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capri0mniI originally posted (pretty much) this to dialecticdreamer's journal this morning -- this is slightly edited and expanded, since I've been thinking about it all day (and I've been meaning to post about it here, and kept forgetting):
A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to a Radiolab show on symmetry, and the second half (~25 minutes) of the hour was dedicated to mirror images: Mirror, Mirror. In the first part of that segment, it was pointed out that, in inanimate stuff (rocks, metals, etc) molecules are about 50-50% left- and right handed in orientation. But in every form of life we know of, ever, all molecules are left-handed.
The first thought that popped into my head was: "Ooh! Medusa!" Could it be that when a living thing looks on the face of Medusa, half the of all the the molecules in their body instantaneously "switch" to their mirror images? So that what was once a living, sentient, thing, is now an inert mass of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen? And could some creatures (oh, such as the Weeping Angels, perhaps, or the Gargoyles from that late, lamented, animated series) have some means of voluntary control over this, and thus switch from "Living" to "Stone" and back again? ...Not sure how surviving the stone state would work, exactly, but wood frogs managed to figure something out with regards to freezing, so...
And then, my brain quickly hopped from folklore/mythology/fantasy to science fiction, with a few more thoughts:
Is it the Left-handedness that's the magic key that turns on the Life light, or simply the uniformity? If it's uniformity, than it's likely that the life on half the planets in the universe is lethally toxic to life on the other half, and could go a long way toward explaining Fermi's Paradox -- the really technologically advanced species know this, and decide it's safer to STAY HOME. If so, that's a bummer for those of us who like to imagine our stories being true, someday, somewhere. But it's a massive lot happier than the usual explanation: they destroyed their environments, and killed themselves off in wars before ever developing space-travel (to which I say, BTW: "Anthropomorphize, much?").
Also: Which came first? Did inanimate "Stuff" become "Life," with its ~Will to Survive~, when a certain quorum of complex molecules all shared the same handedness, by random planetary coin flip? Or did the ~Will to Survive~ come first? In other words: though not "Will" as we Puny Humans conceive of it, was there -- is there, nonetheless -- something going on in certain particular amino acids that causes an active 'preference' for linking up with each other and 'rejecting' molecules that turn in the opposite direction?
If Stuff became life by planetary coin flip, then the chances are pretty high that half of all life is lethal to the other half.
But:
If the "Will" came first, then it could be that complex intelligence is just as inevitable as complex organisms. The deliberate choices which are key to active problem solving are simply a natural extension of the molecular "choices" made by the proteins in our cells (Life=Survival=Evolution = Adaptation=Problem Solving). Also, if it really is "Something Special" baked into the amino acids floating out there in intergalactic space, maybe All. Life. Period is Left-handed. We'll say that's true, anyway, so our aliens can eat each other's food, and happily swap bodily fluids without worry.
dialecticdreamer's journal this morning -- this is slightly edited and expanded, since I've been thinking about it all day (and I've been meaning to post about it here, and kept forgetting):A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to a Radiolab show on symmetry, and the second half (~25 minutes) of the hour was dedicated to mirror images: Mirror, Mirror. In the first part of that segment, it was pointed out that, in inanimate stuff (rocks, metals, etc) molecules are about 50-50% left- and right handed in orientation. But in every form of life we know of, ever, all molecules are left-handed.
The first thought that popped into my head was: "Ooh! Medusa!" Could it be that when a living thing looks on the face of Medusa, half the of all the the molecules in their body instantaneously "switch" to their mirror images? So that what was once a living, sentient, thing, is now an inert mass of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen? And could some creatures (oh, such as the Weeping Angels, perhaps, or the Gargoyles from that late, lamented, animated series) have some means of voluntary control over this, and thus switch from "Living" to "Stone" and back again? ...Not sure how surviving the stone state would work, exactly, but wood frogs managed to figure something out with regards to freezing, so...
And then, my brain quickly hopped from folklore/mythology/fantasy to science fiction, with a few more thoughts:
Is it the Left-handedness that's the magic key that turns on the Life light, or simply the uniformity? If it's uniformity, than it's likely that the life on half the planets in the universe is lethally toxic to life on the other half, and could go a long way toward explaining Fermi's Paradox -- the really technologically advanced species know this, and decide it's safer to STAY HOME. If so, that's a bummer for those of us who like to imagine our stories being true, someday, somewhere. But it's a massive lot happier than the usual explanation: they destroyed their environments, and killed themselves off in wars before ever developing space-travel (to which I say, BTW: "Anthropomorphize, much?").
Also: Which came first? Did inanimate "Stuff" become "Life," with its ~Will to Survive~, when a certain quorum of complex molecules all shared the same handedness, by random planetary coin flip? Or did the ~Will to Survive~ come first? In other words: though not "Will" as we Puny Humans conceive of it, was there -- is there, nonetheless -- something going on in certain particular amino acids that causes an active 'preference' for linking up with each other and 'rejecting' molecules that turn in the opposite direction?
If Stuff became life by planetary coin flip, then the chances are pretty high that half of all life is lethal to the other half.
But:
If the "Will" came first, then it could be that complex intelligence is just as inevitable as complex organisms. The deliberate choices which are key to active problem solving are simply a natural extension of the molecular "choices" made by the proteins in our cells (Life=Survival=Evolution = Adaptation=Problem Solving). Also, if it really is "Something Special" baked into the amino acids floating out there in intergalactic space, maybe All. Life. Period is Left-handed. We'll say that's true, anyway, so our aliens can eat each other's food, and happily swap bodily fluids without worry.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-14 12:50 am (UTC)In the Mass Effect series of games two of the alien races use right handed molecules, and thus have their own food and you have to be very careful if you get into a relationship with one. It's treated like a food allergy.
If the universe was a patchwork of left and right, each poisonous to the other, ignoring each other would be a relatively positive outcome. The negative one would be trying to colonise each other with toxic terraforming :( Actually I think that's what's happening on Barrayar, though the life there isn't sentient so noone feels very bad about it. Then again, electromagnetic waves have no handedness, and there's other ways we could communicate. You could have a range of approaches, from cooperation-at-a-distance to expansionistic terraforming to very carefully climate controlled space stations, all happening at once between different species and subcultures.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-14 11:05 am (UTC)Yes, also in Rosemary Kirstein's thoughtful Steerswoman series of novels although I don't want to say any more because massive spoilers are massive.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-15 10:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-14 01:29 pm (UTC)That's where I first got the seed for the idea that the mechanisms that lead to intelligence could be baked into the chemical compounds of life, itself. And that "Sentience" exists as a continuous spectrum of complexity, rather than a discrete switch which is either "on" or "off," same thing with "Sapience."
Then again, electromagnetic waves have no handedness, and there's other ways we could communicate.
Somewhere, in another discussion of Fermi's Paradox, I saw someone suggest that maybe we haven't been able to detect alien communications, because they're using frequencies of dark energy. ;-)
And tangentially,
As near as I understand, it's the uniform handedness of a group of molecules which determines whether life is likely to form from them. So since non-life tends to have randomized handedness, and light reflected from a molecule tends to orient its polarity to the molecule's... this leads to an interesting test for life: Check to see which worlds polarized light is coming from!
---
I love the idea, but the more I think about it, I'm wondering how we'd filter out interference, to avoid false positives...
no subject
Date: 2015-03-15 10:50 am (UTC)this leads to an interesting test for life: Check to see which worlds polarized light is coming from!
Huh!
no subject
Date: 2015-03-15 12:00 pm (UTC)That was my reaction. But, as I said up-thread, the more I think about it, the more I realize there may be niggling technical reasons why this is unworkable (Q.V. the excitement a few years ago, over the polarization in the Cosmic Background Radiation that turned out to be interference from dust in our own atmosphere).
However, thin as it may be, I think it's a strong enough thread of an idea to put into a fictional tale or twelve, with some hand-wavy technobabble. And that may inspire someone to look into making it factual.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-14 12:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-14 01:03 am (UTC)