Aliens everywhere
The planetary science and ecology of worldbuilding is fascinating, but what about the creation of alien cultures? Many alien races are green-painted humans, or based on species with which we are intimately familiar — cats, dogs, horses. Given that we don’t have any data on extraterrestrial organisms, is there science that can help inform the creation of alien species?
Ants. There are an estimated 22,000 species of ant, and their societies and behavior are all very different from the usual mammalian/vertebrate model.
I read Anthill by E.O Wilson earlier this summer. Dr. Wilson is a noted biologist, and has studied ant behavior for decades. He’s written many books, but Anthill is the 80-year-old’s first novel. The framing story is of a young naturalist studying ants, coming of age, fighting ecologically destructive development in the southern US.
It’s the center section, The Anthill Chronicles, where the book shines. Told from the point of view of the ants, by a scientist who’s studied them for decades, this part of the novel makes it clear just how different ant culture really is, though the rest of the book delights in drawing sneaky parallels between human and ant.
Three things make ant culture alien to us: reproduction, communication, and control. I’ve chosen a passage from The Anthill Chronicles to illustrate each.
1. Only one member of the colony reproduces. All the rest are sterile females.
As the months passed, the Queen, growing heavy with egg-filled ovaries, retreated ever deeper, distancing herself from the still-dangerous nest exterior. She had become an extreme specialist. She alone laid eggs, she alone was the growing tip of the burgeoning colony. The workers performed all the labor needed to raise her offspring, their sisters. They were the Queen’s hands and feet and jaws, and increasingly they replaced her brain. They functioned together as a well-organized whole. They were altruistic toward one another, and they divided labor without regard to their own welfare. The Trailhead Colony came to resemble a large, diffuse organism. In a word, it became a superorganism.
Lots of behaviors that strike us as foolish become sensible if your only goal is to protect the colony and the queen. Individual safety is meaningless – your genes are passed on through your mother, to your sisters. Suicide bombers are an aberration among humans, but quite reasonable as a last-ditch defense of your colony.
The smaller ant on the right intentionally exploded, killing herself and trapping the invader in toxic yellow goo. This sort of self-sacrificing behavior is only sustainable as a routine behavior if the evolutionary importance of the colony is much greater than the importance of the individual, as it is for ants.
2. Communication is almost entirely chemical.
Because they [ants] live most of their lives in underground darkness, they cannot speak to each other with sight or sound. Instead, they are forced to communicate with chemical signals. Human beings think in sound and vision. Ants, forced to be pheromonal, think only in taste and smell. No human can understand the chemical sensations that crowd the brain of a worker ant. We have no understanding of the entities she conceives, or the tones, the accounts, and the blends that course through her mind.
Ants recognize their siblings by smell/taste – members of the group smell like home. Ants that don’t smell right are enemies by definition.
Chemical communication can also drive more complex behaviors, like travelling to food and bringing it back to the nest. If a forager finds a large cache, like a dropped half-sandwich after a picnic, she will haul a load back to the nest and leave a scent trail indicating food. The next ant to stumble across the fresh trail will follow it, find food, and also leave the chemical food signal along the trail. As more ants do so, the trail gets stronger, and in turn attracts more ants.
Back and forth they’ll go, strengthening the trail, until every last crumb has been hauled away. Foragers finding the trail will reach the end but not find food. These ants will return with nothing, and will not add scent to the trail. The chemical will dissipate and the trail weaken, until no ants follow it to the empty picnic site.
3. There’s no central guidance.
The mental life of the colony was not shared by each worker equally. What any worker knew and thought was only part of what the colony knew and thought. The colony intelligence was distributed among its members, in the same way human intelligence is distributed among the gyri, lobes, and nuclei of the human brain. [...] The Woodland Colony as a whole learned in this manner by calling up pieces of knowledge and putting them together as need demanded, communicated by means of a pheromonal language. Because the superorganism knew much more than any individual ant, it was far smarter.
Just as in the picnic example, everything happens by consensus. Groupthink is the only organizational principle. The queen doesn’t control the colony. How could she? Her only functions are to lay eggs and to stay safe, and neither one is compatible with active leadership. No individual ant can know enough to guide the whole colony in finding food or defending itself. The group mind is remarkably effective at all these tasks – ants are everywhere.
Mark Moffett’s astonishing book Adventures among Ants is full of examples and photographs from around the world (including the suicide bomber above).
The differences between ant culture and human culture give me all kinds of ideas for science fiction. Some of these have been done, but there are still new ideas and plenty of room to explore the speculative implications of the aliens among us.
What would happen if we met an alien race that didn’t communicate through sound or sight? How would we communicate? Would each even realize the other was sentient?
Chemical communication can mark place (applied to a spot or trail or individual) and time (fades). It would be hard to record, though. What implications might this have for the development of culture? Art?
What if we met a swarm intelligence? How would we interact with its individual components? Would that interaction be meaningful? What about interaction with the group?
The idea of swarms and group intelligence is already widely used in simulation modeling. Remarkably complex behaviors can arise from the group dynamics of many not-so-bright components. Could a group intelligence arise spontaneously from a large array of not-so-bright components, like maybe iPhones?
I didn’t even get into ant agriculture, or warfare, or different physical types of ants (same species, same colony, but wildly different in appearance and function). Ants really are alien to our everyday experience, though in some ways very familar.
What ideas are springing to life in your brain? Have you encountered any of these ideas in fiction? Or everyday life?
More information
Deborah Gordon’s TED talk about ant behavior research
Alex Wild’s ant photography. I didn’t get this article together with enough lead time to request permission to use his photos, but they are very nice.
Mark Moffett interviewed on The Colbert Report.
Two examples of ants in fiction: The City Under the Back Steps by Evelyn Sibley Lampman and The Once and Future King by T. H. White.
Of course, the most obvious SF equivalent to social insects are Star Trek’s Borg. Here’s a relevant abbreviated excerpt from my book:
“By imagining the Borg, the Star Trek writers left not a single human fear button unpushed. The Borg blur the flesh/machine boundary. They symbolize loss of individuality, forcible conversion and technological supremacy by Masters with an inflexible will.
Yet looking at the Borg, I couldn’t help noticing that there are such creatures already on earth. They have preceded humans by several million years and are very successful in their own niche. Excepting their hardware, the Borg are very closely modeled on social insect societies — in particular, the army and driver ants of Africa and South America.
The points of equivalence are obvious. Each grouping of social insects (a hive or a nest) can best be considered a single organism. They communicate by scent trails, they specialize for specific tasks (nurses, farmers, soldiers, consorts) and their behavioral repertory, although extensive, is completely hard-wired. Army and driver ants have additional points of similarity to the Borg: they are aggressive nomads, who “assimilate” everything in their path by the simple expedient of ingesting it. And like the nests of terrestrial social insects, the Borg cubes are ruled by Queens.
Add Oedipal fears to the Borg brew and it becomes very potent indeed. I was puzzled by the fact that the Borg Queen in First Contact sported lipstick, an atypical concession to appearance for a Borg, until I realized that it probably was a representation of the dreaded vagina dentata.
Among social insects, individual members of the hive are expendable, except one: the life of the hive and all its members depends absolutely on the presence and well-being of the (a) queen. All inhabitants of a hive are descendants of a single queen and recognize her pheromone. If they lose the scent connection, they wander around aimlessly, stop eating and die.
In a close parallel to this, single Borg are expendable. Their fellows do not mourn for them, nor do they collect the bodies. On the other hand, they are in constant communication with each other through subspace connections. Their network is so strong that non-Borg who have been temporarily absorbed and then rescued (Captain Picard, Seven-of-Nine) remain permanently, though weakly, connected to the Collective. When deprived of the collective experience, individual Borg either self-destruct or go mad, unless they can find another Queen-substitute to attach themselves to.
A lifeform like the Borg is actually quite possible as a biological concept, since it is well poised for natural selection. If the Borg are by nature the equivalent of social insects, it is odd that the Federation considers them “evil”. The Borg cannot help what they do: they are simply following the dictates of their nature. They are adversaries, certainly, but not with human motives.When the Borg turn Picard into Locutus, they are merely making the best use of a new addition to their collective — and perhaps that is what makes them so scary.”
Good example, thanks.
I suppose this is the wrong place to admit that I didn’t think of that because I really don’t watch Star Trek?
I have noticed that in most cases the Hive Queen is treated as the sole sentient member of the collective and the others as remotely controlled drones, for example the Buggers/Formics in Orson Scott Card’s Ender series where killing a queen made the rest of her hive die immediately.
Also while the “suicide bomber” thing makes sense for insects where only one in several thousand females is fertile it doesn’t make sense for a collective of technologically linked entities that are all fertile like the Borg. If anything I would expect such a collective to act like Mars from the online graphic novel A Miracle of Science (for example: http://www.project-apollo.net/mos/mos358.html ).
I don’t think you need to be a Star Trek aficionado to be aware of the Borg — they’ve become an integral part of the collective pop culture.
On a related note, it has become quasi-customary in the SF/F community to hint that Star Trek is bourgeois/square (in part because it’s optimistic, unlike cyberpunk) and hence lacks the “edginess” required by today’s hipsters. The franchise is light years far from perfect and its science is mostly lamentable. But it introduced scads of interesting concepts, particularly in biology (broadly defined).
I’m aware of the Borg, they just didn’t pop to mind when thinking about social organisms. I didn’t realize they were that closely modeled on bees/ants.
My lack of Star Trek knowledge doesn’t have anything to do with disdain or lack of respect. I watch very little video of any sort through lack of time and inclination. It’s not my preferred form of entertainment. I’m a season and a half into a recent crime drama, after about three years of owning the DVDs, and that’s about the total of my video consumption.
I have read all of the prosifications (not all novelizations; is there a word for the short story versions?) of the original series.
But I don’t think that helps with Borg-knowledge.
But. Talking about my entertainment preferences is irrelevant. Anyone else have any thoughts on social insects/alien lifeforms? Or machineforms?
Chemical communication is somewhat slow, but I wonder if it’s possible for biological radio transmitters to evolve. I think if we made contact with a sapient alien hive it would be extremely difficult for us to communicate or even recognize each other as sapient barring advanced technology.
Given the current popularity of parallel processing I think it likely that the first Artificial sapiences will be distributed over multiple servers. And the first human-sized sapient robots will be either remote drones or use wi-fi (or the future equivalent) for parallel processing.
Those are great ideas. Biological radio? Hm.
Animals here use sonar in the dark and underwater. How would things have to be different to develop radio instead?
I think smartphones will be the first self-organizing AI. Or an internet virus.
There are many animals that sense electric fields, not just electric eels but other kinds of fish. From there it is not implausible to jump to some sort of electrical/electromagnetic communication.
But one should think of the evolutionary circumstances. I believe that electric senses are most strongly developed in locations with limit visibility, such as muddy rivers. Not 100%, of course. So one might imagine creatures living in caves, or in a forest so dense very little light reaches the floor, or with such heavy foliage one needs to see ‘beyond’ the trees for the forest…
If you consider biological viruses to be alive then you can say computer (and memetic) viruses are also alive.
As for smartphones pretty much every desktop and laptop connected to the internet is linked to other devices at least as much as phones are, and they have much more processing power. That being said there is an iPhone app called SIRI that can be described as a primitve AI personal assistant, and it’s an offshoot of a DARPA project. Though I think the AI for Galactic Civilizations II is smarter (one of the difficulties is called “masochistic”).
The brain is a kind of parallel processor, with many different “modules.” The main barrier to artificial sapience, I believe, isn’t just computing power, but that we don’t really understand sapience or intelligence or any of those squishy words. I think the key will be understanding the modules of the mind–in the same way that understanding in a deep way evolution and so much of life came from perceiving the “modules” of genes and the genetic code–but we aren’t even close to that yet.
You said what I wanted to say.
Of course there’s also Frank Herbert’s 1973 SF novel Hellstrom’s Hive which also uses a human based social insect type society.
Suitably creepy and alien.
Dr. Phil
I haven’t read that one, Dr. Phil, but will add it to the list. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it on the shelves.
A couple of years earlier there was a documentary on insects called The Hellstrom Chronicles, where they used a fictional scientist to argue that insects were superior to humans and would take over. Herbert then took that concept and ran with it. When I first read it, it was one of the few SF novels where smell was so important — the other two were The Santaroga Barrier and Dune, both of which are also by Frank Herbert! Hmm….
Dr. Phil
I’ve been playing stories in my head for years about a character whose senses and communications are limited or disordered, except for their senses of smell and touch. In my mind, the biggest problem is giving a human (or human-like) character a method of broadcasting odors without things getting really gross, really fast. So far, I’ve decided that this character must be an perfumer, heh.
The Arachnids, the Bugs, the empire from Klendathu. The creatures from Starship Troopers, the book, not the movie, were basically colony arthropods with a society and culture similar to that of the ants. They had specialized castes that where physically diverse. They cared more for the survival of the colony than the individual. They could afford heavy losses due to industrialized breeding, and this effected their culture, their technology, and their warfare tactics. They could field lasers as realistic weapons, since they’d be firing them by the thousands. They could afford to send a thousand troops after one man. And if one thousand bugs died, it was a net victory, they had thousands more they saved thanks to his loss. The humans needed to kill the bugs by the thousands… and the bugs spent most of the book doing a very good job keeping the humans from doing that, putting them on the defensive every step of the way. Not outgunned, but hopelessly outnumbered, against a sentient species that we may not be able to negotiate with.
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