OUR FUTURE IN THE OCEANS

I’ve had a lifetime love affair with the underwater world. Influenced by everything from Jacques Cousteau films and TV specials to the ancient Sea Hunt TV show with Lloyd Bridges, I’ve spent a lot of my swimming time under the surface—on purpose! As a pre-teen I made my own “underwater habitats”, anchoring plastic garbage pails to the bottom of our backyard swimming pool, and submerging overturned canoes in lakes. Naturally, I became a scuba diver as an adult, fascinated by shipwrecks and coral reefs—if you visit a tropical vacation spot and don’t spend time underwater on the reefs, you’re missing some jaw-dropping beauty that the above-water environment just can’t match.

I loved to read science fiction stories about the undersea world, too. There have never been that many. Except for the iconic Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, The Deep Range by Arthur C. Clarke stands as the earliest major undersea SF work I can remember. Peter Watts’ Rifter series and Michael Crichton’s Sphere are standouts too. And yet, I’m convinced that our oceans will play an even bigger role in human life of the future than they do now.

From ancient times, oceans have provided essential transportation routes, and today the shipping and shipbuilding industries comprise nearly ten percent of the economic value added from the oceans worldwide, and about five percent of the employment, according to recent reports. Fishing (wild) and fish processing are the largest economic sectors (employing 36% of the workforce) but maritime and coastal tourism comes an impressive second (23% of employment). In terms of economic value, offshore gas and oil is extremely important. But I expect that this whole picture will be very different a hundred years from now.

Wild fish stocks have been devastated by overfishing, pollution, ocean acidification, and climate change. As the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere increases, ocean waters will become even more acidic (affecting the entire oceanic food chain), currents will shift, and fish populations will struggle to recover. If we want to continue to eat seafood, it will have to come from aquaculture. There are serious problems with fish farming that must be overcome, especially related to the spread of disease, and genetic threats from interbreeding. But it’s reasonable to expect that a century from now we’ll see giant aquaculture installations patrolled by submersibles (like Clarke imagined in The Deep Range). We might not raise whales for their meat, but certainly fish and crustaceans, and some years farther into the future we’ll have mammoth production facilities for edible forms of algae, like spirulina, drawing nutrient-rich water up from the ocean depths for the crops, while being self-sufficient in energy thanks to the water temperature differences (like geothermal sources we use today). The algae farming business will explode as soon as we develop food processing technologies that will turn the raw algae into more palatable forms of protein. Drop into a vegan food store sometime and see what can be done with vegetable-based fake meat.

I expect oil and gas production in the oceans to increase over the coming decades, but the environmental risks will eventually be more than we’re willing to stomach. Instead, energy production from offshore wind farms, ocean tide-powered turbines, and possibly the raw energy of ocean floor volcanic vents will all be developed into significant industries, as long as we’re careful to avoid degradation of the environment. I hope (and believe) that we’ll be wise enough to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, which will reduce some of the most hazardous ocean shipping. We also need to become less obsessed with consumer goods, or at least opt for more locally-produced foods and goods, out of concern for the environment (and plain good sense). So ocean shipping will decrease in the coming century or two, but it may be replaced by increased tourism, as populations in developed countries age (and flock to cruise ships and beach resorts) and the middle classes of developing countries become able to afford such luxuries.

Even if we do cut back on oil and gas extraction in the oceans, there’s every likelihood that we’ll go after other resources in the ocean floor as they become harder to get on land. But the environmental impact could be a nightmare, so my personal hope is that we’ll turn to the asteroids for our minerals and chemicals, and not to the seabed. A better alternative would be to develop more efficient ways of extracting minerals from seawater itself, especially since that could tie in with desalinization machinery, producing much-needed fresh water in an increasingly hot climate. After all, the water created by such efforts will return to the ocean as rain and river runoff, replenishing what is taken.

Will we ever have undersea colonies under vast transparent domes, like some pulp stories and comic books have portrayed? I hate to say it (because the geek in me will be heartbroken) but probably not. To live under the ocean full-time we will have to genetically alter our own bodies, either to cope with the side-effects of breathing high pressure air for long periods of time, or to actually enable us to ‘breathe’ water ourselves, like fish. I think genetic science will eventually be capable of both, but there will be no reason to do either on a large scale. Robotic machinery will be much more efficient at doing any task we need done in the underwater environment, and living underwater will never be a practical remedy for overcrowding the land surfaces of our planet. Giant floating islands, maybe, but not vast domed cities on the ocean floor.

Still, if you’re an underwater junkie, don’t despair. Where underwater cities may never be practical, a premium hotel industry on the seafloor might do just fine.

DIY FUTURE

My wife and I spent a few days assembling a tool shed last week. Yes, I said a few days…of our vacation…assembling (not building from scratch) a pre-made metal tool shed. Admittedly, do-it-yourself isn’t our strong suit, but we can read instructions. Well, OK, the instructions were translated from some other language and “clarity-challenged”, the metal panels were poorly stamped and dented more easily than the average pizza box, and the approximately one million tiny screws and bolts were clearly intended to be handled by the fingers of a five-year-old rather than an adult male. But other than that….

It got me thinking about the future of DIY.

Will there even be a future for do-it-yourself projects? There was a time when every suburban home had a fully-equipped workshop with table saws and drill presses and who-knows-what-else, to crank out lawn furniture, gazebos, rowboats, and even larger workshops. But then, in those days, people also repaired things that broke. When’s the last time you actually fixed something rather than just replacing it? Consumer goods these days aren’t meant to be repaired by the homeowner (just like they’re not meant to last past the end of the warranty period). Even the ones that aren’t filled with computer chips just aren’t designed for the home handywoman to take apart and put back together with no parts left over. So will we actually make things for ourselves?

On the one hand, the growing availability of 3D printing suggests we will. The price of 3D printers for home use has begun to fall, and will continue to do so as more competitors enter the scene. You can already get access to one at many libraries. In the coming century they’ll become much more flexible in the types of materials they use and the variety of objects they can produce. For now, anything large or complicated still requires that the parts be made individually and then assembled (hopefully with edges and holes that line up!) But that may not always be the case. Still, can it properly be called do-it-yourself if you’re just feeding plans into a machine that does all of the work?

There are lots of reasons that on-site 3D printing DIY might grow in popularity, and even become mandatory. As we become more and more concerned about dwindling resources and the impact of fossil fuel use on the climate, transportation of goods will become increasingly undesirable. Better to have things manufactured where they’re needed and from local materials. In fact, when the printing materials eventually come from the disassembly of other objects, it will be the ultimate form of recycling. Provided that the energy needs aren’t too extravagant, it could be a big step toward protecting our planet from further degradation, and that will especially be true as we become ever more mobile, moving our families around in pursuit of employment. Instead of bringing our things with us, we might recreate them at the new home each time, and perhaps even produce a whole new dwelling in each new location, as needed.

These days, when we need some new knowledge for a DIY project, we turn to YouTube. But in coming years we’ll be able to have interactive holographic mentor/coaches, possibly beginning with humans for hire, but eventually provided by sophisticated computer simulations. Virtual reality real-time teaching could be the best thing ever for do-it-yourself fans.

Needless to say, the ultimate expression of home manufacturing technology will be like the replicators in Star Trek, able to produce just about anything, durable or consumable, from energy or a supply of basic matter. Pretty dang cool, and whole lot better than fiddling with miniscule nuts and bolts.

Not really DIY, though, in the sense of actually making something ourselves.

I expect that, in spite of advancing technology, DIY projects will trend toward smaller things within the coming century, as shrinking energy supplies make individual transportation, and consequently suburban living, untenable. Most of us probably won’t have single-family houses—more likely condominiums in tall buildings—so the DIY workshop will become a rare indulgence. But there are other forces that might strangle DIY into oblivion.

Pressure continues to grow in an effort to make each of us into “consuming machines”, with advertising urging us to buy everything we can. That pressure comes from corporations (whose profit managers probably hate DIY) but also governments as they try to boost their national economies with domestic consumption and international trade. It isn’t likely to go away. A cynical forecaster might predict a thoroughly globalized world effectively run by multi-nationals greedy for sales and definitely not in favour of recycling DIY-style. Or authoritarian regimes that ban DIY because it takes jobs away from workers (and eats away at sales taxes, too).

It’s probably impossible to predict the future of do-it-yourself pursuits beyond the next century because the technology is changing too quickly. So my advice is to enjoy it while you can, and especially the amazing new capabilities provided by 3D printing.

Oh, and if you’re tempted to get one of those DIY metal sheds in a box…at least invest in some good earplugs so you don’t have to hear each other curse.

FREE SUMMER READING

My collection of disaster stories is now FREE. Let’s admit it, there’s a guilty pleasure in imagining how civilization could end!

An invasion from beneath our feet. A hammer blow from the sky. A genetic crop modification that could bring about humanity’s extinction.

Not only will it cost you nothing at my bookstore here and here and all other major ebook outlets, but the ebook also contains a link to another collection of my short fiction.

Tartarus Rising: The most critical business centres of the world are suddenly swallowed into the ground, a chemical explosion devastates New Jersey, and survivors flee the rumours of invaders from beneath the Earth. (First published in the anthology "Doomology" from Library of Science Fiction & Fantasy Press, 2010).
Saviour: A killer asteroid is headed for the Earth and the defence against it depends on one man. But what if he’s the wrong choice?
The Cleansing: The people of a far-future pastoral Earth discover that their forbears genetically modified their crops to be protected from mutations by occasional die-offs. Except no-one has a plan when all of the crops start to die at the same time.

Three short stories with a total word count of about 16,000.

So I hope you'll enjoy my gift of some great summer reading!

OCTOPUSES AREN'T ALIEN AFTER ALL?

Image from the H.P. Lovecraft Wiki

A number of science-related stories caught my eye this week: a competition to design Elon Musk’s Hyperloop, claims that octopus DNA is alien, and a planned clinical trial to revive people who are brain dead. How to choose? So read on about each of these.

First, the Hyperloop: You may remember back in 2013 when billionaire Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla cars fame announced his idea for an enclosed, near-vacuum, high-speed rail transportation system that would run across the continent between the largest U.S. cities in hours instead of days. Tech lovers jumped on the idea, so much so that Musk had to publish disclaimers denying any connection to the hyperloop companies that sprang up, and a year ago he announced a competition for universities and other organizations to design the ultimate hyperloop transport pod. He even had a test track built at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The response has been terrific, and so are the designs—you can take a look at them at The Verge. The plan is have the test pods compete sometime this August but no date has been confirmed.

The economic benefits of such a high-speed transportation system could be considerable, but I’m more excited about the ecological benefits of getting that many cars and buses off the highways and commuter jets out of the air. The classic science fiction stories I loved to read as a kid (like The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke) often had planet-wide transport systems, maybe running right through a planet, and while the scenery at such high speeds (or underground) might not be much of an attraction, it sounds a lot more environmentally friendly than sub-orbital rockets shooting all over the globe. That’s a win in my book.

You may have seen recent Facebook posts of articles claiming something like “Scientists Say Octopuses Are Alien!” The drift of the story is that researchers had found that “octopuses have a genome that yields an unprecedented level of complexity, composed of 33,000 protein-coding genes” which is beyond the number found in a human being. Other quotes proclaimed that they are utterly unlike any other creatures on Earth. In other words, the flamboyant octopus must be alien!

Except the original article in the journal Nature didn’t make that claim at all. The point was that octopus DNA can rearrange itself in ways that previously had only been seen in vertebrates, not invertebrates—notable, sure, but hardly alien. And the article was published almost a year ago—why did so many “news” outlets jump on it now? Snopes.com explains the whole charade more extensively. The takeaway is: don’t believe everything you read, especially online. I have to wonder whether this flap speaks to a childhood obsession with Lovecraft’s Cthulhu among web journalists.

So what about bringing the dead back to life? No, it’s not yet another zombie movie or a re-imagining of Frankenstein. A new clinical trial in India will explore the possibilities of using stem cells to repair brain damage in patients who are officially brain-dead because of accidental injuries (only remaining alive because of life-support machinery). The research, if it goes ahead, will involve the injection of stem cells and peptides, plus transcranial laser stimulation with infrared lasers. Stem cells are the body’s embryonic-type cells capable of becoming any of the specialized cells our bodies use for a huge variety of functions. Stem cells have been used in treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases. Might they be able to replace damaged brain cells and eventually enable a clinically dead person’s brain to “reboot” itself? That’s a simplified explanation, but the question of whether or not the clinical trial will go ahead is a big IF now, not only because of the question of medical ethics, but also because of concerns that the lead researcher may not be qualified to conduct that type of study.

It will be interesting to see what happens if the trial goes ahead, but if the process works, what then? The implications for healing brain injury patients are staggering, but it’s unlikely that such research would stop there. Why not revitalize aging brains? Return the next aging Einstein to his youthful mental prime? Or, yes, perhaps even bring the recently dead back to life, as long as decay hasn’t proceeded too far. It might even be a way of preserving the brains of special people beyond the life of their physical bodies.

OK, now I can’t help picturing Richard Nixon’s brain in a jar on the TV show Futurama, and that means it’s time to stop writing. But there’s always lots of juicy stuff to read in the science columns. Just be sure to keep your inner skeptic fully consulted.

WHOSE DATA IS IT ANYWAY?

You can’t use a computer or other networked device these days without hearing about “the cloud”. Cloud file storage means that your computer, phone, or tablet uploads files to some company’s computer servers via the internet. The advantages include: a) saving storage space on our own device’s hard drive or flash memory, b) you can access your files from other internet-connected devices you own without having to make copies, c) other people can access your files with your permission (like photos you want to share), and d) you can backup your files and not worry about them being lost if your computer implodes. Sounds like a good deal, right? Cloud services usually offer free storage up to a certain limit, and then let you buy more space if you need it (because who ever deletes files anyway?—well, actually some cloud services do, but we’ll get to that).

More and more software companies are moving away from selling software to you in favour of having you subscribe to their service (like Adobe’s iconic Photoshop), with all of your work-in-progress automatically stored “in the cloud”, of course.

There have been problems. Business servers can be damaged or hacked or shut down if the company goes out of business. Internet services can have outages. But it’s some more insidious features that have kept me away from cloud storage.

If you’ve ever had an Apple iCloud account and wanted to cancel it, change to a new one, or just sign out, you’ll have seen a warning that documents stored in your iCloud account will be deleted from your local computer.

What?? Why? Whose files are they anyway?

Something similar can happen if you subscribe to the music streaming service, Apple Music. In fact, people who weren’t careful have apparently lost thousands of tunes they purchased, created, or got elsewhere, because of the strange way Apple does these things. In the case of iCloud, I’ve read that you can’t actually delete an account—your files all remain on Apple’s servers in case you ever want to sign back in. And Apple isn’t unique—a number of services had to backpedal because their terms of agreement seemed to suggest they would own the data they stored. So the biggest players now expressly state that they do not claim ownership…except they still act like they do.

Again, whose files are they? You thought they were yours, but once you’ve uploaded them to the cloud, a company can delete them from your own computer and then hang onto them for as long as they like.

No thanks. Extra hard-drives aren’t that expensive.

So where will all this lead? Well, it will take some determined lobbying to stop this trend, and I don’t see anything like that happening. People blindly accept the situation because of the convenience it offers, just like they willingly give companies access to huge amounts of private personal information for “reward points” or other paltry incentives. I don’t understand that either. But since hardly anyone objects, we have to assume it will only get worse, and soon all of the electronic documents, photos, music, and other forms of creativity and entertainment you produce or consume will be under the control of others.

Don’t expect it to stop there.

Eventually our phones and tablets will be replaced by devices that directly interface with our brains. Our minds will have internet connectivity, with the ability to access all of that information and entertainment by the power of thought. Now we upload our photos to the cloud. Maybe by then we’ll depend on it to store our actual memories. And when we do, who will have control over them? I think you know the answer. We’re willing to hand over custody of personal documents and pictures for the sake of a few gigabytes of free storage, so it’s not realistic to expect we’ll balk at such things when we’re offered the ability to practically relive that Bruce Springsteen farewell concert we loved so much, note by note, anytime we feel like it.

Just as long as we don’t opt out of the storage company’s service, or do anything else to cross them, and as long as they don’t go out of business or succumb to a malware attack. Then it’s ‘bye bye memories’.

The two Total Recall movies were based on a Philip K. Dick story called “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”, but that was about implanting fictional memories for fun. What about when a company makes you subscribe to their service to be able to access your own memories? Or when you’re able to learn specialized job skills using direct information downloads to your brain, but the training company can take those skills back if you stop paying for them? Or if you’re a creative type and you want to keep working on that epic fantasy novel you’re writing but the cloud server is offline, or there’s been a glitch that erased a couple of chapters, or the service wants half the royalties if the novel ever sells…or…or…? Are you getting the picture?

Whose data is it anyway? Unless you’re keeping it totally under your own control, that’s just not so easy to answer anymore.

This blog post doesn’t even touch on the other risks of cloud computing, like cyberattacks and weak security among users. If you want to read more, here are some starters from InfoWorld, Business News, and Information Week.

CAN WE PROGRAM ROBOTS TO MAKE ETHICAL DECISIONS?

Self-driving cars are being tested by Google, Tesla, and other companies around the world. So far their safety record is good, but then they’re programmed to be much more conservative than the average human driver. Such cars are among the first of many robots that could potentially populate our everyday life, and as they do, many of them will be required to make what we’d consider ethical choices—deciding right from wrong, and choosing the path that will provide the most benefit with the least potential for harm. Autonomous cars come with some unavoidable risk—after all, they’re a couple of tons of metal and plastic traveling at serious speed. But the thought of military forces testing robot drones is a lot more frightening. A drone with devastating firepower given the task of deciding which humans to kill? What could possibly go wrong?

Most discussions of robot ethics begin with science fiction writer Isaac Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

It should be remembered that Asimov created the three laws to provide fodder for a series of stories and novels about scenarios in which the three laws failed. First and foremost, he was looking to tell interesting stories. As good as the laws are for fictional purposes, the reality will be vastly more complicated.

The core value of the three laws is to prevent harm to human beings above all. But how do we define harm? Is it harmful to lie to a human being to spare his or her feelings (one of Asimov’s own scenarios)? And there’s the question of quantifying harm. Harm to whom and how many? Some recent publications have pointed out that self-driving cars may have to be programmed to kill, in the sense of taking actions that will result in the loss of someone’s life in order to save others. Picture a situation in which the car is unavoidably faced with the sudden appearance of a bus full of children in front of it and cannot brake in time. If it veers to the left it will hit an oncoming family in a van, or it could choose to steer right, into a wall, and kill the car’s own occupants. Other factors might enter in: there’s a chance the van driver would veer away in time, or maybe the bus has advanced passenger-protection devices. Granted, humans would struggle with such choices, too, and different people would choose differently. But the only reason to hand over such control to autonomous robot brains is in the expectation that they’ll do a better job than humans do.

One of the articles I’ve linked to below uses the example of a robot charged with the care of a senior citizen. Grandpa has to take medications for his health but he refuses. Is it better to let him skip the occasional dose or to force him to take his meds? To expect a robot to make such a decision means asking it to predict all possible outcomes of the various actions and rank the benefits vs. the harm of each. Computers act based on chains of logic: if this, then that. And the reason they can take effective actions at all is because they can process unthinkably long chains of such links with great speed, BUT those links have to be programmed into them in the first place (or, in very advanced models, developed by processes like the search algorithms used by Google and Amazon that simulate self-learning).

A human caregiver would (almost unconsciously) analyze the current state of Grandpa’s health and whether the medicine is critical; whether the medication is cumulative and requires complete consistency; whether Grandpa will back down from a forceful approach or stubbornly resist; if he has a quick temper and tends to get violent; if his bones are fragile or he tends to bruise dangerously with rough handling; if giving in now will provoke greater compliance from him later, and so on. Is it possible to program a robot processor with all of the necessary elements of every possible scenario it will face? Likely not—humans spend a lifetime learning such things from the example of others and our own experience, and still have to make judgments on all-new situations based on past precedents that a computer would probably never recognize as being relevant. And we disagree endlessly amongst ourselves about such choices!

So what’s the answer? Certainly for the near term we should significantly limit the decisions we expect such a technology to make. Some of the self-driving cars in Europe have a very basic response when faced with a troublesome scenario: they put on the brakes. The fallback is human intervention. And that may have to be the case for the majority of robot applications, with the proviso that each different scenario (and its resolution) be added to an ever-growing database to inform future robotic decision-making. Yes, the process might be very slow, especially in the beginning, and we’re not a patient species.

But getting it right will be a matter of life and death.

There are some interesting articles on the subject here, here, and here, and lots of other reading available with any Google search (as Google’s computer algorithms decide what you’re really asking!)

A VIRTUAL VACATION?

The May holiday weekends in Canada and the United States serve as unofficial kickoffs to summer. We camp in the outdoors, open up our summer vacation properties, or just kick back with cool beverages in the backyard, all to celebrate not being cooped up in the house by Winter’s nastiness. Soon it will be full-on summer vacation time: wilderness excursions for the adventurous, campground stays for those with kids, and long road trips for those who have kids and are very brave, optimistic, or just forgetful.

But there are lots of reasons to believe that the ‘vacation trip’ might soon become a thing of the past. Let’s face it, the concept of the individual family car is unsustainable over the long term because of climate change and the dwindling supply of oil. And even with a robust infrastructure of charging stations for electric cars, with power supplied by solar and wind farms, I think the tradition of the road trip will fade.

Other forms of vacation transportation face the same challenges. Aircraft burn huge amounts of fuel and are shameful polluters. Cruise ships too. Passenger trains might enjoy a resurgence of popularity, but the track infrastructure in North America has been neglected for years and I’d be surprised to see any appetite to rebuild it (unless rail interests here suddenly become willing to learn from Europe and Japan). Even highly-efficient transit systems like Elon Musk’s proposed Hyperloop (a super-high-speed magnetically-levitated train traveling in an enclosed tunnel at near-vacuum) would be useful for reaching a destination but hardly a means to enjoy the journey.

Wait—as a science fiction writer, shouldn’t I be touting the dream of space tourism? Second honeymoon jaunts to luxury hotels on the Moon or Mars?

With current technology, and any improvements of it that we can reliably predict, that’s not going to be possible for any but the ultra-ultra-wealthy. Far too wasteful of energy. But also too slow to appeal to many people anyway. Being cooped up for days, weeks, or months with nothing to look at but black space would make the worst road trip to Disney World look like heaven (space crews will have to keep busy or they’ll go nuts).

But, you say, we all need a change of scenery, so what’s the alternative?

Maybe the reality is…we should look to virtual reality. After all, is it really necessary for our body to sit around on a beach in Jamaica as long as our mind thinks we are? The experience is what’s important, and we experience the world through our senses. Those can be fooled. The makers of the VR headset Oculus Rift have finally released their consumer version, bringing a whole new realism to gaming and, potentially, many other forms of entertainment. Oculus features extremely high definition screens with extra peripheral detail for each eye and awesome refresh rates to trick our brains into seeing a seamless visual environment. Of course, the audio component—precision surround sound—has been available for years. As for the sense of touch, the network of nerves throughout our skin isn’t the same all over our bodies—it’s highly concentrated in our hands and face, and much less sensitive elsewhere. Gamers already experience sensory feedback systems that use vibrating pads in gloves and pedals to simulate touch, and there’s lots of room for refinement there. The rest of the body could probably be tricked by systems of heating and cooling pads, plus air-driven pressure points inflated and deflated like a fighter pilot’s flight suit (used to regulate blood circulation during high-g manoeuvres, but certainly adaptable to other uses). Something as crude as a motion chair or platform wouldn’t be needed except for more active pursuits like waterskiing or hang-gliding.

The sense of smell isn’t hard to fool with aerosol systems, and taste really only comes into play when we eat or drink. So we make sure there’s a supply of real margaritas on hand (or any other taste treat, provided by the staff of a VR vacation emporium, perhaps in your favourite shopping mall).

The possibilities mentioned above don’t even include the progress being made in direct brain-computer interfaces. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been focusing heavily on implantable neural interfaces in recent years. Brown University’s BrainGate project is making great progress in allowing paralyzed people to control technical devices with only their thoughts. The more precisely we can use EEGs and Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy to sense the activities of greater numbers of brain cells, the more ability we’ll have to affect a specialized environment directly with our minds, so we won’t be dependent on just witnessing some software designer’s idea of a perfect vacation, but will be able to create our own. Eventually, sending signals into precise brain centres, we’ll be able to temporarily replace the input from our senses and trick our brain into accepting something wholly fictional as reality.

At some point (in the 23rd or 24th centuries?) we might combine that direct brain interface with projection technology and produce something like Star Trek’s holosuites. But in the meantime, these true virtual reality technologies will be developed long before a fast and cost-effective means of space travel. Plan to holiday on Mars from the comfort of your own living room (you won’t even have to get shots!)

For now, after a hard blog-writing session, I’ll give my brain a vacation that fits my budget: a cool brew and a few hours in front of the Scenery Channel.

IMPLAUSIBLE SPACESHIPS COULD BE POSSIBLE

At a science fiction convention recently, I heard panellists complaining that most spaceships in science fiction, especially in movies and on TV, just aren’t realistic. And it’s true. But there are some creative concepts that might vindicate some of those fiction writers and moviemakers.

One is the thought that we could someday harness gravity to propel our ships. It’s not a new idea—in H.G. Wells’ First Men In The Moon the main character coats a sphere with an antigravity material, causing it to launch into space, and then opens parts of the coating to allow the craft to be pulled to the Moon by gravity. A slow form of travel, to be sure, but maybe we’ll one day learn to manipulate gravity the way we use light energy in lasers. (Comic strip detective Dick Tracy’s Space Coupes of the 1970’s somehow used magnetism to get to the Moon and back, but I’m not buying it.)

Speaking of lasers, last month Russian internet billionaire Yuri Milner announced plans to spend $100 million to send miniature probes pulled by light sails to Alpha Centauri. Mind you the probes would be little bigger than a computer chip with a sail about a meter wide. They’d be propelled by the light from a gigantic laser array pumping out 100 gigawatt laser pulses, which would push them fast enough to travel the four-light-year distance in about twenty years. It’s not impossible that such technology could be scaled up to propel passenger-carrying craft.

The concept of a faster-than-light “warp drive” isn’t pure fantasy, either. In the mid 1990’s mathematician Miguel Alcubierre conceived of a way to get around the light-speed barrier of Einstein’s theories. It would involve warping space: compacting space itself ahead of the spacecraft and expanding it behind, so it would be the bubble of space contained between these areas of altered space that would actually exceed the speed of light, like a surfer riding a wave. Yeah, it makes my head hurt, too. And the Alcubierre Drive would require exotic materials that might not exist. Still, we can hope.

One of the most interesting and controversial proposals of recent times would answer the problem of fictional spaceships not carrying thousands of tons of fuel. In fact, it would be a total game-changer. It’s an electromagnetic drive now often called the EM Drive (shown in the photo) designed by an English scientist named Roger Shawyer about fifteen years ago, but it’s so revolutionary, and contrary to prevailing belief, that most scientists simply won’t accept that it works. The Shawyer engine uses microwaves bounced around in a sealed chamber to produce propulsion. Established wisdom says that in order to go in one direction in space we have to throw something in the opposite direction. So scientists declare that Shawyer’s device can’t work. Except Shawyer showed that it does. And then Chinese researchers got one to work, and an American inventor showed a working model to NASA, and now a respected German professor has made one that works (though he’s still not sure why it produces thrust). The jury’s still out on the EM Drive, but acceptance is growing, and if it turns out to be workable it just might prove that many of the fictional spaceships we’ve read about in books and seen in movies are more realistic than we thought.

Not X-wing fighters, though. They’re still pure fantasy.

THE IMPLAUSIBLE SPACESHIPS OF SCIENCE FICTION

At the Ad Astra science fiction convention I attended recently in Toronto, a number of panels touched on the question of realistic spaceships in fiction.

Star Wars X-wing fighters? Not realistic, especially in space. With no air for wing surfaces to act on, there’s no reason to have wing-like structures, and no sensible way the ships would swoop and soar, darting in and around larger ships and into canyon-like spaces on death stars.

The mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind is gorgeous, and impressive as hell, but I can’t imagine any practical reason to make a ship with so many strange levels, and bizarre things sticking out of it.

Star Trek’s beloved Enterprise? Well the idea that a burst of plasma from a matter-antimatter reaction could push a ship forward is OK, but there’s never any indication of how it slows down again. It creates a “warp field” to allow it to surpass the speed of light and then pops out of warp drive at some unspecified speed that doesn’t seem to be related to anything. Then it goes into orbit around a planet. Real spaceships have to use just as much thrust to slow down as they use to speed up, or possibly harness the drag from a planetary atmosphere for braking (a process that involves a lot of orbits and a lot of excess heat to deal with).

Creators of space-based games like Warhammer 40000 use their imagination to design warships with bat-like wings, spidery legs, huge tail fins, tentacles etc., all to look alien and cool. Except all those frills add huge quantities of extra mass, surplus surface area (the easier to be hit by intentional fire or debris), all amounting to vast areas of waste space.

The Discovery from 2001: A Space Odyssey was realistic, and some of the ways spacecraft behaved in the recent TV series The Expanse weren’t too bad. Overall, though, an awful lot of fiction just plain ignores the realities of space travel, especially the time it would take to get places, the huge amounts of fuel required, and physical properties like inertia and momentum. Things that aren’t moving don’t want to move, and things that are moving don’t want to stop. To make them do either requires a lot of force. To expect to travel through space with the convenience and comfort of the family car, in a sleek package that looks like a futuristic jet fighter, just isn’t, well…realistic.

Of course, the plausibility of a spacecraft design has as much to do with its intended purpose as with its technology.

Gigantic spaceships, many kilometers long (Star Wars, Independence Day, the game Eve online) with vast chambers full of complex plumbing might make for exciting chase scenes and dramatic battle sequences, but large size usually means excessive mass (what on Earth we’d call weight) and the greater the mass, the more force required to get it moving, stop it from moving, or change its course. So high mass is generally not a desirable thing in a spaceship. In a space battle such a behemoth would be virtually impossible to get out of the way of an incoming missile or other weapon. And what do they need so much room for anyway? On the other hand, a colony ship intended to travel to another star could require centuries for the trip, so it would have to be enormous—you’d need to carry enough people to ensure a genetically diverse population for the colony, and maybe even an entire Earth ecosystem to transplant in the new world. Another justification for high mass (though not necessarily large size) would be if the ship required something like a big shield of water around it to protect the occupants from cosmic radiation. (FYI, here’s an amazing graphic showing size comparisons of nearly every fictional spaceship out there. Wow!)

Spaceships that are never intended to enter an atmosphere have no need for a sexy streamlined shape—they can be as ungainly as you want, as long as the structure can handle the strain of acceleration and deceleration. But a shuttle craft to and from a planet’s surface would benefit from an aerodynamic design, able to get some lift on the glide down, and with less wind resistance to contend with on the way back up.

One of the ways TV and movie spaceships most often fail in the realism department is that they don’t include enough space for the fuel the ship would use. They’ll show a craft about the size of a small bus to carry a dozen people to and from orbit (like in the movie Elysium). The American space shuttles were the size of passenger jetliners for a crew of seven, and required a mammoth liquid-fuel rocket and two solid-fuel boosters just to get them into orbit. Sure, we hope there will be significant gains in efficiency in the coming century or two, but as long as spacecraft use reaction drives (shooting something out the back to push them forward) they’ll require a significant amount of mass to eject. And gravity isn’t going away anytime soon.

What’s your biggest complaint about spaceships in fiction—the faux-pas that blow all their credibility out of the water?

There are some ideas being explored that could make “unrealistic” spacecraft into viable concepts. We’ll have some fun looking at them in my next post.

COULD ALIEN LIFE FORMS BE HIDING UNDER ANTARCTIC ICE?

Photo credit - Subglacial aquatic system. By Zina Deretsky / NSF (US National Science Foundation), via Wikimedia Commons

First let me say that the word ‘alien’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘not-of-this-planet’. Under the kilometres of ice on the Antarctic continent there could be forms of life that have a better claim to belonging on Earth than we do, having been here millions of years longer, yet are entirely foreign to our experience.

In central Canada, where I live, the landscape is dotted with thousands of lakes where ancient glaciers ground hollows in the rock, and water has accumulated in the lowest points. The land surface of Antarctica is shaped by moving ice as much as four kilometres thick. Naturally, there are bumps and hollows and, thanks to the immense pressure of all that weight, and possibly the heat of the earth beneath, there are lakes of liquid water. Nearly four hundred of them, in fact, with more still being discovered, and good evidence that water flows among many of the lakes through rivers and streams. You may have read about Lake Vostok, Antarctica’s largest such lake, which made headlines in February of 2012 when a team of Russian researchers managed to drill down to the lake’s surface and collect samples. News came this week that a new sub-glacial lake, just a little smaller than Vostok, has been found near the eastern rim of the continent. If confirmed by penetrating radar, the site is bound to draw a lot of new activity because it’s only about one hundred kilometres from an existing research station—a lot more accessible than remote Lake Vostok.

These lakes get scientists so excited because they may have been hidden away from the world for twenty-five million years. That doesn’t mean the water is that old—there’s evidence that a constant process of old water freezing while new ice melts refreshes the lakes every thirteen thousand years or so. But the lakes could contain life that old—life that’s been sheltered from all of the changes on the Earth since then, and especially sheltered from we humans. Not to mention life capable of surviving under tremendous pressure, isolation from new sources of nutrients, and serious cold (actually about -3C, but kept liquid by the pressure).

Very alien life, from our perspective.

Unfortunately the Lake Vostok samples from 2012 were contaminated when lake water rushed up the bore hole and mixed with kerosene used to keep the hole open. Scientists still checked it out and found forms of microscopic life that appeared to have DNA different from anything we’ve seen before, but those results are suspect. The Russians made a new, cleaner hole in January 2015 and collected more water, but there hasn’t been much news about the analysis of that sample (dang secretive Russians) and the funding for more research there has dried up. This new lake, if confirmed, should be easier to study, and the world at large might finally get some meaningful results. Considering that we’re still learning new things about the history of our planet by constantly-improving analysis of fossils and geologic deposits, a body of water containing life that’s been isolated for millions of years could be a real treasure trove of knowledge.

Of course, with a science fiction writer’s imagination, we can speculate about any number of sensational outcomes:

• New drilling releases a deadly organism that threatens the whole human race.
• An ancient life form is much more efficient and prolific than modern Earth life and begins to take over the planet.
• A life form is discovered that can’t have originated on Earth, proving that space aliens have visited here in the distant past.
• Live aquatic aliens from another world are hiding out until other members of their species return for them.
• Elvis is found alive and well! (OK, only if he’s become a mer-man).

And that, my friends, is how a new lake under four kilometres of dense ice has the potential to affect your world. Never let it be said that there’s nothing left to be discovered. Otherwise some of us wouldn’t have anything left to blog about.