WILL WE EVER NEED PERSONAL ROBOTS?

If you’re of a certain age the first personal robot in fiction that made an impression on you may have been Rosie the maid from “The Jetsons” animated TV show. The idea of robotic servants has been around much longer than that, of course, and every year we expect to come closer to finding one available in stores. Well, OK, maybe at Neiman Marcus. But if you were keeping an eye on the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, there really wasn’t much that fits our usual concept. You know: the basically humanoid robot, a similar size to us with roughly analogous limbs and sensors that will do all of the jobs around the house that we don’t feel like doing. A few look cute, but aren’t much use as anything but toys or novelty items. The robots that do useful work are specialized: a small robot that will wash your windows, another that will clean your barbecue grill. Yes, there are scientists all over that are working to develop humanoid robots, but my question is: why bother? Why make a general purpose robot that can “do it all”—like us, only better? It’s a massive challenge, and it isn’t necessary. And from what I see, that’s not the direction things are going.

I have a feeling our cities of fifty years from now will surround us with specialized robots that will each do one thing and do it well. There’s no need for a robot that can clean the house and drive you to an appointment. It’s much more likely we’ll build houses with self cleaning rooms, each with its own Roomba and wipers on the windows (especially with dirt and moisture-repellant surfaces everywhere). And we’re getting closer all the time to self-driving cars. (You can read more about them here.) So-called smart appliances will not only order the groceries but assemble and cook them, too. And brain-computer interfaces will connect us to the internet and, through it, to all of our robotic devices, so we won’t even have to lift a finger to set anything in motion. Why would we need a robotic servant that looks sort of like us?

Child care? Maybe. But a daycare space with one smart computer (or human) in charge and a lot of mechanized baby movers or glorified waldos, for the physical tasks, seems more efficient and more likely. Medical care could use robots, but they wouldn’t have to be mobile. We’d go to them, or remote-controlled gurneys would carry us.

I don’t see a practical need for an all-purpose humanoid robot at all, unless it’s for one of the least practical reasons of all: companionship. (No, I’m not going to get into all the movies and books about glorified sex dolls—you can check them out on your own.) But if it’s companionship we want, don’t make a robot that looks like Rosie. A big, cuddly teddy bear would probably be the way to go.

As for me, I hope we still have dogs.

WE ARE FAMILY

I read this week about a website called modamily.com (as in modern family) that promotes what’s called “non-romantic co-parenting”. The idea is that the website will match you up with someone who has similar goals and principles regarding parenting so the two of you can co-parent a child without any romantic relationship whatsoever. All important details of the arrangement (including the method of conception) would be worked out ahead of time, of course. I guess it’s kind of like a divorce settlement without the animosity.

Our concept of the family has been changed by the high divorce rate, adoption, surrogate parenting, gay marriage and who knows what else? If people are willing to have non-romantic parenting arrangements, why stop at a couple? In this world of the internet, why not half-a-dozen or more parents from various parts of the globe united in raising one child? (Though imagine the grief of having six parents tell you to clean up your room!) Sooner or later someone will try this. Whether or not they should is another question.

SF writers have been trying to imagine future approaches to parenting for decades. Many stories and novels have offered parental arrangements that don’t include co-habiting with each other or the children. Brave New World and numerous others have featured laboratory fertilization and gestation, with the child-rearing handled by entities like daycare centers and sometimes even by robot caregivers. I noticed that the newest Superman movie Man Of Steel showed that type of system in use on Krypton. The question of parenting in space colonies or colony ships has always been an issue because children would be few, the group very close, and there may be compelling reasons for parenting duties to be shared among more than just the two genetic parents. There’s even some precedent for this in small tribal cultures where paternity can often be in doubt. What’s next? Once gestation is taken out of the womb, will it really matter who our “natural” parents are? Perhaps parents will be chosen by the state.

One of the great joys of parenting is watching that little being, from your own flesh and blood, grow and develop and achieve. It works the other way around, too, with children being proud of their parents, wanting to be like them. There’s no question that role-modeling is important to child development. Sons often want to grow up to be “just like Dad”. But say a child on a spaceship crew doesn’t know who his father is. I suspect he’ll choose the man who best represents the qualities he wants in a dad, and emulate him. What if all of the children chose the same guy (the manly and brave captain, no doubt)? Then, with both genetics and behavior, we’d be messing with the mostly random variety that evolution has directed up to this point.

In many cultures family is everything. We use phrases like “blood is thicker than water” to say that blood ties demand the ultimate loyalty. Evolution is behind this, too. But can bonds like that survive forms of family structure that have no basis in genetics or even living under the same roof? And won’t society suffer without them?

The old/new-again expression claims “it takes a village to raise a child”. In these days of the “global village”, it’s pretty hard to predict how all of this will turn out.

SPACE TRAVEL THE SLOW WAY

Those of us who believe that humankind has a destiny among the stars are convinced that somehow, some day, a faster-than-light method of travel will be found. Warp speed. Jump ships. Convenient wormholes. Whatever will get us to other star systems and their planets in a reasonable amount of time. Physicists and mathematicians look at the formulae, pat us on the heads and say, “Good luck with that.”

The alternative is what became known in science and science fiction as “generation ships”: giant ark-like spacecraft meant to carry hundreds, or even thousands of people, many of whom might be born, live, and die while the ship is still in transit. The concept showed up in novels like Orphans of the Sky by Heinlein, The Songs of Distant Earth by Clarke, even TV shows like the early 70’s clunker The Starlost and parts of the movie WALL-E. After all, even optimistic estimates of near future technology place the travel time to the Centauri system, our nearest stellar neighbours, at more than a hundred years. The human lifespan is edging up to that figure, sure. But we wouldn’t launch a crew of babies, counting on them to build a colony at the end of the trip while in their final years of life. Other stars with potentially promising planets for colonization, like Gliese 581 and Gliese 667C are five times as far. So the spacecraft required would have to be self sufficient and support suitable populations for fifteen to twenty generations.

One of the popular arguments against such a project is that, by the time the first ships reached their goal, technological improvements on Earth would have produced faster ships that would have passed the original colonists and rendered them obsolete. Who’d want to take that risk?

Obviously there are a lot more problems with the concept than just technical ones. What’s the attraction in setting out for the stars knowing you’ll die in space before actually getting anywhere? What would give purpose to the lives of all of those people in the centuries between stops, and what guarantee could there be that they wouldn’t develop completely different priorities along the way, utterly changing the mission? They might become apathetic with no challenges to overcome, or turn to war amongst themselves because of the pressures of confinement and boredom. They might evolve in ways we can’t predict (especially if the ship isn’t completely shielded from cosmic radiation). A lot can happen in a few hundred years. Would such children of space even be recognizable as human by the time they got to their destination?

Still, if there were to be a suitable type of human being for such a long journey in a big tin can, they’d have to be people who are perfectly content with something like an urban environment, never seeing natural settings larger than an inner city park. They’d probably need to be easily occupied by non-physical activity, especially diversions generated by computer—as satisfied with virtual experiences as the real thing. It might help if they’re not overly ambitious, so they don’t get into conflict over things like leadership. Content to spend their time in smallish spaces, interacting in less personal ways, since large gathering areas would be at a premium.

Hmmm. Is it just me, or does that sound a lot like the millennial generation?

Maybe the generation ship idea isn’t dead. It was just waiting for the right humans to come along.

I STILL MISS THE ORIGINAL U.S.S. ENTERPRISE

After ten years of work, some Arizona researchers now claim that when popular TV series come to an end, or even when popular characters are killed off, fans mourn in the same way they grieve at the death of a close friend or relative. When I read this I thought it was ridiculous. Sure, when a favourite show ends after I’ve invested years into it, I feel disappointed, maybe even ripped off if I think the story was ended before it was complete. But mourning? Like over the death of a friend? Come on.

Then my wife busted me by reminding me how hard I took it when the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701 was destroyed in the movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.

It’s true. I didn’t cry, but I felt real pain.

And the Enterprise isn’t even a human character—how could I relate to it so strongly as to feel that kind of reaction at its demise? I didn’t even feel as badly when they killed off Spock at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (probably because we’d all heard rumours that Leonard Nimoy wanted out of the role, but I was pretty sure he’d be back somehow). Yes, I know the Enterprise has been replaced, many times, but they’re not the same. There will only ever be one original ship.

I grew up with that ship. I watched every episode of the original series when it first aired and watched them again numerous times in reruns and from tapes or DVD’s. My brothers and I had models of the Enterprise and the Galileo 7 shuttlecraft. Together with friends, we poured over blueprints—it felt like I’d walked the corridors myself and taken countless rides in the turbolifts. Most of all she took us on extraordinary adventures.

Yet even all that isn’t why I felt such a strong attachment to her. The way I felt was because of the way the characters felt. The Enterprise was Kirk’s first and only true love—he would do anything to defend her (and it could be argued that he might never have permitted her destruction if she hadn’t already been marked for decommissioning). She was far more than just a home to the other members of the crew, too—she defined them, and they her. And even when the original series ended, at least I could imagine the Enterprise voyaging on between the stars, continuing on its five-year mission and beyond. But not after Star Trek III.

Though there have been other Enterprises, I think the TV and movie creators have missed a trick by not invoking the same empathy and love in the audience for the ship herself. William Shatner’s Kirk and his Enterprise were like one being, indivisible. But Chris Pine’s Kirk doesn’t seem to be devoted to the ship at all, even though she’s his first command. I think that’s a mistake. And I think it’s a lesson for filmmakers and SF writers alike.

While we’re creating our heroic, charming, rascally, or just plain lovable human and alien characters, lets not forget their spacecraft, their time machines, their submarines or starbases.

Fans can fall in love with them too.

Science Fiction We Could Really Use Right Now

Maybe I’ve been overdosing on dystopian and apocalyptic fiction lately, in books, movies, TV—it seems to be everywhere. We call it things like “dark fiction” because that makes it sound more adult, as if anything “light” and optimistic isn’t worth our time now that we’re grown up. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good disaster story as much as anyone, but I can see real ones any time I feel like turning on the news. What about the hopeful fiction? Especially the hopeful science fiction? Have we lost hope in science?

I miss the days of the original Star Trek series and its inferior (but entertaining) contemporaries that placed their main characters in jeopardy every week yet managed to achieve a happy ending through some triumph of scientific reasoning, moral fortitude, pure luck, or any combination of the above. Much as I enjoyed the action elements of the rebooted Trek movie franchise, they’re not about science. And it’s rare to find an SF movie or TV offering that doesn’t focus mostly on the cost of scientific and technological advancement to our society, rather than its benefits.

SF has always had its cautionary tales, but the good stuff invoked a sense of wonder, too. I admired Phillip K. Dick and William Gibson, but I loved Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. They made science exciting. Attractive. Even reassuring, in a way, compared to the current focus that offers a whole lot more cloud than silver lining.

Is it because our society feels let down by science? Fukushima, climate change, Monsanto with its frankenfoods. It’s easy to conclude that the major scientific advances have all gone toward ways to kill more people or to make the already-rich become obscenely wealthy. That’s not quite true—the tech developments with the greatest impact on our lives have been in computing and communication, so we can play video games with strangers across the world and our kids can text each other while they sleep. Hallelujah.

Maybe it’s time to rescue science—rehabilitate its image. That might be quite a challenge in the real world, but we could start in our fiction, to show the way. How about some stories that feature science once again making wonderful discoveries, fixing our problems of today, and painting a future where we’d actually like to live? That’s not hiding our heads in the sand, it’s providing the hope that our species needs to keep striving, advancing, and reaching for the stars (literally and figuratively). Maybe it’s time for an anthology of positive SF stories, or a special series of inspiring novels. I’m betting they’d sell, too.

Count me in.

INVISIBILITY: WHAT GOOD IS IT?

Now you see it—now you don’t. The most famous magician’s trick of all: making something disappear. It’s also a trick that’s driven a lot of scientific research over the centuries, and inspired it’s share of fictional treatments, too. I think my favourite is still H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (the Chevy Chase movie inspired by it was also a guilty pleasure, though), but James Bond’s car in Die Another Day and the invisibility cloak in the Harry Potter books would be pretty cool, too.

Or would they? And how close are things like that to becoming a reality?

There have been at least three announcements of scientific discoveries involving invisibility within the past month. One came from a team from Singapore who created a box of special transparent materials in a precise configuration that can redirect light and hide whatever’s inside the box while appearing to be see-through. Scientists from the University of Toronto unveiled a system involving small antennae that create magnetic interference and prevent radar from producing a return from the shielded object. And a group from the University of Texas have produced a kind of cloak material that might be almost as usable as Harry Potter’s except, so far, it only makes things invisible to microwaves, not visible light.

In spite of the effort poured into it, how useful would invisibility really be? Yes, spies might love it, and soldiers on the battlefield—if there weren’t so many other ways of detecting people and objects. You can envision invisible police speed traps. Or private detectives on a stakeout. Or cat burglars in buildings without motion detectors, I suppose. Or nudist colonies in the middle of a city, for that matter. We could imagine that, if invisibility shields were reasonably available they might be desired by criminal elements for bordellos, crack houses, or floating crap games. Naturally every secret government agency worth its salt would want invisible headquarters. The U.S. President’s Air Force One and Marine One would benefit from real stealth technology.

But think about it further. Whether a criminal operation or a government one, actual invisibility wouldn’t make sense. Suddenly there are empty lots all over the place where there used to be buildings? Not very subtle. No, fixed objects like buildings would benefit more from truly effective projections of false facades. Disguises yes, invisibility no. Even James Bond’s car wasn’t truly invisible—it was made to blend chameleon-like into the background behind it.

As I put my mind to this, one of the most likely applications of invisibility technology in the future might well be to hide the wealthy. In fifty years from now, perhaps, the “gated community” of today will have become the invisible community, with the richest of the rich relying on the premise of “out of sight, out of mind.”

Unless the wealthy, like the nudists, just can’t resist the urge to show it off.

WHO ELSE IS OUT THERE?

Continuing analysis from the data gathered by the Kepler space telescope shows that of all the stars in our galaxy that our similar to our sun, possibly one out of every five has an Earth-size planet orbiting in the habitable zone—with temperatures that permit liquid water. That could mean billions of planets out there capable of supporting life that wouldn’t be completely strange to us. We don’t have to imagine unrecognizable life forms that breathe chlorine or methane or are made of silicon (although those are still possible, I suppose).

Why does this news excite us? Unless we manage to make an end run around the laws of physics—inventing warp drive, harnessing wormholes, or something equally exotic and improbable—we’ll never be able to get to more than a handful of those planets. They’re just too far away. Perhaps we could found a colony or two, but it’s really the thought of other intelligent life that’s the compelling part, isn’t it? Is there something comforting in the thought that we’re not alone in the universe—that somewhere “out there” others are looking back in our direction and asking the same questions? Even if we will never meet?

It’s fun to remember all of the different ways we’ve imagined alien species. For most of TV and movie history, there were the limitations of makeup, costumes, and puppetry. Think of the green Orion slave girls of Star Trek, or Mr. Spock himself, or Klingons and Romulans, Cardassians and Ferengi. Give them some prosthetics and suddenly they’re children of another star. Aliens from lower-budget shows like Lost In Space were embarrassingly cheesy. Dr. Who brought us dozens of roughly humanoid species, or human-sized robotic entities like Daleks and Cybermen. And then there’s one of the most popular tropes of all: aliens that make themselves look exactly like humans so they can a) hide among us, or b) communicate without frightening us. I hope the guy who thought of that one got a juicy bonus from his producer.

With computer graphics, Hollywood can make aliens look like anything they want, but so much depends on whether they’re meant to be our allies or enemies. Wookies and Ewoks are just teddy bears on different scales. E.T. the Extraterrestrial is ugly but cuddly. And then there are the willowy, large-eyed hairless aliens of The X-Files, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and others: they’re like us but smarter-looking because they don’t have to shave anymore and obviously have machines to do all the work, eliminating the need for actual muscles. But if an alien species is supposed to be an implacable enemy, they look like something from the insect world: the Bugs of Starship Troopers and the Buggers of Ender’s Game, or even the acid-dripping Aliens that made Sigourney Weaver’s life Hell. Somehow there’s never a giant can of Raid around when you need one.

The truth is, even our wildest imaginations couldn’t have come up with all of the bizarre manifestations of life to be found right here on our home planet, from the hidden depths of rain forests to deep-ocean volcanic rifts (though hopefully tube-worms aren’t intelligent). So we don’t have much hope of correctly imagining what’s “out there”. Is it still comforting to think of life on other planets? Give me your answer the next time you wake up from a nightmare about a slimy demon bursting from your chest.

THE POTENTIAL IS...ENDLESS

It was announced last week that the world’s population will grow from the current 7 billion to 9.7 billion by the year 2050. That many billions of people, each with his or her own story—in fact a lifetime of stories. Kind of boggles the mind, doesn’t it? And that’s just on our one little planet.

Instruments like the Kepler space telescope have detected nearly a thousand planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy so far, and thousands of other potential candidates. If each star in our galaxy has just one planet orbiting it, that makes hundreds of billions of planets. Who knows how many are habitable by some kind of species capable of thought and communication? Or maybe someday we’ll get to them.

Of course our Milky Way galaxy is only one of more than one hundred billion galaxies in the universe (if you want a conception of that, here’s a great link to a video courtesy of the Hubble Space telescope).

Are you gobsmacked by the possibilities yet? Well how about this:

Remember that time you were invited to a party but blew it off and went to a movie instead? Except you wanted to see Gravity and your friend talked you into seeing Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2. Did you feel bad about it (at least the movie choice, if not the party snub)? Don’t worry too much because in a parallel universe another version of you did go to the party, and a second doppleganger went to the right movie. Thank you, quantum physics.

That is, if you subscribe to some version of physicist Hugh Everett’s many-worlds interpretation. An overly simplified explanation would basically say that every time a quantum particle can either zig or zag it does both, perhaps zigging in this universe and zagging in an all-new universe that is just slightly different from ours from then on. Even if it only applied to the decisions made by people, there’d be a mind-boggling number of new universes floating around after just one day (even a universe where Miley Cyrus can keep her tongue in her mouth…maybe). Since there is an unthinkable number of quantum particles interacting at any given pico-second, the number of possible universes is literally incalculable.

What am I getting at? Nearly ten billion humans, billions more potentially-habitable planets in the galaxy, a hundred billion galaxies, and an infinite number of possible universes (some of which just have to allow for warp-speed to let us get to all of those other places). The conclusion?

It can never be possible to run out of stories to tell! Not to mention people to tell them to.

Now if I can just live another hundred years to make a small dent in that number.

And find publishers for them all of course.

Interested publishers can find my contact information on the “About Scott” page. Probably best if you’re from this universe, though.

Voyager Has Left The Building

A couple of cool things got me thinking this week. If you haven’t seen it, here’s a link to a video pieced together by NASA from images captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling the Moon since 2009. The video gives us a chance to see the Moon as a spinning globe. It does spin like the Earth does, except the speed of its rotation is such that the same half is always facing the Earth—we never get to see the far side at all. Somehow this view makes it special in a way that static photographs can’t.

One day human explorers will go back to the Moon—we’ll probably build colonies and mine its dusty surface for rocket fuel. There may even be tourism, if people can be convinced that there are things that are fun to do in one-sixth of Earth’s gravity (let’s just leave their imaginations to work on that one, shall we?) And remember the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey with the monolith dug up on the Moon that screams out a warning to the aliens that humans have made it that far into space? Which brings me to the second cool thing…

NASA announced last Thursday that the Voyager 1 spacecraft had finally left the solar system—or at least it’s left the heliosphere, the sun’s main zone of more energetic gases for the denser and more placid elemental particles of interstellar space. Technically, it still has to pass through the Oort Cloud, which is considered both a part of the solar system and interstellar space. At 18.2 billion kilometers from Earth, it’s by far the most distant man-made object, and as it continues on into the space between the stars is it possible that it could encounter explorers of an alien race? That was the premise of the movie Star Trek: The Motion Picture: Voyager was altered by a race of intelligent machines and sent back to Earth, where it mainly provided an excuse for endless sequences of expensive special effects. On the remote chance that such an encounter could happen, the real Voyager was equipped with a unique gold record (like Elvis and the Beatles had on their walls in great numbers) which incorporated pictures and sounds of Earth as well as important messages from some VIP’s at the time. Think about it—that could very well be the first human-made object investigated by an alien intelligence.

A gold record. From 1987. That needs a special phonograph to play it.

Will the aliens say something like, “Hey, that’s a cool little trinket”? Or something more like, “Damn tourists—think they can toss their trash just anywhere”?

And if they are inspired to come and meet us, remember that Voyager itself contains 1987 technology, including an 8-track tape recorder and computers with 240,000 times less memory than your iPhone. Couldn’t that be kind of embarrassing? That would be like me finally getting to pitch an idea to James Cameron only to find him holding a picture of me wearing a mullet.

But then, if they’ve intercepted our TV broadcasts it’s all over anyway. Three’s Company, anyone?

SCIENCE FICTION PREDICTIONS: WHO GOT IT WRONG?

Most of us probably think of science fiction as a literature that predicts things, from new trends in society to nifty gadgets we’d like to see. A quick Google search will show you lots of predictions writers got right: nuclear power, communications satellites, submarines, a moon landing, cell phones, the internet, ray guns (the U.S. Navy had another successful test of a laser weapon this summer)…the list is long. There are also a lot of predictions that didn’t come true, at least not yet, and it has me wondering who got it wrong: the SF writers or the rest of us?

Take flying cars as an example. Yes, there have been a few creations that functioned as both cars and planes (not well as either) but there’s no chance of them replacing the automobile anytime soon. Is it because technology is lacking? Probably not. I imagine that the computer stabilization systems that make Harrier jump jets and stealth fighters able to fly could keep a little sport coupe in the air, too. Maybe the powers that be took a look around themselves during rush hour and realized the prospect of such unskilled and easily-distracted commuters actually swooping around each other in the sky (while texting and putting on makeup) was just too frightening. Or more likely the profit margins just weren’t there. Let’s keep making cars instead (using the same old assembly line equipment) but dressed up with a little more cheap primping every year. You can blame the same reasoning for the absence of personal rocket packs—or maybe that’s the fault of the insurance companies!

What about the idea of household robots to do all of our chores for us? Some would say the requirements of such varied multitasking are beyond our automation capabilities, but would that be true if enough money had been poured into the research? Except, you see, a robot that could do everything would only make the robot manufacturers rich. What about the appliance factories, the home renovators, and the makers of convenience foods? They’d be left out in the cold. Nope, better hold off on that robot thing for a while longer.

Remember the 1960’s magazines articles and Jetsons episodes that boldly forecast a dinner menu consisting entirely of pills? Stupid idea, right? Well maybe not if you consider that, according to some sources, modern farming requires a gallon of gasoline to produce a pound of beef. Not to mention the waste of water and grain stocks. Our western levels of food consumption are clearly not sustainable for everyone on the planet. But we like the taste of food—so much so that we’re eating ourselves into early graves. So maybe the idea of pill meals wasn’t stupid, it just didn’t take human nature into account.

Who got it wrong? Hard to say. In fact, if you believe in the quantum theory of multiple universes, maybe there is a parallel Earth where people do wear jumpsuits, eat pills for dinner, and fly to work like James Bond in Thunderball on the thrust of their own personal jet pack. The question is: how can we get there?

Scotty, I don’t suppose you could arrange a convenient transporter “accident”, could you?