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Nonfiction Views: Taxi From Another Planet, by Charles Cockrell [1]
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Date: 2022-11-22
I said it in my review back in May of David George Haskell’s Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction. I said it again in August, when I reviewed Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test: How Behavior Evolves and Why It Matters, by Marlene Zuk And I’m saying it again now: “I already live on a knife-edge of awe, stunned disbelief and overwhelmed incomprehension when it comes to the natural world we inhabit.”
But I keep trying understand more, and so I turned to Taxi from Another Planet: Conversations with Drivers about Life in the Universe, by Charles S. Cockell. With this book, I go beyond “the natural world we inhabit” and journey into both the origins of life on Earth as well as the farthest reaches of the universe. And I make the trip by taxi!
Kudos to the author, who is a Very Serious Astrobiologist with the University of Edinburgh, and to Harvard University Press, a Very Serious Publisher, for presenting some Very Serious Science into such an entertaining and even whimsical package. It has become almost hackneyed for journalists to pay tribute to taxi drivers as sources of inspiration and information. The author of this book happily latches on to the tradition, initially inspired by a question posed by one particular driver in 2016:
Taxi drivers are linked into the collective mind of our civilization in a way few of us are. They feel the pulse of human thought...Unencumbered by a cartload of academic knowledge, technical detail, and the conservatism bred by uncertainty, taxi drivers have clear perspectives on the sorts of questions that most people find significant. Sometimes, they offer an entirely new point of view….Name a single academic who would stand in front of 200 university students and ask, as though it were a profound question, whether there were alien taxi drivers. Yet here we were.
And off we go in the first chapter of the book, examining various theories of whether life on Earth is unique, or whether it is just one node of a universal pattern that would be replicated countless times, with lifeforms dropping the flag in their taxis as they ferry others around on countless planets throughout the universe. What exactly is it that triggers, as he calls it, the “transition from mere chemistry to biology.”
Whenever I read about this subject, I’m always left with the same feeling I have when reading a novel with huge holes in the plot. Cockrell admits that there is still much we don’t understand, but runs through the science of the CHNOPS elements—carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur--churned out by stars as the universe was formed; the energy sources that might allow those elements to react with other elements; how those reactions could have led to self-replicating cells; how those calls might have evolved to more complex organisms. We know a lot about each stage and the science behind it, and Cockrell explains it very well, but there is always that bit of a loss of explanation as to how exactly things progressed from one stage to another. And so there remains the question: are these laws of physics, chemistry and biology able to kick in and lead to an infinite number of taxi drivers in infinite different circumstances across the universe, or is there something unique about Earth that enabled nature to hack hack drivers?
The question as to whether life is inevitable everywhere is returned to later in the book, in a chapter entitled “How Did Life Begin.” Here we learn about phospholipids, molecules that have the peculiar ability to arrange themselves into a membrane, and thus bringing the possibility of organization an otherwise chaotic swirl of chemicals and chemical reactions. If, as is said, humans are in essence just walking bags of chemicals, there had to have been a point in which bags were created. And here we learn about the Murchison meteorite, which crashed into Australia in 1969. It turns out that within alien 4-billion-year-old relic of the universe were long chains of carboxylic molecules essential to life. But the spark of life needs more: it needs something to work as a catalyst, like strings of amino acid molecules called enzymes. It turns out the Murchison meteorite also contained some 70 types of amino acids. In short, this alien rock had within it the stuff of life. So maybe Earth isn’t so unique after all.
Will we ever be able to fully understand the progression from a swirling chaos of elements to me sitting here typing symbols on a computer? Still an open question.
The book is full of great questions, and a lot of well-explained answers as well. Each chapter is framed around a specific taxi ride, with the conversation with the driver serving as both catalyst and membrane for the information presented. A chapter on the potential outcomes of alien contact gives an amusing history of humankind's beliefs on the subject. Early on, there was an expectation that of course there would be life elsewhere. Metrodorus of Chios in ancient Greece wrote: “It would be strange if a single ear of corn grew in a large plain, or there was only one world in the infinite.” (There strikes me as something off about this quote, since corn as I understand it had its origin in pre-Columbian America and would not have been known to Metrodorus in 4 BCE; it must have been some other crop in the quote.) In 1584, a Dominican monk named Giordano Bruno wrote “For no reasonable mind can assume that heavenly bodies that may be far more magnificent than ours would not bear upon them creatures similar or even superior to those upon our human earth,” Bruno ended up being burned at the stake by the Inquisition. Montesquieu, noting an experiment in which a sheep’s tongue, when frozen, induced the tiny hairs presumed to be the producers of taste to retract. From this, he further surmised that cold inhibited creativity, and that beings on, say, Venus, closer to the sun and hotter, may have superior musical abilities.
We also ponder microbial life, which is vastly the most numerous on Earth, and our ethical responsibility to take extreme measures to not introduce them to other planets. We learn about the possibility of ghosts, what human colonization of Mars might be like, and how we might communicate with aliens. We learn the ins and outs of such questions as the possibilitty that we are inhabitants of an alien zoo. We discuss the philosophy of the meaning of life.
Politics enter the mix as well. Is it wasteful to spend money on space exploration? Will alien societies be tyrannical or freedom-loving? On that last question, the author is something of an expert: among his other books are Extra-Terrestrial Liberty an Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of Tyrannical Government Beyond the Earth, and Human Governance Beyond Earth: Implications for Freedom, books that ponder the implications of societies in situations like interplanetary travel, in which isolation and lethal environments are at the forefront.
A fun book, and highly recommentded.
THIS WEEK’S NEW HARDCOVERS
His Masterly Pen: A Biography of Jefferson the Writer, by Fred Kaplan. In this unique biography, Fred Kaplan emphasizes Thomas Jefferson’s genius with language and his ability to use the power of words to inspire and shape a nation. A man renowned for many talents, writing was one of the major activities of the statemen’s life, though much of his best, most influential writing—with the exception of the letters he wrote up to his death, numbering approximately 100,000—was done by 1789, when Jefferson was just forty-six. All of his works—from his earliest correspondence; his essays and proclamations, including A Summary View of British America, The Declaration of Independence, and Notes on the State of Virginia; his religious and scientific writings; his inaugural addresses; his addresses to Indian nations; and his exchanges with Washington, Madison, Hamilton, John and Abigail Adams, and dear friends such as Maria Cosway—demonstrate his remarkable intelligence, prescient wisdom, and literary flair and reveal the man in all his complex and controversial brilliance.
Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, by Jefferson Cowie. American freedom is typically associated with the fight of the oppressed for a better world. But for centuries, whenever the federal government intervened on behalf of nonwhite people, many white Americans fought back in the name of freedom—their freedom to dominate others. In Freedom’s Dominion, historian Jefferson Cowie traces this complex saga by focusing on a quintessentially American place: Barbour County, Alabama, the ancestral home of political firebrand George Wallace. In a land shaped by settler colonialism and chattel slavery, white people weaponized freedom to seize Native lands, champion secession, overthrow Reconstruction, question the New Deal, and fight against the civil rights movement.
American Caliph: The True Story of a Muslim Mystic, a Hollywood Epic, and the 1977 Siege of Washington, DC, by Shahan Mufti. On March 9, 1977, groups of heavily armed men stormed the Washington, D.C., headquarters of B’nai B’rith International, the Islamic Center of Washington, and the District Building, a few hundred yards from the White House. When a firefight broke out, a reporter was killed, and Marion Barry, later to become mayor of Washington, D.C., was shot in the chest. The deadly standoff brought downtown Washington to a standstill. The attackers belonged to the Hanafi Movement, an African American Muslim group based in D.C. Their leader was a former jazz drummer named Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, who had risen through the ranks of the Nation of Islam before feuding with the organization’s mercurial chief, Elijah Muhammad. Like Malcolm X, Khaalis had become sharply critical of the Nation’s unorthodox style of Islam. And, like Malcolm X, he paid dearly for his outspokenness: In 1973, followers of the Nation murdered seven Hanafis at their headquarters, including several members of Khaalis’s family. When they took hostages in 1977, one of the Hanafis’ demands was for the murderers, along with Muhammad Ali and Elijah’s son, to be turned over to the group to face justice. They also demanded that the American premiere of Mohammad: Messenger of God—an epic about the life of the prophet Muhammad financed and supported by the Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi—be canceled and the film destroyed.
Finale: Late Conversations with Stephen Sondheim, by D.T. Max. In 2017, New Yorker staff writer D.T. Max began working on a major profile of Stephen Sondheim that would be timed to the eventual premiere of a new musical Sondheim was writing. Sadly , that process – and the years of conversation – was cut short by Sondheim’s own hesitations, then the global pandemic, and finally by the great artist’s death in November 2021. Now, Max has taken the raw version of these conversations and knit them together into an unforgettable work of literature and celebration. Finale reveals Sondheim—a star who disliked the spotlight—at his most relaxed, thoughtful, sardonic, and engaging, as he talks about work, music, movies, family, New York City, aging, the creative process, and much more.
Con/Artist: The Life and Crimes of the World's Greatest Art Forger, by Tony Tetro. The art world is a much dirtier, nastier business than you might expect. Tony Tetro, one of the most renowned art forgers in history, will make you question every masterpiece you’ve ever seen in a museum, gallery, or private collection. Tetro’s “Rembrandts,” “Caravaggios,” “Miros,” and hundreds of other works now hang on walls around the globe. In 2019, it was revealed that Prince Charles received into his collection a Picasso, Dali, Monet, and Chagall, insuring them for over 200 million pounds, only to later discover that they’re actually “Tetros.” And the kicker? In Tony’s words: “Even if some tycoon finds out his Rembrandt is a fake, what’s he going to do, turn it in? Now his Rembrandt just became motel art. Better to keep quiet and pass it on to the next guy. It’s the way things work for guys like me.”
Great Short Books: A Year of Reading—Briefly, by Kenneth C. Davis. From hard-boiled fiction to magical realism, the 18th century to the present day, Great Short Books spans genres, cultures, countries, and time to present an enchanting and diverse selection of acclaimed and canonical novels. From works in translation like Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station and Marguerite Duras’s The Lover to popular, acclaimed authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Stephen King, this compilation is a celebration of classics from the historic to contemporary—plus a few bestsellers. Each entry includes the novel’s opening lines, a spoiler-free plot summary, a “why you should read it” section, and suggestions for what to read next.
Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of the Music Press, by Paul Gorman. This book offers a history of the journalists who described the wild landscape of the rise of rock and its evolution from the 1950s to the 2000s, chronicling the emergence of trailblazing music magazines in New York, Los Angeles, and London and their transformation into essential reading for anyone who cared about popular culture. Gorman captures the extraordinary rise of the inkies on the back of rock and roll’s explosion into the postwar American and British youth culture. He recounts the development of individual magazines from their Tin Pan Alley beginnings to Creem , Blender , and Crawdaddy! followed by the foundation of Rolling Stone , NME , Melody Maker , and Sounds —as well as the emergence of dedicated monthlies such as Q , The Face , and Mojo . Evoking the golden age of the music press, the book is illustrated with iconic magazine artwork and archival photography
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them. If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be appreciated. Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 15% each week). We also partner Libro.fm for audiobooks. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month.
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