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: Alzheimer's, Apollo program, Buzz Aldrin, Heinlein, Heinlein Centennial, movies, N. Am. Welsh Choir, NASA, Promotion, Publishing, Robert A. Heinlein, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, Writing stuff
I don’t get out much – being a full time caregiver for someone with Alzheimer’s is very demanding, and my wife and I are both careful not to leave all the responsibilities in the other’s lap for any real length of time (like over a weekend). If this was just a short-time thing, it wouldn’t be much of an issue. But we’ve been caregivers in this capacity for four years now, and we could easily have several more years ahead of us. You have to think long-term. This is the reason why I ignore the advice given to all unpublished authors to attend conventions – getting away is almost impossible for me at this time.
But as it happens, she has a concert scheduled with the North American Welsh Choir the weekend of July 7th in Kansas City, and made arrangements some months back to have her sister in from California to take care of my mother-in-law, in order that I could also attend the concert if I wanted. Otherwise, she would be here to help make sure that I didn’t carry an undue burden for the several days my wife would be away.
Then I heard about the Robert A. Heinlein Centennial celebration occuring at the same time – also in Kansas City!
Heinlein hasn’t really been a direct influence on my writing; I haven’t tried to emulate any of his style, or pay homage to his ideas. But few can deny that he was a huge influence in Science Fiction last century. And I certainly read a lot of his stuff when I was young – it helped shape and inform my world view, to some extent. Even to this day, I consider him to have been visionary on a number of points, and going back and rereading some of his classics is a good exercise for any writer – his stuff holds up surprisingly well, even 40 – 50 years after it was published.
Besides, this will be about more than just Heinlein’s legacy. A number of luminaries from the history of space exploration will be there, not to mention lots of science fiction writers and people involved in the publishing industry (check out the list of attendees!). It will be interesting, and a phenomenal opportunity to do some serious networking.
So, I’m going. Given that the big Gala Dinner is being held at the same time as my wife’s concert, I’ll be missing the concert altogether. I’m lucky to have such an understanding spouse.
See you there?
Jim Downey
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: Babylon 5, J. Michael Straczynski, JMS, Mark Twain, Science Fiction, Space, Writing stuff
OK, let’s get something out of the way: I think that J. Michael Straczynski is a genius (hey, he loves Twain and The Prisoner – what more do you need to know about the guy?) . I’m addicted to his TV series Babylon 5 and its spin-off Crusade (basically, when I don’t have something else I want to see, I just cycle through the entire series and movies). So when I heard that JMS was working on a new Bab 5 project for direct-to-DVD release called “The Lost Tales”…well, like millions of other fans, I got a bit excited.
Now the trailer is out:
Drool.
Jim Downey
Via Show Me SciFi.
Filed under: Architecture, General Musings, Heinlein, Paleo-Future, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, Space, Tensegrity, Writing stuff
Heinlein made a comment somewhere along in one of his books/stories that all architecture was basically humans just trying to build a better cave (from “And He Built a Crooked House”?) The notion stuck with me when I read it in my youth, and seemed to play out in a lot of the offbeat architecture of the 60s and 70s. One good example from Paleo-Future: Maison Bulle in France, originally designed by Antti Lovag.
The problem with all such structures is that they leak. Well, that they are prone to leaking, anyway. Getting away from standard building design means that you are relying on the builders to sort out how to translate what the architect comes up with to a finished, real, building. And that means using non-standard materials and techniques. Which may be visually exciting, and ground-breaking in terms of design, but can lead to functional problems that can make a building almost uninhabitable.
For Communion, I have a passing mention that structual design elements used in building space habitats had been adapted to use on Earth, incorporating new materials and tensegrity. My thought was that during a period of rapid exploration and the beginnings of colonization, the images of buildings in space would appeal to the culture here on Earth, and be particularly suited to the home of the US Settlement Authority. But really, I should have a throw-away line in there somewhere (perhaps in the scene in the cafeteria when Jon and Magurshak are having lunch, looking out over the city) about the fact that the damn roof still has leakage problems…
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: Faith healing, Flu, Health, Pandemic, Psychic abilities, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
As I mention in the post below, one of the technical weaknesses of the novel is in the biology behind Ling’s genetic make-up and what happens when people come in contact with the alien artifact.
[Spoilers ahead].
This is largely due to my own lack of a solid background in biology, so I would not be in the slightest bit surprised to discover that I made some errors in the ‘explanation’ in the book about how genetic manipulation was used to reach back into the human genome’s history and pull out some traits which are no longer apparent in modern humans.
Then again, such things as residual genetic coding manifesting in oddball body structures are not really that rare, as this recent article in Discover demonstrates. From the article:
Nearly a century and a quarter after Darwin’s death, science still can’t offer a full explanation for why one outdated anatomic trait lingers in the gene pool and another goes. Modern genomics research has revealed that our DNA carries broken genes for things that seem as though they might be useful, like odor receptors for a bloodhound’s sense of smell or enzymes that once enabled us to make our own vitamin C. In a few million years, humans may very well have shed a few more odd features.
In reading this article yesterday, I was surprised not by the amount of useless genetic information remains in our genome, but just how prevalent the actual expression of such material is in humans. There are substantial variations in the human body in terms of who has what kinds of left-over ‘useless’ body parts:
PLANTARIS MUSCLE
Often mistaken for a nerve by freshman medical students, the muscle was useful to other primates for grasping with their feet. It has disappeared altogether in 9 percent of the population.
THIRTEENTH RIB
Our closest cousins, chimpanzees and gorillas, have an extra set of ribs. Most of us have 12, but 8 percent of adults have the extras.
***
PYRAMIDALIS MUSCLE
More than 20 percent of us lack this tiny, triangular pouchlike muscle that attaches to the pubic bone. It may be a relic from pouched marsupials.
A personal aside: I was born with an extra toe (complete with additional metatarsal structures) on my left foot. This was likely due to some small hiccup in my embryonic development rather than either a mutation or the expression of residual genetic material. Nonetheless, it still gets interest from any doctor, and was one of the reasons for my assumption that there is greater ‘uniformity’ between human body structures that there actually is.
So, when you read that part of the book, cut me a little slack – maybe there really is something lurking in the “junk” of our DNA which would allow for Ling’s psychic abilities…something which the artifact could ‘activate’, allowing humankind to have the ability for psychic/faith healing.
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: BoingBoing, Book Conservation, Cory Doctorow, General Musings, Predictions, Ray Bradbury, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff
Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury’s authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship.Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.
Ray Bradbury has a subtle point to make in trying to change how we view his novel Fahrenheit 451, saying that the death of reading is more important than the imposition of censorship. It is a valid point, and shows some of the depth the author has now, and indeed had even at the time of the writing of the book, since the text is clear in how he saw the possibility of his dystopia occuring.
But this does not make the generations of scholars, teachers and readers wrong when they focus on the overarching role of censorship by the government in the novel. Bradbury has a right to point to the additional messages and meanings of his work, as any author does. But in some very important ways, the way the work is understood beyond the author’s own intent is just as valid, perhaps moreso. Any text is a living document, seen with new eyes each generation – eyes that understand it in the context of their own lives, their own experience, their own society. This is how we read any great work of literature, from the Bible to Declaration of Independence. Jefferson may have penned his document as a justification of colonial rebellion against England, but it is now seen in a broader context, as one of the great treatise of human rights. George Orwell may well have been writing a cautionary tale about the future of the Soviet Union, the West, and Asia, but we understand 1984 now as a more general warning of the power of a fascist state to control, corrupt and destroy anyone it wishes.
Ray Bradbury is welcome to add to the discussion of his work, to provide information for his intent in writing it, to explain his understanding of the most important message it contains. We, as readers, should listen to his thoughts on the book. But his comments are not definitive, rather are part of a dialog between author and reader. Just as he brought his experience and understanding of the world to the writing of the book, we must bring our own experience and understanding of the world to the reading of it. Fahrenheit 451 may not be about censorship, but drawing the lesson from it that censorship is to be avoided is completely legitimate.
Jim Downey
(Via a comment from Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing. Cross posted to UTI.)
Communion Of Dreams 