HOW MUCH OF THE FUTURE SHOULD WE TRY TO PREDICT?

I’ve mentioned before that I rarely write stories of the distant future. Readers expect authors to include details of that future society, especially the technology. Will we have flying cars? Hotels on Mars? Robot servants? Everlasting bodies? They want to read about that—they want to see it in their minds.

Not only is that stuff hard to predict with any credibility hundreds of years ahead (how many futurists of the early 20th Century predicted the smartphone/online world we experience now, let alone where that path will take us from here?) But if you do it too thoroughly, the reader of today might not even be able to relate to the image you conjure. Why do Star Trek movies continue to show a full bridge crew manipulating physical controls like sliders on touchscreens at exotically-shaped workstations covered with more multi-coloured lights than a Christmas tree? Certainly the technology of the 23rd Century and beyond will make it possible for humans to be little more than passengers along for the ride while artificial intelligences handle all of a spacecraft’s functions. If there’s a reason for the AIs to feed regular data about the ship’s progress and surroundings to the humans, isn’t it more likely to be an immersive virtual reality experience than current-style readouts, blinking lights, and a big TV at the front of the room? And let’s not forget that brain-computer-interfaces are already a reality—if the humans ever do have to take control of something, they’ll just form a thought to “make it so”.

But that would suck on the big screen.

It would amount to a handful of characters sitting in chairs in some nondescript space, maybe with some kind of headset on (but probably not). We might not even recognize them as fully human. As much as our mechanical technology is changing by leaps and bounds, we’ll also very soon have the ability to make significant changes to the human form itself.

Our societies as a whole are fluctuating rapidly, too. Thirty years ago, who would have predicted the way our world has now been shaped by terrorism and our lawmakers' response to it? Or the new emphasis on equal rights for members of the LGBTQ community? Earlier than that, it was racial rights that were in flux. Gender equality still hasn’t been fully resolved, but then questions of gender identity are expanding all the time. Science fiction of recent decades has offered some striking examples of where biological engineering might take human sexuality—the novel 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson includes some interesting possibilities.

But if we go too far in earnestly trying to describe the bizarre paths the human race could take over the next, say, five hundred years, will the result be as alien as anything that might have evolved on some distant planet? How will we identify with such people? How will they speak to us? The easy answer is to say that such characters will still have an “essential humanity” revealed by the author, but that might be disingenuous. Because we could very well have less in common with these trans-humans of tomorrow than we do with the ancient Sumerians of millennia ago.

There can be benefits in pooling our collective brainpower to predict where scientific developments are taking us, especially in helping us to decide which paths we definitely do not want to take. But our primary purpose as writers is to tell stories—stories that entertain, yes, but also offer instruction, philosophical exploration, and catharsis. To do so they have to touch the core human identity within us. None of that comes across if we can’t relate to the story—if we can’t picture ourselves in it.

So, by all means let’s enjoy creative visions of a far-flung future, but also recognize the practical limitations that fiction for a present-day audience dictates: too much strangeness, even if it’s likely to be accurate, can get in the way. And although it might seem like laziness when an SF writer doesn’t make his or her future world so utterly different from our own, maybe it’s not. Maybe sometimes it’s just good storytelling.

MORE BUILDING BLOCKS OF THE FUTURE

CREDIT University of Central Florida

In my last post I wrote about some of the ways a bright technological future is already under construction, one development at a time. There are far too many new inventions and discoveries to be covered in a handful of blog posts, but I thought I’d touch on just a few more. You can follow the links to read more details at the magazine NewAtlas.com.

Some of the most exciting new work is being done in the area of energy. Since our ravenous consumption of energy from fossil fuel sources is one of the key reasons our world’s environment is in such a sorry state, every alternative is a step toward heading off even worse damage. Some new developments are potential sources of energy production, like the wafer materials known as ferroelectret nanogenerators such as are being developed at Michigan State University. These FENGs (for short) involve layers of complex materials sandwiched together which produce an electric current when compressed. So, for instance, pressing on a touch screen device might produce the energy to power that screen. Bending and flexing can also produce current, perhaps turning our elbows or knees into potential energy generators. With a FENG folded into a more potent package in the heel of a shoe, creating energy could be a walk in the park!

Thermoelectric materials produce electric current because of temperature differences on either side of the material. Scientists at Korea’s Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology say they’ve developed a thermoelectric coating that can simply be painted onto objects. So nearly anything that has a warmer inside and a colder outside (or vice versa) could produce energy. Maybe not useful for house paint in northern climates where we like our homes well insulated, but possibly for shelters in more gentle climes. And certainly potentially useful for loads of household gadgets from coffee mugs to crockpots.

With our desire for ever more powerful portable computing devices, designers have explored lots of ways to make our clothing and accessories “smart” with circuitry incorporated into them, but also elegant means to power such devices. University of Central Florida scientists have created a “fabric” that uses threads of very special filaments. A coating on one side of the filament gathers solar energy then passes it over to the other side, which is a superconductor (storing energy like a battery). A combination sweater/smartphone anyone? Although, not surprisingly, the first practical uses for this stuff will probably be in uniforms for the modern soldier, giving them the ability to power a range of portable high-tech hardware without the weight of batteries.

Other developments are fascinating if mainly for their “oh, wow” ingenuity, like the way Irish materials scientist Jonathan Coleman added flakes of graphene (one-atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms) to Silly Putty to produce an electrically conductive material he calls G-putty that’s ridiculously sensitive to pressure impacts of any kind. That could make it the perfect choice for medical sensors and other sensing equipment (and made of Silly Putty!)

Still other innovations could transform our world in ways that might take some time to become clear. A company in the Netherlands has created an alternative to stairs and elevators which they call Vertical Walking. In a near-sitting position, a person uses their arms and core muscles to pull themselves up vertical rails in a series of movements that provide healthful exercise but aren’t much more strenuous than walking, while not requiring the external energy, space, and infrastructure of elevators. I’m not sure it’ll catch on, though it’s an interesting idea.

But I have to say that not all new inventions will necessarily make the world a better place. Speaking as someone who’s still mystified by the appeal of “selfies” and their proliferation along social media, I wasn’t impressed by the appearance of the selfie stick. So I’m also not a fan of the AirSelfie drone—a miniature quadcopter the size and shape of a smartphone designed to offer even more ways to be relentlessly narcissistic. Stored in your smartphone case, powered by and linked to the phone, it flutters smoothly into the air at your command, just far enough to take yet another series of pictures of YOU.

If you think this is the most exciting of the breakthroughs I’ve just mentioned, please, I don’t want to know.

THE FUTURE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION

The future isn’t something that will suddenly spring upon us ready-made. Whether you grew up on The Jetsons, Star Trek, Futurama, or just got a kick out of the predictions in magazines like Popular Mechanics and Popular Science (flying cars are always just a few years away) you probably wondered what it would be like to fall asleep for decades like Rip Van Winkle and suddenly arrive in that future world. Of course, that’s not the way it happens. The future comes with every passing moment. You’ve already witnessed incredible changes in technology in your lifetime, many of which no one predicted. Yes, a leap ahead ten years would bring a whole range of new gadgets and processes, but the point is, those “next big things” are in development now.

That struck me forcefully this week when I discovered the online magazine New Atlas. Article after article featured new discoveries, pending inventions, and cool gadgets—the future in process. It’s not only fun to read about the incredible ingenuity of human beings, but also to let your imagination run free about what these new creations could bring.

Some of them are potential game changers on a large scale. Like the research at Australia National University on the light-changing properties of certain nanocrystals (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and nanotechnology is one of the most promising areas of research around). The reason humans don’t see well at night isn’t that there isn’t any light around, it’s just light at frequencies the human eye can’t detect. Night vision goggles mostly collect infrared light and other frequencies and amplify it. But nanocrystals can be produced that shift the frequency of incoming light, say, from infrared into something in the visual spectrum. So imagine an ultrathin coating on regular eyeglasses or even contact lenses that can make these night-time forms of light visible for us. Suddenly there’s no more need for glaring, energy-sucking streetlamps that turn cities into gargantuan floodlights and banish the night sky. Usage of every kind of artificial light could be reduced. Not to mention the aesthetic and artistic possibilities of seeing our surroundings in whole new ways.

Sticking with crystals for a moment, some other Australian researchers at the University of New South Wales are working to refine a form of solar power crystals called perovskite. Perovskite was discovered about seven years ago, and along with its ability to convert sunlight into energy, it can be made with different chemical compositions to produce distinct properties. Among other things, it can be manufactured in various colours or completely transparent, and can be sprayed on in layers. So you could paint your car, or almost any other object, and the whole thing would become one big solar panel. Issues of durability and efficiency are being worked out, but someday perhaps every structure of an entire city could be put to use providing free and abundant energy. A bright future indeed.

One of the big problems humanity has to deal with is all of the waste products we produce, everything from nuclear waste to raw sewage. On the nuclear front, scientists at the University of Bristol, in England, have developed a way to make good use of the carbon from graphite blocks that have been used for decades to control nuclear reactions in UK generating plants. The graphite ends up mildly radioactive, but rather than find ways to dispose of it these scientists put it under pressure and heat and turn it into man-made diamonds. The diamonds aren’t for decoration—the radioactivity in them reacts with the diamond structure to produce an electric current, and suddenly you’ve got a diamond that’s a battery. A non-radioactive diamond coating makes the battery safe to handle, and it’s thought that these diamonds could still be producing half of their original energy output nearly six thousand years from now! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Energizer bunny!

But pressure and heat can help transform another waste product, too. It was high pressure and heat that, over eons of time, turned sludgy sea bottoms into crude oil. In a copycat process, a team from the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has learned how to turn raw sewage into biocrude: an oil-like sludge that can be processed the same way as other forms of petroleum from the ground, including into gasoline and other fuels. Considering that U.S cities are calculated to produce 128 billion litres of raw sewage every day, a process like this could be a tremendous boon to both the production of energy and the reduction of pollution.

Obviously, all of these discoveries are still in the refinement stage and will need to be scaled up considerably before they make a major mark on our world, but they are the future, right before our eyes. And, even more importantly, a hopeful future.

I’ll take a look at more of these new developments in a future post.

GENE EDITING--IT'S TIME TO MAKE SOME DECISIONS

We now know that almost every characteristic of our human bodies, from our appearance to our athletic abilities to many of the diseases we’re prone to, is largely determined by our genes—our DNA (and related molecules). Even before we knew that, we were able to breed desirable traits into our livestock and agricultural crops and some of us wondered whether doing the same thing with humans would be a good idea. So what if we could just take a pair of scissors and some Scotch tape to someone’s genome and, with a snip here and a careful patch there, cure their cancer? An enzyme technology known as CRISPR/Cas9 may offer something very close.

That was one of the big science news stories of the past week. Scientists in China have begun clinical trials in humans using CRISPR to treat cancer patients by “editing” their genes. There’s a kind of loophole in our immune system that cancer takes advantage of—closing that loophole should help our bodies prevent the growth of cancer more efficiently, and that can be done by altering genes in a certain type of immune system cell. So far, so good, right?

The scissors analogy for CRISPR is a good one—researchers chemically break a strand of cellular DNA in a desired spot, perhaps remove some pieces, then allow the DNA to come back together again. It’s also possible to splice a patch of new laboratory-made DNA into the break. Since DNA is a critical part of the instructions that tell our cells to do what they do, gene editing changes the behaviour of the cell and its components. That’s the whole point.

Although the genes of the human body have been mapped, we still have a huge amount to learn about which genes are responsible for which human characteristics, exactly how they produce the effect, and what the implications will be if we make changes. The long-term side effects are especially hard to predict—we can’t know until we try it, which means experimenting on humans.

This prospect might fill you with horror or with wonder. It might conjure up images of Frankenstein or of beautiful, nearly-immortal super humans. As is the case with almost every technology, it will be up to us to decide how much of it is a good thing, and which directions we don’t want to take it. A method similar to CRISPR has already been used to cure a girl of leukemia, and it may soon be used to battle muscular dystrophy, HIV, and retinitis pigmentosa (a major cause of blindness). Certainly curing cancer sounds like a tremendous benefit. Many other hereditary health conditions are potential targets for gene editing. But what if curing diseases isn’t enough? What if it’s used to help women (or men) stay as slim as a supermodel? Or to produce champion swimmers with webbed toes? Or to enhance a child’s language skills at the expense of their math abilities? I especially believe (and fear) that gene-editing will at some point be used to alter our bodies into whatever body image is currently in fashion. Let’s face it, we live in a consumer society. Eventually, the characteristics of our own bodies will become a “product” for which we’ll be able to pay. And the prospect of changing our bodies at will opens up a huge number of potential ways we could be manipulated and exploited by governments, corporations, or both.

I’m not a fear monger—gene editing probably has just as much potential for good as for bad. My point is something I’ve said before: all of us have a responsibility to stay informed and to speak out about how powerful technologies are used. One thing we can’t do is to put the genie back in the bottle. That never works. Gene editing is here to stay. But let’s be proactive and say, “Wow, where can we go with this?” Instead of, “OMG! Where did that come from?” Let’s get ahead of developments and work out the rules our society wants researchers to follow, instead of just reacting after the fact.

To learn more, here’s a good interview with prominent CRISPR researcher Jennifer Doudna.

WHY DO WE WANT TO BELIEVE IN ALIENS?

Do you believe in UFOs? Little green men? The flying saucer crash at Roswell?

You scoff and say, “Hallucinations! Mass hysteria! Cheap drugs!”

Even if you do believe, you probably don’t admit it to just anyone, content to watch reruns of The X-Files in private. Yet it’s perfectly acceptable to be a supporter of the SETI project—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—in hopes that scientists will discover irrefutable signs of alien life elsewhere in the galaxy with intelligence like our own or greater. I can’t say why one belief is more creditable than the other, but the bigger question is: why do we humans feel such a strong need to believe that there is other intelligent life in the universe? Are we so disenchanted with our billions of fellow Earth dwellers that we hope beings from elsewhere will be better company? (Don’t get me started on the subject of rush hour drivers.)

The concept of non-human intelligent beings probably goes back to the beginnings of our own consciousness. Gods, demi-gods, angels and demons, plus any number of supernatural entities have populated human thought since the earliest of times. Sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects have been recorded for thousands of years too, including an account of “fiery discs” in the sky over Egypt in 1440 BC, a molten silver object shaped like a wine jar that descended into the middle of an ancient Roman battle, and shields that spat fire andswooped over the army of Alexander the Great. Long before Roswell came stories of a chaotic battle of multi-coloured discs and globes in the skies over Nuremberg, Germany in 1561, and something similar over Basel, Switzerland a few years later, with both events depicted in woodcuttings. There were reports of alien spaceship crashes and attempted abductions as early as the 1890’s. I’m not sure about the first accounts of people being “probed” by aliens—they sound more like stories concocted to keep teenagers away from Lovers Lane. But UFO reports were so numerous in the U.S. in the mid-20th century that the American government felt compelled to order its military to investigate, most notably with the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book from 1952 – 1968 (which concluded that there was no evidence UFOs were extraterrestrial vehicles—but what do they know?)

It’s probably safe to say that the very first self-aware ancestors of ours looked up at the night sky and wondered if those sparkling points of light were alive. As the idea gained acceptance that the stars were actually other suns like ours, we were compelled to wonder if those suns also had planets, and if those planets had borne children. If they had, and if those children happened to be older and smarter than us, would they someday come to visit? Was it inevitable that they would?

We have to remember that the belief in otherworldly beings far pre-dates any scientific support. It’s only in recent years that our space telescopes and other instruments have produced solid evidence that other stars do have planets, and although some of the planets appear to be close enough to their suns to support the kind of life we’d recognize, there’s no data to confirm that such life exists. Worse, in spite of decades of dedicated searching, there’s been no sign of advanced civilization anywhere beyond the Earth—no froth of radio noise, no TV shows, no electromagnetic shouts of “Is anybody out there?”

Why do we still believe? Why did we ever believe?

Maybe it’s because we just want new friends. We are social animals, after all—refreshing new company might be nice. Or maybe it’s our species’ burning curiosity—we have hopes that an older, more advanced culture might have the answers to questions of science, medicine, and philosophy that have so far eluded us. Perhaps even the meaning of life itself! It could also be that some inner part of us recognizes the need for a mentor—a parent or teacher figure—who can lead us past the pitfalls and blind alleys as we make our way out into the universe. Or it could simply be that, in the same way we can’t truly comprehend non-existence (like death with no afterlife), neither can we comprehend a whole vast universe with no other beings like us.

Science fiction writers thrive on “what if” scenarios: imagining the possible consequences of different histories, geographies, social structures, and technological developments. Real alien species would provide rich fuel for all that inquisitiveness. But the truth is, it would just be so damn cool to meet an actual alien from another planet, green-skinned or not.

Just as long as they leave their probes at home.

COULD YOU LEAVE EARTH BEHIND?

When I was growing up every kid wanted to be an astronaut. I did too, and not just a ten-day-mission astronaut but a guy who worked full-time in space like the heroes of my favourite SF classics. Maybe on a five-year mission to boldly go…or even to jump on a giant colony ship to be a pioneer in a new star system. Cool! Except I always knew there was one big roadblock that stood in my way (beyond my lack of brains, brawn, courage, and training, of course).

I’d miss the natural Earth way too much. I’m kind of an outdoors guy. Not the hunting and fishing kind so much (as a scuba diver, I enjoy watching them more than catching them), but I love to camp in the bush, go canoeing or hiking, and even when I’m home I go for a daily walk outside our town in the fields and hills. I like the outdoors—I need the outdoors. I don’t think I could stand to be cooped up in a tin can, no matter what the size, or under a dome on the Moon. Or anywhere I couldn’t step outside and feel sunshine and a fresh breeze on my face. Even here on Earth we can be susceptible to “cabin fever” when we’re confined inside. Much as I envied the Star Trek gang, I always felt sorry for the ninety-nine per cent of the crew who never got to join an away team and visit the latest planet. Even if they did, it wouldn’t be Earth. No smell of green grass, trill of bird song, or rustle of the wind through trees.

I love trees. I try to surround myself with them every chance I get. Not much room for trees on a spaceship, though. And who knows what would pass for trees on some other planet? But what about Star Trek holosuites, you ask—a computer simulation of almost any environment? Impressive, but not good enough.

Scientific brain trusts try to solve space travel problems like shielding the crew from cosmic rays, reducing the harmful health effects of zero gravity, ensuring the psychological balance of crewmates to keep them from driving each other crazy. But what about the lack of trees?

I saw an article this week about how the Japanese government has been promoting nature appreciation since the early 80’s for the sake of people’s health. In Japan they call it “forest bathing”—going out in the woods for some peace and quiet for stress relief. But, more than that, a variety of natural oils from trees and other plants, collectively called phytoncide, seems to give a boost to the human immune system. That kind of thing shouldn’t really be a surprise, given our evolutionary history. There have been concerns for some time that we humans, especially children, suffer adverse health effects when they aren’t exposed to the natural world. Researcher Richard Louv coined the term “nature deficit disorder”. No, it’s not officially recognized as a medical disorder, but maybe it soon will be as we continue to keep ourselves locked up in glass towers and brick boxes, surrounded by concrete and asphalt.

So what if we were to leave our natural world entirely and confine ourselves to completely artificial environments for months or years?

There have been experiments to study what happens to humans in closed environments, but mostly, as with the Arizona research facility Biosphere 2, they included miniature ecologies—mini rainforests and savannahs, for instance—as well as people. And the results so far haven’t been all that encouraging. Even so, I do think that we’ll need to take Earth ecologies with us somehow for long-term stays in space. I just don’t think that the human animal could stand spending years at a time in a domed outpost on the Moon or Mars, say, without getting a pathological compulsion to get outside and take a breath of air (a very unhealthy impulse in those circumstances!) But if we can take along some good rich soil, fragrant wildflowers, pungent cedars and pine trees, and blossoming berry bushes, not to mention the birds and the bees…we might be all right.

Personally, I still don’t think I could ever leave the Earth for very long, but for some people, taking a piece of Earth along with them might just be enough.

MAYBE WE'RE ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE AFTER ALL

Photo Credit: A. Passwaters/Rice University based on original courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech at http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1454.html

The question of whether or not life exists elsewhere in the universe has been examined in countless ways, and much of the discussion depends on knowing how rare an occurrence life is. When it does arise, how likely is it to evolve into an intelligent species? We’re now nearly certain that there are at least hundreds of other planets in our galaxy (based on our best instrumentation and scientific rationale) and assume that the number is actually higher than that by orders of magnitude, but we still don’t know the odds of life arising in any given place, let alone intelligence. And sometimes rather oblique investigations make the issue even murkier.

Although we can imagine forms of life composed of different elements, Earth life is based on the element carbon. Without carbon-based molecules, there would be no life as we know it. So is carbon a common element on extraterrestrial planets? If so, we might have high hopes that carbon-based life would have arisen elsewhere. The problem is that many scientists who investigate planet formation feel that Earth shouldn’t have large amounts of free carbon that isn’t locked into the planet’s core. So some researchers from Rice University have theorized that Earth must have been hit by a Mercury-type planet something like four billion years ago and absorbed the doomed planet’s carbon into Earth’s upper mantle and crust, where it could eventually be used for the evolution of life forms. If that’s true, and if carbon-based life couldn’t arise any other way, then the rarity of that exact type of collision means that the number of planets hospitable for our kind of life would be equally rare.

Another couple of researchers at Cornell University have approached the question of life’s scarcity in a completely different way. They’ve calculated the rate at which genetic material (like DNA) increases in complexity through natural evolution, reasoning that if you work that rate backward you can figure out how long ago the most basic life forms came into being. According to their calculations, it took far longer than we’ve previously thought for life to arise and ultimately evolve into intelligent beings—nearly ten billion years, in fact. Ten billion years ago is before the existence of the solar system, so they propose that life arose elsewhere and travelled to Earth by meteorites. But if it really does take that long for intelligent life to develop, then we shouldn’t be expecting visits from advanced aliens anytime soon. They’ll all be at about the same stage of evolution as we are—we may even be among the first intelligent species to arise.

What would it mean to us if we do turn out to be alone in the galaxy? On the bright side, we won’t go out into space and face a slew of hostile races eager to kill us off, as in Starship Troopers by Heinlein, and the John Scalzi Old Man’s War series. But it would also mean that we’ll never find companionship beyond our own kind, never get fresh perspectives on art, music, love, or the meaning of life. We’d never get a chance to learn from others with very different experiences. Even worse, if the number of planets with carbon-based life turns out to be near zero, then it will also be nearly impossible for us to find new worlds that are hospitable to us and our fellow Earth species, which means we’ll have to terraform every planet we encounter before we can colonize it, a process that could take thousands of years.

Much as I hate the thought that venturing out into galactic space would bring humanity into conflict with other races, I really hope that life isn’t a rare thing in the cosmos, and that we’re not the only intelligent beings. A universe with no inviting planets or potential friends would be hostile indeed.

WHERE'S A HANDY ROBOT CARPENTER WHEN YOU REALLY NEED ONE?

As I write this, my wife and I are in the process of building our next house. I’ve never built a house before. I think the biggest structure I’ve actually built was a doghouse, and I struggled to assemble a pre-fab shed so, yes, I’m probably crazy. We’ve needed a lot of help from incredibly generous (and knowledgeable) family and friends. But I found myself asking, “Why aren’t there robots I can rent that would do all this for me?” Doesn’t every hapless DIY-er ask this question?

Whatever happened to those predictions that we’d have robot servants to perform all the menial tasks of life for us? Were futurists and science fiction writers just way too optimistic about the timeline required to develop such technology? Or were they flat out wrong, and there are too many hurdles to overcome to be worth it?

Let’s look at the processes involved in building my house. A properly programmed human-size robot should be able to select the correct lumber for a given wall and transport it to the site. With an extra accessory or two, it ought to be able to measure any cuts necessary and chop the wood into the required lengths. It might need to be a little bigger to include the laser measure and saw blade, though. Then it could probably place each piece in the proper configuration and pop a few nails in to hold it in place. Hmmm, I guess we’d better give the robot a built-in level and nailer, too. Gee, suddenly the robot’s getting a bit heavy for that plywood floor and kind of bulky to squeeze under those temporary braces keeping the newly-framed wall from falling over. Maybe there’s a reason cars built by automation require gigantic factories.

OK, let’s try again. We’ll give the robot hands like humans have, to let it just grasp the tools it needs each time, like we do. Never mind that our hands require nearly thirty different bones and 2500 nerve endings per square centimeter to provide the dexterity and bio-feedback needed to handle tools and other things. Let’s say we’ve solved that, and now we tell the robot to hammer a nail into something. For our new house my wife and I chose an exterior cladding that’s a kind of thick panelling with a dense outer coating to do the job of ten-test and siding all in one. A clever idea in theory but Boy, does it like to repel nails! You see, it takes a bit of extra effort to pierce the coating and the stuff bounces like crazy—try driving a nail into that. No, wait—that’s not difficult enough—make it a fancy round-headed nail. Got the picture yet? Every time the hammer hits the nail, the position of the nail changes a little and the angle of attack of the hammer stroke has to adjust to compensate, perhaps with a slight turn of the hammer face and a stroke that’s more of a push than a swing. Or a bit more left force than right, with just a touch of body English. Get it wrong and the nail goes Ping! and flies off into the fourth dimension, never to be seen again.

There are countless tasks in house-building that require mental and physical versatility like that, from compensating for warped boards, to judging how far you can tolerate something that’s just slightly off-level or off-square (OK, ‘slightly’ might be an understatement). Not to mention adaptation to the on-site environment—windy or wet, flat or rough, and full of sawdust. Robotics experts will tell you that there are huge numbers of micro-decisions involved in some of the most routine tasks, and we completely take for granted the extraordinary abilities of our brains and bodies to handle them.

I can’t really predict if we’ll ever produce robots with that kind of sophistication, but I do know that jobs like house construction will be out of the question until we change the arcane conventions of the field. Like language that includes studs, cripples, and scabs (oh my!). The fact that “dressed lumber” means a 2 x 4 is actually 1 ½ inches x 3 ½ inches, and an 8-foot stud is only 92 5/8 inches long instead of 96. And speaking of inches, the imperial system of measurement has got to go. Have you ever tried to use a calculator for an equation involving measurements like 27 13/16ths?

Any logic-based robot brain could be forgiven for quickly going insane.

BIG NEWS IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

Photo Credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA)

There’s a new neighbour in the ’hood and it has the astronomy community buzzing. A team called the Pale Red Dot project at Queen Mary University in London has discovered an Earth-like planet orbiting our nearest stellar neighbour. Finding Earth-type planets orbiting other stars is becoming a regular thing, but when it’s orbiting the star nearest to us, that’s very big news. The Alpha Centauri binary star system is usually called our nearest neighbour, but there’s a red dwarf star called Proxima Centauri (loosely orbiting the Alpha Centauri system) that’s just a little closer at 4.25 light years. The newly-discovered planet, Proxima b, is thought to be a rocky planet with a mass similar to Earth or a little more, in an orbit closer than Mercury’s orbit around our Sun. Thanks to the much lower energy output of a red dwarf star, such a close orbit is still within a range that should allow liquid water to exist—what scientists consider the star’s “habitable zone”. So life of a kind we would recognize could possibly survive there, although it wouldn’t have an easy time of it. The planet is probably tidally locked, keeping the same face to its sun all the time—only areas near the night/day dividing line would avoid getting either too much sun for comfort, or an endless cold night. On top of that, Proxima Centauri occasionally sends out burst of x-rays and ultraviolet radiation that might kill off any life trying to gain a foothold there. We also don’t know anything about the planet’s atmosphere. All in all, for any kind of life to exist on Proxima b would be a real long shot (though some scientists consider it a better bet than Mars).

So why all the excitement?

Maybe there’s a lot of astronomy research that’s driven by pure scientific curiosity, but I’d argue that the question we most want answered is, “Are we alone in the universe?” That’s why it was such a thrill when the first planets were confirmed around other stars. Why we get an extra kick when we find planets that are similar to Earth, and especially when they’re in a star’s habitable zone. We can’t help feeling that any of those just might be home to another intelligent race, or at least some form of life that doesn’t come from Mother Earth. But all of those planets discovered so far have been unthinkably far away—there’s no way to reach them within any meaningful timeframe using foreseeable technology (dropping in on the neighbours would take thousands of years in travel time).

Now we see the possibility of a living planet practically next door in galactic terms. Yes, it would still take thousands of years to get there using current technology, but some of the most promising engine tech being developed, like nuclear pulse propulsion or fusion rocket drives might take us there in less than a century. Even more significantly, this new discovery provides the incentive to make that effort.

Humanity is at its most brilliant and daring when faced with a challenge that’s daunting, but still feels achievable. Getting to the Moon was a perfect example—enormous resources were required to make it happen, but first there had to be the will to make it happen. Now, when you combine our most compelling cosmic mystery—the search for other life in the universe—with a target that involves serious obstacles but doesn’t feel completely unachievable, you’ve suddenly got something that can light a fire under our collective backsides.

Yes, we’ll still need to wait for better information about the new planet’s atmosphere, gravity, etc., perhaps from the European Extremely Large Telescope due to enter service in 2024.

But in the meantime, we’ve got a new place to go and an eons-old reason to go there. That makes the discovery of Proxima b a game changer.

ARE ALIENS BUILDING MEGASTRUCTURES?

Are there alien races so advanced that they can turn their whole solar system into a construction project?

If you follow astronomy news, you’ll know that there’s been a lot of interest since last year in a star designated KIC 8462852, also informally called Tabby’s Star after astronomer Tabetha Boyajian at Yale, who’s devoted a huge amount of her time to studying the star after it was first flagged by some amateur stargazers. According to data from the Kepler Space telescope, Tabby’s Star has been getting dimmer over recent decades, but not consistently, and not because of any known kind of star behaviour. It undergoes strange “dimming events” that might see it lose 2% - 3% of its brightness over a period of time. New research shows that it’s not just occasional flickering, but an overall steady decline in the star’s output as well. Scientists have no solid explanation—some have suggested a cloud of dust or other material getting in the way, or possible a swarm of comets, but none of these ideas explains every aspect of the data.

So could it be that Tabby’s Star is home to an alien race so powerful it has built mammoth structures in space that are blocking or even capturing their star’s light?

No one will commit to that scenario, but Boyajian herself plans to study the star for a full year, and others will explore a wide range of evidence to learn whether the star’s fluctuation is natural or…alien-made.

Mega-sized artificial space structures aren’t a new idea to scientists, and especially not to science fiction writers. Writer Olaf Stapledon mentioned the possibility of a race harnessing the entire energy of its home star back in 1937 but it got widespread attention when physicist Freeman Dyson published a paper about the concept in 1960. It came to be known as a Dyson sphere or Dyson shell—although Dyson himself proposed a large number of vast power stations orbiting a star, the popularized form of the concept became a shell of material, drawn from asteroids and moons, that would totally enclose a sun, capturing every bit of its output, and consequently making it disappear from view to any other solar system (except for heat and other energy radiating from the back of the shell, presumably). Writer Larry Niven invented the Ringworld, a wide band of solid stuff kept in orbit around its star, its inner surface providing a huge amount of living space and lots of energy for the race that engineered it. Dan Alderson came up with the idea for the Alderson disk, like a giant vinyl LP record perhaps extending to the orbit of Mars or even Jupiter with the sun as the spindle in the center. The disk could also be given an up-and-down motion that would make the sun ‘bob’ above and below it, making both surfaces habitable. Later, Larry Niven and fellow writer Gregory Benford invented the Bowl of Heaven—basically half of a Dyson sphere for living space and energy capture, but with a hole in it through which to blast a stream of highly-energized particles forced out of the sun, like a rocket engine, making the whole star system into one stellar-scale movable spaceship. Now that’s what I call big concept.

Could Tabby’s Star be dimming because beings there are constructing a ringworld, or a Dyson sphere, or some other mammoth object we can’t even imagine?

Maybe, but there have been lots of other times when hopeful scientists have suggested alien intervention as the explanation for phenomena that turned out to be natural, from the too-regular-to-be-natural radio emissions of pulsars, all the way back to the canals on Mars, ‘discovered’ by Percival Lowell (not to mention an embarrassing finding by a radio observatory in Australia that turned out to be caused by the scientists’ microwave oven as they reheated their coffee!)

Still, if we ever do discover other intelligent life “out there”, this is probably how it will be done. So I shouldn’t discourage the wishful thinkers too much. And what effect will it have on us, if such a thing is ever proven? Will it send us into a panic, or inspire us to perform unimaginable feats ourselves?

You know which one I’m hoping for.