Filed under: Connections, Fermi's Paradox, General Musings, James Burke, Predictions, Saturn, Science Fiction, Space, tech, Titan, Writing stuff
In my previous post, I commented that the universe had just changed with the discovery of 581 c. A friend who saw this responded that no, the uninverse didn’t change – our perception of it did.
Well, yes, and that was exactly what I meant. I was referring to the wonderful series The Day the Universe Changed by science historian James Burke. If you are unfamiliar with it, by all means track down the series and enjoy. It is primarily about Kuhn’s concept of paradigm shift, leavened with a nice helping of applied philosophy. If you’ve seen any of the Connections series that Burke has done, you’ve probably got an idea how he would approach this issue.
The idea that our perception of the universe fundamentally determines our actions is one that I use explicitly in Communion of Dreams. [Spoiler alert.] In the book, the entirety of the scientific community believes that ours is the only civilization still active in at least our little corner of the universe. That belief is challenged by the discovery of an alien artifact on Titan, the moon of Saturn. From then on the story line spins out exploring the very nature of perception and knowledge in the very midst of a paradigm shift – all tightly controlled (at least at first) within the small community of people involved. At each stage of revelation, the characters have to confront and integrate new knowledge, and how they cope with that radical shift is at the very heart of the story that I tell.
This is why after posting my brief “welcome” last night, I kicked back and had a wee dram of my favorite scotch. Because whether or not most people realize it, this event was a turning point in our history. Yes, we all expected that sooner or later such a planet would be found – but now it has happened, and the universe around us is now viewed differently. Sure, the universe itself hasn’t changed – but how we understand it has undergone a shift. Just a small one, but an important one nonetheless.
And just think what will happen when we discover life elsewhere. Particularly intelligent, technological life. And after you start to understand the impact that will have, sit back and once again consider what it is my characters in Communion are going through.
Jim Downey
Filed under: General Musings, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, Space, tech, Writing stuff
Wow. It may not seem like it, but the universe just changed.
No, this doesn’t mean that there is life elsewhere other than our little rock. Let alone intelligent life. But make no mistake – this is something of a milestone.
Welcome 581 c. Welcome to the history books.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Carl Sagan, Cassini, General Musings, movies, NASA, Predictions, Saturn, Science Fiction, Space, tech, Titan, Writing stuff
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
Filed under: Apollo program, BoingBoing, Buzz Aldrin, General Musings, Government, NASA, Neil Armstrong, Science Fiction, Space, tech, Writing stuff
It’d be fun to include this little gem into any future revision of Communion. From an article in Aviation Week:
Space History Buffs Try to Save Sat Dish
A chance reading of a “for sale” advertisement in a weekly newspaper has launched a group of 30 space history buffs on a mission to save the 30-meter Jamesburg AT&T/Comsat satellite dish about an hour from Monterey, Calif.
The dish was built in 1968 to support the Apollo 11 moon landing a year later. Besides its commercial duties, it also played a role in capturing and distributing images of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, says Pat Barthelow, an avionics technician from Sacramento who first noticed the ad in the Carmel (Calif.) Pine Cone and quickly put out the word.The weekend restorers worked over the past four months to get the dish running. The 10-story high dish is housed in a 20,000 square foot building, both of which are in excellent shape, Barthelow said.
[Mild spoiler] This would make for a perfect reference about ‘industrial archeology’ for Arthur Bailey to make at any of several junctures in the book. I love the notion that people are now starting to realize that the NASA era contains valuable historical artifacts that are outside our usual scope of consideration. Sure, someday there will be a dome covering the site of the Apollo 11 landing, where Niel Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked. But places like the Jamesburg Earth Station are just as valuable from the perspective of understanding the tech behind our first ventures into space.
(Via BoingBoing.)
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Fermi's Paradox, General Musings, Predictions, Science Fiction, Space, tech, Writing stuff
If you’ve read Communion, [spoiler alert] you know that I posit the existence of other intelligences in the galaxy, but that our solar system has been ’embargoed’ from receiving any radio transmission from those civilizations through a huge network of the alien artifacts (one of which is at the center of the entire story line). This is my way of accounting for ‘Fermi’s Paradox‘, which basically states that if there are extra-terrestrial civilizations, we should have seen evidence of them.
A recent discovery makes me wonder whether I need to do a minor revision of the novel to account for this:
Near-Perfect Symmetry Revealed in Red Cosmic Square
By Ker Than
Staff Writer
posted: 12 April 2007
02:00 pm ETIf symmetry is a sign of splendor, then the newly discovered Red Square nebula is one of the most beautiful objects in the universe.
Seen in the infrared, the nebula resembles a giant, glowing red box in the sky, with a bright white inner core. A dying star called MWC 922 is located at the system’s center and spewing its innards from opposite poles into space.
No, I’m not saying that this is evidence of stellar engineering on a massive scale by some extra-terrestrial civilization. But it is a fascinating thought…
Jim Downey
Filed under: Buzz Aldrin, General Musings, movies, NASA, Predictions, Science Fiction, Space, tech
I recently came across this old (going on 5 years now) vid of Buzz Aldrin popping Bart Sibrel (a proponent of theory that the lunar landings were a hoax) in the mouth when the guy confronts him:
I grew up with the “Space Race”, and it helped to shape a lot of my attitudes and thoughts about not just science fiction, but about life. The men (unfortunately, the mindset of the time meant that astronauts were all men) who were in that program accepted that it was a very risky thing to want to go into space, but thought that the risks were worth it. Sure, NASA was working to limit the dangers, but it was just a given that the dangers would always be there.
That was a different era. From my perspective now, it was not unlike adolescence, when you *think* you can understand the risks you’re taking in doing stupid and dangerous things, but you don’t really – your brain hasn’t matured sufficiently, and you don’t have enough experience to know just how crazy you’re being. But when you have a couple of close calls – or lose some friends and loved ones – your perspective changes, and you want to take a safer path. We call it maturity in an individual, and prudence in the space program.
But I fear that it has become just timidness, and is the reason why we haven’t continued to build on our early successes (and failures) in our efforts to explore our solar system.
There is a natural, and understandable, reaction to facing death and injury (of every sort, from physical to emotional to financial): you seek safety. You try and arrange your life to be less dangerous, to be more predictable. Or at least that’s how most people react. And really, it is not a bad thing, for a person or for a society, to take that course.
But sometimes it works out that an individual, or a society, will have an incentive to continue the risk-taking. In the ‘history’ of Communion, I have the real exploitation of space being spurred by disaster – initially, it is by the Israeli effort to establish a viable sanctuary on the Moon using conventional heavy-lift rockets after a devastating nuclear exchange. This is undertaken even in the face of huge risks (the tech is only where we’re at now – meaning that rockets, with crew and passengers, are lost perhaps 5-10% of the time), because it is felt that these risks outweigh those of staying on Earth.
Humans are complex. We don’t always respond to stimuli in ways which are predictable by a simple formula. Sometimes, the calculation of risk goes all wonky. Sometimes we factor in so many variables that we ourselves don’t even understand our decisions. And sometimes, we just plain make mistakes. As a fiction author, I love that – it gives plenty of latitude in plotting and character.
Buzz Aldrin would probably say in retrospect that the risks he took to go to the Moon were well worth it, that he and the other astronauts knew well the dangers they faced, and that they didn’t change when confronted with death and loss. Rather, they did what they could to correct the problems that they encountered, adjusted and went on…knowing that there were many other risks still facing them.
That he didn’t allow those adjustments to make him timid is clear in his reaction to Sibrel. Sure, there are other ways of dealing with an idiot who is harrassing you, particularly when you’re a 72 year-old man. Some of them are arguably better ways. But it gives me a certain smile every time I think about that incident to know that “The Right Stuff” hasn’t completely disappeared.
Jim Downey
Filed under: General Musings, Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain, movies, Predictions, Science Fiction, Space, Titan, Writing stuff
Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday, age 84.
There have been many authors who had a great influence on me. Among these was Vonnegut. I can no longer say which of his books I read first, but there’s a fair chance that it was The Sirens of Titan, which had a sufficient impact on me that it was one of the reasons I choose that moon for the setting of Communion of Dreams.
What can you say about him? The man was brilliant in so many ways – with a biting wit and a perspective borne of really living, unlike so many writers who think they have something to say because they were once turned down for a date or didn’t get the promotion they thought they deserved. With his background at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, he was taken seriously even outside of the genre of science fiction. If you haven’t read his work, do. None of the movie adaptations of his books comes close to capturing the power and black humor of his writing.
Fittingly, he was also a huge fan of Mark Twain’s, and if there is any justice in the world, he will now be considered in death to be in the same league as Twain (I cannot offer higher praise to an author), though of course he would never have thought this possible himself. His use of humor and wry observations on the human condition echoed Twain, his writing style emulated Twains, and he even held a certain resemblence to him. He thought so much of Twain that he named his son after him.
I do not believe in heaven. I do not believe in the afterlife. But I hold a small, quiet hope that the Tralfamadorians have granted Kurt the grace to be caught in the happiest moment of his life, whatever that may be.
Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday, age 84.
So it goes.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Carl Sagan, General Musings, Predictions, Press, Science Fiction, Space, tech, Titan, Writing stuff
News yesterday of interest:
Travis Barman, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, said water vapor has been found in the atmosphere of a large, Jupiter-like gaseous planet located 150 light years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. The planet is known as HD 209458b.
OK, this is mostly significant because someone has gone on record announcing a discovery that pretty much everyone expected would happen before too long. With over 200 extra-solar planets now on the books, it was really just a matter of time before one was determined to have water vapor in its atmosphere. Scientists just needed the right combination of observeable data.
Important? Yeah, in the sense that it’s happened. Surprising? Not really. This is more the sort of thing that the press can get excited about than a real breakthrough – almost no space scientist would be surprised that water exists outside our solar system.
It is interesting for me, though, since I posit for Communion that there is an array of scientific instruments in orbit around Titan which has been created just for the purpose of seeking out likely extra-solar planets for colonization. (And I place it there due to the “bubble” of shielding created by the web of Tholen gel on Titan’s surface – which, of course, is foreshadowing of the larger discovery to be made about the gel in the course of the novel.) I fully expect that at some point we will identify planets in other stellar systems suitable for supporting human life – likely long before our tech advances to the point of allowing us to travel such distances. It’s just so much easier to look at the data coming our way in the form of electromagnetic radiation than to actually send a ship out to investigate.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, General Musings, Paleo-Future, Predictions, Psychic abilities, Science Fiction, Space, tech, Writing stuff
I’m a big fan of the blog Paleo-Future. The appeal is probably obvious, because it focuses on “A future that never was.” As I say on the Communion of Dreams site:
Welcome to Communion of Dreams, set about 50 years from now in an “alternative future history.” The world I have envisioned in this book is recognizable, in the same way that the 1950’s are recognizable, but with a comparable amount of unpredictable change as between that era and the present. Most authors will avoid writing about the near-term future, because it is easy for a work to become dated. I’m not that smart. Or perhaps I’m just more willing to jump in and explore what could be just over the horizon, if things work out a certain way. Nah, scratch that – let’s just go with ‘I’m not that smart.’
I’m sure that my predictions about artificial intelligence, psychic abilities, tech development, our future in space, et cetera, will all someday be profiled on some future version of Paleo-Future. You just can’t get all this stuff right.
Which is OK. The job of the science fiction author isn’t to predict the future, let alone create it. It is to posit a possible future, and within that context explore some aspects of humankind – or at least tell a good story. I like to think that I accomplish those things…and that I might even hit the jackpot and make a few predictions which will come true.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Feedback, General Musings, NASA, Predictions, Press, Science Fiction, Space, tech, Writing stuff
On this morning’s Marketplace, Robert Reich had a good commentary about the problem with near-Earth asteroids and the NASA effort to identify and track these potential threats. Being an economist, he took the position that for the cost of one week’s expeditures in Iraq, we could fund this program completely through 2020, and then start thinking about what technologies we might need to deal with such a problem asteroid.
All well and good. But what does it have to do with Communion?
My previous versions of the book contained another bit of ‘history’ in addition to the “Fire-flu”: that an asteroid of about 300 meters diameter had hit in central China in the mid 2020’s. This I used for an explanation for several things in the world that I create: an offset to the effects of global warming; an explanation for what happened to the rise of China as an economic power in coming decades; and as a motivation for humankind’s rapid development of the necessary technologies to get into space in a big way.
I don’t see the matter as at all unlikely, and if you look at the information provided by the scientists involved in the search to identify these near-Earth asteroids, you quickly come to the conclusion that we’re rolling the dice each year to see whether or not we’re gonna get hit.
But this seemed to be the thing that tripped up most of my early readers. The prospect of both a pandemic flu and a meteor strike was just too much – even though the two things are in no way related, and we’re ‘overdue’ for both. I’m not sure whether this was just asking people to suspend their disbelief a bit too much, or whether it was just a little too frightening a prospect, but it was clear that however well it worked to create the “world” of Communion, it had to go.
So I dropped back, thought through the potential ramifications of a pandemic flu, and figured that I could more or less accomplish the same things with saying that the world collapse which followed the Fire-flu leads to some small-scale nuclear wars. In the great scheme of things, I see this as probably just as likely a scenario, I suppose. But it is somehow less satisfying an explanation for me. Ah well.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 