What follows is a transcript of a conversation I overheard in a bar restaurant in Marseilles, France, a while ago.
Both the woman and the man looked to be in their twenties. She had a French-inflected British accent. He sounded Texan (but intelligent).
I missed the start of their conversation. I’ve transcribed the rest from a recording I made surreptitiously once I realized that the conversation was a bit odd. I’ve cut out most of the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’, pauses, repetitions, and drinks orders.
I used italics and [notes] here and there to try to put some of the expression back in. Also, I tidied up a few of the sentences, left out a digression about the relative merits of French and Californian wines, and made sure that no personally identifying information was left in.
(And, I added her/him identifiers on the left, in response to a request from sp2. I’m not sure how well those will format in different browsers, though.)
I’ll probably release the transcript in several parts, as it’s slow work transcribing the noisy recording. Especially as they switched back and forth between English and French throughout the conversation, and I have to borrow my wife’s time to get the latter translated.
Aside from all that, it’s more or less verbatim.
I don’t know whether the recording was legal in France, but it’s hard to see how it could be. So, I’ve waited until I was out of that country to start publishing this transcript. Once it’s all been published, I’ll delete the recording. And, I’m going to say that the whole thing is a work of fiction.
(I don't know who to credit for the accompanying cat astronaut image.)
The transcript ended up spread over five parts;
Part One
[Stuff I wasn’t consciously listening to, then something about frames of reference, and inter-cultural translation, then…]
Her: Science does translate, of course. And you lot excel at it, so that makes a big impression, both good and bad.
Her: Some music translates, sort of. But not much of it. Mostly, they like Bach, Pink Floyd, Joy Division.
Her: Oh, and Chrome.
Him: What, like ‘Blood on The Moon’ Chrome?
Her: Yep.
Him: Ok; Pink Floyd on bad acid. It kind of scans. Bit of a recency bias, though.
Her: Well, most of humanity’s musical output has happened in the last three hundred years, and most of that in the last fifty or so.
Her: Anyway. The rest, paintings, plays, literature, dance, the arts in general, philosophy, theology, politics,economics - stuff like that doesn’t translate. They understand it - but like you would, say, bee dances. Y’know, it clearly means something to the bees, and you can kind of guess what, but you’ll never grok it the way the bee does.
Him: Ok. But back to the bit about you being here.
Her: Oh, right. Well, mostly it’s trilobites.
Him: The pill-bug things?
Her: Yep. They were cool.
Her: They were the dominant animal life-form around here for almost three hundred million years. They went through three major civilizations. The longest one lasted almost a million years.
Her: The dinosaurs came along a lot later, of course, and hung around for only about half that time. They still managed two civilizations, though.
Her: But that's about it. Well, apart from the cephalopod ones, but those all came and went pretty quickly, they never seemed to get the hang of it. You lot are the only technological one so far.
Him: The only technological one? Those others weren’t? That trilobite one hung around for, what was it, a million years? How could they not develop technology? I mean, technology practically is civilization.
Her: It’s that way for you lot, but not for everyone. Tech civs turn up pretty frequently on rockballs. But they tend not to last long.
Him: Easy come, easy go?
Her: Basically. The traits that build one up in the first place tend to smash it down soon after. I mean, just read the news.
Him: Like, it’s a Great Filter time?
Her: Yep. Probably. Non-tech civs, though, they tend to last. Most of them do develop tech, eventually, but they do that after they’ve figured out how to be a civilization, not before.
Him: We’d still be in the Stone Age if we’d tried that.
Her: Well, like I said – rockball species tend to end up on the tech path. Your planets don’t give you much choice. You’d need to be, well, superhuman, to get a non-tech civilization rolling along here.
Him: [Laughs] Oh, great, so it’s the Marvel universe? That’s the one that works?
Her: [Laughs] Oh, sorry. “Superhuman” isn’t the right word. “Not human” is closer. What I mean is, well, you’d have to be a different species on a different world for that to work.
Him: You said that the trilobites managed it, though. Three times.
Her: Different species, and this world was very different back then. They were, well, much more laid back than you lot are. They could afford to be; they didn’t face anything like the competition you did.
Him: The dinosaurs; they had two?
Her: Yep, they faced more competition, but they were still pretty laid back. You kind of can be when you weigh thirty tonnes. Mostly, they just ate leaves. But in a very dignified, civilized, way.
Him: Good table manners?
Her: Good grazing manners. And great dinner conversationalists - if you ignored the flatulence. Fortunately, that was happening way away at the other end of what were very long people, so it was ok. Mostly. Depending on the wind direction.
Him: We thought it’d be the predator dinosaurs that would build civilizations. Y’know, like the raptors?
Her: Because they’d be solving problems, cooperating when hunting, that kind of thing?
Him: Yeah.
Her: Nope, the violent shouty people just ran around being violent and shouty. It was the peaceful thoughtful ones who actually built civilization.
Him: Man, Some things never change...
Him: And the cephalopods?
Her: Not so surprising that they didn’t go the tech route. Liquid-dwelling species generally don’t. For the obvious reasons; their environment tends to be more stable…
Him: And they have a hard time discovering fire?
Her: Yep, plus, when they do discover it, they’re usually in no mood to take notes.
Him: So it was unusual for us to turn up so late?
Her: ‘Us’ as in the planets first tech civ? Yes, although not freakishly so. Lucky break for the biosphere as a whole, of course. It gave evolution a chance to take advantage of the joints’ superb magnetosphere and the frenetic plate tectonics – so, lots of complexity, diversity, and all that good stuff. If you want a contrast, look at your neighbours.
Him: Mars and Venus?
Her: Yep, habitable, and inhabited, once. But Venus is a little too close to the sun, and a little too big. It held on to a bit too much of its atmosphere. Mars is the reverse, a little too far away and a little too small to hold on to enough atmosphere. Both lost their plate tectonics early on, too, which definitely didn’t help.
Him: Earth got the lucky ticket?
Her: Pretty much. Habitable rockballs aren’t uncommon around stars like the sun. Ones that can remain habitable over the long haul, though, those are a lot rarer. Here, it’s just the Earth, plus some stuff on Mercury.
Him: There’s life on Mercury?
Her: Some. It’s based on a heavily stabilized poly-strand information molecule, y’know, lots of cross-linking, redundancy, and active error-correction. Sort of a heavy-duty equivalent of DNA.
Her: Those are harsh conditions to survive in, but if you can, then there’s a surfeit of radiant energy to draw on. You can find even something similar on the surfaces of some of the cooler red-giant stars.
Her: Thing is, while it’s impressively well-adapted, it’s also very simple, as life goes. The equivalent of primitive bacteria, as it were. Nothing even remotely like actual bacteria, of course, but at a similar level of complexity. You get the idea.
Her: What you might call ‘bacterial-grade’ life isn’t that uncommon. Once even a crude self-replicating molecule turns up in virgin territory, one with a bit of slop in it for selection to work on, then there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll end up with some form of bacterial-grade life, eventually. And this universe has accumulated a lot of territory, and a lot of eventually.
Him: If it’s that common, well... we’ve not found any?
Her: It’s not particularly showy. The stuff on Mercury, for instance, is only on the side facing the sun, and it hides out a meter or so below the surface, where conditions are marginally less hellish. You’ve got to know what to look for, where to look, and how to look.
Him: Like that XKCD cartoon? The one with the two ants talking on the floor tiles?
Her: ‘We’d have found the pheromone trails by now?’ Well, that one’s about looking for intelligent life, but, yep, same idea.
Her: Thing is, bacterial-grade life can get started in most places, but mostly it just stays at that grade. It doesn’t do much. But it doesn’t need much, either; which is why it lasts. There’s even some, the last lingering traces of it, in the upper clouds of Venus, and hiding out under a few rocks on Mars.
Him: Well, per Dawkins; the point of evolution is to maximize replication of the data molecule. So I guess those are all successes, simple or not.
Her: Yep. Exactly. And by that measure, life on red giants, however unimpressive, is on to a winner. Those stars are just incomprehensibly big. Like, when this one eventually goes, it’ll expand out to Earths orbit. Any life that can use even a fraction of that surface area gets to do some serious maximizing.
Her: Still, it may be an evolutionary success, but, to be honest, it’s not a particularly interesting one. There’s only so much enthusiasm you can muster for studying incandescently hot crystalline gloop. Believe me, I’ve tried.
Her: The interesting stuff is complex life, and that’s much less common. That requires the replicating molecule to luck out and be somewhere that can provide the right kinds of coherent evolutionary pressures on a sustained basis. Most normal planets, the inner-system ones at least, are a good bet. Most rockballs aren’t. And rockballs able to support a biosphere as good as yours – those are extremely uncommon.
Him: Ok, I get why the stuff on Mercury stopped where it did. But, presumably, evolution started playing all across the solar system at around the same time, so how come you lot were around when the trilobites were? I mean, wasn’t that kind of early for it to churn out planet-hopping sentients?
Her: That’s down to evolutionary arcs. On a rockball, evolution has to deal with frequent disruptions and resets. Y’know, asteroid impacts, snowball earth, that kind of thing. On the plus side, you get to see lots of interesting experimentation. But, it takes a long time, and some luck, to get anywhere big. Normal planets provide much better long-term stability, so things there tend to evolve in more of a straight line. Hence, we got into space while your biosphere was still playing with stromatolites.
Her: So anyway, to go back; that’s why we won’t let you wreck this place. Losing an exquisite, high-quality, rockball biosphere in our own backyard - that would just be way too embarrassing.
Him: Ok. I get it - we’ve turned up late to the celestial party, we’re drunk, and you won’t let us piss in the punchbowl.
Her: [Laughs] You’ve been pissing in the punchbowl, darling. We’re just deciding what to do about it.
Him: Ok, ok. So, how did we even get invited to the party, anyway? I mean, how did we get started? What made humans, well, human?
Her: Ah, sorry. We don’t know. Well, not all of it, not the details.
Him: Your lot missed that too?
Her: Well, it’s a big world. There’s a lot going on.
Him: Yeah, but you’re space aliens. You’re supposed to be good at stuff! Not just at turning up late to everything important.
Her: Honey, we’re all space aliens to somebody.
Her: Anyway, we’re not incompetent. Well, no more than anyone else. We’re just over-stretched.
Her: In your terms; think of a big charity organization doing the best it can with limited resources. The RSPCA, for example. They do a great job, but they can’t be everywhere and do everything.
Her: I mean, sure our civilization has vast resources at its command. But we’re just a tiny, tiny, part of it, off at the side somewhere. We think this is important work, but, in your terms, we’re barely funded. I don’t think there’s ever been more than a few hundred of us on-site here, fewer in slow times.
Him: So, you lot being ‘on-site’, that’s the cause of the UFO sightings people keep reporting?
Her: Hey! We’re not that incompetent! That’s just fantasy-prone locals.
Him: Are there other aliens around? I mean, like, ones that aren’t in your crowd?
Her: There could be, I suppose, but none we know of. No ‘flying saucers’ though, and certainly no ‘disguised lizard people’. I mean, what would that even look like?
Him: Jeff Bezos.
Her: Well, ok… but apart from the obvious.
Him: Or maybe Zuckerberg, although he’s got more of an android vibe.
Her: To be honest, androids look more convincing than that.
Him: For that matter - the whole ‘secret aliens among us’ thing; Why are you even telling me this stuff? I mean, ok, I saw that ...thing... you did. But I‘ve got no proof, no photo or video on my phone, so you didn’t need to tell me anything. Aren’t you worried about, y’know, blowing your cover?
Her: You know how it is; sometimes it’s just nice to talk? And no, I’m not worried – who are you going to tell and who would ever believe you if you did?
Him: They could check you out? I mean, like do a medical exam and discover I was right? That you’re not human?
Her: Why would they? Some guy says a girl he met in a bar said she was an alien? So they arrest her and run tests? Well, ok, in Texas, sure, but not in the civilized world.
Her: Even if they did, I’d pass for human. You know, ‘adopt their bodies’, ‘blend in’, and all that sort of thing? They might find some anomalies. But even those fall within the range for your species, more or less.
Her: Well. ok, a close look at the details of our DNA and cellular machinery would get weird, I admit. But, as knock-off brands go, we’re pretty damn kosher.
Him: I gotta admit, you look very human to me. Brand name, top of the line, and mint condition, as it were.
Her: See? You can flirt! I knew you could!
Him: Um… Anyway, back to… You were saying, about the origin of humans?
I’ll get the part two transcribed when my wife has some time free to help me with the translation.