SLEEPING BEAUTY IN SPACE

If your heart is set on becoming one of the first humans on Mars you’d better get your application in soon to Mars One—they’re the ones who plan a one-way mission to the Red Planet in 2023, funded by a reality TV show, and with further colonists to follow every couple of years. The deadline to apply is Saturday August 31^st. Mind you, more than 165,000 people have applied, so good luck with that.

NASA and the U.S. government have talked about a Mars mission for sometime after 2030 but such a trip will definitely have its challenges. Some researchers funded by NASA think a lot of the problems might be solved by putting the crew into hibernation. (Just think—six months of catching up on sleep!) The idea of hibernating astronauts is certainly not new—it was big in the 60’s in everything from Lost In Space and Star Trek on TV (look for the original episode “Space Seed” that inspired the later movie The Wrath of Khan and the latest ST movie Into Darkness) to the movies 2001: A Space Odyssey and its much later sequel 2010. They used to call it “suspended animation” (more impressively technical, don’t you know). If you’ve seen any of the Alien movies, you’ve seen it there, too. However, the recent research doesn’t propose to freeze the astronauts, just lower their body temperature and considerably reduce their bodies’ needs for energy and oxygen.

When we think of hibernation we probably think of black bears—for five long winter months or more their body burns only enough stored fat to keep their core temperature above a minimum level, and even their urine is recycled to prevent dehydration. Lots of other animals enter into hibernation or similar dormant states, but is it possible for humans? The knowledge we have on the subject mainly comes from accidents. In 2012 a man in Sweden survived nearly two months in his car, buried in snow. Many other low-temperature survival stories seem to show that, if done right, humans might come through long periods in a dormant state without harm.

The advantages for space travel? Lots. There would be much less need for food, water, and space to move around—you might be able to send a crew of twenty instead of six. Psychologically, it would be far more pleasant for the crew to be unconscious than having to occupy themselves and get along together for months in a tin can millions of miles from home. One of the biggest hazards—solar radiation—would be easier to shield against if the crew weren’t moving around. Of course, there are many problems to solve, like how to create and maintain the hibernation state (just let the deep freeze of space do it’s work? Brrrr). There also needs to be a way to prevent the loss of muscle and bone mass that astronauts currently combat with rigid exercise regimens. Maybe something like electro-stimulation of the muscles could do the trick. I’m sure bodies would also need to be turned regularly to prevent bed sores.

My thoughts? I’d love to see other planets (but a two-way trip, thank you very much) so I might be willing to undergo suspended animation under three conditions:

1)    The computer programmed to wake me up is not named HAL 9000.

2)    They can arrange to fill my dreams with visions of Rio de Janeiro beaches.

3)    My fellow astronaut looks like Sigourney Weaver.

The Kepler Failure and Area 51: Coincidence?

Two science stories linked themselves in my brain this past weekend. The first was NASA’s announcement that they’ve given up trying to fix the Kepler space telescope. The Kepler was launched in March of 2009 with a mission to find planets orbiting other stars. It does this by spotting the almost indiscernible drop in the light from a star when one of its planets passes in front of it. The telescope needs to stay perfectly aligned and absolutely still for long periods of time, and to achieve this it has four reaction wheels that act like gyroscopes to stop wobble. One of the wheels quit in July 2012 and a second stopped this past May. NASA engineers have tried since then to work a fix, but have now officially given up and instead are soliciting suggestions for other missions Kepler could undertake. That’s a real shame for several reasons: for one, it cost $550 million dollars (and no-one wants to see that kind of money wasted), but more importantly because Kepler has confirmed the existence of 135 planets around other stars and identified 3500 other possible candidates—it succeeded brilliantly at its job and we now have better evidence than ever that there are other places in the galaxy where life might exist.

The other story of the week for geeks is that the CIA finally confirmed the existence of its secret base in Nevada, the infamous Area 51. Unless you’ve been living in a cave you’ll know that Area 51 has been at the center of one of the most enduring of all conspiracy theories, involving the supposed storage and testing of an alien spacecraft from a crash in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. A Freedom Of Information request by George Washington University National Security Archive resulted in the de-classification of a report called “The Secret History of the U-2” revealing not only the existence of Area 51 in the Nevada desert, but the fact that it had been used for the testing and development of the ultra-high-flying U-2 spy plane, which had resulted in an increase in UFO reports at the time.

Why do we want so badly to believe in alien life from other worlds? Is it because we’re actually not all that fond of our fellow human beings? Is it the innate love of imagined monsters and things that go bump in the night? Are we yearning to have our deepest questions about existence answered by someone who might know more than we do—maybe even find God, whatever we imagine God to be? Or is it that we’re desperately hoping for someone to help us out of this deep hole we’ve dug for ourselves (climate change, pollution, nuclear proliferation—name your poison)?

I’ve never believed the stories about Area 51 and aliens. (A government keeping a secret like that for so long? Please.) But it seems unthinkable that Life wouldn’t have arisen anywhere else in this vast universe, and some places are much older than our neighbourhood. It’s a stretch to accept that any race could have bridged the distances between stars, but as a big Star Trek fan I obviously hope that it’s possible. Heck, one-time Canadian Defense Minister Paul Hellyer has testified in public that "at least four species" of alien have been visiting Earth for "thousands of years." He’s a former defense minister—maybe he does know something we don’t.

Then it hit me—the reason my brain linked these stories together:

Maybe the aliens got together and subtly sabotaged the Kepler spacecraft because we were getting too close to discovering their home worlds.

Now there’s a conspiracy theory for you!

WHAT WILL OUR GREAT-GREAT- GRANDCHILDREN BE LIKE?

I have trouble writing stories about the far future—even one or two hundred years from now. I’m afraid they’ll end up like Star Trek and many other SF tales: essentially 21^st century humans interacting with 23^rd or 24^th century technology. I’m sure it won’t really be that way, so to write scenarios like that feels knowingly misleading.

You may think the people of the distant past were more primitive than we are, maybe even less intelligent. I disagree, and I think the great literature of history should be proof enough that our intellects, emotions, desires and motivations are really not different from our ancestors of many centuries ago. Our bodies aren’t either.

But can we say that about our descendants of even a hundred years from now?

Our physical bodies have been changing over the past generation and more because of our sedentary lifestyle and abundance of high-calorie foods—eventually adaptations will show up in our DNA—but technology will change us much sooner than that.

We’ve already become hooked on tech like Google searches and smartphones, to the point that some studies show we’re losing short-term memory and other cognitive functions in ways comparable to victims of head injuries. The new catchphrase for that is Digital Dementia. “Use it or lose it” is an integral part of brain development and maintenance throughout our lives. So if we continue to grow dependent on technology, our brain functions, personal interactions, and even conversations may be very different in a hundred years (I already have a hard enough time understanding the language of teenagers!)

We can also deliberately change our bodies in an increasing variety of ways. A not-quite-finished novel of mine postulates that within a few years smartphones will give way to direct brain-computer interfaces that we’ll routinely attach to, or even implant in our heads. Like Google Glass with a direct brain connection, they’ll keep us linked to the future version of the internet 24/7, to the point that we won’t know or care whether the answer to a question comes from our own memory or a digital database somewhere. Forget phone calls or texting—we’ll be able to communicate almost like telepathy, except that the messages will travel through the ‘net via wifi or its successor. I truly believe this will happen within decades, not centuries. Heck, by then artificial intelligence may have advanced to the point where our implant will have a mind of its own, like a little angel or devil sitting on our shoulder. Who can possibly guess how that will change our behavior? Futurist Ray Kurzweil has famously predicted that such a cultural shift (part of what he calls The Singularity) could happen as soon as 2045.

Medical engineering will allow us to replace limbs and other body parts with efficient and more versatile replacements that will make the Six Million Dollar Man look quaint. Within the lifetime of most of us, we’ll probably undergo medical procedures that will involve nano-devices travelling our bloodstream to pinpoint problems and maybe even treat them. (And a little internal ‘nip & tuck’ while they’re at it? Why not?) Geneticists are making great advances in deciphering and manipulating DNA. Screening embryos for desirable traits might become routine. Perhaps we’ll even be able to get injections of DNA cocktails or nano-gadgets that will replace plastic surgery in making us stronger, more youthful, and more attractive.

My point is, in a hundred years from now human beings won’t be the same as we’ve been for millennia, and an author who doesn’t reflect that in their vision of the future is missing the mark. That’s what makes this job so hard. Or just think of it as a challenge. Yeah, that sounds better.

SCIENCE FICTION IS ALL ABOUT HOPE (REALLY!)

Those who don’t understand SF think it’s about robots, aliens, space travel, time travel, and other stuff of childish dreams that bear little relation to reality. I could write pages about how much past SF is infused into our very real present, but other writers have done it well already. And anyway, SF is about dreams—a very good thing.

SF is the most hopeful fiction there is.

SF is the fiction of human potential. It celebrates the extraordinary skills and abilities that the human species commands, which raise us above the level of other creatures. Old thinkers and empire builders acted as if our great abilities meant that humans were destined to subdue and dominate, but SF writers know the universe is too big a place for that. Instead, SF is about reaching barriers and overcoming them, one at a time, using every one of the gifts our race can muster. It’s about flights of technological fancy that we will someday make real, yes, but also about the drawbacks of those technologies and how we will overcome them.

When real life is dull and the immediate outlook is bleak, SF imagines bright futures in which problems have been solved, and continue to be solved through our ingenuity, energy, and sheer persistence. Often our own cherished scientific research presents us with doors that seem closed to us: the airless vacuum of space, the speed of light, the sheer size of the universe. But SF imagines keys to open those doors, or sometimes simply trusts that humankind will find a way as we’ve done so many times before. That’s hope.

SF can take us to some very dark places, often of our own creation: future worlds poisoned by our excesses, overrun by engineering run amok, dehumanized by dependence on technology, stifled by political bureaucracy at its hellish worst. Yet even these stories revolve around the human characters’ refusal to accept defeat and destruction. They are stories about invention, courage, self-sacrifice, and above all: hope. Even when they don’t end happily, their very existence as stories testifies to the writer’s hope that humanity can recognize such warnings and use our gifts to avoid the danger.

Occasionally SF even forecasts the end of humankind—at least, as we know it—whether because we change ourselves into something very different, artificial intelligence supersedes us, or some other species takes over. But still, SF is optimistic about Life itself, and its triumph over the dead matter of the cosmos.

SF educates, agitates, advises, and inspires. An article I read recently proposed that science fiction is important because it motivates great innovators to think big and to make imagined technology real. It also illustrates “the big picture”: the social implications of these new innovations, and where they might take the human race. If you want to understand the need for such inspiration to fuel human progress you should check out Project Hieroglyph, an online space “for writers, scientists, artists and engineers to collaborate on creative, ambitious visions of our near future.”

SF is important because it celebrates the human determination to overcome all obstacles. It’s about potential. It’s about hope. And who doesn’t want to be part of that?

IS PRIVACY AN OBSOLETE WORD?

One of the biggest news stories this month was the “outing” of the PRISM electronic surveillance program run by the National Security Agency in the U.S., which monitors phone, email, and every other electronic means of communication that American citizens use, without the requirement of a court-issued warrant. As with every other unethical action of government these days, PRISM is carried out in the name of the fight against terrorism. The news story broke after it was revealed that Verizon was turning over logs of its customers’ daily calls to the NSA. All of its customers. We’ve since learned that Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple and others have been cooperating with PRISM. Company spokespersons have issued various denials, but then the legislation allowing PRISM forbids companies from revealing their participation. So what else are they supposed to say?

And don’t feel complacent if you live in Canada or another country—the whole point of PRISM is to monitor non-U.S. citizens’ interactions with Americans. The moment the data is directed through an Internet server on American soil (and the lion’s share of ’net infrastructure is in the U.S.) it becomes accessible.

Yet, I don’t think PRISM itself was the story—the bigger story is that most Americans aren’t upset about it.

And maybe they shouldn’t be. Maybe privacy as we’ve known it is a concept whose time has passed. Because it’s no longer possible.

Government surveillance of citizens has been a trope in a lot of science fiction. The book most often referenced is George Orwell’s 1984. Have we reached the era of Big Brother watching our every move? Well, Yes, as long as we understand that today’s Big Brother includes more than just government. Every time you use a new app or computer program you commit to an agreement that includes the app owner’s so-called “privacy policy” (What? You don’t read those 25 pages of legalese fine print?) Typically, it says they will only disclose your private information for reasons that will improve your use of their product. Who decides what uses fit that description? They do.

I’m always amused by the term “security camera”. Some modern cities are blanketed by them. Do they make you more secure? Not really. Crime hasn’t ground to a halt. I’ll accept that they help police solve some crimes, but that’s mainly because criminals are often really stupid. In the meantime those cameras capture dozens of images of each non-criminal citizen every day as they go about their lives.

Companies track all of your credit card and debit purchases, of course. And unless you’ve disabled the “location services” feature on your smartphone Google, Apple, and who knows who else can know exactly where you are at any given time.

The key to the Big Brother era is the computing power to bring all of those various bits of data together and correlate it into meaningful information. A few years ago, Target stores famously identified pregnant women because of the vitamin supplements, hand sanitizer, cocoa butter (for stretch marks) and other items they bought. I’m sure they’ve become much better at it since then. With all of the data sources, and the ability to put puzzle pieces together, it’s fair to assume that if you have a secret worth hiding from potential blackmailers, somebody already knows it. Would you rather have it in the hands of organized crime, big multinational corporations, or the government? Tough choice, huh? But if you insist on trying to protect your information, here’s a good article from PC World.

My wife says we need to go live on an island. I’ve tried to tell her about satellite cameras that can read a cigarette package from space, but….

THE CASE FOR SPACE

Years ago I read a book called The Millennial Project by Marshall T. Savage. It was a brilliant, creative, and comprehensive step-by-step plan to colonize space. I’d still recommend it to our elected governments, private interests, and anyone else interested in preserving Life by seeding it beyond the confines of Earth. The book’s offspring, the Millennial Foundation, is still around (although renamed the Living Universe Foundation) but its progress has not been newsworthy and Savage is not even active with it anymore. Nonetheless, the core reasons for colonizing space and other planets remain: 1) The human population is too high—the planet can’t sustain us. 2) Human life, and all earthly life, is just too vulnerable on this single planet. Depending on which scientists you talk to, there have been anywhere from a handful to more than twenty “mass extinction events” in the history of life on Earth. The asteroid QE2 passed within six million kilometers of the Earth last Friday—not especially close, but it was as large as the asteroid that’s thought to have killed the dinosaurs. They’re out there. We should be too, before one of them strikes.

Even though I’m a big Star Trek fan, it’s a near certainty that we won’t to be able to colonize other solar systems in the foreseeable future. We night be able to make Mars more Earth-like and livable, but it will take a century or two (if you’re interested in the idea, you can’t do better than to read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars books). We could also make human colonies in large bubbles orbiting the Earth, in hollowed out asteroids (after we’ve mined out their metals), or in domed cities on the Moon. Rather confining, perhaps, but then how many people now live out their lives without ever leaving a city? Maybe the “upside” of urbanization is that we’re creating a generation of potential colonists. Would people be interested in going somewhere untamed and unpredictable to live? Immigrants have been doing it for centuries.

I was really pleased to follow the exploits of Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield aboard the International Space Station recently who, through the clever use of Twitter along with impressive photography skills, musicianship, and pure personality, has done more than any man since Neil Armstrong to make space exploration “cool” again. Maybe it’s time for another big push to get people interested in the idea of living somewhere “out there”. If nothing else, mining the Moon and the asteroids and moving as many people as possible to somewhere else might give our planet its one best chance to heal. And the more people go into space, the more they’ll want to go.

At the very least, they’ll gain a gift that existing astronauts always bring home with them: a unique appreciation of the jewel that is Planet Earth.

AGE IS ALL IN THE MIND

When optimists assure us that age is just a state of mind, even they know they don’t mean it literally. But as with virtually every other body function, it may be that aging is controlled by our brains. In a study published this month in the journal Nature, researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York discovered that the aging process in mice can be controlled by manipulating a molecule called NF-kB in the hypothalamus—a nut-sized part of the brain that has long been known to control many other things like body metabolism and growth. The NF-kB is a signaler affecting the levels of a hormone called GnRH, which has been linked to neuron regeneration. By stimulating NF-kB the scientists could accelerate the aging of the mice, but by blocking the NF-kB and injecting the mice with additional GnRH they were able to slow the aging process and extend the lifespan of the mice by as much as 20%. And it wasn’t only that the mice lived longer, but they were less susceptible to age-related health problems, including chronic conditions related to inflammation.

A study from Yale University earlier this year found that a single gene in mice, the Nogo Receptor 1, appeared to be the switch controlling the maturation of the mouse brain. With the Nogo receptor chemically switched off, the brains of older mice re-acquired the ‘plasticity’ of adolescent mouse brains, enabling better learning, less mental decline, and perhaps even better healing from brain damage. (Did the re-adolescent mice start giving attitude, I wonder?)

Of course, this is another research story Of Mice And Men—it will be years before we can expect to find any of these methods translated for humans. But it’s the job of SF writers to predict from current trends. What will we do when people can live much longer lives?

Say we routinely live an extra forty or fifty years—will we be willing to add those years to our working lives? Or will we expect our retirement to somehow exceed our money-earning years?

How will younger people rise within company structures if all of the plum executive positions are locked up by elders who refuse to go away? What would motivate a young worker in a scenario like that? And then there’s the question of innovation: wouldn’t the oldsters with the power be inclined to maintain the status quo? The same would almost surely be true of government. Slowing aging might put the brakes on progress, both technical and social. And, especially if the age-retarding treatments were expensive, the power gap between rich and poor would become ever more firmly entrenched.

The costs of a longer-lasting population would also be high, financially and ecologically. Our economies can’t afford more people who aren’t producing goods and wealth, and our planet can’t sustain many more mouths to feed. Maybe from the beginning of our working lives it would be mandatory to set aside ten or twenty percent of our income for investments to support us in our later years. Maybe, like China, governments would be forced to regulate the number of offspring we have. Maybe you would be allowed to get the longevity treatment only if your children agreed to be sterilized and remain childless.

The Fountain of Youth sounds like one giant can of worms to me.

CARS TO PROTECT US FROM OURSELVES

In my part of the world the police have declared this week to be Distracted Driving Week because last year more people were killed in highway car accidents involving distracted drivers than in accidents involving alcohol. That’s really saying something.

Distracted driving can include drinking a coffee or talking to a passenger, but most often we think about cell phone calls, tinkering with a GPS, applying makeup, and especially texting.

Really, with Facebook Home on our phones to alert us whenever a friend sneezes, and Twitter to make sure we don’t miss a single Kim Kardashian labour pain, how can we be expected to pay attention to something as trivial as what lies ahead of us on the road? This whole ‘controlling a speeding car’ thing is seriously cramping our style when it comes to what we actually want to be doing.

The answer? Robotic cars, of course. They’ve been a dream of science fiction writers almost since the genre began.

Since 2006 when the Lexus LS arrived in North America we’ve had cars that will park themselves. Now you can get different versions of that feature even on cars as low-priced as the Ford Focus. Mostly they use ultrasonic sensors to determine the measure of the parking space and guide the car into it.

But why have a driver at all? There are cars that can drive themselves. There have been for a while. In 2010 an Italian company named VisLab sent a convoy of vehicles more than eight thousand miles from Italy to China and several of them were unmanned the whole way. Mind you, the ones that did it with no human intervention were following the track of a vehicle just ahead of them that did have humans tweaking the course from time to time. But the technology has improved by leaps and bounds since then. With arrays of laser and radar sensors and other navigation systems that would put many fighter jets to shame, autonomous cars are proving their stuff. And more and more of their systems are making their way into commercial cars: gadgets that will warn you if you steer out of your lane (and steer you back), warn you of a potential front collision, and even hit the brakes for you in an emergency. The robotic cars that gets the most attention are the self-driving cars from Google. They’re already legally allowed on roads for testing purposes in Nevada, Florida, and California.

Experts at the Society of Automotive Engineers 2013 World Congress recently predicted that fully driverless cars won’t be commercially available before 2025, but I think they’re being pessimistic. Whenever that day arrives, it should spell the end of distracted driving, shouldn’t it?

Just please, nobody teach the robots how to tweet!

SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH GOOGLE-COLOURED GLASSES

If you can’t remember how you ever lived without your smartphone, you’ve probably heard about Google’s big project Google Glass. If you haven’t, come out of your cave and, well, Google it. Glass is what they call an augmented reality (AR) head mounted display (HMD). That means a mini computer that you wear like a pair of sunglasses which will display information in front of your eyes and take pictures or video of what you’re seeing. It won’t exactly replace your smartphone for now because it will need to be tethered to your phone by Bluetooth to make use of cellular data services where WiFi isn’t available. But it will have pretty amazing capabilities, controlled by voice commands. Within the next few months it will be tested out by a corps of volunteers and then made available to the public.

As a science fiction writer, I’ve thought about where this kind of technology will lead us within the next decade or two.

On the good side, it might make it more feasible than ever for you to work from home. Just remember that your boss will want to access the headset feed and see whatever you’re seeing. So no surreptitious glances to catch a few moments of Ellen or Dr. Oz, and be sure to remove the headset when you take a bathroom break.

One or two politicians in the States are already making noise about banning Google Glass while driving (too distracting). But a few years from now I’ll bet police will want us to wear connected headsets, so they can catch us speeding or running red lights, and subpoena the video feeds of accident or crime witnesses. They might get permission for that, too. After all, the F.B.I. is pushing hard right now to be able to monitor cellular calls and texting in real time. And, of course, Homeland Security can get just about anything they want in the name of battling terrorism.

Insurance companies will support the police in these measures. In fact, you can bet they’ll offer reduced premiums if you let them tap your headset feed (and thereby confirm that you’re not smoking, drinking excessively, using drugs, or engaging in high risk behaviours).

But it won’t all be business. What about Reality entertainment? Imagine getting home from work and immediately twinning yourself for the rest of the night with a next-generation Kardashian, or even Lindsay Lohan still milking her notoriety. Why, you wouldn’t have to miss a second of her binge drinking, judge baiting, and rehab sampling. Up close and really personal.

Suddenly those one-way expeditions to Mars don’t sound so bad.

PUTTING METEORS TO GOOD USE

Unless you were taking a sabbatical from electronic media last week, or decided to catch up on all the seasons of Dexter in one mad marathon, you know that a 17-meter-wide asteroid exploded over Russia, leaving more than a thousand people injured, mostly from the fragments of windows shattered by the sonic boom. The cleanup was expected to require about twenty thousand workers. The same day saw the asteroid 2012 DA14 fly past the Earth close enough to be inside the orbit of communications satellites, but that asteroid had been tracked and scientists knew it wouldn’t hit us. So why didn’t they know about the meteorite over Russia?

In the vastness of space, pieces of rock that size are too small, too dark, and too fast to be easily seen. It takes a lot of observation time with specialized equipment to spot them, and there could be millions of them.

Scientific American has a great article about the efforts underway to catalogue Near Earth Objects (NEO’s) here and good information about the Russian meteorite here, so I won’t repeat it. But even with those efforts, we won’t have a track on every potentially dangerous object out there anytime soon, and it will be even longer before we can do anything to prevent a serious strike (if ever).

What could we do about them? That’s where science fiction thinking comes in.

Giant laser platforms. Nuclear missiles. Gravity rays. Dozens of ideas have been tossed out over the years—some intended to be practical, others just to serve as plots for movies like Armageddon. My own thought is that we should kill two birds with one stone: develop a system that will sweep up the space debris for safety reasons, but then use it for something worthwhile. Perhaps an electromagnetic scoop system or shield that will absorb and utilize or even distribute the huge kinetic energy these things represent (travelling at speeds of nearly twenty kilometers per second) and then make use of their raw materials in the construction of space platforms, colonies, and spacecraft. Many asteroids have significant metal content, and getting metals from the surface of the Earth into space is terribly costly in energy. Far better if the stuff we need is already up there.

I’m not saying it’ll be easy to engineer something like this, but if we ever do we just might find ourselves wishing for more space rubble out there. Deep Impact? Bring it on!