Communion Of Dreams

Gah. I am either having a relapse of the very stubborn flu that had me laid low last month, or am fighting some new bug with similar (yet still considerably less severe) symptoms. This is highly annoying.

So, I’m about to go take a nap. But first a couple of quick notes, and then a bit from Phil Plait’s blog about a recent discovery that is very exciting.

Note one: downloads of the .pdf of Communion of Dreams have crossed 8,200 and downloads of the audio version continue to climb as well. That’s exciting.

Note two: heard nothing yet from the agent I mentioned contacting the other day. No surprise - I expect that it will take a month or so to hear from them. But I needed something else to note.

Now, about the news from space . . .

I have written previously about the Cassini probe’s 10 year mission to Saturn, and how there have been a lot of great images and information coming back to scientists about that planet and its moons. Information that helps to confirm what we knew when I was first writing Communion (since most of the action of the book takes place on and around Titan.) But there is news which would potentially require me to revise the novel slightly - not about Titan, but about its sibling Enceladus. You may have heard something about this, but I’ll go to the Bad Astro Boy himself for the news:

Life’s cauldron may be bubbling underneath Enceladus

A few days ago I wrote about how the Cassini Saturn probe dove through water ice plumes erupting from the surface of the icy moon Enceladus. The pictures were incredible, but it may very well be that the other detectors got the big payoff.

They detected organic compounds in the plumes.

Now remember, organic molecules don’t necessarily mean life. What Cassini detected were heavy carbon-based molecules, including many that are the building blocks for making things like amino acids and other compounds necessary for life as we know it.

Edited to add: Carolyn Porco, imaging team leader for Cassini, says:

[…] it is now unambiguous that the jets emerging from the south polar fractures contain organic materials heavier than simple methane — acetylene, hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde, propane, etc. — making the sub-surface sources of Enceladus’ dramatic geological activity beyond doubt rich in astrobiologically interesting materials.

Whoa. I mean, *whoa* . Seriously. It ain’t life, nor even proof of life - but it is *damned exciting*.

Now, a nap.  All this excitement makes me tired.

Jim Downey

*This post previously ran at UTI last year. And while some of the personal details mentioned in it have changed - I did indeed keep that promise to tweak my manuscript, obviously, and things have continued to progress with my MIL - the sentiment is the same.

Jim D.

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This has been a hell of a day. Not as bad as some, perhaps, but as far as routine days go, not the sort you want to pop up often in the queue. It started with my mother-in-law being ill. Now, most adults know how a young child (either their own or one they’ve babysat) can be when sick. Think intestinal bug. Think explosive diarrhea, of the toxic/caustic variety. Poor kid doesn’t understand what’s going on, or how to best cope with their misbehaving body (if they are capable of that on their own yet). Then picture that not in a toddler, but in a 95-pound woman well into dementia before the effects of dehydration and fever kick in. Took my wife and I two full hours to get her and the bedroom cleaned up.

And then I was on deadline to write my final column for my newspaper. Yeah, my *final* column. My decision, and if I want to go back the paper will be glad to have me. But because of the demands of care-giving, I could not adequately keep up with the art scene in my community (what I wrote about - weird to see that in the past tense). And I was feeling a little burned out with it as well. But still, closing off that particular chapter of my life was somewhat poignant.

So it’s been a day. Which is all just prelude to explaining that one of the refuges I seek after such a day is one of my “regulars”. Typically, it’s Twain, likely his Roughing It, which I have long considered some of his best and funniest work. But tonight, I turn to another old friend I never met: Carl Sagan, particularly his book Pale Blue Dot.

I’ve said before that I’m not a scientist. Which is perhaps why I don’t have some of the same quibbles that many scientists have with Sagan. But I really respect someone who can take scientific research and knowledge and present it in a form an intelligent layperson can understand. Stephen Jay Gould could do that for me. PZ Myers does it for me. So does Carl Zimmer. I could name others, but these are people I respect. In that same way, I really respected Carl Sagan, who I knew more as an author than as the host of of the PBS series, most of which I missed in its initial broadcast. Sagan helped introduce me to whole areas of science I had never considered before, and his considerable human decency in his atheism helped me understand that my own misgivings about religion were not an indication that I was lacking in morals or ethics.

So it was that when I started to write my first novel, Communion of Dreams (unpublished - yeah, yeah, I know I need to finish tweaking the mss and send it out again), I set most of the action on Saturn’s moon Titan, as a tribute to Sagan. Sagan had formulated a theory as to the nature of Titan’s atmosphere (that it contained a complex hydrocarbon he called “tholin”) which accounted for the rusty-orange coloration of the moon. His theories were pretty well borne out by the Huygens probe, by the way, though he didn’t live long enough to know this.

So tonight, on the tenth anniversary of his death, on a day when I’ve been through my own trials, I will nonetheless raise a glass, and drink a wee dram of good scotch to the memory of Carl Sagan. And I’ll promise myself, and his memory, that I’ll get that manuscript tweaked and published, if for no other reason than to honor him.

Here’s to Carl: Sorry you had to leave so soon.

Jim Downey

Via Phil Plait, news that in observation of the 10th anniversary of the Cassini launch, NASA has just released a bunch of very cool images and vids from the probe. Given that I set the bulk of Communion of Dreams there in the neighborhood of Saturn, I always find it stunning to see actual images which reflect what I envisioned. In particular, the scene in the book when the first research team is approaching Titan is perfectly caught in this image. Wow.

And here’s a passage from Plait’s post which precisely echoes my own sentiments, and would be prophetic if Communion was real rather than fiction:

We don’t go to these exotic locations in the solar system because we know everything that’s going on, or because we know what we’ll expect to see. We go because we don’t know. But we also go because we need to have our positions rattled, our notions shaken, our ideas tested. When we see Saturn from above, or co-orbit with a moon, or see a rainbow reflected in particles of ice a billion kilometers away, the only thing we can be sure of is that we’ll see new things, unexpected things.

Unexpected things, indeed.

Jim Downey

My good lady wife sent me today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day of ice geysers erupting on Enceladus, one of the inner moons of Saturn. While I don’t mention any of the other moons in Communion, I would imagine that should Titan’s Mistress ever actually be filmed, then such images would be a natural.

Anyway, it’s a cool image, and I thought I’d share.

Jim Downey

NASA has put up a nice little movie showing the rings of Saturn as seen by the Cassini spacecraft as it transitions through the plane of those rings - fascinating stuff. Of course, you can also see a lot of images taken during the Cassini mission at the CICLOPS site, including many different images of Titan - images which conform to my suppositions about the surface of that moon in Communion of Dreams.

That’s hardly just luck, of course. I tried to base my depiction of the moon in keeping with the best known science at the time of writing, and during revisions updating to reflect new data once the Cassini mission arrived at Saturn. As I have mentioned previously, Carl Sagan’s work was of particular value to me in formulating not just the environment of Titan, but in also how weather works there.

Emphasis on keeping everything as accurate and in accord with known science was important to me in writing Communion, so far as I was able. I even made extensive use of a precursor to this JPL site in calculating distance (as reflected in the amount of time it takes radio signals to travel) for the actual dates mentioned in the book. It’s kind of fun - you just plug in your date, select your two points in the solar system, and the site will not only give you distance in km/miles but also show you what you would see from a specified vantage point if you were looking through a telescope. I no longer remember whether the earlier site gave me actual light-minutes distances (which would also be how long radio waves would take to transit), or if I did the calculations myself. Either way, the numbers cited in the book are accurate.

Jim Downey