Communion Of Dreams

Of all the many wonderful characters created by J. Michael Straczynski for his Babylon 5 universe, I have always been particularly fond of the Technomage Galen. Why? Well, actor Peter Woodward is just plain cool (he understand real weapons and fighting like few actors or fight directors do - his ‘Conquest‘ series for the History Channel a few years back was one of the best such documentary series I have ever seen). But more than that, the character Galen uses *exactly* the kind of technology that I envision is commonplace in the world of Communion of Dreams: the cyberwear which allows the user a functional augmented reality.

Recently, I wrote about how researchers have made a first important step in this direction, with the development of “a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.”

Well, now Wired is reporting that - surprise, surprise - DARPA is interested in the development of this technology. From the article:

Today, a handful of soldiers with advanced gear can see a few digital maps, through helmet-mounted monocles. Some pilots can get data about their world, on heads-up displays. But one day, troops could see an info-”augmented” reality all around them, with contact lenses that provide “first-person shooter-type video game” environments to those that wear them. At least, that’s the idea behind the latest project from DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue sky science and technology division.

The agency’s Information Processing Techniques Office announced Wednesday that it’s looking for information on “the creation of micro- and nano-scale display technologies for the purpose of creating displays that could be worn as transparent contact lenses.” And not in some far-off future. But in “three to five years.”

Three to five years. As I said in that post in January:

Woo-hoo! I love it when my predictions start to become reality!

Jim Downey

“All of life can be broken down into moments of transition or moments of revelation.”

-G’Kar, Z’ha’dum

Yesterday a buddy of mine and I got out to do some shooting. It may seem odd to someone who isn’t into shooting sports, but this can actually be one of the most relaxing things you can do, at least for me at this time. Why? Because, when I’m shooting, I have to be completely attentive to what I am doing - I can’t be thinking about what is going on at home, whether my MIL is stirring and needs attention, et cetera. As I have mentioned previously, one of the most exhausting aspects of being a care-giver for someone with Alzheimer’s/dementia is that I always, always, have part of my attention diverted to keeping track of what is going on with my MIL. You try doing that with part of your brain while accomplishing anything else, and you’ll quickly understand the problem.

Anyway, it was a good time, doing some informal shooting out on private land. We shot some pistols, a little 9mm carbine of mine which is just a lot of fun, and then my friend got out one of his black powder rifles: a Peabody .43 Spanish made in 1863. My friend is something of an authority on 19th century guns, and has been educating me about them. We shot several rounds, the large 400 grain bullets punching paper at 40 yards, the gun giving a slow but very solid shove back into your shoulder. That’s typical with black-powder: it’s not the sharp crack you get from modern weapons, with their higher pressures from faster-burning powder. After each shot, we’d pull down the trigger guard, rolling the receiver down and ejecting the cartridge, then insert another cartridge by hand and set it before closing the rolling block to prepare the weapon to fire again.

After all the shooting was done, our equipment packed up and put away, we headed back into town and got some lunch. As we talked over lunch, I asked my friend about how long it was before the Peabody we had been shooting evolved into the later repeating rifles which proved so reliable and popular. Because, as I saw it, all the elements were there: a dependable brass cartridge, a mechanism to extract and eject the spent shell, the moving receiver. All that was needed was a way to hold more rounds and feed them.

As we finished up our meal he gave me the brief run-down of the history or the repeating rifle development (which is basically what you’ll find in this Wikipedia article, particularly the sub-headings of ‘predecessors’ and ‘development’), and the conversation moved on to a more general discussion. I started to explain that one of the things I find so interesting, one of the unifying themes in all the things I have done is an interest in . . .

“Transitions,” my friend said.

I stopped. I was going to say “innovations,” but he was right.

“It shows in your novel.” (He’d recently read Communion.)

“Actually, I was thinking more of ‘innovations’ - those instances when people bring together different and diffuse elements to achieve something new, whether it is a mechanism, or a procedure, or just a way of looking at the world.”

We paid the bill, headed out to the car.

“Yeah, but it’s like the way that the people involved in your book - the characters - are all struggling to understand this new thing, this new artifact, this unexpected visitor. And I like the way that they don’t just figure it out instantly - the way each one of them tries to fit it into their own expectations about the world, and what it means. They struggle with it, they have to keep learning and investigating and working at it, before they finally come to an understanding.” He looked at me as we got back in the car. “Transitions.”

Transitions, indeed. Moments of transition, moments of revelation. Because that is all we have, when you come right down to it.

Jim Downey

Standing there, looking out the window to the driveway just below, I saw the fox take the unwitting squirrel. One quick, quiet leap from behind a tree, a snap, pause to snap again at the struggling grey mass, and it had breakfast. A pretty, lethal thing, yellow-red short fur, characteristic long legs and bushy tail, eyes sharp as it looked around. Probably weighed twelve to fifteen pounds, lean and long. Made me consider keeping the cats inside.

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Peter Diamandis received a standing ovation for his presentation on the absolute need to go into space. It wasn’t just that the attendees at the Heinlein Centennial Gala were predisposed to his message - it was because his energy and enthusiasm swept away all doubts that this was *going* to happen, that it was economically inevitable, once we realized that it was actually possible. What’s that? Charlie Stross and others have said that while something like asteroid mining might be possible, it won’t lead to colonization? Yeah, that’s the argument. But Diamandis calculates that one 0.5 kilometer metallic asteroid will contain a *lot* of valuable metal…to the tune of 20 Trillion dollars worth. Sure, such asteroids only comprise about 8% of the known bodies anywhere near our space…but still, you’re talking tens of thousands of such asteroids of varying size. That’s a damned big incentive to build infrastructure, and once the infrastructure is in place, once the basic research has been done and there are multiple private corporations, countries, and even private citizens exploiting this resource, there are going to be some who find it advantageous to actually locate in space (semi-)permanently.

Diamandis joked that his strategy is going to be to issue a lot of ‘put options’ for the precious metals, then announce that he is going to go grab one of these asteroids and use the procedes to finance the expedition. Hey, when a man worth that kind of money makes such a joke, people should take it seriously.

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I watched, one afternoon last week, while my mother-in-law suffered a slight TIA. She was sitting in her wheelchair, having just gotten up from her afternoon nap, and was finishing some yogurt. I was sitting and talking with her, when she just slowly sort of folded in on herself. While she is 90 and suffers from Alzhemer’s, she is usually capable of responding to direct questions about immediate events (how she feels, if she likes her yogurt, et cetera), but she suddenly went quiet, almost insensate. I checked to see whether something like a heart attack was in process, and asked if she was hurting or if there was some other indicator of a serious emergency. Eventually I got enough information to conclude it was likely ‘just’ a TIA or some similar event, and got her back in bed. I monitored her, and all seemed to be well. She woke two hours later, with no evidence of damage. But it was an indication of her condition, and likely a hint at things to come.

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I want to have Jeff Greason’s baby.

Greason (pronounced ‘Grey-son’) is the head of XCOR Aerospace, and is one of the many companies trying to build the infrastructure of private commercial spaceflight. He and his company have accomplished a lot in the development of dependable, reusuable, and powerful rocket engines…engines sufficiently well engineered that they show no indication of wearing out after even thousands of operating cycles (being turned on and off). As he explains, the two biggest problems previously with rocket engine design was that there was wear leading to failure on both the throat of the engine (where the burning fuel exhausts) and on the nozzle (which creates the high thrust needed). The XCOR designs have engineered these problems out, and they’re still waiting to find out what other life-span problems the engine might have. And once you have dependable rocket engines, you can build a reusable and dependable vehicle around them.

But that’s not why I want to have his baby. Yes, dependable reusable rockets is a critical first-step technology for getting into space. But as Greason says, he didn’t get interested in space because of chemical rockets - he got interested in chemical rockets because they could get him into space. For him, that has always been the goal, from the first time he read Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert Heinlein when he was about 10. It is somewhat interesting to note that similar to the setting and plot of the book, XCOR Aerospace is based on the edge of a military test range, using leased government buildings…

Anyway. Greason looked at the different possible technologies which might hold promise for getting us off this rock, and held a fascinating session at the Centennial discussing those exotic technologies. Simply, he came to the same conclusion many other very intelligent people have come to: that conventional chemical rockets are the best first stage tech. Sure, many other possible options are there, once the demand is in place to make it financially viable to exploit space on a large enough scale. But before you build an ‘interstate highway’, you need to have enough traffic to warrant it. As he said several times in the course of the weekend, “you don’t build a bridge to only meet the needs of those who are swimming the river…but you don’t build a bridge where no one is swimming the river, either.”

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In one of the sessions, people got to talking about what drives technological development, and one of the big things that people focused on was war. This has been a common theme in a lot of SF, including my favorite series Babylon 5 (see the Shadow War arc). I don’t entirely buy it. I tend to think that economics are a bigger force in tech development - even in wartime, most of the tech developed isn’t something like a pure weapon such as the atomic bomb; it is all the support infrastructure which has dual-use and can be adapted easily after a war because it is economically advantageous.

But this discussion took another familiar turn: that only after we have threatened ourselves with extinction through something like a nuclear war, would we find the will to go into space in a big way. That, actually, is one aspect of Communion of Dreams, but I don’t see mankind being able to survive a major nuclear exchange and then still have the capability to get into space. The infrastructure necessary to support a space-faring tech is really quite extensive, even if you have just small private companies and individuals building and using the rockets/spaceplanes to get to low-earth-orbit. Take out that infrastructure…wipe out the industrial base of the major nations, or even kick it back 50 years…and you will not have access to the kinds of composite materials, computing systems, et cetera, which are necessary components of any spacecraft. Burt Rutan will not be making SpaceShipTwo unless he has the parts - it’s that simple.

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There are a few things I’ve learned in my 49 years here. One is that we age, and we will die (sure, I’d love for Heinlein’s rejuvenation technology to come into play, or some version of ‘Singularity’ to save me from personal extinction…but I’m not counting on it.) It might be through something like the advancing senescence of global warming which we should see coming but act on too late. It might be something quick and unexpected, perhaps one of Diamandis’ $20 trillion rocks taking us out before we get around to using it for other purposes.

We should be like the fox, not the squirrel. The quick-witted one. The one who takes the future and makes it his own, rather than the one who is unpleasantly surprised for a brief and painful moment.

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to UTI.)

In a few days I’ll turn 49. Statistically, I’ve got a couple more decades to go. Realistically, I could drop dead tomorrow from an undiagnosed heart condition, develop cancer or some other terminal disease, or just get hit by a truck. You tend to take this sort of philosophical attitude when your own parents both died before they hit 40.

But that does not define my life - I do not constantly worry or live in fear. I don’t panic when I hear that they’ve found a couple of car bombs in the heart of London, any more than I lose my head over reports of a new strain of bird flu discovered in Indonesia, or that there are weather conditions that favor the development of tornadoes in my area.

I take reasonable precautions, try and keep track of my health, wear my seat belt, indulge in particularly dangerous sports rarely, and try and keep aware of my surroundings. I do carry a concealed weapon (legally - all licensed and everything), but no more expect that I will have to use it than I expect I’ll have to use any of the several fire extinguishers around the house and in the car. I don’t go poking around bad neighborhoods or bars late at night, don’t seek to draw attention to myself when I don’t know what the tactical situation is.

And I guess that’s where I come down on the question of whether or not we should be broadcasting “contact” signals out into the cosmos, in the hope of connecting with some other intelligent life.

Just about every major science fiction author has dealt with the question of alien contact at some point or another. Sometimes it is handled with an assumption of happy-happy E.T. helping us out, being part of the big brotherhood of intelligent species. Sometimes it is having us be lunch. Sometimes we’re the bad guys, enslaving other races or having them for lunch.

I tend to agree with Carl Sagan’s position that we’re unlikely to be at anything resembling technological parity with another race (and this is the premise of Communion of Dreams). And I tend to agree with those who advocate a certain caution in making our presence known in the universe. Via MeFi, there’s a very good article on this very topic in The Independent by Dr. David Whitehouse, formerly the BBC Science Editor and a respected astronomer, that I heartily recommend. An excerpt:

The fact is, and this should have been obvious to all, that we do not know what any extraterrestrials might be like - and hoping that they might be friendly, evolved enough to be wise and beyond violence, is an assumption upon which we could be betting our entire existence. When I was a young scientist 20 years ago at Jodrell Bank, the observatory in Cheshire, I asked Sir Bernard Lovell, founder of Jodrell Bank and pioneering radio astronomer, about it. He had thought about it often, he said, and replied: “It’s an assumption that they will be friendly - a dangerous assumption.”

And Lovell’s opinion is still echoed today by the leading scientists in the field. Physicist Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has been for decades one of the deepest thinkers on such issues. He insists that we should not assume anything about aliens. “It is unscientific to impute to remote intelligences wisdom and serenity, just as it is to impute to them irrational and murderous impulses,” he says. ” We must be prepared for either possibility.”

The Nobel Prize-winning American biologist George Wald takes the same view: he could think of no nightmare so terrifying as establishing communication with a superior technology in outer space. The late Carl Sagan, the American astronomer who died a decade ago, also worried about so-called “First Contact”. He recommended that we, the newest children in a strange and uncertain cosmos, should listen quietly for a long time, patiently learning about the universe and comparing notes. He said there is no chance that two galactic civilisations will interact at the same level. In any confrontation, one will always dominate the other.

Do I want to see us in some community of space-faring nations, such as the reality envisioned by J. Michael Straczynski in Babylon 5, or Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek? Yeah, that’d be cool. Do I expect it to happen that way? Um, not at this point. The only thing we know is based on our experience here on Earth, where whenever a technologically superior culture encountered a less sophisticated culture, the latter always came out the loser to a greater or lesser degree. Until we have some solid information to the contrary, I don’t think that it would be wise at all to draw attention to ourselves. After all, we have no idea what the neighborhood is like.

Jim Downey

Cross posted to UTI.

OK, let’s get something out of the way: I think that J. Michael Straczynski is a genius (hey, he loves Twain and The Prisoner - what more do you need to know about the guy?) . I’m addicted to his TV series Babylon 5 and its spin-off Crusade (basically, when I don’t have something else I want to see, I just cycle through the entire series and movies). So when I heard that JMS was working on a new Bab 5 project for direct-to-DVD release called “The Lost Tales”…well, like millions of other fans, I got a bit excited.

Now the trailer is out:

Drool.

Jim Downey

Via Show Me SciFi.