The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020, Page 3

  There is a lesson to be learned here from the past. Back in the early 1800s, when President Thomas Jefferson doubled the size of the United States with the historic Louisiana Purchase, he wrote that, sadly, it might take a thousand years to colonize this vast territory that he had just purchased from Napoleon. But in fact the western United States would be settled in just a century. Why? Because of the discovery of gold in California in 1848.

  Similarly, some people believe that there might be a second “gold rush,” this time in outer space, where rare earths, platinum metals, and even ice might be mined from the moon and the asteroid belt.

  Rivka Galchen’s “The Eighth Continent” describes how corporations are already laying out plans for ambitious space ventures. Some foresee a traffic jam around the moon, which might eventually require a revision of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 to prevent disputes as to who owns the moon. We have to make sure that outer space remains a peaceful domain, and that nations can settle their differences over it without going to war.

  And what lies beyond the moon? Sometime after 2030, NASA hopes to send humans to Mars. Meanwhile, some astronomers would like to know what lies even farther away, beyond our solar system. This is where a new controversy has erupted, a tale told by Shannon Stirone in “The Hunt for Planet Nine.”

  Even schoolchildren know that, ever since Pluto was unceremoniously demoted from being a planet, there are eight planets going around the sun. But now, as our computers analyze the motion of the outer planets, they are telling us that something strange is tugging on these planets.

  History might repeat itself. Back in the 1820s, astronomers noticed that the planet Uranus was not acting according to Newton’s laws of motion. Either Newton was wrong (a horrible thought to any astronomer) or a new planet was tugging on Uranus. Using pure mathematics, it was possible to locate the position of this mysterious planet. On the first try, after only a few hours’ work, astronomers found a new planet, Neptune, in 1846, exactly where Newton’s equations said it would be.

  Is history repeating itself now? The outer planets again seem to be deviating slightly from Newton’s laws, so astronomers are using supercomputers to find the exact location of what may be a new ninth planet. This is hard work. Astronomers are a skeptical bunch, and they demand a smoking gun—​an actual photograph of this phantom planet. A computer program is not enough. So far, a photograph of a ninth planet has not been taken, but as Stirone proposes in “The Hunt for Planet Nine,” either way, history might be made. Either we will discover a new planet, or a new theory of gravity will emerge if it becomes necessary to revise Newton’s laws. This is a win-win situation.

  As we probe deep space, will we eventually encounter aliens from space, vindicating the claims of science fiction writers?

  On the one hand, encountering an advanced civilization could lead to a new enlightenment here on Earth if we were able to use its advanced technology to eliminate poverty and disease, ushering in a new Age of Aquarius. On the other hand, as physicist Stephen Hawking warned, such an encounter could be more like that of the Aztecs with the Spanish conquistadors, which did not go well for native peoples. The Spaniards had steel swords, gunpowder, horses, and a written language (as well as the smallpox virus). The Spaniards were perhaps a few centuries more advanced than the Aztecs, and the encounter between them led to the total collapse of the latter’s civilization.

  So far, talk of alien civilizations remains the stuff of Hollywood movies. Our radio antennas have not detected a single message from an intelligent civilization in space. The presence of so many stars in the galaxy presents us with the Fermi paradox: if aliens are so plentiful, then why haven’t we met them yet? These and other questions are addressed in Adam Mann’s essay “Intelligent Ways to Search for Extraterrestrials.”

  Finally, we have exciting new developments in my field, physics. After the movie Back to the Future came out in 1985, toy companies received an avalanche of phone calls asking to purchase hover boards. Unfortunately, hover boards do not exist. To create them, we would need super-powerful magnetic fields. We could create those using superconductors, which have zero resistance to electricity. But supercooling them down to the required temperature near absolute zero is very expensive. If some enterprising physicist could create room-temperature superconductors, it might set off a second industrial revolution as we produce super-magnets to levitate our trains, cars, industry, and even hover boards.

  One small but important step in this direction came just last year. Back in 2004, scientists at the University of Manchester first created a new substance called graphene, consisting of a single layer of carbon atoms. It has miraculous properties. For example, it is the strongest substance known to science. If you balance an elephant on a pencil that is placed on a sheet of graphene, the sheet will not tear. Last year, physicists adjusted two sheets of graphene to a certain angle and voilà! It became superconducting. This has set off a stampede of physicists who want to make startling new discoveries, perhaps winning a Nobel Prize. This is discussed in David H. Freedman’s essay “With a Simple Twist, a ‘Magic’ Material Is Now the Big Thing in Physics.”

  To be sure, this superconductor is not functioning at room temperature, so much more work has to be done. Meanwhile, physicists not only have a new toy to play with but might also one day set off a new industrial revolution.

  To me, the ultimate scientific revolution would be realizing Einstein’s dream of a “theory of everything”: a theory that unites all the laws of physics into a single equation. In “A Different Kind of Theory of Everything,” Natalie Wolchover discusses this Holy Grail of physics, the dream to find the Final Theory out of which the universe sprang into existence.

  If we find a theory of everything, it might answer some of the deepest questions in physics, such as: What happened before the big bang? Are there other universes? What lies on the other side of a black hole? Is time travel possible? Are there wormholes to other universes?

  Back in the 1950s, physicist Wolfgang Pauli announced his version of the fabled unified field theory in a talk at Columbia. After his talk, Niels Bohr, one of the founders of the quantum theory, stood up and said, “We in the back are convinced that your theory is crazy. What divides us is whether your theory is crazy enough.”

  In other words, all the easy theories had already been tried and shown to be incorrect. Hence, the Final Theory must be a radical departure from all previous attempts. It must be so crazy that it has eluded the greatest minds of the past century.

  Many physicists, myself included, think that this theory is string theory, which reduces all subatomic particles to resonances vibrating on a tiny string. But some want to go even further than string theory: using the mathematics of polygons existing in hyperspace, they have proposed a theory that there is no space or time.

  On the one hand, the mind spins when contemplating the concepts coming from advanced physics, which include higher dimensions, multiverses of universe, and twisted space-times. But on the other hand, these concepts speak to the ultimate simplicity and elegance of the universe itself, which we can comprehend with the human mind. As Einstein once said, if a theory cannot be explained to a child, then the theory is probably worthless. In other words, all great theories, in the final analysis, should not require a thicket of algebra and mathematics but be explainable in terms of simple concepts, principles, and pictures. Ultimately, the universe is not about memorizing mind-numbing equations, but about revealing the dynamic and fundamental principles underlying all of reality, which we believe to be simple, elegant, and even “crazy.”

  In other words, at the deepest level, the universe is described not by a mass of tedious, obscure, and useless equations, but by simple and elegant principles and concepts.

  This is something, I hope, that even my daughter can appreciate.

  Michio Kaku

  ROSS ANDERSEN

  A Journey into the Animal Mind

  from The Atlantic

  Amid the h
uman crush of Old Delhi, on the edge of a medieval bazaar, a red structure with cages on its roof rises three stories above the labyrinth of neon-lit stalls and narrow alleyways, its top floor emblazoned with two words: BIRDS HOSPITAL.

  On a hot day last spring, I removed my shoes at the hospital’s entrance and walked up to the second-floor lobby, where a clerk in his late twenties was processing patients. An older woman placed a shoebox before him and lifted off its lid, revealing a bloody white parakeet, the victim of a cat attack. The man in front of me in line held, in a small cage, a dove that had collided with a glass tower in the financial district. A girl no older than seven came in behind me clutching, in her bare hands, a white hen with a slumped neck.

  The hospital’s main ward is a narrow, 40-foot-long room with cages stacked four high along the walls and fans on the ceiling, their blades covered with grates, lest they ensnare a flapping wing. I strolled the room’s length, conducting a rough census. Many of the cages looked empty at first, but leaning closer, I’d find a bird, usually a pigeon, sitting back in the gloom.

  The youngest of the hospital’s vets, Dheeraj Kumar Singh, was making his rounds in jeans and a surgical mask. The oldest vet here has worked the night shift for more than a quarter-century, spending tens of thousands of hours removing tumors from birds, easing their pain with medication, administering antibiotics. Singh is a rookie by comparison, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he inspects a pigeon, flipping it over in his hands, quickly but gently, the way you might handle your cell phone. As we talked, he motioned to an assistant, who handed him a nylon bandage that he stretched twice around the pigeon’s wing, setting it with an unsentimental pop.

  The bird hospital is one of several built by devotees of Jainism, an ancient religion whose highest commandment forbids violence not only against humans, but also against animals. A series of paintings in the hospital’s lobby illustrates the extremes to which some Jains take this prohibition. In them, a medieval king in blue robes gazes through a palace window at an approaching pigeon, its wing bloodied by the talons of a brown hawk still in pursuit. The king pulls the smaller bird into the palace, infuriating the hawk, which demands replacement for its lost meal, so he slices off his own arm and foot to feed it.

  I’d come to the bird hospital, and to India, to see firsthand the Jains’ moral system at work in the world. Jains make up less than 1 percent of India’s population. Despite millennia spent criticizing the Hindu majority, the Jains have sometimes gained the ear of power. During the thirteenth century, they converted a Hindu king, and persuaded him to enact the subcontinent’s first animal-welfare laws. There is evidence that the Jains influenced the Buddha himself. And when Gandhi developed his most radical ideas about nonviolence, a Jain friend played philosophical muse.

  In the state of Gujarat, where Gandhi grew up, I saw Jain monks walking barefoot in the cool morning hours to avoid car travel, an activity they regard as irredeemably violent, given the damage it inflicts on living organisms, from insects to larger animals. The monks refuse to eat root vegetables, lest their removal from the earth disturb delicate subterranean ecosystems. Their white robes are cotton, not silk, which would require the destruction of silkworms. During monsoon season, they forgo travel, to avoid splashing through puddles filled with microbes, whose existence Jains posited well before they appeared under Western microscopes.

  Jains move through the world in this gentle way because they believe animals are conscious beings that experience, in varying degrees, emotions analogous to human desire, fear, pain, sorrow, and joy. This idea that animals are conscious was long unpopular in the West, but it has lately found favor among scientists who study animal cognition. And not just the obvious cases—​primates, dogs, elephants, whales, and others. Scientists are now finding evidence of an inner life in alien-seeming creatures that evolved on ever more distant limbs of life’s tree. In recent years, it has become common to flip through a magazine like this one and read about an octopus using its tentacles to twist off a jar’s lid or squirt aquarium water into a postdoc’s face. For many scientists, the resonant mystery is no longer which animals are conscious, but which are not.

  * * *

  No aspect of our world is as mysterious as consciousness, the state of awareness that animates our every waking moment, the sense of being located in a body that exists within a larger world of color, sound, and touch, all of it filtered through our thoughts and imbued by emotion.

  Even in a secular age, consciousness retains a mystical sheen. It is alternatively described as the last frontier of science, and as a kind of immaterial magic beyond science’s reckoning. David Chalmers, one of the world’s most respected philosophers on the subject, once told me that consciousness could be a fundamental feature of the universe, like space-time or energy. He said it might be tied to the diaphanous, indeterminate workings of the quantum world, or something nonphysical.

  These metaphysical accounts are in play because scientists have yet to furnish a satisfactory explanation of consciousness. We know the body’s sensory systems beam information about the external world into our brain, where it’s processed, sequentially, by increasingly sophisticated neural layers. But we don’t know how those signals are integrated into a smooth, continuous world picture, a flow of moments experienced by a roving locus of attention—​a “witness,” as Hindu philosophers call it.

  In the West, consciousness was long thought to be a divine gift bestowed solely on humans. Western philosophers historically conceived of nonhuman animals as unfeeling automatons. Even after Darwin demonstrated our kinship with animals, many scientists believed that the evolution of consciousness was a recent event. They thought the first mind sparked awake sometime after we split from chimps and bonobos. In his 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes argued that it was later still. He said the development of language led us, like Virgil, into the deep cognitive states capable of constructing experiential worlds.

  This notion that consciousness was of recent vintage began to change in the decades following the Second World War, when more scientists were systematically studying the behaviors and brain states of Earth’s creatures. Now each year brings a raft of new research papers, which, taken together, suggest that a great many animals are conscious.

  It was likely more than half a billion years ago that some seafloor arms race between predator and prey roused Earth’s first conscious animal. That moment, when the first mind winked into being, was a cosmic event, opening up possibilities not previously contained in nature.

  There now appears to exist, alongside the human world, a whole universe of vivid animal experience. Scientists deserve credit for illuminating, if only partially, this new dimension of our reality. But they can’t tell us how to do right by the trillions of minds with which we share the Earth’s surface. That’s a philosophical problem, and like most philosophical problems, it will be with us for a long time to come.

  Apart from Pythagoras and a few others, ancient Western philosophers did not hand down a rich tradition of thinking about animal consciousness. But Eastern thinkers have long been haunted by its implications—​especially the Jains, who have taken animal consciousness seriously as a moral matter for nearly 3,000 years.

  Many orthodox Jain beliefs do not stand up to scientific scrutiny. The faith does not enjoy privileged access to truth, mystical or otherwise. But as perhaps the world’s first culture to extend mercy to animals, the Jains pioneered a profound expansion of the human moral imagination. The places where they worship and tend to animals seemed, to me, like good places to contemplate the current frontier of animal-consciousness research.

  * * *

  At the bird hospital, I asked Singh whether any of his patients gave him trouble. He said that one refused to be fed by hand and sometimes drew blood when he tried to pick it up. He led me to another room to see the offending bird, an Indian crow whose feathers were record-groove black but for a sash of lat
te-colored plumage around its neck. The crow kept fanning one of its wings out. Light from a nearby window filtered through the feathers, as though the wing were a venetian blind. Singh told me it was broken.

  “A few days after the crow arrived, it started using a special call when it wanted food,” Singh said. “None of the other birds do that.” The bird’s call was not an entirely unique case of bird-to-human communication. A grey parrot once amassed a 900-word vocabulary, and in India, a few have been trained to recite the Vedic mantras. But birds have only rarely assembled verbal symbols into their own, original proto-sentences. And, of course, none has declared itself conscious.

  That’s too bad, because philosophers tend to regard such statements as the best possible evidence of another being’s consciousness, even among humans. Without one, no matter how long I stared into the crow’s black pupil, wishing I could see into the phantasmagoria of its mind, I could never really know whether it was conscious. I’d have to be content with circumstantial evidence.

  Crows have an unusually large brain for their size, and their neurons are packed densely relative to other animals’. Neuroscientists can measure the computational complexity of brain activity, but no brain scan has yet revealed a precise neural signature of consciousness. And so it’s difficult to make a knockdown argument that a particular animal is conscious based strictly on its neuroanatomy. It is suggestive, though, when an animal’s brain closely resembles ours, as is the case with primates, the first animals to be knighted with consciousness by something approaching a scientific consensus.

  Mammals in general are widely thought to be conscious, because they share our relatively large brain size, and also have a cerebral cortex, the place where our most complex feats of cognition seem to take place. Birds don’t have a cortex. In the 300 million years that have passed since the avian gene pool separated from ours, their brains have evolved different structures. But one of those structures appears to be networked in cortexlike ways, a tantalizing clue that nature may have more than one method of making a conscious brain.