Thoughts, ramblings and other stuff

I wasn't sure what to think about Extant at first. The premise didn't seem all that interesting and I'm not a fan of mystical pregnancy but once the action concentrated on Ethan I really started getting into it. I have a thing for AI emergence. Also, Space! There is little right now that even mentions space that just having some space station action made this feel like a space ship show.


What they were selling in trailers made it look like maybe some weird version of first contact with semi-friendly aliens trying to resurrect their species. And at the beginning it seemed like Ethan would become the evil/crazy/creepy fake child (they are popular in moving pictures, aren't they?). But at the end it was exactly the opposite and it became a story about Ethan's growth and not being afraid to let him do that. Trust A.I. and he will save the world.

I know that the show was also about Molly and her marriage and her working through her trauma (death of fince and their child, inability to have children). That it was about weird alien lifeform that could maybe grant immortality but also mind control people and wanted to invade us Body Snatcher style.

This storyline started badly as it was full of people behaving stupidly - from the conspiracy guys who seem to always make the stupidest mistakes that allowed one woman to just escape and break into secret facilities despite their manpower and tech advantage - to Molly just doing the something that seemed suicidal (telling Sparks she was pregnant, searching for Ethan alone in the woods, going into that building where they were holding her son). At least Molly managed occasional moments when she was smart and brave and been able to find solutions to problems and figure out what is happening. Sparks family not so much. Also villains in this really went nowhere - so lets assume arrested or dead.

I don't know what to think about Molly's alien offspring. I was with her at the beginning - with him just trying to protect himself (and her) from people who wanted to use/kill him - so I didn't mind the turning soldiers against each other and using hallucinations to make people help him. But once he started to, I think, eat people minds I switched to team Harmon. If next season was a possibility (not with these ratings) we might've seen something that let us understand his perspective but we are left with what he said to Molly and believe that without the others forcing him to help take over human race he will just do what is right. And maybe go back yo Molly. (on the other hand he might be plotting to take over the Earth still and Molly and Enver Gjokaj's character have been infected)

John often spoke like he was lecturing not having conversation and his arguments with Molly and Julie were mostly about his ideas about who Ethan should be and how they should react to him and how they were rising him wrong. But it felt like Molly, after she got over her initial doubts, actually loved Ethan. And Julie was right to be mad at him for basically taking Ethan all for himself because it suited his needs. In all of this John was the one who objectified Ethan the most while lecturing everyone how they shouldn't. The way how he tried to force Ethan to develop in the way he wanted, at a speed he was comfortable with, and only do things he approved of as part of some imagined human-like normalcy tattered dangerously on the edge of abuse. In the end it almost cost him everything as Ethan stopped trusting him. I like how they combined this with the variation on how machines turn on use because we want to destroy them (Skynet) and chose the other door. John letting go and allowing his kid to become what he could be saved everyone in the end.

The magical happy ending seemed a little too convenient. I kind of like the symmetry of the two sons confrontation but it was hard to get into it as we saw too little of the alien boy to really care for him so they weren't really equal. We saw the Offspring (didn't even have a name) actions not him so there was no emotional connection there which made Molly's insistence on saving him never truly resonate and Ethan was one of main characters so we cared about him much more and wanted him to win. However, Ethan surviving the bomb when we were told noone can save him was a little cheesy (and the glowing-heart-like scene even more so) but he was my favourite character so I chose to believe that was the way Culture was started. It's certainly better ending that the one A.I. had (and if the series continued they wouldn't have to deal with explaining robot boy growing up).


Half way through the season I realised I really got into the story and waited for the next episode to see what will happen next. Too bad that the beginning of the season was boring and made most of characters unlikeable and unreasonable. The ratings never recovered. Too bad - the second half was much better and made way more sense then anything on The Dome this year.

There have been rumors circulating ever since NASA announced the press conference. The buzz came from the fact that the participants are scientist that work on the non-Earth or extreme environment subjects. This lead to people wondering if NASA s going to announce finding traces of alien life. Maybe evidence of the compounds that indicate presence of life forms somewhere in the solar system. The speculations and rumors have been circulating around Internets evolving into 'NASA found aliens'.

This is not true. The conference is still an hour and half away but there have been leaks and some sites already reported the most important part. They didn't find life on other planet. They found a bacteria on Earth that uses a different biology. 

Till now we thought that all life on Earth uses the same biology. From tiniest bacteria to blue whale we are all made from the same basic compounds and use the same DNA with the same basic DNA code (with only minor variations). Despite all the different forms life on Earth can take, it uses very limited number of blocks to build this diversity.

The six elements since now been taught as necessary for life are: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus. What this conference shows is that this is not true. They found a bacteria that uses arsenic instead of phosphorus.

To most of life on Earth arsenic is toxic. There are some bacteria known to sue it instead of oxygen in photosynthesis or the ones that oxidize arsenic compounds for energy. This is different.

This bacteria completely replaced phosphorus with arsenic in it's metabolism. It doesn't need phosphorous at all. If you don't understand how shocking this is you need to realise that phosphorous builds the backbone of DNA structure and is main part of all the compounds that store and give energy for cellular functions. In this bacteria arsenic plays this role. This means they are incompatible with all the other Earth life forms.

This is a very important discovery. Till now there has only been speculations on possibilities of different biologies. here we have a living proof that it works. That one can replace one of the main elements of life with a similar one and still get a viable organism. This also broadens the requirements for extra-terrestrial life environments.

I've always felt that concentrating only on Earth like environments as supporting life was wrong. All the declarations about what kind of conditions support life are assumed true based on one example (as I said life on Earth is pretty uniform so it is, as a whole just one example). And if you've ever worked in science you know one is not sufficient sample size. This just proves the point.

EDIT: It seems that the bacteria doesn't actually have arsenic built. If the phosphorus is present it prefers phosphorus and it grows faster on phosphorus. Only overexposed to arsenic it starts to substitute it for phosphorus. So most of the time it is just like us. Just most tolerant of biochemistry changes.

More details in here and in Science.

There's a rainstorm outside. It is a first downpour today but the heavy rains come everyday now. In the South there's already been some local flooding and it'll probably getting worse now. I, luckily, live in a flood free zone but I'm hoping for all those people in the mountains it'll stop raining before the streams and rivers there overflow. The floods are most common and devastating natural disasters in Poland (although we lately also have tornadoes). This is how we pay for Global Warming.

It been raining heavily for more then an hour, maybe two. I'm not sure because I lost consciousness when I come back home and when I woke up about an hour ago it was already raining. It's been very humid last few days, which makes the mid 20^o temperatures seem much hotter. The air is hard to breathe and I'm sleepy and tired all the time. This made me even more convinced I was right to avoid Galveston. All the accounts say this is normal weather there. Just hotter. If I was to live on Venus... I would rather move to Mars.

I only force myself to do the poster but I wasn't up to updating. The humidity is so great all the metal and ceramic surfaces (they are usually colder) are crying. The water condensates on them and everything is wet. This was especially evident on Tuesday before the first rain. In the cold room everything was wet. Good thing we have air condition in the lab. I wouldn't be able to do any serious work otherwise.

And I forgot - just to show once again that the world is more crazy then any conspiracy theories - in Australia crop circles are caused by the wallabies running in circles while being high on poppies. They probably think it's funny, man.

And last moment update - the things SF/fantasy writers do in their free time  - they start insult battles on Twitter. I wonder how long will it take for Scalzi to respond. I'll watch unfold safely on my friend's page.