Who has done this with the Silurians and plans to wake up and restore an hot Earth. In the whoniverse the hot lizard babe is married to her Dr Watson. Their loving relationship seems based on love of violence drinking tea and epic cunnilingus. Those forked tongues have their uses. In fact all the reboot Dr Who has the theme that love finds a way. Many species finding a way to be together to bump uglies or just be together. In an episode where the ship is incarnated it is made explicit that the The Doctor and the TARDIS have had a loving relationship lasting hundreds? thousands of years?
And Doctor Who provides a realistic model of ... well, anything, really ... in what universe?
(Remember whose blog this is! I can't look at an SFnal question without dissecting it and tackling it seriously. And Doctor Who -- like Star Trek -- is basically an anything-goes fantasy that's all about the feels.)
Russia /Ukraine
This is getting positively Shakespearean ...
Does Prizohgin fulfill the role of George Duke of Clarence or that of Ricahrd Earl of Warwick - "Proud setter-up & puller down of Kings"?
One thing is certain, there is/will be zero trust between the parties to this outbreak of "Peace" ....
I give in - predictions?
Stay away from high windows?
self-driving tractors for ploughing/spraying/harvesting are an off-the-shelf technology that lends itself readily to de-mining agricultural land
The good news there is that it's available as bolt-on bits. So you can take a second hand heavy machine, fit it with kit from "now it's an RC car" up to "now it can drive itself around any mapped paddock at the nominated speed etc". The optimisation problem is that you want not-valuable machines to do the work but you also don't want them breaking down in a possibly-mined area where you have to de-mine a path to them so you can pull them out.
I suspect that small camera drones are a surprisingly useful part of de-mining, optionally with the cheap IR cameras that are now pretty readily available. For a few hundred you get a flying camera that you can use to inspect things and it's unlikely to set mines off (but if it does you're irritated rather than devastated)
“Not sure how to categorize BJ.” Oh c’mon - I cannot believe you left that one on the table;
Going back to my comment,
He's NOT an entertainer pretending to be a statesman.
He's not a statesman pretending to be an entertainer.
He's more of a wild dude pretending to be an entertaining statesman?
He's more of a wild dude pretending to be an entertaining statesman?
That's a reasoned view. I think timrowledge also has a point in suggesting he's a human-formatted vacuum.
I suspect that small camera drones are a surprisingly useful part of de-mining, optionally with the cheap IR cameras that are now pretty readily available.
My first thought was an IR equipped drone flying over fields as the sun starts to set. Unless they are designed to avoid IR detection I suspect they will be a different temp than the dirt around them.
Now it MIGHT require an IR detector that costs more than $5.
As to tractors I could see one PUSHING what I think of as a cultivator with some shielding between it and the tractor. Something like this modified to be pushed.
umequip.com/seedbed-tillage/perfecta/
Are there any land mines?
The news sources I follow seem to feel the area in front of the Russian defense trenches and such are heavily mined. Except for some of the roads which can be easily targeted.
David L@84, the best thing about the Omphalos hypothesis in my opinion is that it led to this work of Marcus Rowland's (crossover fanfic, Buffyverse x DS9, sorta): https://www.tthfanfic.org/Story-2106/MarcusRowland+Omphalos.htm
That was something. I don't want to say too much, as pretty much everything would be a spoiler, but that was an interesting thing to read. Readers see the situation coming before the characters, since we know the title, but it's still an interesting situation. Thanks for sharing.
I'm expecting the term "agricultural" in the slightly deprecating sense to be used a lot. Even if stuff looks pretty at the start once it detects a few mines it'll be rough as guts.
HERE are some of our thoughts from the time, including some amazingly pessimistic & totally-wrong predictions, when it all kicked off ...
I still think that "it would beggar belief for the Russians not to have marked [Chernobyl] as a radiological hazard, and to avoid it" is a reasonable observation; however, they didn't and grunts for whom events of 1986 were things that happened when their parents were children were apparently delighted to set up camp where no Ukrainians lived. They probably should have wondered if the locals knew something they didn't.
W T F?
Time to sack the scriptwriters .. again?
Prizoghin "forgiven" & sent to exile in Belarus - tell him to check his tea for Polonium & stay away from windows?
Putin will b even more paranoid & twitchy after this, which does not bode well ... but has he been seriously weakened?
And, of course, we were all wrong, oh dear.
Meanwhile .... Lest we forget - today's Grauniad.
Yes on the dusk mine search https://twitter.com/SmartUACat/status/1671924007866712066?t=O_bQFOI7OPXSZXS7Jx88jw&s=19
Actually, he is more like an ego on legs. Unlike Trump, he is a long way from being stupid, but he carries solipsism to a level which is unusual even in politics.
But, on a cheerful note. Let us assume that the Independent's Rentoul is right (a very big 'if' indeed, but let that pass), the economy will get worse for the next year and then get somewhat better. If so, Starmer should get in, and possibly win a second term. If THAT happens, the Conservatives might well select Johnson to rescue the party :-)
Maybe this is one of those concepts that are too silly for anything but comedy? "Looking for Love in All the Wrong Cosmoi"
Greg: there is a caveat here in that until historically very recently (as in, some time post-1970s) it was commonplace for stillborn and dead-just-post-birth babies in the UK as well as Ireland to be just dumped in mass graves with no indication of where they were buried and very little documentation: the real scandal here is that the unfeelingly dumped children were older, oh and of course that nobody was told about it and nobody appeared to give a damn. So yeah it's rightly scandalous, but it's not uniquely awful except for the age thing.
The above does not appear to be widely known: I know only because my twin brother is in such a mass grave. We don't know where it is. They wouldn't even tell my parents what was going to happen to him at the time: apparently he was considered medical waste and thus just entered the hospital's waste stream, though seemingly with enough separation that he did at least end up in something like a grave rather than a random landfill (not that he was in a position to care). This was not Ireland but Hertfordshire.
(Frankly this is not something I care much about personally -- he was genetically identical to me, we shared almost all stimuli until the point of his death, and thus the only difference from me he could have had relates purely to random thermal noise, randomness of embryological development, and things like uterine positioning. I don't consider that to be enough to override the identity of indiscernibles: the thing to mourn is the future that might have been, not a body which is genetically identical to one still walking around above ground, and burying someone in a mass grave or using them for compost doesn't change that.
But I can see how a lot of people might disagree: something with its own brain that in time could become a person is definitely qualitatively different from most medical waste and that classification was frankly silly. It's IMHO even worse where the baby was not one half of a surviving monoamniotic twin pair, so couldn't be regarded as any sort of "duplicate".)
Re: '... was Medvedev being the "Bad Guy" to Putin's "Good Guy" (!)'
Thanks! For some reason I often scramble his name.
Anyways, yes - it could be an act - since Medvedev probably doesn't want to accidentally fall out of a window. He's been the second favorite pol for quite a while so anything that happens to him would likely make headlines. He was once a moderate (for Russian values of) which is why that interview/news clip really jarred.
Kingmakers - okay, which financier is the kingmaker backing Putin (since alliances via marriage are no longer the in thing)?
Re: Agriculture/demining robots/IR camera drones...
Well, that's some potentially good news - thanks! If these devices work, then this would be one hell of a boost to sales for the manufacturers, i.e., all that free worldwide advertising, proof of concept, field tested, etc. (Hint, hint: These manufacturers should donate their products!)
Loss of life means nothing to whoever is making the strategic decisions for Russia. I'd really like to see Russia's up-to-date census data because at the rate they're losing citizens (esp. adult males), I don't see how Putin can sustain his self-promoted image of a testosterone powered leader of a testosterone powered nation. The reality is closer to Putin being the leader of a nation of babushkas. (And babushkas who've just lost sons and grandsons don't give a flying f*ck about upsetting some egotist.)
Belarus - all the recent antics make me wonder whether Belarus is some restocking station for the mercenaries. Hopefully NATO has been tracking movement (esp. supply shipments) closely. Same with Kazakhstan - although considering there was a massive people's protest in 2022 and Putin sent some troops to 'stabilize' things, not sure what this means. (Ah - just read that the Kazakh president said: No, the Wagner things is an internal/domestic matter.
Here's some background on the Kazakh state of affairs as of 2022:
https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-59894266
Re: Star-Trek: TNG '... about the feels'
For me the all-time scariest episode was when they introduced The Borg. The script didn't get into tech detail on how the Borg were made, it focused on what such an entity meant. Sorta like what real-life, highly respected research unis and very, very wealthy corps have done when they introduced AI (Chatbot, etc.) into the real world: zero info about how AI actually work. It's all about the feel$$$.
Back in March Kazakhstan seized a bunch of equipment at Baikonur due to Russia getting behind on payments owed for use of the cosmodrome. Medvedev has since described Kazakhstan as an "artificial state"...
Re: 'Medvedev has since described Kazakhstan as an "artificial state"...'
The Kazakhs must have been thrilled to hear this!
I haven't been following Kazakhstan news for a while. The last time I read anything about it was an article about how Kazakhstan was developing warmer relations with China plus they're one of the few countries that officially sided with China over its claim to Taiwan (One China).
Back in 1994-1995 China and Kazakhstan resolved (signed) a border dispute over some land. If Russia somehow wins Ukraine, China might have a go at 'reclaiming' a whole bunch of territory*. Next - Muslim is the biggest religion in Kazakhstan while China's history with its own Muslims is less than humane so my guess is that most Kazakhs would not welcome China as its new overlord.
*Kazakhstan is the largest uranium producer (approx. 30%-40% of global production), third for titanium, seventh for zinc, eighth for lead, and eleventh for gold. (Production estimates depend on source/year while ranking is pretty consistent.)
paws4thot @ 177:
169, 171, 172 - Well, in March 2022, my comment on Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy was "Cometh the hour, cometh the man". Would anyone argue with that?
Yeah, but it still usually comes as a surprise.
Moz @ 192:
The good news there is that it's available as bolt-on bits. So you can take a second hand heavy machine, fit it with kit from "now it's an RC car" up to "now it can drive itself around any mapped paddock at the nominated speed etc". The optimisation problem is that you want not-valuable machines to do the work but you also don't want them breaking down in a possibly-mined area where you have to de-mine a path to them so you can pull them out.
I suspect that small camera drones are a surprisingly useful part of de-mining, optionally with the cheap IR cameras that are now pretty readily available. For a few hundred you get a flying camera that you can use to inspect things and it's unlikely to set mines off (but if it does you're irritated rather than devastated)
How giant African rats are helping uncover deadly land mines in Cambodia
Re: Giant African rats - land mine hunters
Yep! When I first saw a video about these rats a couple of years ago I thought they'd also probably make good pets. They're not at all like the rodents that visited my shed last winter, polished off the left-over lawn seed and left droppings everywhere - ugh.
APOPO is the non-profit org that trains these rats.
'Giant Rats Are Sniffing Out Landmines and Tuberculosis'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBqMJjfSgYY
"(Remember whose blog this is! I can't look at an SFnal question without dissecting it and tackling it seriously. And Doctor Who -- like Star Trek -- is basically an anything-goes fantasy that's all about the feels.)"
I cannot thank you enough for "Saturn's Children" and "Neptune's Brood". They are the only beyond-the-solar-system and real AI hard SF that I have read in the past 30 years that remotely makes sense, both from a technical point of view and from the motivations for going out of the solar system point of view. The Deus Ex Machina (the ship teleportation (forgot how it is called and my epub is on another computer)) at the end of "Neptune's Brood" was a little let down however.
Everything else I have read is thinly disguised magical fantasy. I tend to completely avoid the genre now.
Yes, the point is that it only sometimes happens - the man has to have the potential in the first place. And it sometimes happens in unexpected ways - consider Brexit (which had been coming for 30 years) - cometh the hour they finally got the vote they wanted, cometh the man to, er, deliver it :-)
"Crustacea are aquatic arthropods, occupying the niche that insects monopolize on land: it turns out that a key enzyme required for hardening chitin—insect carapaces—doesn't operate efficiently in seawater, so crustaceans use heavier, denser, calcium carbonate crystals to stiffen their shells. Which is why crabs don't fly."
To which the only sane comment is, "And thank fuck for that!"
I cannot thank you enough for "Saturn's Children" and "Neptune's Brood". They are the only beyond-the-solar-system and real AI hard SF that I have read in the past 30 years that remotely makes sense, both from a technical point of view and from the motivations for going out of the solar system point of view.
Same here, at least regarding beyond-the-solar-system part. Real AI hard SF is slightly more common, although still pretty hard to find.
Don't forget that they are the number one exporter of potassium. They also invented toffee and trouser belts. According to the Kazakh national anthem sung in the documentary Borat, of course.
I too was surprised when I heard that Prigozhin was going into exile in Belarus. Can he be so foolish as to trust the goodwill of Vladimir Vladimirovich? If you come at the king, you'd best not miss.
If you come at the king, you'd best not miss.
Yes, but was Prigozhin coming at Putin? There's a perspective that says he was really aiming at Shoigu -- that is, it was a Wagner Group/Army high command squabble that got out of hand, not an actual coup.
(Still doesn't look good for Prigozhin's probability of buying new life insurance, though.)
The outcome from this kerfuffle is that Prigozhin and an unknown number of Wagner troops are now in Belarus, where Putin recently sent some 'tactical' nuclear weaponry. Given that Prigozhin has long been an advocate for using such weapons this is unlikely to be a good thing.
That seems to be true, but anyone with the slightest amount of nous would not have adopted a mutiny to achieve that, and then backed down. That would apply anywhere, but in a country whose constitution is absolutism moderated by assassination, it's insane. We can reasonably deduce that either Putin has completely lost control or he has an undisclosed scheme to deal with Prigozhin, Shoigu, probably Gerasimov and the conduct of the war. It's hard to tell, especially without access to Russian media. We live in interesting times :-(
I was thinking of that story yesterday and trying to recall the full title. Thanks.
BTW, fun story. Well, for very Pat Cadigan values of fun. I enjoyed it a lot. It still stands out for me amoung the other stories in the Alien Sex anthology. Thanks also to the editor, who I recall was Ellen Datlow.
Thanks to Charlie for this thread, and everyone else in this discussion.
Re: 'Putin has completely lost control or he has an undisclosed scheme to deal with Prigozhin, Shoigu, probably Gerasimov and the conduct of the war.'
Add that his plane left Moscow and then its blip disappeared off the aviation trackers so he could be headed anywhere: one of several secret bunkers, a secret ally, arms dealers, financiers, Belarus, China, NKorea, Iran, India, Cuba, etc.
Putin probably has Plan A through Plan Z, and back again in the Greek alphabet.
I suspect Putin's plan list would start with the Cyrillic alphabet before he got onto either Latin or Greek. Plan А to Plan Я gives him (ummm, counts...) 33 before he needs to change alphabets.
Meanwhile, it "appears" ...
That Prigozhin is alive & posting messages & claiming that he was "never against Putin" in the first place" ...
Secondly: Beware Chine-made surveillance cameras - as previously muttered about, IIRC?
No. The fact that almost all consumer electronics is easily hackable, and cheap versions more likely to be so, is something I would have thought you would have known. Including modern cars, incidentally. Indeed, you DO know that anything that is capable of linking to Alexa, Google Assistant or Siri comes pre-hacked, don't you?
The previous hoo-hah was about devices being installed with Chinese snoopware, rather than good, honest all-American snoopware, which we should be using.
As I've been saying for decades, the "West", esp. the US, has always wanted to do to the USSR/Russia what the West did to the Ottoman Empire, and the Russians know it.
He did say he wanted the Sec. of Defense, not Putin.
Am I the only one thinking of the "Knights Templar"?
whitroth
The Ottoman Empire did it to itself, certainly after about 1860 ...
It sealed its own fate by (being forced to join?) the Central powers in 1914 ...
SEE ALSO the chapter: Goeben, being an Enemy then flying" in Barbara Tuchman's "August 1914"
You seem to have missed my point: they had been drooling over the "Sick Man of Europe" for decades, waiting until they could tear it apart and apply colonialism to it.
You're not going to suggest that the West doesn't want to do that to Russia?
You're not going to suggest that the West doesn't want to do that to Russia?
Very likely. Don't assume it would be a bad thing.
Keep in mind, Russia is a colonial empire which started out about the same time Spanish, Portuguese and French colonial empires started. The difference is that Western European empires acquired their colonies overseas, while Duchy of Moscovy did it over land and contiguously. Thus Duchy of Moscovy (to call things by their real names) is able to claim that its entire enormous territory is "all Russian land" the way Portugal could never claim about Mozambique (as an example).
Well, in the rest of Europe colonial possessions went out of style by 1960; about time for Duchy of Moscovy to do the same. I really wish for restoration of Novgorod Republic, although this time around it would have to center on St. Petersburg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novgorod_Republic
"all Russian land" the way Portugal could never claim about Mozambique
Doesn't stop the French. France the country covers most of the planet with weird bits of not-France interrupting their territory. Including "their" bit of the pacific where they were setting of nuclear bombs for a while (unlike the British, who tested their bombs on Australians).
https://ibb.co/TTpy8Z6 someone posted this in another context. But I'm captioning it "Jon Finds True Love" because I can't find the original anywhere. Toxoplasma garfielda is a far more likely alien love story than any Roam-eo and Juliet style matchup.
Don't forget the Yanks, with Hawaii, Midway, Guam, Puerto Rico etc. which are all American. They also used some of their overseas possessions to test nukes, the big fusion weapons. I calculated that they fired off something like 150 megatonnes of fusion tests in the Pacific over a period of about ten years or so.
The French tests were all underground and quite limited in size -- basically they were comparing their hardware against the mathematical models run on supercomputers, and like the other members of the Big Five when they were sure the models matched the hardware they stopped testing and signed the Test Ban Treaty.
unlike the British, who tested their bombs on Australians
But wasn't the uranium mined from Australia? (I have no idea on the path of British bomb uranium but Aus does have a history of uranium mining.)
There's more than one way to be social.
Yes, and this is intricately bound up with the differences in social and romantic expectations mentioned earlier.
Did you perhaps see the most recent episode of Strange New Worlds? There's a lovely scene about that. Spock and another Vulcan are sitting at a table looking, well, stiff and Vulcan; meanwhile two of Spock's human crewmates are watching from a distance. They have a conversation that basically goes, "Look at them being all buddy-buddy." "Nah, they hate each other." "Are you messing with me?" The punchline arrives when Spock stands up, notices them watching, and calmly walks over to say, "I regret that you had to witness that outburst."
Regarding current events:
"How could the same nation that gave the world the August 1991 Coup, the Anti-Party Group, and the Kornilov affair bungle a simple coup so badly?" - James Nicoll, SF reviewer
It was probably Canadian-sourced uranium used in the British nuclear weapons program but we went the plutonium weapons route quite early -- the Windscale Piles breeder reactors were used to make Pu-239 starting in 1952.
But wasn't the uranium mined from Australia? (I have no idea on the path of British bomb uranium but Aus does have a history of uranium mining.)
So the logic is because the uranium came from Australia the UK bomb should be tested there? So logically the first US bomb should have been tested in the Belgium Congo?
I guess I should have been explicit.
[sarcasm off]
wasn't the uranium mined from Australia?
I think it was more that they'd given away their nearest desert (Palestine) to white-ish people so they couldn't test their bombs there, but they still had Australia and luckily the white people in Australia live on the coast so there's lots of empty desert available. Yes, it really was that brutally racist. Still is, the arguments about compensation continue even today.
Mind you, if you want brutal: the settlers did not consider the inhabitants of the test area even worth studying to find out what effects the tests had on them. At least the Nazis considered Jews human enough to be worth collecting experimental data from...
Do you have a link for that? James Nicoll's blog is now behind a paywall (on Patreon).
Do you have a link for that? James Nicoll's blog is now behind a paywall (on Patreon).
Yes, I do; it was on Facepalm rather than Patreon. I don't do the Patreon thing, though I read his reviews on https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/; that also has blog posts. It's also possible to follow him on DreamWidth, which allows for longer and more thoughtful discussions than social media doom scrolls.
Anyhow, he made the quip in this post on the face thing.
This post was sponsored by the XenoDildonics Inc.
if they build it, you will come
wild applause
The French exploded plenty of bombs in the atmosphere, both in Algeria and in French Polynesia, including at least one 2.6 megaton hydrogen bomb.
Wikipedia has a list of all known nuclear bomb explosions.
Cultural differences… their bodies are not made to fit like two human bodies are. :D
I was referring to the last series of six French test shots in the Pacific in 1995-96 which caused a lot of anger and protests and led to the DGSE topping a Greenpeace activist in NZ. They were all underground shots.
OK. Why then refer, in the immediately preceding sentence, to the US tests in 1950's? All the US tests were underground after 1962, as well. Confusing.
Related to this topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY
(Isao Hashimoto's animation of all nuclear explosions.)