It would take the NASA “high-techies” a bit of getting used to, but astronaut Michael Foale (a veteran of the orbital Mir), and the rest of us who continued to work with the Russians, had either been pre-adapted to or had carefully absorbed Russian-think, which amounted to thinking outside the box, every hour of every day.
One morning there had been some difficulty in trying to figure out how to hook a high-tech deep-ocean thermometer within camera-swivel view of the bot Jake so that the camera lens could read the very small markings. Someone had proposed designing a new lens or a new swivel arm with a magnifier. One of the Keldysh newcomers expressed a certain amount of panic over the possibility of not being able to tell if Jake (or worse, the Mir) was moving too close to a hydrothermal vent’s stream of superheated water.
Keldysh veteran Mike Cameron pushed the electronic thermometer aside and dropped a box of Crayola crayons on the table. “Here is how we’re going to do it,” he said. “We mount a crayon near Jake’s nose. If the wax begins to melt, back Jake off, then the cold water should solidify it instantly. If it melts again, back off again.” That’s Russian-think.
Captain Paul Mallery, of Ten-Ten House, had heard me talking often about the Russian approach to technology. With Russian-think on his mind, he sent me an e-mail for the crew. “[Here’s] another example,” he wrote, “of how sometimes we gain more if we are able to give up our stubborn thought limitations and think outside the box.” The example was a question once used in a job interview. He was to imagine himself driving past a bus stop one night, through a gale of horizontal rain (and with the cell service out). There were three people at the bus stop: an old woman in ill health and on the verge of collapse and possible death, an old friend who had once saved his life, and the perfect partner—life’s one true love. His car could carry only one passenger. Taking any one of them and leaving the other two behind presented both personal and moral dilemmas.
The solution was to give the car keys to the old friend and direct him toward the nearest hospital with the old woman, then stay behind with the woman of his dreams and wait for the bus. This sort of thinking applied even to the constantly emerging questions about cephalopods. One of the first things we had seen when we landed near the Titanic’s prow in 2002 was an octopus that had wings shaped like the ears of Dumbo the elephant, and for that reason it had affectionately been named by the biologists Dumbo. There was a beautiful winged cuttlefish hovering near the wooden eaves of the reception area and the red, spindly-armed octopus that had kept watch at my viewport, seemingly as curious about us as we were about it. They were among the most commanding of the predators. I had begun calling the world below “planet of the cephalopods.” At the first vent zone we reached, about two-thirds of a mile down and still within the deep scattering layer, a five-foot-long Humboldt squid was seen in the distance, moving behind a sheet of shimmering hot water. It evidently did not like the lights of the Mir-2, because it swam up to the sub directly and very aggressively started slapping the lights. “Shades of [Captain] Nemo’s Nautilus [in Jules Verne’s novels],” I wrote to Arthur Clarke, who only a day earlier had written, in an e-mail, “Look out for the squid.”
Later that night, Jim Cameron and I and some of the astrobiologists were standing on deck, talking about the remarkable intelligence exhibited by cephalopods, including the Humboldt squid and some of its insanely camouflage-prone octopus and cuttlefish cousins. “They have manipulative limbs every bit as good as our own,” I said. “And they’ve certainly provided us with enough examples of memory, complex problem solving, even the occasional use of crude tools—enough to suggest that if their brains kept developing, one of them should have built a civilization.”
The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould had once said that the greatest evolutionary step taken by humans was the one taken on two feet: it freed up the hands for carrying objects and making tools and thus force-fed the development of our brains. I did not agree. Octopi have “free hands,” yet over the course of more than two hundred million years, they had not advanced.
All of us wondered why. I saw the difference between human beings and octopi in modes of reproduction. The most complex brains were large and energetically expensive, probably requiring a long gestation period in a placental mother who ate a lot of high-nutrient foods. A cephalopod’s embryonic brain development was limited to whatever nutrients were supplied in the yolk of its eggs.
“Why else,” I asked, “after being around longer than the dinosaurs, had they come this far in brain development, all those millions of years ago, and no farther?”
“What makes you so sure that they had come this far two hundred million years ago?” Cameron asked. “We primates evolved intelligence during a series of ice ages that had to rank as one of the most continually biologically stressful periods the planet had seen since the Permian and Cretaceous extinctions. What makes you so sure that four million years ago the cephalopods weren’t all howler monkeys compared to what they have become today? What makes you so sure that under the same environmental stresses and pruning that more or less acted like rocket fuel for the development of Australopithecus or Homo erectus, cephalopods haven’t been undergoing parallel change right along with us?”
I had never asked these questions. None of us had. And whether the possibility was right or wrong, who cared? It was a new way of looking at what we had been seeing all along and asking what we had never asked before. That was what counted. I thought about it, laughed, and said, “Wow.”
There was nothing else to say. It was completely outside the box, and it was a perfectly good night for science.
AUGUST 1, 2003
Although the Archaea in the rusticle consortium were the same microbes that Bob Ballard’s team had discovered at the hydrothermal vent zones in 1977, and although it seemed obvious that we would find rusticles at the vents, our first days of searching offshore of the Azores were fruitless, insofar as rusticles were concerned. Throughout the first week of the expedition, my inner theme song seemed to be the U2 classic, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”
Then Jim and Mike Cameron found a whole rusticle reef thriving on an iron-rich overhang of rock. They insisted on keeping the Mir down an extra hour to sample a “rusticle stalactite” intact.
“No doubt of it,” I wrote to Cullimore and Johnston. “The morphology is identical to the Titanic’s rusticle consortium: growth bands, fibrullar bundles, channels, reservoirs, span threads, iron-oxide ‘shell.’ So a mystery has been solved with reasonable certainty. The [microbial] cysts [that colonize the Titanic and other ships] are coming from the vents. This is amazing.”
AUGUST 3, 2003
Sometimes the past really does have a way of sneaking up from behind and biting you in the butt. For nearly a year and a half, I had not experienced a recurrence of what was known in New York as “World Trade Center cough” and “ground zero lung.” I had thought that the first incidents of asthma in my life, followed by two cases of bacterial pneumonia, were merely a temporary glitch that would never bother me again, so I packed an extra book and some equipment into the limited space available to me instead of the rescue inhaler and other medicines.