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“The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens – and Ourselves”
By MARTIN ZEILIG “That life exists elsewhere in the universe seems almost inevitable,” Dr. Arik Kershenbaum writes in this intriguing and entertaining book.
“That we could know anything about it seems almost impossible. But my goal is to show you that we can actually say a great deal about what aliens must be like, how they live, and how they behave.”
Dr Kershenbaum is a zoologist, College Lecturer, and Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge, says his bio. He has researched animal vocal communication for the past ten years in Europe, Israel and the United States and has published more than 20 academic publications on the topic.
He is also a member of the international board of advisors for METI.org, a think tank on the topic of Messaging Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. Arik has done extensive field work on animal communication, following wolves around Yellowstone National Park and the forests of central Wisconsin to uncover the meaning of their different kinds of howls, as well as decoding the whistles of dolphins among the coral reefs of the Red Sea, and the songs of hyraxes in the Galilee.
Using his own trained understanding of life on Earth and Darwin’s theory of evolution—“which applies throughout the universe,” according to Dr. Kershenbaum’s book—Dr. Kershenbaum explains what alien life must be like: how these creatures will move, socialize, and communicate.
Dr. Kershenbaum agreed to do an interview with The Jewish Post & News.
JP&N: Why did you feel it necessary to write this particular book?
AK: Until recently, it was absolutely fine to restrict thoughts about alien life to science fiction. It was fun, and it was entertaining, and it didn’t have anything to do with science, or biology, or real life of any kind. All that is changing now.
Our understanding of the possibilities of life in the universe has blossomed as our technology for examining other planets has moved forward in leaps and bounds. Difficult as it is, we’re going to have to put aside the science fiction, and make a study of alien life into a well-grounded scientific discipline. And everyone should realize that the universe almost certainly is teeming with life – now we just need to find it.
But the search for extraterrestrial life isn’t enough. It’s also important to think about what that life is going to be like. What are the principles that determine how life evolves elsewhere in the universe? Will it be similar to life on Earth, or totally different?
These questions were very hypothetical as long as the chances of discovering life on other planets was remote in the extreme. Now that scientists are quietly optimistic, we all need to make an adjustment.
Fortunately, the Earth is an amazingly diverse habitat, full of life in the most surprising range of possibilities. Even if the conditions on other planets are very different from here, we have learned enough on Earth about the processes of evolution, and the forces that drive the properties of life, so we can apply those principles more generally to whatever exists on other worlds.
JP&N: Daniel Fabrycky, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, has argued that “over billions of years no intelligent aliens have made it to the point of reaching Earth, meaning humanity has dismal prospects for space exploration and expansion.”
What would you say in response to Prof. Fabrycky?
AK: I think that the current climate crisis gives us a clue to how unlikely it is that humanity will survive to get the chance to explore space. It has always been thought that the process of life arising from “non-life” (i.e. a mixture of chemicals) was the limiting step in the distribution of civilizations throughout the universe.
But a more serious barrier might be the challenge of surviving rapid technological advances, without destroying ourselves through environmental destruction and war. It may be that many planets produced civilizations like ours, but they’re all dead.
However, there are many other possible explanations for why we’ve never noticed any alien civilizations. The laws of physics, as we know them, seem to make travel between the stars almost impossible. Maybe alien civilizations know things that we don’t, but maybe we’ve got things right, and aliens haven’t developed warp drive simply because it’s not possible.
As for not having received any radio or similar signals from outer space, we’ve only been looking for the last few decades – we only invented radio just over 100 years ago! – and we’ve never had funding to do a really comprehensive search for intelligent signals. I’d say that Fabrycky may be right, but that it’s too early to rule out a better possibility.
JP&N: What else would you like our readers to know about this topic?
AK: Life evolves according to the laws of biology, just like balls roll according to the laws of physics. We’ve come to understand a lot about these biological laws, and we can apply them to make predictions about life, even on other planets.
We can’t predict what colour aliens will be, but we can say a lot about the way they will interact, and solve problems like moving around, finding food, and cooperating or competing with other animals. Much of the underlying diversity of life on Earth – plants vs. animals, predators vs. prey, etc – arises as the result of common rules, and that means that this diversity is going to exist on other planets too.
“A direct biological comparison between us and alien intelligences could bring us to a more complete and more satisfying description of life in the universe. Perhaps we will be able to come to an acceptance of a wider type of humanity; one that has room for creatures that don’t look like us, no matter what planet they inhabit,” Dr. Kershenbaum writes in “The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy.“
“The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy”
By Arik Kershenbaum
A Penguin Book
356 pages
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Winnipegger behind restoration of historic Jewish cemetery in Portugal
By MYRON LOVE The Butterfly Effect is roughly the idea that, metaphorically, great trees grow from small seeds or, to be more specific, the theory that tornadoes in North America may be triggered by a butterfly in Africa – or a seagull in the Atlantic – flapping its wings multiple times.
This story is an example of the Butterfly Effect in human terms. Roughly 40 years ago, a Winnipegger by the name of Bonnie Neil – she was known as Bonnie Griffith back then – happened to be visiting Portugal – in her role as program director of the old Hargrave YMHA’s Stay Young seniors group – and came across an abandoned Jewish cemetery in the south of the country. She mentioned the sorry state of the cemetery to a member of the small Jewish community in Lisbon. Now, that cemetery is a Jewish heritage site.
A social worker by training, she was hired by the Y in 1975 to work with teens. After a short time, she switched her focus to developing programming for older Jewish adults. “I founded the Stay Young Club,” recalls Neil (who isn’t Jewish). “When I started at the Y, there were no programs for older adults. I first proposed to Les Marks (who was then the Y’s executive director) the idea of programming for older adults and he gave me carte blanche to create programming.”
With funding from the Jewish Foundation and the Federal Government’s New Horizons program, Neil set to work. She began with a weekly gym and swim program, then added a weekly lunch, a Yiddish group, a choir and a light exercise group. Within a couple of years, the Stay Young Club was offering activities for older adults every week day.
The ambitious Neil then began going further afield. She began organizing short trips for Stay Young members, starting with Calgary and Edmonton, subsequently to Florida and Palm Springs. Looking even further afield, she took her charges to Israel three times –with assistance the first time from the well known Noach Witman (who operated Witman Travel in addition to hosting the Jewish Radio Hour). Subsequent Israeli trips were organized through Beth Shore at Flair Travel.
Les was always asking me where we were going to go next,” she remembers. “I had come across a little book listing places of Jewish interest. I noticed that Portugal wasn’t listed. We had been flying with CP Air -which flew to Portugal. I decided to go to Portugal to see for myself what might be of interest to Jewish travellers.
“As I knew nothing about the country, I asked a Jewish woman I met what there was in Portugal that might be of interest to Jewish travellers? She suggested I visit the southern city of Faro where there was a Jewish cemetery.”
Now some background: It is common knowledge (I think) that all Jews (except those who were willing to convert to Christianity) were expelled from Portugal in 1496 – four years after Jews were expelled from Spain. I hadn’t given much thought to what Jewish life in Portugal was like following the expulsion. According to information that Neil gave me, Portugal began allowing some Jews back into the country in the early 1800s. During World War II, the country became a haven for Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. Thousands of Jewish refugees found safety in Portugal. After the war, most left for other destinations. The Jewish population currently is about 900 – with two-thirds living in Lisbon, the capital.
(Ed. note: Portugal has become a prime destination for Israelis seeking to obtain citizenship in a different country, although without actually leaving Israel. According to the Times of Israel, over 60,000 Israelis have been granted Portugese citizenship, although only 569 had actually moved there as of September 2023. According to the TOI article, ‘The surge of Israeli applicants began after Portugal passed its “law of return” in 2015, allowing the descendants of Portuguese Sephardic Jews who were affected by the 16th-century Inquisition to apply for nationality. The Portuguese government has announced plans to end this policy in December 2023, saying its purpose of reparation will be ‘fulfilled.’ “
It sounds quite similar to the vast number of Lebanese who hold Canadian citizenship – between 40-75,000. It seems that Portugal and Canada offer attractive alternative destinations for Israelis on the one hand, and Lebanese on the other. If either group thought their lives were truly in peril, then they would have a safe place to where they could run, but in the meantime both Israelis and Lebanese seem content to stay where they are.)
In the 15th century, Faro had been a centre of Hebrew printing. The Jewish community began to be reconstituted in the 19th century. The cemetery was opened in 1820. In the 1860s, Jews from Morocco settled in the community – with some Russian and Polish Jews coming before World War I.
So Neil traveled to Portugal on an exploratory visit and asked her guide to show her the cemetery. She was horrified by what she saw.
“The last Jewish resident of Faro had died a year before,” she recalls. “When I arrived, the gates were locked. I could see that there was garbage and weeds everywhere. I also learned that the city was planning to tear down the cemetery to expand a sports field nearby. I let it be known that I was planning to bring a group of Jewish tourists and I got a promise that the cemetery would be cleaned up.”
During a stopover in Lisbon, she mentioned the cemetery’s deplorable condition. Then she went home. As it happened, the tour was cancelled due to a lack of registrants.
She says that she never gave Portugal another thought.
In 1985 she left the Y for government employment. “While I loved working at the Y,” she says, “I was a single mother by then with two children – and the government was offering a salary that was twice what the Y was paying.”
Recently, Neil learned what happened to the cemetery. It seems that shortly after she alerted the Jewish community in Lisbon, a community member by the name of Ike Bitton founded the Faro Cemetery Restoration Fund. The result of the fundraising effort resulted not only in the cemetery’s restoration, but also the opening a small Jewish museum containing a display of furniture from Faro’s synagogues.
Neil left government in 1992 to go into private practice in the social work field. She notes that she did some programming with seniors at the Simkin Centre. She retired in 2014. She still supports some Jewish institutions such as the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre.
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