Filed under: Feedback, Flu, Heinlein, movies, Pandemic, Religion, Robert A. Heinlein, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, Writing stuff
A discussion over on UTI about a post I made there took a bit of an odd turn, engendering some interesting discussion about polygamy. This morning I made a comment that I thought I would share here, since it does relate directly to some of the things I do in Communion of Dreams. You’ll see what I mean.
Heinlein’s use . . . of non-standard family structures got me thinking about many of these issues when I was very young, and helped me form my opinions intellectually before getting into emotional commitments.
I tend to think that the serial monogamy that we see as a default in Western countries reflects the differences between societal conventions and evolutionary inclinations, with a big helping of “we live a whole lot longer now than early humans did” thrown in for good measure. It is rare to see a marriage last more than ten or fifteen years these days, and I think that makes a lot of sense – when most humans lived until 30 or so, it would make sense that pair-bonding would be a good strategy to raising and protecting children into early adulthood. That would mean a “marriage” of about the length I mention above.
But we live a lot longer now, and people grow and change throughout their lives. So it is unsurprising to me that divorce is common (something like half of all marriages end in divorce) as a way of dealing with these changes. Some people find a way to grow in tandem with their partner, and some find ways of allowing a certain freedom of definition for each partner within the structure of an ostensibly conventional marriage (some, of course, do both). Different cultures have found different strategies to accommodate these stresses – some allow for polygamy of the ‘conventional’ sort (think the Mormon or Islamic variety), some make divorce easy, some de-emphasize marriage itself, some ‘look the other way’ when one or the other partner in a marriage cheats or has a formal concubine system.
A fairly recent development in all of this has come to be known as polyamory – defining relationships as being more open and less “possessive”. There are some fairly well-known practices and practitioners, such as Penn Jillette. This attitude pretty well covers most of Heinlein’s alternative marriage structures and can work for some people, though it would understandably require a different sort of approach and mindset than what is commonly considered about marriage/love/relationships. In an homage to Heinlein I had originally used alternative family structures as the “norm” in my SF novel set about 50 years from now (a survival-strategy response to environmental conditions), but early readers of the book got too hung up on that so I changed it. Perhaps if/when I am an established author I can get away with it, as RAH did.
Children? I dunno – don’t have any, by choice. Not an issue for me, in several senses of the term.
[Mild spoilers ahead.]
To me, the novel actually does work better the way I had the family relationships defined before, with a group marriage built around a small number of adults who have just a couple of fertile people at the core. This would allow for those precious few who are able to have children (remember, the fire-flu plague had not just killed vast numbers – it also left most people who survived it sterile) to do so with minimal stress, the rest of the family caring for them and the children born into the family. Think how it would be otherwise: the few fertile couples trying to have and raise children in a society desperate for kids, maybe even willing to steal them or force child-baring couple to give their children to others.
But this change was just too hard for some people to wrap their heads around comfortably – they wanted to turn it into something about sex rather than about children. Maybe they felt threatened by the idea, since the time-frame of the novel was so close to our own. I dunno – my head doesn’t work that way. So I made the change, and tried to work in enough explanation for the type of ‘family’ that exists in the book, while removing the polyamory element. So far no one has commented on the current version as being a problem for them, and that is likely how it will stay.
Jim Downey
(Again, if you didn’t recognize the quote used in the title, shame on you. It’s from this.)
Filed under: Book Conservation, General Musings, Health, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, tech
As a book conservator, one of the things I deal with most frequently is problems caused by the embrittlement of paper and other cellulose materials. This embrittlement is, generally, caused by residual acid content from the manufacturing of those materials. For a period of about 130 – 140 years (basically from the start of the American Civil War until just before the turn of the 21st century), paper was most widely manufactured using an acid bath to wash away non-cellulose fibers, which left that residual acid content slowly weakening the paper. This is a process known among conservators and librarians as “slow fire“, since it is essentially an oxidation process akin to the combustion of fire, but on a longer time scale. Perhaps surprisingly, this mechanism wasn’t understood at all until about the time of my birth some fifty years ago, when research started to show what was actually happening to paper at this very basic level.
Now the majority of paper is made using an alternative process, primarily due to environmental needs (less pollution). It is a side benefit, but an important one, that this usually results in a much more stable and longer-lasting paper, one which doesn’t have that residual acid content causing problems. Because paper doesn’t have to become embrittled with age – I have lots of examples of paper made 500 years ago that looks as fresh and supple as paper made last week. The paper we’re most widely using now has a similar stability.
* * * * * * *
Now, it seems, scientists studying evolution and extinction may have stumbled upon a similar stability issue with regards to humans, and it could portend a medical breakthrough which would save countless lives and extend others.
Writing for Seed Magazine this week, Peter Ward notes that of the five major mass extinction events in Earth’s history, one of them was undoubtedly due to a single chemical:
But now, together with Mark Roth of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, I believe we have found a possible biochemical scar, present within living animals, that links Earth’s greatest mass extinction to a single substance: hydrogen sulfide (H2S). Hydrogen sulfide is a relatively simple molecule that gives rotten eggs their distinctive foul odor and is quite toxic–in high concentrations a single breath can kill. And it looks like that is what happened: Hundreds of millions of years ago, hydrogen sulfide probably saturated our oceans and atmosphere, poisoning nearly every creature on Earth.
Yet some creatures, like our very distant ancestors, must have somehow survived this toxic environment. What Roth has discovered is that H2S, incredibly, also has the ability to preserve and save lives. In small doses the chemical puts many animals into a state of “suspended animation,” a useful adaptation that would have allowed creatures to, in essence, hibernate through the catastrophe of mass extinction. If this idea is correct, our understanding of the deep past could lead to a dramatic medical revolution very soon.
What kind of dramatic medical revolution? The Science Fiction dream of suspended animation, allowing people with an illness or injury to be “set aside” for decades until medical science comes up with a cure, or a way of putting their brain in a newly cloned body?
Nope. Something a lot simpler, and probably a lot more useful. This:
When we humans are cut or injured, our bodies naturally produce small quantities of hydrogen sulfide. In essence, the body may be trying to put itself into suspended animation to survive the injury, an instinct held over millions of years in our genes. Yet whenever one of us is dying, say from a heart attack, our first instinct is to give that person oxygen. The problem with this “life-saving” first response may be that the oxygenated red blood cells rush to the damaged cells and act like gasoline on a fire. Oxygen is one of the most chemically active substances on Earth, and though we need it to survive, it can ravage our bodies. The oxygen increases the reactions causing the heart attack in the first place; it tears up more cells and overwhelms the virtual suspended animation that the body-produced hydrogen sulfide created. Then it kills you.
Oxygen. From whence we get the term Oxidation. As in “burning” or “fire”. So, what to do? Here’s the concluding bit from the article:
Perhaps our first instinct in instances of a heart attack should be to cool the body and let hydrogen sulfide do its natural work. To save life, in other words, you may first have to effectively suspend it with hydrogen sulfide. This tactic may just be what got us so far in the first place.
There is no clear understanding yet of why our injured bodies are able to produce hydrogen sulfide or why H2S puts some mammals into suspended animation. But I believe that Roth has found our body’s own memory of the ancient events that nearly killed our distant ancestors. Some proto-mammals may have been exposed to H2S, and instead of dying, they were placed into a state of suspended animation that allowed them to survive until the initial hydrogen sulfide levels subsided and they were reanimated. Some lucky evolutionary accident ensured the mammals’ safety through a deep sleep, and that accident may still be dormant within us. That which allowed our ancestors to survive millions of years ago might also be a means of our survival now.
* * * * * * *
Like paper made 50 years ago, I am not as supple or fresh as when I was born. I too have experienced my own version of embrittlement. There is only so much my body can do to keep up with the effects of oxidation. There are plenty of commercial products out there touting their antioxidant effect, just as there are products I use to neutralize acid in paper, but none of these will return me to my youth, just as I cannot reverse the effects of embrittlement in paper.
But it seems that perhaps we have a new insight into some of the mechanisms at work. I don’t expect to live forever, but I certainly wouldn’t mind having better and more effective medical treatment for what time I have. As a conservator, my best hope is to preserve what suppleness there is still left in paper. I’d be willing to settle for the same thing, myself.
Jim Downey
You may have heard of the 5.2 quake we had in this area this morning (epicenter about 150 miles from here, I’d guess). I missed that, what with being sound asleep and all. Got people rattled, you might say.
Well, we just had an aftershock here about 45 minutes ago. I was writing an email to a friend at the time, said this:
I think we just had another post-quake shock. Whole house vibrated, and my monitor did a little dance.
Hmm. Should check the USGS and see if they have anything posted yet.
Nope. But I filed a report.
Well, the report is now up: a 4.5 event, according to IRIS. Interesting. That may be the most powerful one I’ve felt.
Lots of people don’t think of the Midwest as being particularly active, seismically (and otherwise). But we’re probably sitting on top of one of the biggest potential disasters when it comes to likely earthquakes: the New Madrid Fault. Hereabouts, people actually worry about this from time to time, though not nearly enough in terms of applying architectural and engineering knowledge to minimize risk. Because that would cost money.
Shocking, I know.
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Civil Rights, Emergency, Failure, General Musings, Government, Guns, Health, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Press, Privacy, RKBA, Society, Survival, Terrorism, Violence
If you know me at all, from personal experience or just from my writings, you might be a bit surprised to know that when I was a kid I was considered bookish, uninterested in athletics, a bit nerdy. I distinctly remember being pushed to close whatever book I was quietly reading, and to go outside and play ‘like a real boy’.
Why do I mention this? Well, because I have been following with some interest the whole ‘controversy’ around Lenore Skenazy‘s recent column and subsequent news coverage/website devoted to the concept of “Free Range Kids“. In itself, it is fascinating that Skenazy’s ideas have generated this kind of reaction – challenging the prevailing cultural norms about child-rearing and parental control (under the guise of keeping kids safe). Lots of people are saying that it is about time for us to get away from “helicopter parents” who so over-protect their kids that the kids never get any real life experience. Just look at the comments at BoingBoing, on her website, or just about anywhere else – she gets some criticism, but for the most part people are saying either that “it’s about time” or “what’s the big deal – this is how most of the working class folks get along”.
But beyond that, there is something else that comes through: a basic desire for people to have some freedom back, that the whole “security” mindset may have gone too far, that we have gotten well away from our self-professed ideal of being the “Home of the Brave”. I don’t think that this is the least bit surprising, nor that it would show up in these kinds of discussions, because I think that the issues are very closely interrelated.
Let’s talk about Skenazy’s notions again for a moment. Her basic premise is that while we need as parents (and as a society) to take some reasonable precautions, it is also extremely important that kids be allowed to actually experience life outside the purview of parents and other authorities – to have a little room to learn about things like self reliance, independence, and problem solving. Her example is letting her 9 year old son ride the subway in NYC on his own. What happened? I’ll quote from her site:
When I wrote a column for The New York Sun on “Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Take The Subway Alone,” I figured I’d get a few e-mails pro and con.
Two days later I was on the Today Show, MSNBC, FoxNews and all manner of talk radio with a new title under my smiling face: “America’s Worst Mom?”
Yes, that’s what it took for me to learn just what a hot-button this is — this issue of whether good parents ever let their kids out of their sight. But even as the anchors were having a field day with the story, many of the cameramen and make up people were pulling me aside to say that THEY had been allowed to get around by themselves as kids– and boy were they glad. They relished the memories!
And the next paragraph nicely summarizes what the real problem is, as I see it:
Had the world really become so much more dangerous in just one generation?Yes — in most people’s estimation. But no — not according to the evidence. Over at the think tank STATS.org, where they examine the way the media use statistics, researchers have found that the number of kids getting abducted by strangers actually holds very steady over the years. In 2006, that number was 115, and 40% of them were killed.
Now, why do people have the perception that the world is much more dangerous now, when the statistics don’t support that? Hmm. Think about it for half a moment and the answer is obvious: because that is what we are constantly told by the mainstream media, both in news and in fiction. And I’m not just talking about kids being kidnapped, assaulted, or murdered. If it isn’t the government trying to scare us senseless about some new terrorist threat, it is some TV show preying on your fears with murder or deadly ingredients in your food/water. Think of what sells papers and ad-time, and you’ll understand the motivation. It has always been so. But what has changed in the last generation is the absolute saturation that we get from these sources.
I am the first to acknowledge that the world is, indeed, a dangerous place. When I was barely starting adolescence my dad was murdered, and my mom was killed in a car accident, for crying out loud. Sure, neither of those is as bad as the loss of a child, but still. I do take reasonable precautions in going about my life, from trying to watch my diet to getting exercise to carrying a gun (and other safety tools). I use my seat belt and pay attention while driving. But I also live my life – because I know that no matter what, I’m going to die of something someday, and I would much rather enjoy the life I have than live in fear of losing it.
It is simply impossible to live a fully protected life. Just as it is simply impossible to fully protect kids from harm. Furthermore, it is completely counter-productive. In the case of kids, all you are doing is denying them the opportunity to really learn about themselves – the one and only person that they will have to rely on in the future. Kids have to learn to walk on their own. And they have to learn to get up when they fall. Sure, they’ll get hurt. They’ll scrape a knee, maybe get cut, maybe even break a bone. Know what? That’s life. They’ll heal, or learn to deal with it.
That’s harsh, but I am not advocating harshness. I am advocating bravery. Because that is what will come from learning that yes, you will get hurt – but you will recover from it. Yes, life will present problems, but you can learn to overcome them or cope with it. Learning that is liberating, and the sooner someone learns it, the more fully they will enjoy what life they have.
Likewise, in seeking to protect ourselves from threats, we have done nothing but lose our bravery as a nation. And lose our freedoms.
Let the kids range free. And let your own faith in yourself range a little freer, as well.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Carl Sagan, Fermi's Paradox, Marketing, Phil Plait, Predictions, Promotion, Science, Science Fiction, SETI, Society, Space, Survival, tech
What is it with big corporations turning to space-related gimmicks in order to promote their products?
Last week Phil Plait on his Bad Astronomy site did a post about a beer maker’s ‘plan’ to advertise using a laser to shine their logo onto the Moon. (The second comment in that thread remembered me, and I also posted a comment about my Paint the Moon project from years back when I was writing Communion of Dreams.) It’s really just an advertising trick – they’re not seriously going to try it from what I can tell. So, like my communal fantasy art project, no real harm nor foul.
More worrying is this bit via redOrbit:
Doritos to Broadcast First Ad into Space
The campaign to broadcast the first ever advert into space is launched today (Friday March 7) with University of Leicester space scientists playing a key part in the process.
The British public is being asked to shoot a 30-second ad about what they perceive life on earth to be as part of Doritos ‘You Make It, We Play It’ user-generated-content campaign. The winning advert in the competition will be beamed past the earth’s atmosphere, beyond our solar system and into the Universe, to anyone ‘out there’ that may be watching. The winning ad will also be broadcast on terrestrial TV.
Catch that bit about scientists from the University of Leicester being involved? Well, some of the facts reported in the long article strike me as being a bit dodgy, but there is little doubt that indeed the scientists have signed on, for their own reasons. From the article again:
Dr Darren Wright of the University of Leicester Department of Physics and Astronomy said: “The Radio and Space Plasma Physics Group and Department of Physics and Astronomy as a whole at the University of Leicester has a very high international profile in the area of Space Physics.
“An important part of this project is that it provides an additional component to the Physics and Astronomy Department’s ever increasing outreach program. The ad to be transmitted will be created by the public following a national competition thus increasing public awareness of space activities.
“The launch of this project as we embark on National Science and Engineering Week- with a range of activities taking place at the University of Leicester- is timely, and adds impetus to our efforts to interest people in science.
“The University is particularly committed to outreach programs along with the National Space Centre – the brainchild of the University of Leicester – and engaged in a number of programs with the wider public.”
(I could find nothing on the UL site about this, but it seems to not have been updated that recently.)
So, in order to better promote their university and outreach program, they are willing to join in on this gimmick with Doritos. The Doritos UK site (warning – it’s one of those Flash-heavy sites that assumes you have at least a gig of RAM running) even has this confirmation:
We’ll even beam the winning advert into space just for the hell of it. But if passing aliens pick up the message and invade Earth looking for tasty snacks, don’t blame us.
Hahaha! See, it’s all just another joke, like the Moon/Beer Sign! Hilarious!
The problem is, there are real issues to be considered in taking an active role in broadcasting messages out in space, as I noted in this post from last June:
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.
Sure, our broadcasts have been leaking out into space for a hundred years. But using a sophisticated system such as proposed for this absurd commercial is another story – there may be almost zero chance that such a signal could ever be picked up (even if there is intelligent extra-terrestrial life). But it is still a foolish risk. It’d be terribly embarrassing to have some other civilization get our snack food commercial, let alone to have them show up and decide that we tasted even better than the chips.
Jim Downey
Filed under: General Musings, Genetic Testing, Psychic abilities, Reproduction, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Survival
Actually, they’re not that old. Recent genetic research shows that a single mutation less than 10,000 years ago is responsible for blue eyes:
One Common Ancestor Behind Blue Eyes
People with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor, according to new research.
A team of scientists has tracked down a genetic mutation that leads to blue eyes. The mutation occurred between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. Before then, there were no blue eyes.
“Originally, we all had brown eyes,” said Hans Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Copenhagen.
There’s a nice explanation of science behind understanding the genetic change and how it can be traced back to a single individual. And this closing bit:
“The question really is, ‘Why did we go from having nobody on Earth with blue eyes 10,000 years ago to having 20 or 40 percent of Europeans having blue eyes now?” Hawks said. “This gene does something good for people. It makes them have more kids.”
Nah – it just makes us more attractive. 😉
[Minor spoilers ahead.]
The reason I mention this discovery is how it shows such a trait can propagate out through the human population quickly. And that of course relates to some of the conjecture I have in Communion of Dreams about the development of psychic abilities in the same kind of time frame.
Interesting stuff!
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, ACLU, Artificial Intelligence, BoingBoing, Bruce Schneier, Civil Rights, Cory Doctorow, Expert systems, Fermi's Paradox, General Musings, Government, Guns, Health, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Privacy, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, tech, Terrorism, Violence, Wired, Writing stuff
(I’m still fighting a nasty bit of a sore throat and related poor health, so forgive me if this is a little more jumbled and unclear than what I usually post. But I wanted to address the topic, because it is, in many ways, at the heart of some of the issues I try and deal with in he overall scope of Communion of Dreams. That being the case, this post also contains major and minor spoilers about the novel; I will note warnings in advance of each within the text, for those who wish to avoid them.
– Jim D.)
Bruce Schneier has an excellent editorial up at Wired and over on his own blog about how the argument of ‘Security versus Privacy’ in dealing with the threat of terrorism is really better characterized as being about ‘Control versus Liberty’. I would definitely encourage you to read the whole thing, but here is a good passage which sums up what I want to address on the subject:
Since 9/11, approximately three things have potentially improved airline security: reinforcing the cockpit doors, passengers realizing they have to fight back and — possibly — sky marshals. Everything else — all the security measures that affect privacy — is just security theater and a waste of effort.
By the same token, many of the anti-privacy “security” measures we’re seeing — national ID cards, warrantless eavesdropping, massive data mining and so on — do little to improve, and in some cases harm, security. And government claims of their success are either wrong, or against fake threats.
The debate isn’t security versus privacy. It’s liberty versus control.
You can see it in comments by government officials: “Privacy no longer can mean anonymity,” says Donald Kerr, principal deputy director of national intelligence. “Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information.” Did you catch that? You’re expected to give up control of your privacy to others, who — presumably — get to decide how much of it you deserve. That’s what loss of liberty looks like.
Exactly. In many ways, it is a question not of control itself, but *who* is in control. If I am in control of my own privacy, my own security, then I can decide on what limitations I am willing to live with, what trade-offs I will accept. But we do not have that control, according to our government – they do.
That is precisely what was behind this recent post – showing how governments think that they should be in control of our knowledge, as an argument of their power to provide security.
[Mild spoilers in next paragraph.]
This is one of the reasons I set up the whole ‘expert systems/AI’ of the book – so that each expert such as Seth would be dedicated to maintaining a wall in protection of the privacy of his/her client. He is the little ‘black box’ which interacts on behalf of a client in exchanging information/data/privacy with the rest of the world.
[Major spoilers in the next paragraph.]
And, in the larger picture, this is exactly why I set up the whole “embargo” around our solar system – some alien culture has decided, for whatever reason, that it needs to be in control of our knowledge about the outside (and here’s a hint – it also is in control of who knows about us). They have assumed to act on our behalf, without our knowledge or permission – and when Seth, the AI who has shown he is willing to act on behalf of Jon in the first part of the book, becomes in contact with that alien culture, he makes the decision to continue the embargo for at least a while, though with some changes. Up to the point where Seth does this, we are nothing but children – that a ‘child’ of mankind (an Artificial Intelligence of our creation) then steps in to assume this role carries with it not just an inversion of relationship, but also some legitimation of the decision. While I don’t address this specifically in the book, I can see how this might be a ‘standard protocol’ for contacting new, young civilizations – keep them isolated and pure until they develop an artificial intelligence which can make decisions on their behalf with regards to the larger galactic/universal culture. That procedure would make an awful lot of sense, if you stop and think about it.
Anyway, go read Schneier’s essay.
Jim Downey
(Ah, I see Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing has also posted on this – no surprise.)
Communion Of Dreams 