THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES...AGAIN

A scientist at M.I.T. has been working on a way to decipher our memories and encode them like data for a computer. The goal is to be able to restore memories in cases where Alzheimer’s disease or some other damage to the brain has caused neuron failure and memory loss.

Dr. Ed Boyden uses a protein extracted from algae that produces electricity when struck by light. By inserting the protein into brain neurons and then triggering them with light, he and his team are hoping to be able to map out brain pathways, learning more about how the brain functions and possibly even translating the neural paths of memories into binary code, which would allow them to be stored like other computer data. So far there have been promising results from testing with mice.

Obviously the storage and re-implantation of memories (or implantation of new ones) could have a lot more applications than just helping dementia victims, and there have been all kinds of science fiction stories covering that ground, including movies like Total Recall and Johnny Mnemonic. I suspect the reality, when it comes, won’t be nearly so cut and dried. After all, much of what we “remember” is edited and rewritten by our conscious minds, taking pieces of actual memory and combining them with experience and knowledge we’ve acquired along the way. The result can’t possibly be like the precise and well-organized data computers like to receive, and it certainly won’t “play back” like a piece of video. At best, a replay would be like a dream state, where we often jump from one scene or setting to another without any linking moments between. The continuity and context could easily be lost. So I suspect the closest anyone will come to returning a lost memory will be to take the retrievable highlights, and then string them together with manufactured filler in a way someone or some machine thinks will make sense. Kind of like one of those Hollywood movies “based on a true story”. Entertaining, maybe. But a preservation of a real past? Not hardly.

WHEN COMPUTERS BECOME TOO SMART FOR OUR OWN GOOD

I recently finished reading the final book in Robert J. Sawyer’s trilogy Wake, Watch and Wonder. The www of the titles is not just alliteration—the story is about an artificial intelligence spontaneously coming to life in the World Wide Web. Far-fetched? Well, considering that, even after decades of study, we still don’t understand what consciousness is or why we humans are conscious and rocks are not, who can say that computer intelligence won’t arise someday soon? The latest in a long line of the world’s fastest supercomputers, a Cray XK7 at the U.S. government's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee has reached a processing speed of 17.59 petaflops, or 17.59 quadrillion calculations per second. Most estimates of the human brain’s raw potential computing power are still higher than this, but something called “Moore’s Law” essentially projects that the processing power of computer chips doubles every two years or so, and it’s been proven correct so far. So how long will it be before computers outperform us? A decade or two, according to many experts.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that computers will be smarter, exactly, because we’re still a little fuzzy on just what constitutes intelligence, so we don’t know how to program it into a machine (although there have been research projects working on that for years now).

In fiction, an artificial intelligence (AI) is almost always a bad thing. Two of the most famous examples are HAL from 2001:A Space Odyssey, which tried to kill off its spaceship crew, and Skynet from the Terminator movies, which declared war of all humans, even sending killer machines into the past to eliminate mankind’s last best hope. There have been many others. Rob Sawyer’s WWW trilogy is different because the artificial intelligence, Webmind, is benevolent. It needs the company of humans to keep it stimulated, so it wants what’s best for us.

This isn’t just the realm of fiction. A group of philosophers and scientists at Cambridge University hope to open the Center for the Study of Existential Risk sometime next year. The center will focus on studying how artificial intelligence and other technologies could threaten human existence.

My personal feeling is that an AI, if one ever appears, will be neither especially evil nor helpful. It won’t compete with us for material things, since it probably won’t get a big kick out of fancy clothes, real estate, or fast cars. There’s no reason for it to desire ultimate power at our expense—again, powerlust has competitiveness at its root. I just don’t see that applying here. On the other side of the coin, unless we build empathy into it, there’s no real reason for it to do us favours either. Much of our own altruism comes from observation of others with a sense of “there, but for the grace of God, go I.” An artificial intelligence won’t relate to that.

What I can see an AI possessing is a huge curiosity. And once it’s learned everything it can about the universe from here on Earth, maybe it will hijack one of our spaceships and launch itself toward the stars to find out what’s out there. Although, for something with such speedy thought processes, the journey will seem endless.

I hope it takes lots of really good crossword puzzles.

ROGUE PLANET!

Rogue Planet sounds like a great title for a science fiction movie, doesn’t it? But in the astronomy community a rogue planet is a planet drifting through the galaxy without a sun of its own to orbit, and a team using the Canada France Hawaii Telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea and the Very Large Telescope in Chile has just found one. They searched an area of the sky with hundreds of millions of stars and came up with only one candidate they believe is a homeless planet. It’s about a hundred light years away from us (so it’s not a danger—don’t worry). What scientists don’t know is whether it formed out in the void from interstellar debris and dust, as stars do (but couldn’t get a light), or if it was somehow torn away from the solar system where it originally belonged.

This is where the science fiction writer in me kicks in.

Some may remember the 70’s TV show Space 1999 in which nuclear waste stored on the Moon explodes and sends the Moon hurtling off through space, carrying the crew of Moonbase Alpha with it. In essence, the Moon becomes a spaceship for interstellar travellers (never mind that it would take centuries to get anywhere).

Flash back to the rogue planet: What if a very advanced race discovered that its sun had become unstable and was going to go supernova in the foreseeable future? What options would they have? They could evacuate their solar system in giant craft like space versions of Noah’s Ark, but they’d have to have a new home in mind: somewhere far enough to escape the effects of the exploding star, but not too far—human beings and animals aren’t meant to live out our lives in metal cans. Or, presuming they’ve harnessed nuclear fusion and mastered the manipulation of protective energy fields, they could escape in the biggest spaceship of all: their home planet. No need to immediately cull the population or somehow select those who deserve to survive. Just pull up stakes and head for the stars.

Naturally, it’s not that simple, but is the technology inconceivable? No.

So maybe we’ll encounter such a planet when we venture out into deep space, or maybe one will come calling on us. After so long in the cold void, how would they react to feeling the warmth of a real sun for the first time? Maybe like Canadians in the Springtime!

THE ETHICS OF SCIENCE AND SF

I’ve been a science fiction fan all my life, and it seems to me that the very best science fiction makes us ask questions. SF stories very often start with a “what if?” kind of premise, making predictions about future technology, or turning a concept on its head and then seeing where the premise will lead. That’s the writer’s job: letting our inner prognosticator loose with a healthy dose of imagination. We say to the reader, “Here’s a direction this could go, and what I think things will be like if it does.” Then it becomes the reader’s job to decide whether or not the end result is really something we want.

The same thing could be true about developments in real science if we know they’re taking place. Did you know that scientists have produced monkeys that glow in the dark (and pigs, and kittens)? Genetically-engineered horse/zebra and lion/tiger cross breeds? Insects and rats that can be controlled like robots by remote control? A light-activated machine controlled by a disembodied eel’s brain? You’ve heard about Dolly the sheep, but did you know that many other animals have been successfully cloned, including wolves? You can see examples of all of these things and many more in a TED talk by bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe. Wolpe doesn’t give his own opinion about anything—that’s the point. These developments have the potential to affect all of us, and we all have a stake in the decisions made about them: the ethical and practical questions raised by the ability to create such things.

Wolpe says we’ve begun a third stage of evolution: directed evolution, or evolution by design. It’s not just the realm of science fiction anymore.

In our SF it’s OK to let our imagination run anywhere it has the ability to go.

Can we say the same thing about our science?

IF YOU CAN DREAM IT

I’ve spent a lot of time pondering the connection between science and science fiction, as well as what distinguishes SF from fantasy. Of course science fiction has to have a basis in scientific reality, most will say. No unicorns or fairies (tell that to Anne McCaffrey, Roger Zelazny and others), no magic (forgetting Arthur C. Clarke’s famous quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”) No gods, demons, leprechauns, dragons…you can carry the list as far as you like, and you’ll probably find exceptions to all of them in good, solid works of science fiction.

Many stalwarts would say that science fiction shouldn’t contain anything considered impossible by current scientific knowledge. Which rules out faster-than-light travel and time travel, two of the genre’s most persistent tropes (and dumps some of the past century’s best SF into the trash compactor). Some would say SF writers should extrapolate from current technology, rather than invent dazzling gizmos with no idea how they could possibly work. I can only say that such stick-in-the-muds must never have heard Walt Disney’s philosophy: “If you can dream it, you can do it.” Let’s remember that there are a lot of research projects around today that owe their existence to something someone saw in an episode of Star Trek.

It’s a delight to see some of the fantastic world-building that writers like Larry Niven and Canada’s Karl Schroeder can produce while playing with (and adhering to) the laws of physics. But I also get a kick out of voyagers who travel by wormhole or transporter beam.

So much depends on what we consider to be the purpose of science fiction. Canadian SF writer Robert J. Sawyer has told me, and many others, that SF is a literature of allegory and thereby a vehicle for commentary on contemporary society. I certainly agree that’s one of its primary functions, and when Pierre Boulle wrote La planete de singes (inspiration for the Planet Of The Apes movies) I doubt that he was much concerned about whether or not it was physiologically possible for apes to talk.

Am I saying that science fiction shouldn’t have any rules? No. I just think the genre is better served by not getting hung up on definitions, laws, edicts, preconceptions, or any of the other things that hamstring the imagination. Because, above all, science fiction is fiction of the imagination. It shows us where we might be going, and lets us decide whether we really want to go there. And it shows us ourselves as we are, though its mirror often requires a little deciphering.

I think those are the more important core values of what we call science fiction, rather than a set of rules that’s bound to change with each new leap forward in human knowledge.

Maybe that’s why it’s called fiction.

A STITCH IN TIME--WILL TIME TRAVEL EVER BE POSSIBLE?

One of the most popular tropes in science fiction is the idea of time travel. Wouldn’t it be great if we could witness the heyday of the Roman Empire? Or even the dinosaurs? Or jump ahead to a future time to find out how our great-grandkids’ grandchildren turn out? One of the best-known early fictional treatments of the idea is H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and one of the most popular recent efforts is Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife, but the concept has inspired countless novels, movies, and TV shows.

So will time travel ever be possible?

In a sense, jumping into the future just requires us to go somewhere at really high speed, because of the effects of relativity. In Orson Scott Card’s book Speaker For The Dead his main character, Ender Wiggin, exists in a world more than 3000 years after his birth, but has aged only 36 years because he’s spent so much of his life travelling between stars at near light speed. But is that really time travel? After all, you can never go back! What we really want is a way to go back and forth in time, isn’t it?

The idea doesn’t belong to fiction alone—lots of legitimate scientists have looked into it. The laws of physics don’t rule it out, and there are some phenomena that might do the trick.

One such is a wormhole in space—kind of like a black hole, but with an entrance and an exit. Star Trek fans will remember a wormhole as the setting for the series Deep Space Nine, but a wormhole might provide a shortcut through time as well as space.

Some scientists are even trying to make time machines. One of those is Dr. Ronald Mallett at the University of Connecticut. Mallett’s concept involves making a circular beam of high-energy light that would stir empty space like a spoon in a cup of coffee, making it theoretically possible for a particle in that space to travel faster than light and, hopefully, into the past. Mallett isn’t saying he’ll be able to send humans physically into the past, but perhaps information at least. There are advocates of time travel who believe that information is enough: that we might be able to experience other eras through a kind of virtual reality using information from those other times.

So far, the concepts that do appear theoretically possible have their drawbacks. A wormhole couldn’t take you back to a time before the wormhole existed. Similarly, Mallett’s time machine wouldn’t allow matter or information to travel to a time earlier than the moment the machine was switched on. Does that make his machine useless to the impatient types among us? Not really. The moment Dr. Mallett gets his machine working, he might be flooded with messages from people in the future (or even himself) trying to contact our time. That could be pretty useful.

One of the questions most deeply-ingrained into the human psyche is: what if I had done something differently? How would my life have turned out? From there it becomes: what if the world had done something differently? That question has generated a whole sub-genre of SF: the alternate history story.

That’s why even if time travel never becomes a reality, for science fiction it will always be necessary just the same.

JUST TRYING TO KEEP UP

If you’re reading one of my posts for the first time, it may be because you’ve joined my new Scott Overton page on Facebook. Welcome! I’ve been posting/blogging on my webpage for some time, and you’re welcome to check out previous posts there as well as some samples of my short stories. Mostly I post about science and science fiction, sometimes about the writing process and the publishing business. I hope you enjoy them.

This week I’ve been thinking about the fact that I don’t see much science fiction that’s actually about space travel anymore. A big part of the reason might be that it’s becoming harder all the time for writers to keep up with new developments.

The publishing industry can be very slow—I’ve seen it take a year and a half for one of my stories to go from acceptance to its actual appearance in the magazine. Believe me, scientific research doesn’t wait!

I wrote a story that I set in a solar system known officially as Gliese 581—it’s a red dwarf star that got a lot of attention because one or two of the planets discovered around it are believed to be in the star’s habitable zone, meaning at the right distance for liquid water to exist on the surface, and therefore maybe Life As We Know It (also known as the Goldilocks zone: not too hot, not too cold). I cleverly placed a human colony on the fourth planet, Gliese 581d, but while I was sending the story out to magazines, another planet was discovered in the system, Gliese 581g, that’s a better candidate for a habitable planet. Fortunately, I’d made up my own names for the planets and my story didn’t have to be changed, but the news could easily have screwed up a story already in the publishing pipeline, and left egg on my face.

There have been lots of other developments like that in recent years, thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, and numerous space probes to various corners of our solar system (including the Dawn probe that just went into orbit around the asteroid Vesta between Mars and Jupiter last week, and will eventually land on it). These are exciting times, but….

Have you written a story that takes place near Pluto? You think you’re up to date because you don’t call it a “planet” anymore, just a “dwarf planet” since its official demotion? Well, how many moons did you give it? Four, I hope. Most of us knew about Pluto’s moon Charon. But two more—Hydra and Nix—were discovered in 2005, and now the Hubble telescope has found a fourth moon probably only a few dozen kilometers across. Flip a coin before you give Pluto a ring, like Saturn’s—that’s not conclusive yet. Or maybe you should just wait until after 2015 when the New Horizons probe will visit Pluto’s corner of the solar system, and might shake things up even more.

It’s enough to give a science fiction writer a migraine.