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.

A SPECIAL OFFER

If you’ve been coming to this page regularly but haven’t read my mystery/thriller novel Dead Air yet you can learn all about it here.

If you have read it, I could really use your help in the form of a review of the book at Amazon. So here’s a special time-limited offer: If you post a review of Dead Air at Amazon.com before November 18, 2013 send me an email and I’ll give you the link to a free sampler of my work. The ebook sampler includes two of my best published stories plus a sneak preview of my next novel, a techno-thriller called The Primus Labyrinth.

I’m not hoping to bribe you into giving a good review. I want honest reviews—online shoppers can smell a fake—so write what you really thought. But please do the review. It could really help shorten the time until you can have my next novel in your hands.

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.

ON SPEC'S SILVER JUBILEE ANTHOLOGY

The official announcement has been made, so I can finally mention that my short story “A Taste Of Time” has been chosen for On Spec magazine’s Silver Jubilee anthology. I was happy enough to have it published in the magazine last year, but to be chosen from among 25 years of past issues is quite an honour. Unfortunately, the anthology won’t be published until August 2014! Here’s the link for the table of contents.

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.

When Is Good News Bad News?

When is good news bad news? When the good news is about climate change.

Some leaked reports obtained by the Associated Press indicate that the rate of global warming has slowed down in the past fifteen years, even though greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere have continued to rise. The rate of warming from 1998 to 2012 was only about half the rate of the years since 1951. That’s good news, right? Well, not if it gives climate change deniers yet another opportunity to attack the science and encourage everyone to keep burning fossil fuels like there’s no tomorrow.

Friday September 27, 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will begin to present its latest update, and as scientists have gathered in Stockholm to prepare, there has been disagreement on how to deal with the awkward fact of the slower warming rate, and whether or not to even exclude it from the report. Countries have objected to the short 15-year length of the measurement. Others say 1998 was an exceptionally warm year, and a bad starting point. The U.S. is pushing the favourite explanation: that the deep ocean is absorbing more heat than originally expected. But it would be a mistake to hide or obscure any findings. The deep pockets of the oil companies and other industrial interests will ensure that there are lots of voices willing to twist the truth, hide it, or outright deny it. Climate scientists must show that they’re above that and adhere to the strictest standards of full disclosure. The coming report will likely assert that scientists are 95% certain that humans are mostly to blame for the rise in global temperatures over the past sixty years. In science 95% is huge.

Let’s not forget that, in spite of a slower warming rate, the past decade was still the warmest on record and this decade is on track to beat it. Let’s not forget the shocking number of extreme weather events of the past few years, especially massive storms and devastating flooding, even though the rate of warming was slower than expected. Climate science has to be among the most complex of all areas of study, with an unthinkable number of variables to account for. So predictions are bound to have a margin of error. If the rate of warming was an error, at least we’ve come out on the good side so far, but it is no excuse to discount the rest of the science and stay complacent about climate change, doing nothing. (And believe me, as a citizen of Canada, a country that’s gone from having one of the best environmental reputations in the world to one of the worst in the span of one administration, I’m not pointing fingers.)

I’m struck by the fact that millions of people have sacrificed their lives in wars to stop oppressive forms of government—fascism, Nazism, communism, and other –isms—for the sake of future generations. Yet we’re not even willing to make sacrifices to our lifestyle to save our children and their children from a global climate that no form of government will be able to alleviate.

Science fiction writers and fans imagine apocalypses for fun, but when faced with real threats we turn to our faith that science will provide a solution. Well, sometimes science can only offer a warning.

The rest is up to us.

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?