What is Life? On Earth and Beyond by Andreas Losch

Author:Andreas Losch [Losch, Andreas]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-06-30T04:00:00+00:00

Isn't It Just Science Fiction?

A particular criticism, somewhat connected with the issue of geocentrism, that is often (over)heard is that the ideas and concepts of astrobiology are either entirely science fictional, or at least very close to science fiction or sound like science fiction or some similar locution, which makes them allegedly less respectful if not openly pseudoscientific. This issue has two main aspects. The first is related to the issue of “reality” of phenomena under consideration. This need not be some high-brow ontological issue; it is enough to accept rather mundane criteria of usual scientific realism. It is claimed that entities assumed or considered within astrobiological discourse are not real in the scientific sense and are products of fertile imagination and wishful thinking.

The second aspect of the science fiction “charge” can be construed as an epistemological problem (where do some of the concepts/entities/ideas discussed by astrobiologists of today come from?), but it is in fact more a question of legitimacy. Is it legitimate to use creative art not only as a source of somewhat vague “inspiration” in science, but as a source of useful conjectures and working hypotheses, playing a specific, well-defined role in specific research programs? In a trivialized form, is it allowed to quote literary sources in your “hard” scientific papers and reports? (This scientometric issue gains relevance in many practical terms related to the increased administrative needs of realistic scientific institutions.) Traditionally, the answer has been not only negative, but disparaging as well.

I posit that it is high time to bite the bullet and assert that literary discourse presents a treasure-trove of potentially useful scientific hypotheses, or at least proto-hypotheses. Depending on the specifics of the discipline, the lack of quantitative precision may or may not be detrimental for the epistemological status of the ideas presented, but even in the case of highly quantitative fields, like nuclear physics, literary pre-figuration of important hypotheses is part of the real historical legacy. The example at hand is the famous prediction of a chain-reaction within fissile material as a way of releasing nuclear power by Herbert George Wells in his The World Set Free (1914). It stopped Leo Szilard on his walk in the midst of a London drive and almost cost him his life (Rhodes, 1986). A far less known, but probably even more spectacular – and astrobiology-related – example is ascribing the concept of “smart dust” to a 1964 novel by Stanislaw Lem in a premier research journal in the field of textile technology (Farrer, 2010).6

In fact, astrobiology is an excellent ground for evaluating this approach of science fiction as a source for science, although it occasionally surfaced in other contexts as well (for particularly illuminating examples dealing with cognitive sciences, see Swirski, 2000, 2006). We can intuitively understand why that is so. Milan Kundera argued: “In art, the classic metaphysical questions – Where do we come from? Where are we going? – have a clear, concrete meaning, and are not at all unanswerable”.7 This could be

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