Robotic and Biological Symbionts

In the introduction to the stunning coffee table volume Saturn: A New View, Kim Stanley Robinson comments on the amazing photographs Cassini has archived in its ongoing exploration of Saturn. Noting that “the gorgeous concentricities of Saturn’s rings look like gravitation itself made visible,” Robinson is wistful that astronauts have not yet journeyed to Enceladus or Titan. “Even­tually, we might even go to Saturn ourselves,” writes Robinson, “It would be a kind of pilgrimage: it would be a sublime experi­ence.”50 However, roboticist Rodney Brooks would likely argue that we have already journeyed to Saturn and landed on one of its moons. NASA’s planetary missions are extensions of ourselves. These little machines, with the ability to travel billions of miles across the chasm of interplanetary space, enhance our vision—like a pair of contacts or glasses—and extend our sense of touch, our ability to sample the atmosphere of another world. Analogous to cochlear implants, pacemakers, or titanium prosthetic legs that allow paraplegic athletes to run faster than Olympians, Cassini has taken us to the far shores of the outer Solar System and con­tinues to record, in fine detail, the state of affairs at Saturn and its moons. Cassini, like our other planetary science missions, serves as a highly technical extension of humankind. These robotic ex­plorers not only extend our fingertips into the frigid outer Solar System, but Brooks argues that our machines are “us,” and that biotechnology of the future will reconfigure what we think of as human. “Our machines will become much more like us, and we will become much more like our machines,” predicts Brooks. “The distinction between us and robots is going to disappear.”51

Futurist Ray Kurzweil couldn’t agree more. Kurzweil predicts that in the next thirty years we will use biochemistry, biotechnol­ogy, and nanotechnology to reconfigure the human body, in part, by readily incorporating technology into our bodies to enhance longevity and our intellectual capacity. Kurzweil points to the evo­lution of sight to illustrate how technology has exponentially en­hanced our biological capabilities:

There are many ramifications of the increasing order and complex­ity that have resulted from biological evolution and its continuation through technology. Consider the boundaries of observation. Early biological life could observe local events several millimeters away, using chemical gradients. When sighted animals evolved, they were able to observe events that were miles away. With the invention of the telescope, humans could see other galaxies millions of light-years away. Conversely, using microscopes, they could see cellular-sized structures. Today humans armed with contemporary technology can see to the edge of the observable universe, a distance of more than thirteen billion light-years, and down to quantum-scale subatomic particles.52

Kurzweil compares this exponential advance in visual observa­tion to the evolution of information technology. He notes that mi­croorganisms can respond to and communicate events in their im­mediate environment, but with the evolution of humans, language, and the technology of writing, we have recorded information that persists for thousands of years. The simple technology of writing, whether in cuneiform or in modern languages, has exponentially expanded our scientific knowledge and reach. Our robotic part­ners in space are no less an extension of ourselves than a telescope or the technology of writing and have powerfully shaped what we know about our planet and the Solar System, and the billions of worlds we have yet to explore.

Even now we are joint explorers with our smart machines. An­thropologist Stefan Helmreich comments, “What it means to do oceanography and ethnography is changing. In an age of remotely operated robots, Internet ocean observatories, multi-sited field­work, and online ethnography, presence in ‘the field’ is increas­ingly simultaneously partial, fractionated, and prosthetic; it is not just distributed across spaces—multi-sited—but cobbled together from different genres of experience, apprehension, and data col – lection.”53 This collaborative scientific exploration, already being undertaken between humans and machines, affords us a kind of distributed intelligence across the Solar System.

Helmreich, Brooks, and Kurzweil suggest that we think of our machines as symbionts, without whose help we could not explore Earth’s ocean depths, much less the depths of lakes and oceans on icy moons orbiting Jupiter or Saturn. Our collaboration with smart machines incites Helmreich to consider one other order of unsuspected collaboration—t hat between humans and microor­ganisms. He suggests that alien microorganisms, if such exist in the frozen ocean on Enceladus or in Titan’s hydrocarbon lakes, may be more akin to life on Earth than we imagine. As microbiologist Jo Handelsman points out, “We have ten times more bacterial cells in our bodies than human cells, so we’re 90 percent bacteria.”54 Of the microbes coexisting in our bodies, scientists explain that we have “evolved with them in a symbiotic relationship, which raises the question of who is occupying whom.”55

In fact, instead of thinking of microorganisms as alien to us, doctors have begun to recruit them in fighting cancer. Research­ers at the University of Pennsylvania are relying on our symbiotic relationship with viruses and other microorganisms to attack and kill cancer cells. They’re using viruses to insert DNA into patients’ T-cells that in turn causes the T-cells to selectively attack and kill cancer cells. As Stefan Helmreich makes clear:

Microbes are not simple echoes of a left-behind origin for humans, orphaned from all evolutionary association. Microbes are historical and contemporary partners, part of our bodies “microbiomes.” “The” human genome is full of their stories. . . . The bacteria that inhabit our bodies do not simply mirror the bacteria that inhabit the sea—as might brine in our blood. This is not human nature reflecting ocean nature. It is an entanglement of natures, an intimacy with the alien. Such dynamics shift the grounds upon which anthropos might be figured, perhaps transforming humanity into Homo alienus.”56

Evidence of this is the fact that people in different regions of the world have different genetic makeup partly due to local microor­ganisms. People of Japanese descent have “acquired a gene for a seaweed-digesting enzyme from a marine bacteria. The gene, not found in the guts of North Americans, may aid in the digestion of sushi wrappers.”57

As noted in the chapter on the Viking mission, Lynn Margu – lis’s contribution to Gaia Theory was to highlight the extent to which our existence is intimately bound up with the Earth’s micro­organisms. Having proposed the theory of symbiogenesis, which claims that the mechanism for evolution is the symbiotic sharing of genetic material, Margulis demonstrated that bacteria invad­ing single-celled organisms became their mitochondria and chlo – roplasts. We do not know whether extremophiles exist on Titan, Enceladus, or other worlds such as Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. What drives our continued exploration of those distant shores is that our beginnings may be entangled with theirs.