Silicon Soapware #240

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                            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


                          *********************

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