SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.com http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #240 New Moon of June 27, 2014 Contents copyright 2014 by Thomas G. Digby, and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. See the Creative Commons site at http://creativecommons.org/ for details. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* Fifty years ago give or take a few days, on July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. Wikipedia has an article (Civil Rights Act of 1964) that goes into all sorts of interesting detail about negotiations and record-breaking filibusters and political compromises and such, but that's not what I want to talk about here. I have more personal things to say. I grew up in the South before that law was passed. That meant that I grew up in a racially segregated society. Not only were the schools and other major institutions segregated, but so were little things like drinking fountains. For example, big mainstream stores like Sears had pairs of identical drinking fountains, one labeled "White" and the other "Colored". Now drinking fountains are designed to be pretty well protected from germs and such. If you don't put your mouth directly on the nozzle you're not going to pass or catch anything (assuming the underlying water supply is safe). Your fingers do touch the knob to turn the water on, but that's no more dangerous than touching a stair railing or an elevator button. But despite the lack of rational reason for that fear, many people felt that sharing a drinking fountain with someone of a lower-status race was somehow vaguely yucky. When the law was passed racial segregation became illegal. They took down the "White" and "Colored" signs but usually left both drinking fountains in place. Taking one of them out would have cost money for labor and such, and there was no compelling reason to do so. Such redundant equipment (not to be confused with pairs of fountains at different heights for accessibility reasons) would have since gradually disappeared in the normal course of remodeling and new construction. I would expect to see few if any such pairs today. Did visitors from out of the area ever wonder why things like drinking fountains seemed to always come in pairs? Or is that the kind of small thing people tend not to notice? Major public buildings also had restrooms in sets of four, for the various combinations of races and genders, but that may not have looked so obvious since it could have just been a design decision to spread the load out over more smaller facilities rather than concentrate it into fewer larger ones. Back on the drinking fountains, while the ones in the big department stores looked like a nice neat example of "Separate but Equal", I recall a small local store where they were nowhere near being equal. While the "White" one was a fairly decent porcelain drinking fountain, the "Colored" one was an old wash basin. You might have been able to get your head down under the spigot to get a drink without needing a cup, but the way the porcelain was all stained it looked like you probably wouldn't want to. Even today that image comes to mind when someone mentions the concept of "Separate but Equal". ********************* What could be further from a lunch counter labeled "White Only" than the Mos Eisley Cantina in the Star Wars universe? There we have beings not only from different continents, but from different worlds, sharing space more or less peacefully. There are fights now and then, but they're usually over issues other than what race or species someone is. There are analogous places in other science fiction or fantasy universes. But that's fiction. Would something like that be possible in our "real world" and if so, what would it take to bring it about, assuming we have alien beings we might want to share the space with? The most basic requirement is physical compatibility. Can we breathe each other's air? Are we comfortable at more or less the same temperatures? Can we tolerate contact with each other's germs? Can we partake of each other's food and drink? Right now we just plain don't know. We don't have enough data points. All we can do is guess. If we find life elsewhere in our solar system, or somehow contact beings from elsewhere that we can exchange data with, we will be able to make better guesses. But until we contact others who in turn have gathered data from even more worlds, we'll still be mostly just guessing. My guess is that if there are a large number of worlds with intelligent beings out there we will be physically compatible with some, but probably just a minority of them. Scientists are finding more and more planets orbiting other stars. We can't yet tell whether any of them have life, but there are missions being planned to analyze some of their atmospheres. Once that is done we may have some statistical idea of how common life is out there and how many of those life-bearing worlds humans could walk on unprotected (assuming transportation there could be arranged). But that doesn't really answer it. Even if we find a planet whose inhabitants can mingle with humans without either species having to wear gas masks or whatever, will we want to go to a bar or restaurant with them? I don't think disease germs will be a major issue. Humans don't often get seriously sick from things that infect other species of animals and plants on Earth. There are a few exceptions to that (such as rabies), but most alien germs are probably not going to "know" how to infect humans and deal with the human immune systems. If there are alien germs floating around a community of humans, there's a chance that one of them will mutate and make the jump to our species, but I don't think the chances of that are much greater than the chances of something that has always been here as a minor nuisance suddenly becoming deadly. There have been cases of new diseases being introduced to a place whose inhabitants had never developed immunity to them, with devastating results. Those germs, however, had already had experience with humans in other parts of the world. If beings we are coming in contact with have had previous contact with yet other worlds, I would ask them to tell us of their experiences in this area. That should give us an idea of how much danger there really is. I suspect there is some, but not all that much. Of course I could be wrong. Until we have more data I'm not going to recommend that no precautions be taken. So let's say we can breathe each other's air, don't all keel over from each other's germs, and aren't too put off by each other's body odor. Will we want to go to our favorite pizza place or bar or whatever together? How compatible is their food chemistry with ours? It may be that some nutrients are not quite the same, so that a long-term diet of mostly alien food would be unhealthy, but a little wouldn't hurt. Or there may be some alien nutrients so toxic that one bite will send a human to the emergency room (and probably vice versa with aliens eating human food). Some humans have medical conditions that make some ordinary foods that toxic to them. Now imagine a whole race of beings that are in effect deathly allergic to some common Earth foods. Depending on the severity of the problem the solutions could range from simple labeling to strict segregation laws. It may be OK for a human to sit next to a creature from Planet X most of the time, but not while they're eating. Similar questions apply to alcohol and other recreational drugs. For example, what if some aliens can drink methanol (toxic to humans) with impunity? Should bars on Earth have it available for them? And don't forget the taste buds. Who knows how those may be calibrated. So let's say we've gotten past all those problems. We can eat and drink together. Will we want to? We've occasionally encountered someone whose table manners were, by our standards, atrocious. Maybe they were from a place with different standards, or maybe they just never learned the proper ways to eat in this culture. Either way, they were quite unappetizing to watch. Now go to Wikipedia, look up "Starfish", and skip down to the section on the digestive system. Do the same for "Sea anemone". Now imagine something that started out like a starfish or sea anemone but somehow made its way out of the sea to become a human-sized land animal. It has evolved sentience and has built an advanced civilization, but still eats like a starfish or sea anemone. Hint: It may gulp down the whole meal at once, dishes and all, and then do with the dishes and packaging and such what some starfish and sea anemones do with bones and shells and other indigestible matter. How would you feel about dining with such a creature? ********************* Even if most humans are willing to eat with beings whose ancestors were something like cnidarians, will they be willing to eat with us? Consider: Earth humans don't have a decent doorway opening directly to the stomach chamber. Instead, the human digestive system is a long thin tube from one end of the body to the other, with the stomach being just a wide place near, but still some distance from, the starting end. Thus civilized cnidarian table manners won't work for humans. Instead of shoving a package of food into the stomach in one clean motion, we humans are forced to tear or chop or saw or slice it into small pieces which we then ingest one piece at a time. Although this is usually done using specialized hand tools, such are not really necessary, at least on less formal occasions. The human food intake orifice is equipped with so-called "teeth", which are built-in tools for tearing small pieces from a larger chunk of food. This orgy of destruction is often carried out right at the table, in full view of other diners. And even when it is discreetly done behind the scenes and the result brought in as a bowl full of small pieces, it is easy to imagine how those pieces got to be that small. And instead of shoving the whole thing, bowl and all, into the stomach in one neat motion we still have to take the food into our mouth one small piece at a time. Needless to say, on more formal occasions when the cook has gone to the trouble of arranging the food in an esthetically pleasing artistic manner this process of reducing it to small pieces which are then ingested one at a time can seem like wanton vandalism. And in those cultures in which people exchange message loaves or similar items, to tear the loaf to pieces instead of swallowing it whole is to reject the message, thereby insulting the writer. In some places an acceptable workaround is to write such messages on pieces of food that are already small enough to fit into a human mouth, but not all etiquette authorities accept this. So what is to be done? Nobody knows. Many are just sort of hoping that the problem will somehow have been solved within a generation or two. In the meantime we may want to allow restaurants to segregate diners by species. ********************* All this speculating about extraterrestrials reminded me of the SETI project that is looking for intelligent life on other worlds. One branch of it uses idle time on people's home computers. SETI At Home The heading on the screen saver says "The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Home" Even though they're really looking at the skies, Not in this apartment. But what if they're wrong? What if, in the dead of night when I'm asleep, My darkened living room is full of a very quiet meeting of The Galactic Federation Security Council? They always put the chairs back when they're finished So I never find anything amiss, But telepathic debates of other-worldly affairs Leaking into my dreams Could explain a lot. And since I don't clean as often as I should, They may be keeping their transporter in the hall closet With the mops and brooms and vacuum cleaner, Secure in the knowledge that I may go weeks without looking there. Or if the little green men are small enough, They may be living under the sink, Getting essential alien nutrients from Earthly insecticides and detergents and such. Should I look harder? Probably not. If they wanted to be found I would have seen them already. But if some morning I find a Galactic Federation Flag next to the US Flag in my window Then I'll know They're ready to make Contact. -- Thomas G. Digby written 11:13 12/09/2001 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU There are two email lists, one that allows reader comments and one that does not. Both are linked from http://www.plergb.com/Mail_Lists/Silicon_Soapware_Zine-Pages.html If you are already receiving Silicon Soapware you can tell which list you are on by looking at the email headers. 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