So, last night I was in the mood for a little classic science fiction, and decided to watch Alien.
It’s a movie which has aged remarkably well, and as a friend mentioned to me this morning doesn’t seem just silly or cartoonish. The design elements are still widely emulated in science fiction film and television. The special effects are solid and hold up to our modern standards. The cinematographics are perfect for the horror storyline, except for some 70’s lens-flare which seems a bit dated. The anti-corporation subtext is still relevant. And the saga of survival timeless. It’s a great movie.
But one thing about it bugged me while I watched it last night. And thinking more about it this morning, it still bugs me.
It’s the “self destruct” mechanism.
Yeah, I know, this isn’t the first film which had something like that in it. And it certainly wasn’t the last – seems like there isn’t a SF movie or TV show out there which manages to completely avoid using this trope (or at least playing with it).
But think about it: why would you actually build that kind of mechanism into a commercial vehicle? We don’t do that today. The Nostromo was a space tug, hauling an ore-processing facility and some 20,000,000 tons of minerals. You’re talking a huge capital investment – no corporation would want to destroy such an asset, I don’t care how many people were killed on the thing or what sort of horrors happened there. They’d want to be able to salvage as much of the ship, facility, and cargo as possible, no matter what.
And designing the mechanism to act the way it does in the movie doesn’t make sense, either – shutting off the coolant for the nuclear reactor which powers the ship? That’s building a weakness into a system which you would rather want to make as safe and redundant as possible. That’s just asking for trouble.
OK, yeah, I’m being picky. But it really is this sort of thing which I try to pay attention to in my own writing – looking at what makes sense in terms of human motivation and practical engineering, whatever the story or tech that you’re playing with.
But it is still a great movie. I’d hope that Communion of Dreams ages half as well in say, 30 years.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Brave New World, Buzz Aldrin, Carl Zimmer, Comics, Government, io9, movies, NASA, Neil Armstrong, Phil Plait, PZ Myers, Science, Science Fiction, SETI, Space
Today’s xkcd sums things up pretty well, I think: the actual discovery was cool, but the hype made it feel anticlimatic.
Above and beyond what this says about our press being driven by ASTOUNDING!! news and the failure to get even basic science stories right (with some very obvious and excellent exceptions), consider just what was behind the hype: excitement at the prospect of non-terrestrial life of any sort being discovered.
The initial speculation that NASA had proof of life on Titan swept like electronic fire around the world. It wasn’t just science fiction geeks. Or actual biologists. Or space buffs. It was pretty much the whole world, though some had more fun with it than others.
Why did this capture the imaginations of so many people? Easy: we’re hungry for this news, and have been for decades. It’s not just the countless science fiction books and movies which have fed this hunger (mine included) – it is also the very real science behind the search for extra-terrestrial life (or intelligence). Proof of the existence of life beyond our planet would likely be considered one of the most important discoveries in the history of mankind, and the announcement of such a discovery would be a turning point bigger than even the first time that humans walked on the Moon.
It is easy in a time of recession, when money is tight for most people and the government is trying to figure out ways to cut expenditures, to under-value NASA or basic science research. And I am not arguing for this or that ‘big science’ program, per se. But all you have to do is look at what happened this week, to note the wonder and excitement which was launched by the merest possibility of the discovery of life elsewhere, to realize that this kind of knowledge is something that people around the world are waiting for with eager, almost palpable, anticipation. I think it is one of the very best things about humans that this is the case, and it should be encouraged and used.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Bad Astronomy, Brave New World, Carl Zimmer, NASA, Phil Plait, Science, Science Fiction
Well, it’s not life on Titan. But it is very damned cool nonetheless:
NASA’s real news: bacterium on Earth that lives off arsenic!
NASA scientists announced today an incredible find: a form of microbe that apparently evolved the ability to use otherwise toxic arsenic in their biochemistry!
To understand just how important this is, let’s turn to an analogy from one of my favorite science writers: Carl Zimmer.
The search for alien life has long been plagued by a philosophical question: what is life? Why is this so vexing? Well, let’s say that you’re hunting for change under your couch so that your four-year-old son can buy an ice cream cone from a truck that’s pulled up outside your house. Your son offers to help.
“What is change?” he asks.
“It’s…” You trail off, realizing that you’re about to get into a full-blown discussion of economics with a sugar-crazed four-year-old. So, instead, you open up your hand and show him a penny, a nickel, a dime. “It’s things like this.”
“Oh–okay!” your son says. He digs away happily. The two of you find lots of interesting things–paper clips, doll shoes, some sort of cracker–which you set aside in a little pile. But you’ve only found seventeen cents in change when the ice cream truck pulls away. Tears ensue.
As you’re tossing the pile of debris into the trash, you notice that there’s a dollar bill in the mix.
“Did you find this?” you ask.
“Yes,” your son sobs.
“Well, why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s not change. Change is metal. That’s paper.”
OK, I have just broken the usual standards of “fair use” and I hope Carl will forgive me. I’ll compensate by saying that you should go read the whole rest of the post, because it explains far better than I ever could what the full ramifications of this actually are. Seriously – go. I’ll write more tomorrow. Come back then.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Ballistics, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Survival
Well, well, well. For the last couple of months the totals have been slowly approaching our all time high of 303,000 hits in December 2008 – the first full month when we launched BBTI and made a big splash in the firearms world.
November 2010 blew that number right out of the water. We had a total of 384,578 hits last month.
Wow.
As I noted last Friday, I was pretty confident that we would break the all-time high in November. But a big surge at the end of the month, in part thanks to the article in Concealed Carry Magazine but in bigger part to an article which showed up on the popular Survival Blog which cited our data. Thanks, guys!
News on Communion of Dreams is less dramatic. Things are still pending with publication, and I don’t have much info to share about that yet. Downloads, which had jumped in October, have dropped back to their usual range of 600+. As soon as I have details to share with everyone about the publication date, I will definitely post it here and on FaceBook.
All in all, the continued success of both of these endeavors amazes and pleases me. Now we just need to add in similar success with the care-giving book . . .
Happy December, everyone!
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Filed under: Civil Rights, Emergency, Heinlein, movies, Predictions, Robert A. Heinlein, Science Fiction, Survival, Terrorism
By the time the dose of tempus was wearing off I had a picture of the United States in a shape that I had not imagined even when I was in Kansas City – a country undergoing Terror. Friend might shoot friend; wife denounce husband. Rumor of a titan could drum up a mob on any street, with Judge Lynch baying in the van. To rap on a door at night was to invite a blast through the door. Honest folk stayed home; at night the dogs were out.
The fact that most of the rumored discoveries of slugs were baseless made them no less dangerous. It was not exhibitionism which caused many people to prefer outright nudity to the tight and scanty clothing permitted under Schedule Sun Tan; even the skimpiest clothing invited a doubtful second look, a suspicion that might be decided too abruptly. The head-and-spine armor was never worn now; the slugs had faked it and used it almost at once.
That’s from Chapter XXIV of The Puppet Masters, the 1951 classic from Robert A. Heinlein.
It’s been a number of years since I last read the book – I think I read it prior to the release of the movie adaptation in 1994, but not since, so there were parts of the book which I didn’t remember. I had honestly forgotten that the alien invaders had come from Titan, for example – which is funny, since most of Communion of Dreams takes place there. And I forgot that Heinlein sets the book firmly in our current time – the first part of it is in July, 2007.
But what I hadn’t forgotten was the basic story line: alien invasion by quickly-reproducing “slugs” that can attach themselves to the human nervous system and completely control their hosts, using the full knowledge and abilities of those hosts. That made an impression on me when I first read the book in early adolescence. Scared the hell out of me.
What also made an impression was the above bit – the nudity. Hey, I was a hormone-soaked early teen. The idea of society quickly changing such that everyone would run around naked was . . . interesting.
When I re-read the book later (first semester of college at Grinnell – which so happened to be where the first bit of the book is set) and then again in advance of the movie, I just considered this bit to be part of Heinlein’s usual casual sexual tweaking of convention. It was no big deal, but I always just considered him of something of a ‘dirty old man’ who was looking for an excuse to get naked people into his books.
But now . . . well, I have to reconsider. He certainly nailed what people are like when frightened, and how that can have an impact on social mores. Consider my recent post about how willing some folks are to put up with the new security scanners and “enhanced pat downs,” and that’s just because of the *possibility* that these security procedures might make them marginally safer when flying. What if there was a massive threat which could be fought by shedding our clothes? People’d peel, and damned quickly.
So, Heinlein may indeed have just been something of a dirty old man. But he was also something of a prophet.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Augmented Reality, Predictions, Psychic abilities, Science, Science Fiction, Society
As I’ve noted recently, I’m pretty much a hard-nosed skeptic. But as I said in that post:
But I am much less willing to invest my energy into any enterprise which doesn’t seem to be well grounded in proven reality.
“Proven reality.” Well, what constitutes proof?
* * * * * * *
The term psi denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms. Two variants of psi are precognition (conscious cognitive awareness) and premonition (affective apprehension) of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process. Precognition and premonition are themselves special cases of a more general phenomenon: the anomalous retroactive influence of some future event on an individual’s current responses, whether those responses are conscious or nonconscious, cognitive or affective. This article reports 9 experiments, involving more than 1,000 participants, that test for retroactive influence by “timereversing” well-established psychological effects so that the individual’s responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur. Data are presented for 4 time-reversed effects: precognitive approach to erotic stimuli and precognitive
avoidance of negative stimuli; retroactive priming; retroactive habituation; and retroactive facilitation of recall. All but one of the experiments yielded statistically significant results; and, across all 9 experiments, Stouffer’s z = 6.66, p = 1.34 × 10-11 with a mean effect size (d) of 0.22. The individual-difference variable of stimulus seeking, a component of extraversion, was significantly correlated with psi performance in 5 of the experiments, with participants who scored above the midpoint on a scale of stimulus seeking achieving a mean effect size of 0.43. Skepticism about psi, issues of replication, and theories of psi are also discussed.
* * * * * * *
Communion of Dreams is about a re-evaluation of reality. As I note on the homepage for the book, a dust jacket blurb could read in part:
When an independent prospector on Titan discovers an alien artifact, assumptions based on the lack of evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence are called into question. Knowing that news of such a discovery could prompt chaos on Earth, a small team is sent to investigate and hopefully manage the situation. What they find is that there’s more to human history, and human abilities, than any of them ever imagined. And that they will need all those insights, and all those abilities, to face the greatest threat yet to human survival.
* * * * * * *
That .pdf above comes from the site of DARYL J. BEM, Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. His work is starting to get some real notice. Why? Well, here’s a nice summation:
Dr. Bem, a social psychologist at Cornell University, conducted a series of studies that will soon be published in one of the most prestigious psychology journals (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). Across nine experiments, Bem examined the idea that our brain has the ability to not only reflect on past experiences, but also anticipate future experiences. This ability for the brain to “see into the future” is often referred to as psi phenomena.
Although prior research has been conducted on the psi phenomena – we have all seen those movie images of people staring at Zener cards with a star or wavy lines on them – such studies often fail to meet the threshold of “scientific investigation.” However, Bem’s studies are unique in that they represent standard scientific methods and rely on well-established principles in psychology. Essentially, he took effects that are considered valid and reliable in psychology – studying improves memory, priming facilitates response times – and simply reversed their chronological order.
And a very good description of one of the specific experiments:
Perceiving Erotic Stimuli from the Future
The first experiment described in Bem’s new paper involves perceiving erotic stimuli from the future — specifically, perceiving whether an erotic picture is going to appear in a certain location or not. As usual in empirical psychology, the experimental setup is a bit involved — but if you want to really appreciate the evidence for precognition that Bem has obtained, there’s no substitute for actually understanding some of the experiments he did. So I’m going to quote Bem’s paper at some length here, regarding his first experiment.
The setup was, in Bem’s words, as follows:
One hundred Cornell undergraduates, 50 women and 50 men, were recruited for this experiment using the Psychology Department’s automated online sign-up system. They either received one point of experimental credit in a psychology course offering that option or were paid $5 for their participation. Both the recruiting announcement and the introductory explanation given to participants upon entering the laboratory informed them that
[t]his is an experiment that tests for ESP. It takes about 20 minutes and is run completely by computer. First you will answer a couple of brief questions. Then, on each trial of the experiment, pictures of two curtains will appear on the screen side by side. One of them has a picture behind it; the other has a blank wall behind it. Your task is to click on the curtain that you feel has the picture behind it. The curtain will then open, permitting you to see if you selected the correct curtain. There will be 36 trials in all.
And the result? From the same source as above:
1. “Across all 100 sessions, participants correctly identified the future position of the erotic pictures significantly more frequently than the 50% hit rate expected by chance: 53.1%.” (which is highly statistically significant given the number of trials involved, according to the calculations shown in the paper)
2. “In contrast, their hit rate on the non-erotic pictures did not differ significantly from chance: 49.8. This was true across all types of non-erotic pictures: neutral pictures, 49.6%; negative pictures, 51.3%; positive pictures, 49.4%; and romantic but non-erotic pictures, 50.2%.”In other words the hypotheses made in advance of the experiment were solidly confirmed. The experiment yielded highly statistically significant evidence for psychic precognition. Much more than would be expected at random, given the number of subjects involved, the Cornell students were able to perceive the erotic stimuli from the future — but not, in this context, the non-erotic ones.
* * * * * * *
[Spoilers ahead.]
In Communion of Dreams the discovery is that we live in a reality which has been subject to artificial controls on our psychic abilities. Why this was done is unclear, and exactly what range of ‘natural’ psychic ability humans have isn’t known. These are things which I may explore at greater length in subsequent books (hint, hint.)
But I do find it fascinating that there are these cracks in our current perception of reality. Little glimpses into perhaps a greater understanding. There may not be a concerted effort to hide the truth from us, as in my book, but there is something going on, some way in which our scientific theories only ride along the surface of a wave without penetrating it. Perhaps we exist not in the moment, but in a moving field of possibilities, some of which are so powerful that they echo backwards in time.
It’s something to consider. Playfully.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Science Fiction
Here’s a quiet little story for all my friends who have had to make hard choices: Hokkaido Green.
Very nice. Wish I had written it.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Babylon 5, Gardening, General Musings, Music, Science Fiction
There is nothing wrong with referring at this point to the ineffable. The mistake is to describe it. Jankélévitch is right about music. He is right that something can be meaningful, even though its meaning eludes all attempts to put it into words. Fauré’s F sharp Ballade is an example: so is the smile on the face of the Mona Lisa; so is the evening sunlight on the hill behind my house. Wordsworth would describe such experiences as “intimations,” which is fair enough, provided you don’t add (as he did) further and better particulars. Anybody who goes through life with open mind and open heart will encounter these moments of revelation, moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words. These moments are precious to us. When they occur it is as though, on the winding ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across a window, through which we catch sight of another and brighter world — a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter.
I’m reminded of a post from three years ago, and the words of a friend in it:
“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.”
Gives me something to think about as I put the garden to bed this morning.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Bipolar, Health, Predictions, Publishing, Science Fiction
Consider this something of a companion piece to yesterday’s entry.
For some time now I have been increasingly aware of a shift, a change in the wind. From this:
But the good news is that once I realize how deeply I am into this cycle, it usually means that I don’t have a whole lot further down to go. Typically, just a matter of weeks.
Of course, hitting bottom was followed by a prolonged illness this time – a month’s worth of serious pneumonia, and then two months of uneven recovery (which I am still struggling with, though the trend is up.) Even for me, this is unusual.
But it perhaps signifies something else: a larger pattern at work.
I have been intensely ill at several junctures of my life – oh, nothing life-threatening, just really, *really* sick. And those instances tend to come at the culmination of a closing chapter in my life, following a long period of intense work. Usually, once I start to emerge back towards health, it marks a sea change. Like now.
The long years of being a care provider, followed by intensely working on the care giving book, are over. What was by necessity a period of intense introspection and even hermitage has played itself out. The stage is set for me to move on, to turn my energy and my attention outwards again.
What do I mean?
I’m not entirely sure yet. Certainly, with Communion of Dreams to be published, there will be the need for publicity. If we can also get Her Final Year into print, that will compound things, demand more of me.
And here’s the thing – this doesn’t bother me. Oh, I am still an introvert by nature, but I now feel ready to once again take on the role of a public figure.
It’s a bit like re-inventing myself. Not changing my nature, but choosing to emphasize another aspect of myself. And there is power in that.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 