Filed under: BoingBoing, MIT, NASA, Predictions, Science Fiction, Space, tech
Via BoingBoing, word of a new design of space suit under development at MIT which would replace the bulky pressurized suits used for the last 40 years:
Newman’s prototype suit is a revolutionary departure from the traditional model. Instead of using gas pressurization, which exerts a force on the astronaut’s body to protect it from the vacuum of space, the suit relies on mechanical counter-pressure, which involves wrapping tight layers of material around the body. The trick is to make a suit that is skintight but stretches with the body, allowing freedom of movement.
This is exactly the kind of suit I envisioned for Communion of Dreams, something that looks more like a wetsuit than a small spacecraft. Not that that is a new idea, since it is also the kind of suit envisioned by many SF writers and movies/shows since the 60’s. It just makes sense that the tech would evolve this direction, not unlike how early deep-sea diving rigs became more sleek and user-friendly over time.
There’s another benefit to the direction that the MIT team is going with their design: it will aid in maintaining physical conditioning, which is always a problem for prolonged weightlessness. From the news release:
The suits could also help astronauts stay fit during the six-month journey to Mars. Studies have shown that astronauts lose up to 40 percent of their muscle strength in space, but the new outfits could be designed to offer varying resistance levels, allowing the astronauts to exercise against the suits during a long flight to Mars.
Images available here.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Government, Heinlein, Heinlein Centennial, NASA, Peter Diamandis, Predictions, Robert A. Heinlein, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, tech, TGV Rockets
One of the panels I attended at the Heinlein Centennial included Pat Bahn of TGV Rockets. I got there a bit late, and he had a call which pulled him away early, but the few minutes he spoke about his company and the future of spaceflight as he sees it were fascinating.
As opposed to the large-scale space project, such as we’ve seen both in government (NASA) and with Peter Diamandis‘ vision (mentioned previously), Bahn has a very mundane, almost boring approach of incrementalism. He figures that it makes more sense to just keep expanding at the margins – to develop dependable, suborbital services which will bring about a demand for increased services, which will spur additional innovation in the necessary tech, which will in turn make more expansion possible, et cetera, in an upward spiral which will eventually get us off this rock in a stable and dependable way. His basic strategy is expressed in this article he wrote three years ago:
In the late 1970’s, Business Week magazine ran a cover story on the latest Cray supercomputer and how it was going to revolutionize American business. Deep inside that same magazine was a small story mentioning that Apple computer was now selling micro-computers. Business Week was correct that a computer was going to revolutionize American society, they were just wrong about which machine it was going to be. Fifty percent of the American public and 99 percent of the aerospace industry are convinced that a moon program will revitalize and grow a new space era. Meanwhile, 1 percent of the industry is working on the systems that will actually do that.
For the last 2 years a quiet change has been occurring. Small, privately funded teams have been flying prototype systems that have not received much notice. Armadillo Aerospace in Dallas, XCor and Scaled Composites in Mojave, Blue Origins in Seattle and TGV Rockets in Norman, Okla. have all begun pushing equipment off of the drawing boards and into the skies.
The key is cost effectiveness. Rather than have thousands of people servicing a custom-built, highly advanced vehicle with an extensive support system going for orbital capability, a small suborbital reusuable vehicle should be able to serve much the same market as a first step into space, with minimal support staff (TGV stands for “Two Guys and a Van”) for a tiny fraction of the cost. That market? Scientific, military, even conventional business needs. And the cool thing, Bahn said at the Centennial, is that if you are working with scientists, they will go out of their way to help you, since it is in their nature to want to get the best performance out of equipment by tinkering and adapting it.
This notion of providing a limited and possibly passing service is not a new idea. Bahn has in the past compared the current state of suborbital launch capability to where private aviation was in the 1920’s:
“One of the big business models was to fly up and take a picture of your house and sell it to you for $5,” he said. “That was a big deal.”
“There were many things that were done in the 1920’s that did not suvive the long term test. Wing walking is not what you would call a real market. Never-the-less, many markets matured and outgrew many of the experiments of the era.”
And there was a lot of thought early in the development of rocketry that such capability could be used for postal delivery. It doesn’t sound economically feasible at this point, but there’s nothing to say that it might not become an attractive transportation option for such firms as UPS or FedEx if dependable services were provided by a TGV Rockets or some other company. In his juvenile novel Rocket Ship Galileo, Robert A. Heinlein had his characters adapt a retired “mail rocket” for their own spacecraft, used to fly to the Moon.
I find this notion of private development of spaceflight more than a little exciting. When I wrote Communion of Dreams, I was operating under the old model – that the enterprise of getting into space in a big way was going to mandate large governmental involvement and coordination. I’m not going to rewrite the novel, but I am reworking my own thoughts and expectations – this is probably the single largest change for me from attending the Centennial.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Babylon 5, Burt Rutan, Charlie Stross, General Musings, Global Warming, Heinlein, Heinlein Centennial, J. Michael Straczynski, Jeff Greason, JMS, Peter Diamandis, Predictions, Robert A. Heinlein, Science, Science Fiction, Singularity, Society, Space, tech, XCOR
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.)
Filed under: BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow, Firefly, Guns, H. G. Wells, Heinlein, Joss Whedon, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, SCA, Science Fiction, Serenity, Society, Space, tech, Writing stuff
There’s a long and wonderful tradition of mixing genres in literature, and science fiction in particular has always had a tendency to appreciate anachronisms, to play the game of “what if spaceflight had been discovered/introduced 100 or 500 years ago”, or to suppose that for some reason some critical tech wasn’t discovered until well after it actually was in history. You can have a lot of fun with this, of pretending that H.G. Wells or Jules Verne (or even Mark Twain, for that matter) were writing not fiction, but suppressed fact, in their stories, and then extending the tech from that point forward. Conversely, someone like Joss Whedon can have a good time giving the crew of Serenity conventional modern firearms rather than futuristic weapons.
I understand that. I can enjoy an anachronism as much as the next guy. In fact, I was very heavily involved in the SCA for about 15 years (to the extent that I was King twice, held all three peerages, and served in numerous offices including Society Marshal). That’s how I met my good lady wife, and many of my closest friends.
But I don’t really get the whole fascination with Steampunk. Oh, sure, there’s been a lot of good fiction done in the sub-genre. But it’s like it has taken on cult qualities. People go nuts over it – BoingBoing sometimes seems to be Steampunk-crazed, and a search turns up almost 200 entries on the site with that theme. It’s not just appreciation of the literature – it’s the whole “build a steampunk this or that artifact” that has people all excited.There are whole publications and websites devoted to home-brew steampunk projects, not to mention clothing & accessories, weapons, et cetera. A good buddy of mine sent me a link to this ‘Steampunk Jar of Articulated Fireflies‘ yesterday, all excited that he had all the materials on hand to build one, except the phosphorous BBs. Um, OK…thanks for that, but, uh, why would you want such a thing? It’s like Star Trek fandom suddenly took over the defining aesthetic for some significant portion of society, and started making it cool to have your own bat’letH and creating a market for cell phones that function like Original Season communicators. I mean, it’s just plain weird that it has penetrated so far into the culture, with no sign of slowing down.
Yes, of course some of my reaction to this is touched with envy. It’d be a rush to have my fiction engender this kind of fan creativity. Well, to a certain extent it would be. I think the first time I came across someone with a subcutaneous bone-conducting mic/speaker based on my description in Communion of Dreams, I think I’d freak out…
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Depression, Health, Science, SETI, Space, tech, Writing stuff
OK, I feel miserable. Summer cold, with all the joys that brings. But I thought I would take a moment to point out this article on the new SETI Allen Telescope Array in northern California, about to come on-line.
Not that we’ll actually hear anything. It’s clear that we’ve been embargoed, cut off from the rest of the universe until we mature some as a species.
I need a nap.
Jim Downey
(Via BoingBoing.)
Filed under: BoingBoing, Charlie Stross, Cory Doctorow, Fermi's Paradox, NASA, Paleo-Future, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, tech, Writing stuff
Charlie Stross is a smart guy. And a fine writer, with significant Science Fiction cred. So when I saw an item posted by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing yesterday titled “Futility of Space Colonization” with a link to Charlie’s full post on his blog, I was curious. From the post:
That’s the first point I want to get across: that if the distances involved in interplanetary travel are enormous, and the travel times fit to rival the first Australian settlers, then the distances and times involved in interstellar travel are mind-numbing.
This is not to say that interstellar travel is impossible; quite the contrary. But to do so effectively you need either (a) outrageous amounts of cheap energy, or (b) highly efficient robot probes, or (c) a magic wand. And in the absence of (c) you’re not going to get any news back from the other end in less than decades. Even if (a) is achievable, or by means of (b) we can send self-replicating factories and have them turn distant solar systems into hives of industry, and more speculatively find some way to transmit human beings there, they are going to have zero net economic impact on our circumstances (except insofar as sending them out costs us money).
And then this, about the question of colonization in our solar system:
But even so, when you get down to it, there’s not really any economically viable activity on the horizon for people to engage in that would require them to settle on a planet or asteroid and live there for the rest of their lives. In general, when we need to extract resources from a hostile environment we tend to build infrastructure to exploit them (such as oil platforms) but we don’t exactly scurry to move our families there. Rather, crews go out to work a long shift, then return home to take their leave. After all, there’s no there there — just a howling wilderness of north Atlantic gales and frigid water that will kill you within five minutes of exposure. And that, I submit, is the closest metaphor we’ll find for interplanetary colonization. Most of the heavy lifting more than a million kilometres from Earth will be done by robots, overseen by human supervisors who will be itching to get home and spend their hardship pay. And closer to home, the commercialization of space will be incremental and slow, driven by our increasing dependence on near-earth space for communications, positioning, weather forecasting, and (still in its embryonic stages) tourism. But the domed city on Mars is going to have to wait for a magic wand or two to do something about the climate, or reinvent a kind of human being who can thrive in an airless, inhospitable environment.
Colonize the Gobi desert, colonise the North Atlantic in winter — then get back to me about the rest of the solar system!
OK, like I said, Charlie is a smart guy. Go read the entire thing – I think that he has nailed the economics of the matter of space colonization pretty solidly. He’s right with all the physics, energy requirements, et cetera, from everything that I see and know on the subject.
And he’s dead wrong.
Oh, I think that he’s right – right now, it is hard to come up with a pragmatic, practical argument for the possibility of space colonization. But his argument reminds me considerably of this item posted on Paleo-Future last week:
Aerial Navigation Will Never Be Popular (1906)
The August 14, 1906 Lake County Times (Hammond, Indiana) ran an article by Sir Hiram Maxim titled, “Aerial Navigation Will Never Be Popular.” An excerpt, as well as the original article in its entirety, appears below.
But I do not think the flying machine will ever be used for ordinary traffic and for what may be called “popular” purposes. People who write about the conditions under which the business and pleasure of the world will be carried on in another hundred years generally make flying machines take the place of railways and steamers, but that such will ever be the case I very much doubt.
That item goes on to talk about how flying machines will undoubtably be adopted as weapons of war, but that they will forever remain too expensive and risky for any other venture.
The thing is, it is difficult in the extreme to make solid predictions more than a couple of decades out. In my own lifetime I have seen surprise wonders come on the scene, and expectations thwarted. Technology develops in ways that don’t always make sense, except perhaps in hindsight. 100 years ago, many people thought that commercial flight would never become a reality. 40 years ago, people thought that we’d have permanent bases on the Moon by now. You get my drift.
Everything that Charlie Stross says in his post makes sense. You can’t get to that future from here. But “here” is going to change in ways which are unpredictable, and then the future becomes more in flux than what we expect at present. For Communion of Dreams, I set forth a possible future history which leads to permanent settlements on the Moon, Mars, and Europa, with functional space stations at several other locations outside of Earth orbit. Will it happen? I dunno. I doubt that exactly my scenario would come about. But it is plausible.
And with experience in dealing with exploration and colonization in our neighborhood will come the necessary technologies to go further. Even without a dramatic technological leap, it would be possible to slowly expand outward through the Kuiper Belt and into the Oort Cloud, playing hopscotch from one asteroid or cometary body to the next over generations, out past the edge of our ill-defined solar system and into a neighboring one. I’ve seen calculations pertaining to Fermi’s Paradox indicating that a race with little more than our technology could basically spread across the entire galaxy this way in a matter of less than a million years. Add in that any race doing so would undoubtably maintain at least some minimal rate of technological improvement, and you’ll experience a logarithmic growth which would include some truly stunning (to us) tech.
I am surprised that a writer of Stross’ calibre isn’t able to come up with scenarios which allow for him to imagine this happening, for it to make economic, practical, pragmatic sense. Besides, there is more to human motivation than simple economics – there are plenty of instances in our own real history where people have done things for reasons which do not make sense in economic terms, and accomplished goals which would otherwise never have been attempted.
So, yeah, you can’t get there from here. At least now you can’t. But give us a few decades…
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, General Musings, movies, NYT, Philip K. Dick, Predictions, Press, Publishing, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff
Brent Staples has a good opinion piece in today’s New York Times, titled: Philip K. Dick: A Sage of the Future Whose Time Has Finally Come. Staples notes that Dick is now getting the kind of recognition he deserves (see also this post on the subject previously), but I was particularly struck with the ending:
The science fiction writer’s job is to survey the future and report back to the rest of us. Dick took this role seriously. He spent his life writing in ardent defense of the human and warning against the perils that would flow from an uncritical embrace of technology. As his work becomes more popular, readers who know him only from the movies will find it even darker and more disturbing — and quite relevant to the technologically obsessed present.
I couldn’t agree more.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Feedback, Predictions, Publishing, Science Fiction, tech, Writing stuff
JK, a good friend of mine, just had a chance to read the novel through for the first time, and sent me a response. He’s clearly going be biased by his friendship, but I still thought that it might be interesting to see the email exchange we had. Caution: [Major Spoilers Ahead.] JK’s comments are in italics, my replies after.
I really liked the book. For what it’s worth, I expected the return of the fire flu and guessed that Mallory was the carrier and that there was likely to be something screwy about the cyberwear he made, guessed that Gates had some strong connection to the clones, figured that Darnell had told earth about the artifact.
I’m not sure whether this was due to reading it so slowly that I had ample time to consider and reconsider or if it a result of my analyzing everything these days. As I restrict my access to the general noise in the human world I find myself looking deeper into those bits I do let in. It’s been getting to the point that when I take Tasha for walks that I have to remind myself about that little physics story – and that the sky is simply blue and has birds in it 🙂
Heheheheehehehe. I’m not in the slightest bothered that you were able to figure out those things – in fact, I’m glad to hear it. I was very careful to build the necessary clues into the narrative so that anyone could go back and find them. That carries a risk that a few people who are reading carefully and are smart enough will pick up on some or all of the ‘mysteries’. That you did so just means that I did a good job in having sufficient information there to draw the legitimate conclusions later – that I was ‘playing fair’ with my reader.
Anyway, I loved how you developed the action around my expectations. And the biggest surprise to me was the “use” of the artifact. I had really been convinced from early on it was going to be an alien art show direct to the solar system and the gel was part of the power system required for the “beaming” into our heads.
An interesting idea. I hope that the final revelation was nonetheless satisfactory, and fit the available data.
As I mentioned earlier, I found it especially entertaining to have the clear references to current and recent past happenings.
Good, good.
The only technical part I keep coming back to is the experts and their trouble with non-inertial frames. I haven’t gone back through all of it so the following is “lose”. The experts can’t travel well on the space transports but they can seemingly do ok with the quick change of the AG systems. I know for several of the technologies you mentioned oddities in the theories surrounding them. I don’t recall details about the AG that would explain the differences, but then I read Chapter one more than 6 weeks ago and I am nearing 50 🙂
Nah, it is a fair criticism. There are two ‘weak’ spots in the tech of the book – that is one of them, and the other is the biology which lead to the creation of Ling with her latent abilities (which, interestingly enough, I was going to blog about this morning). My only defense is that it *is* science fiction, and while I make a good-faith effort to keep everything working and compliant with science as we understand it today, there is some slop allowed for the effects of the artifact and discoveries we’ve not made yet.
The quickening of the pace of the story in the final chapters was exhilarating! To quote a hackneyed phrase – I couldn’t put it down. Really. I read straight through from C 15 to the end (letting the weeds have a reprieve 🙂 )
Excellent. Paul [another friend] and I were talking about this last night, and he said that he just couldn’t understand people who wouldn’t feel compelled by the book this way. I know I have had a couple of people tell me that was the case. Then again, I have had several tell me that they dived in and didn’t put it down until they were finished 12 or 13 hours later. I don’t expect *everyone* to love it, or even like it – people have different tastes, and that’s OK.
Thanks!!
My pleasure. With your permission, I’d like to post this entire exchange on the blog, since it might just help some agent or publisher to see that there is a readership out there for the thing. I’ll not ID you other than by initials, unless you want to claim ID.
Well, about time to get MMIL up, get the morning really going.
So, there it is. Draw your own conclusions, or make your own comments.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, CNET, Expert systems, Heinlein, Kromofons, Predictions, Psychic abilities, Science Fiction, Society, Synesthesia, tech, Writing stuff
A friend sent me a link to a CNET news item from last week about how a new ‘color alphabet’ was going to revolutionize communications. From the article:
Lee Freedman has waited a long time, but he thinks the moment is finally right to spring on the world the color alphabet he invented as a 19-year-old at Mardi Gras in 1972.
For 35 years, between stints as a doctor, a real estate agent and a pizza maker at the Woodstock concert in 1994, Freedman has been working on Kromofons–an innovative alphabet in which the 26 English letters are represented solely by individual colors–waiting for technology to catch up with him.
And now, thanks to the Internet, the ubiquity of color monitors, Microsoft Word plug-ins and his being able to launch a Kromofons-based e-mail system, Freedman thinks he is finally ready.
Well, maybe.
Science fiction authors have used various tricks at evolving language and written communications, one of the most memorable for me being Heinlein’s Speedtalk from the novella Gulf. And working in other senses is a common tactic, up to and including extra-sensory perception (such as telepathy). This is part of the way I use synesthesia in Communion of Dreams: as a method by which the human brain can layer meaning and information in new ways, expanding the potential for understanding the world. It is noteworthy that many synesthetes will associate colors with a given word or even letter – it may be possible that Lee Freedman drew upon such an experience to create his color alphabet.
(An aside – I have experienced mild episodes of synesthesia upon several occasions. Sometimes these episodes have been induced by drugs, sometimes by intense concentration, sometimes of their own accord. I think that this is a latent ability everyone has, but not something which we usually access, because it is poorly understood by the general populace.)
Anyway, while Kromofons or something similar is certainly possible in the context of computer display (of almost any variety, including nano-tech paint) , there are some real limitations that I can see. First off, you wouldn’t want to have to have a full set of color pencils/markers and keep changing them in order to just write something down in the ‘real world’. Printed material of whatever variety would also be subject to degradation from light-fading: some pigments fade more quickly than others, some inks are more frail than others, some colors react to different lighting conditions in different ways. (Those are all problems I’ve experienced as a book & document conservator, as well as owning a gallery of art.) Even in the world of computer display, variations in lighting and equipment could render some colors ‘untrue’. Not to mention problems experienced by people as they age and color perception skews, or from the small but real percentage of the population which suffers from one type or another of color blindness. Sure, a good AI or expert system would be able to ‘translate’ for people who had such limitations, in the context of augmented reality, but that tech isn’t currently available except in its very infancy.
So, while I enjoy a slightly-nutty idea as much as the next person, and can see some ways that Kromofons could be used for fun, I don’t really see the idea going too far.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 