Ep 014: Natalie Elliot
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Caitlin McShea (0s): Hello everyone. And welcome back to Alien Crash Site. This interplanetary interview series from the Santa Fe Institute takes a page from the 1970s, Soviet science fiction, novel Roadside Picnic written by the Strugatsky Brothers and asks each of our guests to imagine a world altering object that they hope to uncover from the dangerous of an alien crash site. This book was later adapted into Tarkovsky, his delirious and visually captivating film Stalker. Both of these works of art are frequently referenced throughout this interview series because we want to see how they are perceived by our very diverse slate of guests.
This week, we bring Natalie Elliott into the zone. Natalie is a tutor at St. John's College here in Santa Fe, where she teaches cross-disciplinary courses in the classics, history of science, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and music. She is a storyteller, a science writer. She's a frequent contributor to SFI’s Parallax newsletter. She's a short story fiction writer and a novelist. She is specifically interested in the intersection of literature and science as are we in the interplanetary project. And she coauthors the Atlantis Dispatch series with me.
Atlanta's attempts to approach contemporary space news with an inquisitive and philosophical curiosity in order to understand humanity's insatiable desire to explore the unknown we address where human hubris has gotten us in trouble in the past. And we propose solutions to looming problems through what else, a complex systems perspective. Therefore we use these space op-eds to highlight the relevant work that is done by the maverick researchers throughout SFI’s global network. If you haven't yet read any of these dispatches, you can find them along with the original video interviews for these episodes, show notes, transcripts and bonus materials, all at aliencrashsite.org in this rather literary episode of alien crash site, Natalie and I cover a lot of material.
We discuss how art relates to science in the wake of truly significant paradigm shifts and how Shakespeare specifically grappled with such shifts throughout his career and across many, if not most of his plays. We speak a bit about Stalker, about detecting life forms out in the universe. And we speculate on how life may have emerged from life listeners here on earth and elsewhere. Perhaps a clue to that very question lies in Natalie's alien artifact. So with that, let's gear up for a treacherous train ride into the zone. I am Caitlin McShea. This is Alien Crash Site tread lightly jettison your assumptions and broaden your perspective when you have no idea what it is that you're looking for, you're likely to miss it. Or worse you may destroy it in your pursuit.
Natalie Elliot (3m 1s): Hi, Natalie. Welcome to Alien Crash Site. Thanks for coming on. I know you had a busy week, you just were traveling through a lot of wild places.
Natalie Elliot (3m 12s): I did a trip up to Yellowstone I'm out in Montana. So I wanted to see some of the strange environments up there, which turned out to be maybe closer to interplanetary exploration than I expected.
Caitlin McShea (3m 27s): And what were you most struck by? Were you terrified of events of the theme or the view? Was it a little strange?
Natalie Elliot (3m 35s): I mean, you really don't want to fall in. I think there was more odd than fear, but it is one of those places where you see things on earth that don't look like anything you've ever seen. And the landscapes are really cool because they're juxtapose. You have these thermal environments that expose a lot of chemical reactions and they have a lot of colors and textures that look otherworldly and then they are situated right against the sort of standard national park scenery. So the trees are in the background of these kind of prismatic pools that are steaming and are full of rainbow colors.
And you see the weird microorganisms that are metabolizing different kinds of elements and they're different colors. There's a lot of red and green coloration and the green, I don't think is always photosynthetic. It's very interesting that the color is coming from the chemistry in the earth. And it's just like nothing I've seen just on a regular hike in any national park.
Caitlin McShea (4m 38s): That's great. And so you went there, I imagine for leisure, but did you come back inspired? Might some of these strange spaces wiggle their way into the work that you're doing?
Natalie Elliot (4m 46s): It's funny because it's, it made me think right now I'm teaching a lot of Greek texts, both dramatic tragedy and philosophy and that, so some of the geothermal activity in you all sort of made me think about the Oracles from the deep speaking and these sort of bizarre geologic voices. And then the environment also made me think about some of the origins of life questions and the history of life on earth, because they have not the oldest sites for life.
We don't have deep geothermal vents there, but there are microbial max evident in the layers of the rock. So I was thinking a lot about the bizarre kinds of life that exists in extreme environments a lot. And so, I guess in a funny way, the two come together, like the weird forms of life are kind of oracular in their own way. But yeah, those were the kind of the two things that I've been rolling around in my head since I left.
Caitlin McShea (5m 47s): That makes perfect sense. I often think of when we think about alien life, I think unfortunately I have this science fiction megafauna type thought about what aliens will look like. And I basically think they're like green fun versions of myself, but of course you and I talk about all the time, how that's definitely not the case. We talk about it weekly because we co-write this piece together. These Atlantis dispatches. And I think origins of life is something that's very important to the both of us. But when you do think about extreme of files, specifically like microscopic extreme of files, you get a better sense of what kinds of things you might encounter in lands, unlike our own.
And of course we're learning every week about new methods for detecting such things. The landscape, the images that you sent me looked very extreme and uncomfortable.
Natalie Elliot (6m 30s): Yeah, it was very windy. So the steam was really wafting off of things and people have to hold onto their hats, but you could see, there were lost hats and the hats did not do fall in.
Caitlin McShea (6m 45s): No kind of zone proxies, right? These are strange pieces, but hats are flying. Don't fall in your nose if you'll make it out alive. So that's perfect. It's funny. You were talking to you're teaching some Greek works. I have this background image for you because I expect that we'll venture into your art and science overlap specifically in Shakespeare. I definitely want to talk about Shakespeare in the context of like space exploration and while usually moons and planetary bodies are named after Greek mythological characters or gods or Oracles there are 27 moons around Uranus and 25 of them are named after Shakespeare characters.
Natalie Elliot (7m 20s): Oh my God. I didn't know that,.
Caitlin McShea (7m 25s): I thought you'd love that these are the five major moons. You can see those aerials over here, but there was Caliban, Cressida. It's amazing. It was Herschel actually a composer who found the first four moons and then his son ended up naming the other, I think there are 27, total 24 are Shakespeare. And then three, for some reason are from Alexander Pope, but either way, Shakespeare in space.
Natalie Elliot (7m 43s): His mind was definitely there. And I'm, and I think if you read him in a certain way, he gets people thinking about all kinds of planetary bodies in new ways. If you think about how many words that he brought to the English language, that's one thing that people kind of throw around a lot, but I think he also brought a lot of ways of thinking about the class most to us too. I mean, maybe that's kind of apropos that he would have all of his characters batched into the astronomy that we can see now that he maybe helped us live with a little bit more than we were used to living with when it was first kind of becoming apparent that the stars weren't quite what we thought they were.
Caitlin McShea (8m 23s): And so this is something that you've done a lot of research about, how it is that Shakespeare introduced this sort of new science because he lived at this time when a lot of scientific discovery and a lot of new understandings about how the universe works or at least conflicting understandings were coming to be and how he uses his work to sort of investigate those in a sort of philosophical way. I think his head was always kind of there. And so I was thinking about Hamlet. There's not a moon named Hamlet. There is Ophelia, but there's not a Hamlet, but an important change happens around the time that Hamlet's being written. And I wonder if you could take a little of time to talk about that work that you've done specifically around Hamlet and astronomy and conflicting world systems.
Natalie Elliot (9m 2s): It's a really good way to get into the really broad range of Shakespeare’s astronomy. So a lot of the place have astronomical references and he's aware that people interpret the stars in different ways. So he's deeply familiar with astrology. He knows that some people respond to astronomical events with superstitious beliefs and some people respond with more kind of naturalistic leaf. So in Julius Caesar, for example, Cassius says to Brutus, “the fault is not in the stars, but in herself,” but there are a lot of people in that play, looking at these astronomical events that historically actually were happening when Julius Caesar was alive and were recorded by historians and then Shakespeare kind of runs with them in his interpretation.
So the background of Hamlet, I just want to set up is that there are stars and conversations about stars and people looking at the heavens and trying to interpret the heavens and interpreting the heavens as both meaningful and indifferent in like every play. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a play without references like that. I made that wager my life on it, but I probably wagered a lot of money. Oh, we drew all my Bitcoin on it. Hamlet is sort of this very interesting play it astronomically because it's the play where we have evidence that Shakespeare was in contact with the Copernican system.
So most of the references in a lot of other plays suggest that Shakespeare was involved mostly in a geocentric universe. So Copernicus is the one who says the earth actually goes around the sun and that's a big deal in Shakespeare's time. This is the first time in a long, long time hundreds and hundreds of years where people are taking that seriously as a possibility and Copernicus his book is out, but it has only just been translated into English. And in Hamlet, there's a really important set of wine.
So Hamlet is dithering between many cosmologies. He's debating between the sort of Catholic view of purgatory and the Protestant view of the way that the afterlife works. And then he also seems to be caught in between a cosmology that is Ptolemaic and a cosmology that is Copernican. So we see this in a letter he writes to Ophelia, Shakespeare does this amazingly brilliant thing in the poetry. So the letter is addressed to Ophelia, “to the celestial Ophelia and my soul's idol” he writes.
“Doubt that the stars are fire. Doubt that the sun doth move doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt love.” Now sounds like a nice love letter, right? Except the word doubt in Hamlet means two things. It means doubt in the way that we mean it suspect that something is not true, but it also means suspect that something is true. And so the line kind of toggles, if you read it, as me saying doubt in one way, it suggests that Shakespeare is operating in a Ptolemaic universe.
And if you read it the other way, Shakespeare is operating in a Copernican universe and it looks like Hamlet's love sort of depends on where he is. So it's this magnificent moment. And I think that actually also captures the consciousness of Shakespeare's anyone in his universe who is aware of this dilemma. When he's writing, you can't detect which system is more evident from the naked eye. So either system is verifiable with the naked eye. There's no evidence that can tip the balance.
And as his life goes on, we get Galileo's telescope, we get different debates. We have a backstory about Tycho Brahe, which is also in Hamlet. I'm happy to talk about that if you want me to keep going, but in any event, that's the moment I think that we start to hear that Shakespeare's into interacting with that theory.
Caitlin McShea (13m 0s): No, I think that's really well said, and I love the dichotomy that's presented in that love letter, because as you just mentioned, we didn't have a telescope then and so at the time there are these two conflicting world systems, truly of course, Galileo comes along and writes all about exactly that with the advent of the telescope, but the dead has to remain because neither can be falsified as of yet with whatever method of observation we have at the time. And so it's interesting to me that even Shakespeare couldn't take a stance, but had to recognize that there was something strange that two things can be true at once, including whether or not the Hamlet might be the love for Ophelia.
And of course, if you read the play and how he treats her and how everything,
Natalie Elliot (13m 41s): It's all very, very ambiguous.
Caitlin McShea (13m 46s): I mean, I would love to hear about the Tycho Brahe connection. Obviously Hamlet it set in Copenhagen, Elsinore. So there has to be something there.
Natalie Elliot (13m 53s): Yeah, there is. And I think that's the kind of the second set of really interesting circle facts that help us understand and getting to his imagination. So King James went to Denmark and hung out with the king and the King's court astronomer was Tycho Brahe, there's kind of a cool story about this. So Tycho Brahe, he was a character. He got in duals about which view of the heavens was right. He lost his nose. He died of urinary tract infection. He had a lot of problems, but he was really fiery character.
The Danish King gave him this little island called Van. You can still go to it. And he built him a science castle. I think it's like SFI sort of post-doc camps. Anyway, the science castle was called Uranborg and it had all of these observatories on it. And Brian was trying to take data. I mean, once the Copernican world started to open up as a possibility, people started to say, “oh, we have to kind of watch these stars more carefully and think of them as potentially as bodies,” as opposed to these other kinds of ethereal things that exist in a different sphere from the one we live in.
And so Brian was kind of in that mode and he was taking data on Mars. Now his instruments didn't work very well because it was very windy on the island, but he did have a lot of parties and he was very horrible. I guess he taxed the people on the island to death. I'm just finding historical facts about the human side of science and Kepler was his grad student. Kepler had to try to get his data. The family didn't want to give the data, anyway, there's a whole backstory, but the thing that links Tycho Brahe to Shakespeare is that he wrote a book that published his theory, which was actually a combo of Ptolemaic and Copernican world.
So in Tycho Brahe’s world, the sun and the moon go around the earth and the planets go around the sun. So it's like compromise model of the heavens will have both. But Brian wrote when he published his book, he had, he published a friend, his peace with his family and in the family tree he has two-character names that are very familiar to us Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they're smoking slightly differently, but you know, if they're kind of pretty conspicuous names in the play.
And so that's a link that I think also kind of suggests we're talking about stuff that's going on in Denmark when Hamlet is alive. The other thing that I'll mention just in the background is that in Shakespeare's time, the first English translation of Copernicus's diagram of the heavens came out and that diagram was very significant because instead of a sphere of fixed stars that could be sort of crystal clean, it included, an infinite heavens.
And that's, you know, there, you have Hamlet saying, I, you know, I can be bounded in a nutshell, but count myself the king of infinite space. So we get infinite space, infinite jest, you know, and I'm not talking about David Foster Wallace, I'm talking about Hamlet. In any case they're all of these little signposts that remind us that Shakespeare seems to be exposed to these texts. And he seems to be interested in dramatizing, how they will figure not just for the sciences, but for the lives of people who are living with the ideas that they represent in the ideas, which are completely revolutionary for how we think about space for how we think about our existence, how we think about the universe.
Caitlin McShea (17m 33s): So this is a really good segue way into the sort of larger thing. I think that we're both interested, but you especially is how so, you know, obviously people have been looking towards the heavens for quite a bit, right? The heavens exist, but the heavens mean different things to different individuals and different religious or even pursuits. Now we have what we think is kind of evidentiary science, still unproven, pre-telescope. So when my heavens mean something to me and then science tells me that it means something else, I need something to help me reconcile what that confusion is and what it means for me to exist in this new universe I don't yet understand. And I think that you have a lot to say about how art allows one to do that. And I wonder if you'd be willing to kind of generally talk about arts success in that endeavor.
Natalie Elliot (18m 18s): So I think I'll, maybe I'll talk a little bit about Shakespeare and then maybe about Aristophanes. Cause I think they both do something that I love and they, or in general does really well. So the heavens mean something different to many different people and there's obviously a theological heavens and there's a cosmological heavens that can include astronomy. For some people that includes astrology. It's kind of, you know, all over the map and in Hamlet, everything is kind of up for grabs.
The theological vision of the heavens is up for grabs and the cosmological version, the scientific, what we would call scientifically cosmological version is up for grabs. We don't really know what's going on up there. And in Hamlet, the other place that is being called into question is what goes on under the earth, in the afterlife. So Shakespeare has Hamlet asks all these questions. What happens after we die? Well, he has Hamlet asks what happens to a man when he know his body is in the grave. How long does it take before he rots?
He talks about Polonius as a bag of guts, but he also is trying to figure out what this ghost is. Is it a sign that he's going mad? Or is it a sign that purgatory exists in like maybe his new Protestant or education that he's getting in Rittenberg, which is where Luther is hanging out is kind of the wrong story to tell about the afterlife. And so the under the earth in the heavens, there are all of these questions and Shakespeare puts every kind of interpretation on stage. Aristophanes does this too, in the clouds, that's a play. He does it in the clouds. He does it in the birds. He always has scenes where we have these naturalistic phenomena like birds, that kind of stand in for the God. So in the birds, it's he has these people show up and they decide we are going to create new gods. They're going to be the birds. And they'll be great because birds defecate. It's air softeners. So it has to have some scatological. They definitely fertilize the soil and we don't actually have to send them all of the same kinds of steaks that we have to send the Olympians.
And we don't have to worry about all those sacrifices in the same way. He has the clouds, the clouds are meteorological phenomena. They rain on the crops, but they also standing for these kinds of poet voices from the heavens that aren't quite the Olympians. He's performing the Gods. So the point in all of this is that I think the best artists actually don't resolve these things. They, they put them in the foreground for us. So we have to kind of reckon with them and they show us how we struggle with them.
And they show us that we are full of contradictions and that our contradictions often motivate us in bizarre ways that don't make us seem fully rational. And maybe we don't always do justice to our faculties, but they also present fascinating problems. And I think that art is a way to live with those questions and not just kind of fall easily into one scheme of how the world works. I used to think that they give us a way through.
And I think sometimes Shakespeare kind of gives us a little bit of a way through, but it's never a definitive final analysis because I think he knows that as soon as you have some view that will help you reconcile these things in a way that feels, well, maybe a little more comfortable, you're going to get new science. You're going to get new account of how the world works. And suddenly everything falls apart instead.
Caitlin McShea (22m 1s): Instead of navigating a path and choosing a side when uncertainty seems to always be the future, it seems like art and Shakespeare specifically has a means of allowing individuals to settle a little more comfortably in that uncertainty or at least recognize that it exists and kind of navigate with that knowledge because there's always something coming down the pike.
Natalie Elliot (22m 19s): One other place that I love that with the uncertainty stuff that Shakespeare just plays with us is with miracles, especially resurrections. So Shakespeare loves resurrections. He stages them all the time and almost always, I think possibly always, but again, you know, I, I have to wager on this one, we'll throw my Bitcoin in again, when someone is resurrected, he gives you the possibility that it's staged.
So we know, for example, in Romeo and Juliet, the Friar,
Caitlin McShea (22m 56s): sort of a mad chemist, some medieval mad chemist...
Natalie Elliot (22m 60s): He has this potion that will allow anyone to look almost dead so that people believe that they're dead and then we'll be resurrected. So we know the Fryer is cooking up like a fake resurrection, but nobody in the town knows that nobody in Verona knows for sure that this is staged except the Fryer in Romeo and Juliet. Now, obviously it doesn't work out so well, but…
Caitlin McShea (23m 25s): Who doesn't know. And I think that's the issue.
Natalie Elliot (23m 28s): And you know, the reason why he doesn't know this is the cool, this is super cool. The reason why roomy doesn't know is that Fryer John is supposed to give him the memo, right? He's supposed to deliver this message. Don't kill yourself, Julius, just pretending to dead. And there's actually empirical evidence she's not. Her lips are red. He comments on that. She's not blue, but anyway, Romeo doesn't interpret the evidence. Maybe he has a romantic spirit.
Anyway, he doesn't get the memo because the plague is on because Friar John gets quarantined. And so it's the play that turns this comedy that would be one of these additional resurrection plays where everybody gets married and somebody comes back to life right at the end into a tragedy. So there's this kind of, I don't know if it's science that gets in the way, but it’s a phenomenon that people are starting to study scientifically and Shakespeare.
Caitlin McShea (24m 25s): I don't know if it's a science that gets in the way, but it's a problem that science might be able to resolve, but they haven't yet resolved at that gets in the way it's like, it's, I mean, it's viral particle.
Natalie Elliot (24m 36s): Yeah. Quarantine really will ruin a few plants.
Caitlin McShea (24m 39s): Yeah. Totally. Quarantine really gets in the way of love.
Caitlin McShea (24m 45s): Can we relate this a little bit, this idea of a reckoning with kind of uncertain, conflicting paradigms. We use astrology to allow us to successfully, for instance, live and harvest and time the schedules are really so there is this sort of necessary element to it. There's the religious and hopeful element to it. Now there's the idea of exploring it and understanding the systems themselves in a scientific way. But can we talk about where you see instances of this kind of uncertainty in either Roadside Picnicor in Stalker, because especially in Stalker, it seems that the characters who were pursuing this room are terrified of the adventure because they're so unsure of their true selves and their true nature.
Did that resonate with you in your reading or watching?
Natalie Elliot (25m 31s): I'm gonna maybe answer this a little obliquely, but that will be also in keeping with our astronomical themes. So maybe it's a study of like, you kind of have to look at it indirectly. I was thinking a lot about what maybe what Tarkovsky is up to in that play. Like we have this terrain that's sort of tunneling into a place that will reveal one's inner deepest, inner wishes, maybe wishes that one is deeply unaware of or only vaguely aware of and also terrified of which I think is what you were just saying.
And I think that was, I was sort of thinking that's super funny to me because I've been in an MFA program for the past few years. And if you read the sort of basic storytelling technique, the first thing they tell you is like, figure out what your character wants. And it turns out like that's the hardest thing to do. It's very hard to figure out what people want. And so I think when I watched that film, it seems like a lot of what they are doing, every character in the film is kind of trying to the meaning of things. And it's almost as though we can't fully know ourselves, unless we kind of have a working interpretation of how the world works. Like it's almost like, or at least we get distracted by that problem. But I wonder, I don't know. I feel like there's something about knowing what ecosystem you live in. It's not really coherent to want unlimited life.
If you can't have that, and it's not really coherent to want anything that will cause you to be deeply unhappy. So you sort of have to know a little bit about where you're situated and I feel like there's kind of an almost like an ecological thing happening in the background. It's funny because the characters like have especially the professor and the writer, they have their like kind of interpretive frameworks for how the world is. And then the visuals of the film are just full of these bizarro naturalistic images that are overlaid on kind of decaying architecture and often very beautiful architecture, tilework, pattern things, also violent debris that seems to come from technological things.
We get kind of illusions to the technologies of the nuclear power, nuclear weapons, Chernobyl. I feel like there's a funny way in which the people in the film feel like especially those two characters, they feel like they're missing the world because they have a kind of theoretical or theological frame or they're kind of situated there a little bit. And then the visuals are reminding you that there's another story here and the stalker, we're not sure what he's up to, you know, it's this mystery.
And so I feel like we're kind of put in a position where we don't know, and that's kind of the whole magic of the film.
Caitlin McShea (28m 30s): But there is this other...talk about a paradigm shift...talk about something that would totally unsettle your centered self if you were a professor or a writer, is the knowledge of alien life. That these zones behave strangely because this sophisticated alien species has come to visit earth whether they intended to or not. It doesn't seem like the writer or the professor seems to incorporate that fact, which is so different from my own life, into their philosophy that they enter into the zone. It's almost like a non-issue.
Natalie Elliot (28m 59s): That's such a great point. It's funny because it's almost treated as a device, but how could it be? I mean, duh, like even, you know, as I'm listening to you, remind me of that, my own interpretation, I attempt to interpret the film, ignores exactly that phenomenon. And I wonder, I kept thinking about Yellowstone and I was looking at the images because a lot of the sort of watery imagery, I mean, he has those fish images, but I'm thinking more of a lot of the sort of green slime-like stuff that's growing and is clearly an organism.
It just doesn't fit with the stuff that's going on in the speeches of the play. And that's the bulk of the play, the visual kind of disorientation. I'm curious to know what you think is it that that's part of the story. So Kierkegaard has this book, which I think you are familiar with where he's retelling a story of Abraham and Isaac and Abraham is about to kill Isaac and God says, no, no, hang tight. Don't do it.
And so Kierkegaard writes this whole book about what would you do in this situation? And a friend of mine wrote an essay that basically argued that you wouldn't know what you do until you're right in the moment like you couldn't actually know in advance because the kind of conscious experience you're having is a kind of phenomenologically different experience. And I wonder if Tarkovsky maybe is trying to recreate that fact that even though we're watching these people situated in exactly this experience, it's really hard to get into what it would look like.
I don't know, when you start rolling down the idea, if we find life elsewhere, what will we actually experience? I mean, it's very interesting. Try to imagine the range of thoughts and emotions you would have and what we will want to do with that, with that knowledge in advance.
Caitlin McShea (31m 9s): I think about that all the time and specifically the possibility of intelligent life, but of course, I think let's find any life. We'll see what else might evolve from that? Or even another species we haven't yet encountered, but just the knowledge and, and have to, it's not just us, what will that do for like the entire human psychological experience? Will it be positive? Will it be terrifying? I think it would be exquisite. I think it would just be this fantastic and galvanizing thing. I hope for it. I want it so badly, but you don't know, because there are so many other methods for existing in this universe, belief systems that allow one to navigate the world in a hopefully positive way.
Right. So, you can't tell, I think what's interesting. I would like to read almost a prequel to Roadside Picnic, which is just like the day after the aliens left, not 13 years later because we enter into the story where everyone recognizes, this is the thing about our plates. So you were talking about how you have to kind of recognize the ecosystem that you occupy when trying to navigate and make these decisions. Well all of these people recognize that they live in a strange place where aliens once visited the entire economy is wrapped around this, all of their scientific pursuit, whatever it was before, perhaps it was nuclear energy, perhaps it was space exploration.
Now it's what do all of these things in the zone do? It's like retro engineering. It's the entire city is a consequence of this visitation, and it's such a large looming factor of their culture that it isn't even mentioned in the text or the bill. And it's just wild to me. I know the planets go around the sun.
Natalie Elliot (32m 45s): This is kind of making me think about the way we like you and I, and in general, I think we think about the search for life questions, because I think in order to envision the kinds of measurement technologies we would need to look for life in completely bizarre environments we have to think that we're looking for life that doesn't look like us because we can see life. It looks like us. And so I think there's this funny thing, actually, that we simultaneously have to think that life elsewhere is going to be completely different and imagine how we would look for anything that is so weird and alien to us, that it would be hard to identify, but it also has to be life-like enough that it's in that sense, lik- life, as we know it in some, at least remote way for us to be able to identify it.
And I think whether if the lifeforms that we discover, if we do, are extremely weird, like say we find life in a methane ocean on another moon, for example, that form is going to be extremely weird. And I think our minds are a little more blown by that, because then the world isn't built the way we thought it was. If we find life on an icy ocean, like the one that is in Europa, for example, that looks a little closer to how life seems to have arisen and on earth.
And maybe that makes us feel like we're dealing with probably microbial systems. They're definitely disconnected. They evolved in a different way, but they're not like so bizarre that we can't even be sure if they're living. So I think, and maybe I think the more similar things are to us, the more likely we'll be we'll want to just experiment, the more alien I think the more likely we will be to say, hold on, let's just look at what we're dealing with for a little bit.
I don't know, I'm getting away from the film, I guess, but I think maybe because of the sense that there's like a real kind of dark technological mutation side of things. There's a lot more terror in the mix of that film. And I think it is also true that we could create bizarro lifeforms, technologically. I mean, we're, we are already doing this with a lot of the new ways that we're creating biological machines. So maybe Tarkovsky is better for thinking about our technological ways of generating life, then the arrival of alien life.
Caitlin McShea (35m 31s): Well, I wonder, I have a thought, I mean, we've talked about this in past dispatches and you know, everyone who's listening to this podcast listened to the episode with Nina Lanza who has a tool on the perseverance Rover who's looking at Mars and as we, you know, are perplexed by it, we're looking for past life. What did that mean? If it's past, it's not there. So it seems as though we're looking for biosignatures, but really it's almost like there are these artifacts of a former living system, so it's not necessarily living itself, but it seems to be the consequence of some form of a living system, the consequences of some evolutionary process.
And looking for that in this case this week, it was inorganic salts. Like those seem to be artifacts of a life form in the same way that these technological devices or these strange slimy things that existed in the zone are artifacts of a living system, these aliens. And so you don't have to think about it any longer. It's not a possibility anymore. It's 13 years after the fact. And so the artifact itself becomes the interest and not the life anymore. And that seems like strange to me because I'm much more interested in the life itself.
Natalie Elliot (36m 39s): It seems like almost a sort of dark meditation on like what we do with lifeforms when they're already with us, even if they are kind of profoundly different and a discovery. I was thinking, so I'm going to go back to Yellowstone. One of the other highlights was actually seeing some of the bison herds. So I realized that these are national parks. The bison herds, aren't just like out in the middle of nowhere, they're definitely cultivated.
But the view was this kind of major Panorama, and they were walking across a valley. And with all of these rivers, it was totally scenic. And also of course made me think of Jurassic Park, like place the scene. I was very happily imagining this kind of place to seam mega fauna final moment. And I think that those animals are not extinct. They're not that weird to us because they didn't go extinct. They were very close to extinction, but they didn't go extinct like all of the other megafauna, they lived with dire wolves, the wooly mammoths, the saber tooth tigers, the camels, these are all were all North American animals that went extinct. And if suddenly they appeared in Yellowstone National Park. I mean, at first we would be totally astonished, but I think also like, you're right, like 10 years later, you would just go and see them in the way that I saw the bison. But I will say I, you know, was pretty amazing to see them in that setting.
Like there are no fences, there's no indication that they're being farmed. They're not treated as domestic cattle. It's a very different kind of observation. They're not in a zoo. You know, there are all these ways we see things. So I mean, Tarkovsky frames the life, right by all the technological stuff. There's a physics observatory out of the name of it. I can't remember. They have a bison herd. I's really cool because it's like you go out there and you're thinking about, you know, the laws of physics and there is this bizarro bison herd that's been restored, as a result of an effort to bring these species back.
So anyway, the point is, I think how we see things and how long we live with them sort of changes the way that we're oriented to them and how much we're willing to kind of manipulate them or accept them as integrated into our lives.
Caitlin McShea (39m 8s): It's just perplexing to think that some other form of life might be found in the universe or built in a lab and it's going to be world changing. And then 10 years later it was just like, oh, I remember that little novelty that happened way back then. It's like the novelty.
Natalie Elliot (39m 22s): We didn't know before, I guess around the seventies, that life didn't need the sun for its energy. So all of a sudden, that changes the game. If you're looking for life that can exist in deep sea thermal vans, extreme environments, deep oceans, where there is no sunlight and the chemicals of the ocean are the energy source. That is very alien now. Oh, no problem.
We can just look for these guys. They're all over the place now, ubiquitous. It's very bizarre to think, wait, what, how, but yeah, we just, it's just integrated into our sense of things. So I guess we got to watch what we integrate into our sense of how life works. Maybe that's the trick.
Caitlin McShea (40m 16s): I think that, and I think, either a very rigorous historic, or even an artistic record that demonstrates all of the times that we thought we were somewhere and we were incorrect, right. Just the growing archive, that points to the fact that we didn't think there was life here. And there is, we didn't think the universe worked this way. It doesn't look at this in the same way. It's like, we didn't think there was intelligent alien life, but then it came to our little Russian town and left all this stuff behind. And here's the stuff it happened. Some sort of an archive.
Natalie Elliot (40m 47s): Stalker is actually a documentary turns out.
Caitlin McShea (40m 51s): Tarkovsky is actually a documentarian. Solaris is also a documentary! So we're, we're running out of time. We've had a lot to talk about, but I want to make sure that we get to your artifact because that's the most important portion of this conversation. So Natalie, at the risk of imprisonment, great personal injury, even death, what objects do you hope to uncover in an alien crash?
Natalie Elliot (41m 17s): So I had three ideas and I think I'm not allowed to say like just a living thing, right.
Caitlin McShea (41m 24s): Because I have Michael Lachmann on and I was like, sorry, Michael, you can't find life. So I kept let anyone.
Natalie Elliot (41m 29s): So I was thinking that the two things kept thinking about that they're both sort of bad behavior. And I was worried about saying gone here, but here we are, I'll say my second one, I'm going to keep the first one secret. So I would like to find a biological replicator machine. So those words are important, not just like any kind of replicator, because we have those computational replicators exist. Anything that copies, printing, press, whatever you like.
But I think I would be very excited to see a machine that can replicate biological anything, and therefore sort of hold the secret to replication in general. That's my machine.
Caitlin McShea (42m 17s): So when you say a biological replicator, are you talking about like some sort of a mechanized can be utilized by choice version of a molecular machine that replicates, so like a mechanical DNA, RNA, RNA’s system.
Natalie Elliot (42m 34s): So the reason I use the word biologicalness is that yeah, something like that. Obviously we can clone DNA, but I think like the replicator would be able to copy and with adaptation, as opposed to just copying any kind of biological material. And I say biological, because I think often we think of DNA as code, as information that could be extracted abstracted from its chemistry, from its material.
Now I don't know if it can or can't be, it's definitely something that I think is a fascinating question. But I do think right now, at least I would be more excited to find a machine that can replicate stuff that is identifiably biological to us. That is a huge can of worms. But I guess it wouldn't be right if I didn't leave an SFI podcast with a big loaded canvas at the end of day.
Caitlin McShea (43m 32s): I think that's okay. I'm just having a hard time wrapping my head around. So I'm certainly no expert, but it seems to me that that the information contained within DNA is divisible from like the code. It's like the code is less than the information, right? So you get AGA or whatever. It's red. Insert AGA exit amino acid. I don't know which one, whatever, but the AGA itself is not the amino acid. So there seems like it's taking a code and then making things that are unlike itself, it's copying itself in order to replicate itself, the DNA.
But then all of the information that it encodes is much more than itself. And so I wonder how that factors into this device.
Natalie Elliot (44m 14s): I think the device would hold the secret. You find the device, it does this thing. And then it sort of reveals to you the secrets of how information is encoded in biological material and replicated within.
Caitlin McShea (44m 30s): This is your replicator machine is almost like a memory works machine. It's like an origins of memory machine.
Natalie Elliot Like that, but you know, for like creatures
Caitlin McShea (44m 42s): And that's great. And so it seems like in order to get the utility that you hope from this machine, you have to do two things. You have to use it a couple of times and then you sort of have to break it apart and see what's going on at the risk of never being able to replicate biologically again. But in destroying it, you might learn how it is that information is replicated in general or at least by this alien species. If you break it apart, hopefully you have the wherewithal to put it back together.
Natalie Elliot (45m 14s): Yeah. It's like the anticancer, but like a little more complicated.
Caitlin McShea (45m 17s): that was David's device. This sort of like quasi threefold, but one of the three things was the ethic theory device. But of course now there's that paper that came out that sort of demonstrates a proposed notion of what its function was. The difference, I guess, with this is that it's not a mystery. Somehow even despite its appearance or how strange it is once used. It's very clear.
Natalie Elliot (45m 38s): I think the reason why I think it would be interesting is that I think a lot of the ways that we think about biological replication or replication with adaptation is that we think about it in mechanical terms, but it's not quite a machine. Biological reference, replication may not be strictly mechanical in any of the ways we've experienced machines and I'm including computers in that. So I think maybe I need to refine the specs of this thing.
And if I could, maybe I would have a different job other than thinking about art and science. That's what I've come up.
Caitlin McShea (46m 23s): Well, let me ask you this big final question. And hopefully you could explain why you think it is, but this quote, biological replicator machine, this device, this machine in the mechanical sense, this device that you've uncovered from the zone, given its function, is it alive?
Natalie Elliot (46m 40s): I guess like, yeah. Maybe I'm maybe I'm already breaking the rules.
Caitlin McShea (46m 45s): It kind of seems like, okay, Caitlin said I can't have life, so I'm going to make a device that is alive.
Natalie Elliot (46m 50s): Well, I think, let me put it this way. I think it's kind of like the experimental setup for life in the lab. For example, I think there's this funny problem when you think about the origin of life that it's not like there's a switch exactly. Prebiotic life, prebiotic chemical organization that is almost alive, I guess, we're not even clear what the language is that we need. Like, is it a threshold? Is it a tipping point?
What, what exactly is the shift that is involved in going from a biotic to biotic life? And this thing would be like the Rubicon that you cross from life to non-life. If we're going to go a little around this. And I guess that would, that's kind of the mystery, like what exactly starts life spontaneously replicating itself. At some point, all the rocks and prebiotic chemistry, self organizes, and then replicates and adapts and becomes living.
And so all of those things, I think are part of a process that would be encapsulated in this thing. But I think it would be like the frame work in which that happens. Like not all containers create living things. Not all oceans, maybe have life. We're hoping that a lot of the interplanetary oceans in our solar system do, but we don't necessarily, so what does the container look like that actually maybe makes the spark or pushes the organization into cell for application mode or inspires the spontaneity of it?
Caitlin McShea (48m 39s): This discussion that we're having now kind of points to that large question of like containment itself, right? Does this living system actually have to have a membrane? Can it be something a little more dynamically involved with its surroundings? And this device is contained though, of course, because you have to put it in your pocket and make it out of the zone before you start dissolving.
Natalie Elliot (48m 57s): I don't know if it's Olympic.
Caitlin McShea (49m 2s): Well, there's ooze and slime. I like the idea of, it's not even a device at this point. It's just like a lipid that you point stuff a little bit closer. I'm nearly finished. Okay. Well, let's end there please. Let's end with this new life theme song, Natalie, thank you so much for taking the time to enter into the zone and for finding a cheat around my limitation that you can't find life in the zone. Well done. And so I have a lot of literature. This is probably the most literary conversation we've had. So I'll be sure to link all of the stories that we talked about.
I'll link to your site. As many of our listeners will have already heard from our introduction. Natalie has a forthcoming novel coming out about woolly mammoths. She likes them. If you couldn't tell from this conversation. We have a frequent dispatch series that comes out through the Alien Crash Site website. And Natalie is also a very diligent and rigorous science writer for a variety of outlets too. So I looked at some past pieces, one specifically about origins of life. That seems like a proper conclusion.
Natalie Elliot (49m 60s): Sounds great. Thank you so much for having me. It's always so much fun to talk to you. So I'm really excited about our continued conversation. Yeah, exactly. Have a lovely day. Thanks.