WATER AT HOME AND OUT THERE

At a time of year when my part of the world gets its fresh supplies of water in the form of snow, water was on my mind because of a number of science news stories.

People writing about climate change often mention the estimate that if all of the ice pack on Antarctica were to melt it would raise the sea level of the world’s oceans by about twenty-three feet. That figure can certainly be argued, and I don’t think most scientists expect all of the ice to melt (a controversial study released last year claimed that at least parts of the Antarctic continent were gaining ice), but a new report is cause for concern. Until now, it was thought that Antarctica’s ice structure itself would buffer much of the ice melt and slow the melt water’s progress to the sea. That’s because much of the continent is covered with a thick layer of very porous ice called firn that lies on top of the hard glacial ice and is capable of trapping a lot of melt water in its spaces. But new research says that heavy melting, particularly in 2012, filled the upper layers of firn and then refroze to create hard ice. That new hard layer is preventing melt water from getting down to the porous spaces beneath it so a lot of potential storage space is out of reach and the water is running off into the ocean more quickly than expected. What the results will be, no-one is sure.

The cloud cover over Antarctica also affects the rate of melting, and for the first time since the late 1960’s scientists will be doing extensive in-place measurement of those clouds in a project called the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement West Antarctic Radiation Experiment (AWARE), which got underway a couple of months ago and will run until early 2017. Predicting the effects of climate change is incredibly complex, and every bit of data will help. (A voice in my mind just started humming, “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now…”)

I have a great idea for a novel that involves tunnelling through the ice of Antarctica (no, I’m not going to call it Firngully) but so far just thinking about on-site research has given me chills.

While on the one hand climate change is a threat because of rising seawater (and the unknown effects of large amounts of fresh melt water on salty ocean currents), a hotter climate also poses a serious threat to the planet’s fresh water supplies. California’s recent drought years could be just a taste of things to come.

Maybe we need to hijack one of Jupiter’s moons.

A Scientific American article reminds us that there is a lot of water in our solar system. Jupiter’s moon Ganymede alone might contain as much as thirty times the amount of water in Earth’s oceans, and that’s liquid water beneath ice. It’s not alone—there’s good evidence that Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus have liquid water, and a number of other moons probably do. Of course, to bring any of it back to Earth would be a formidable technical challenge, but liquid water “out there” improves our prospects of creating colonies, farming installations, or manufacturing facilities elsewhere in the solar system. There ought to be more science fiction stories about that—maybe fewer spaceships and more submersibles, fewer spacewalks and more extraterrestrial swims!

Aaah, just picture it: tying up the boat and putting away the waterskis, then cracking open a brew while you sit on the dock and look up at Jupiter waxing overhead. That’s the life!

OK, so maybe the snow is getting to me.

CHRISTMAS IN SPACE

The winter solstice is a time of celebration for many faiths and traditions. It has a scientific basis, of course, because humans couldn’t fail to notice that it was the shortest day of the year and the longest night. That in itself isn’t anything to be happy about (especially in the days before reliable fire-making) but at least it was the bottom of the cycle and meant that days would begin to grow longer. In our family we celebrate Christmas, but whatever holiday you celebrate there’s a good chance the focus is on time spent together with family and friends. Christmas can be hard if you’re far from home. Some of us have to travel for business, or stay abroad because of work, or face a military assignment in another country. But picture what it’s like for those who aren’t even on the planet!

Quite a few space missions have been carried out during Christmastime, especially on the International Space Station where astronauts might hang stockings over one of the hatchways arched like a fireplace, eat turkey and cranberry sauce from a plastic pouch or a can, join a Christmas sing-along with Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield and his guitar, and have video chats with their loved ones. Upside-down Christmas trees are a thing aboard the ISS because in zero gravity it keeps them out of the way. Creativity helps if you’re celebrating Christmas in space—the fourth crew of the American Skylab made a Christmas tree out of empty food cans—but a little preparation helps too. The crew of Space Shuttle mission STS-103 in 1999 took Santa hats with them into space, and so have many crews since—not a big deal until you consider that every gram of weight launched into space has a cost in fuel. Obviously someone has decided that fuzzy red hats with pom poms are important to morale.

Physically, astronauts in orbit around the Earth might be only 200 – 400 kilometers from the ground, but their orbits carry them to the far side of the planet and back again. And they must feel far away from their loved ones because of the circumstances. The hazards of re-entry are a barrier that count more than actual distance, and being surrounded by a frozen vacuum while trapped inside a big tin can must seem as isolating as being on a desert island. Live video chats probably help a lot, especially at Christmas. Earlier space crews had to make do with stilted radio conversations, although the time lag from orbit isn’t too bad.

Pity the crew of Apollo 8 who spent Christmas Eve 1968 farther from home than any other humans: 377,000 kilometers away in orbit around the Moon. Talk about isolated. And cramped! Christmas on the far side of the Moon in a floating minivan is not a recipe for a wild party, though definitely historic. They were asked to broadcast a Christmas message back to Earth for the listening public and chose to share a reading from the beginning of the Book of Genesis about the creation of the universe. During that mission they also took the iconic photo of Earthrise over the Moon.

Much as it sounds like a Christmas in space is the last duty any astronaut would want to draw, two things might make it uniquely appropriate. For one, the International Space Station is a terrific example of people from various nations coming together in cooperation and camaraderie, putting aside differences and working toward a brighter future. And secondly, they have the whole universe at their feet, an incomparable view of stars, galaxies, and nebulae, but also the view that moves even the most stoic: seeing our beautiful blue planet with all its inhabitants for the single entity it is. Those two things together are perfect models for the essence of the Christmas season.

Peace on Earth. Good will toward all.

 P.S.,

Considering the bizarre realities of Christmas in space, it’s not surprising that Christmas-themed science fiction can be unusual, too, from various quasi-scientific imaginings of Santa’s flight on Christmas Eve (including at the end of time in a story by Greg van Eekhout), to trying to make contact with aliens (“All Seated On The Ground” by Connie Willis), to a classic but sad Arthur C. Clarke story called “The Star” about how a priest on a space mission discovers that the supernova that destroyed a thriving alien civilization was the Star of Bethlehem. (That one always disturbed me, which was probably Clarke’s intent.)

Just Google “Christmas Science Fiction” and you’ll find lots of suggestions. Happy Reading!

OPEN AI

I’ve written before about the need for caution when it comes to creating artificial intelligence. Strangely, a news item this week helped me clarify my thinking on the subject and even ease my concerns a little—for now, at least.

A new research company called OpenAI has just been created by heavy hitters like Elon Musk (of Tesla Motors and SpaceX fame) and his former PayPal pal investor Peter Thiel, who claim to have rounded up a billion dollars worth of funding to research artificial intelligence. If that strikes a strange chord with you, you might be remembering that Musk was one of a number of famous people (including Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates) who issued a warning this past summer about the risk of a truly successful artificial machine intelligence becoming a threat to the human race. They weren’t the first to say it by a long shot, but they are among the most famous to say it. So is the creation of OpenAI a case of Musk deciding that “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”?

Not quite. The declared purpose of OpenAI is to support fully open research into artificial intelligence that isn’t driven by financial interests, thereby making sure that AI will only benefit humankind. So Musk and friends obviously feel that, if greed and secrecy are taken out of the equation, scientists can produce AI systems that won’t suddenly run amok, make themselves exponentially smarter and smarter, and decide that we puny humans are only worth keeping around as biological batteries (if you’re a fan of the Matrix movies).

I commend them for it, mainly because I think greed and secrecy are the evils behind most of the ways our technological progress lets us down. But not because I think Skynet is lurking around the corner.

Right now research into artificial intelligence is focused on creating better and better digital decision-makers, looking to produce improved search engines, self-driving cars, and various kinds of prediction software related to financial fields—the drive isn’t to create broadly capable all-purpose thinkers like human beings. We can drive a car, do our taxes, write a poem, cook supper, and sing Raffi songs to our kids (if you have the stomach for it). There’s no incentive to create computer intelligence that can do all that—acute specialization makes much more sense, both economically and from a design point of view. So even if an artificially-created intelligence could somehow find a way to combine its own specialized abilities with other AI’s with different talents into one super general intelligence capable of ruling the world, why would it? By their nature, these programs will “want” to do one thing and do it well. Unless a military threat-assessment AI can help a Wall St. stock analysis AI to do a better job analyzing stock, there’s no reason for the two to decide to interact at all, let alone join with a whole bunch of movie-selection algorithms, consumer purchasing trackers, budget optimizers, and trash tabloid article-writing programs.

The scary part of AI research has more to do with the continual improvements in processing speed and data handling—we assume that because computers will eventually outdo the human brain in processing power, they’ll become smarter than us. And somewhere about the same time, because of that superhuman computing power, they’ll become conscious—self-aware—like us. From there (our fearful imaginations insist) they’ll decide that the human race is an impediment or an outright nuisance, best pushed to the sidelines or even exterminated.

None of that really follows.

For one thing, we still don’t understand what consciousness actually is and what makes it work (no matter what anyone says). There’s no evidence that consciousness (or lack of it) is related to brain size or power. Other creatures have much bigger brains than humans (especially whales and elephants) but the state of their consciousness is anything but certain. There’s no evidence that once a brain reaches human-level processing capability it becomes conscious. Neuroscience just doesn’t have a solid explanation for what constitutes the physical difference between a conscious brain and one that isn’t—we can infer things, but we don’t know. So it’s quite possible that the fastest computer that will ever be created might not have the “spark” of consciousness.

Secondly, if a computer intelligence ever does become aware of itself and devoted to its own individual needs, it would only act against humans if we’re an obstacle to fulfilling those needs. Digital brains are built on logic. Expending resources unnecessarily is not logical. Even we illogical humans rarely seek to deliberately wipe out inferior species—we cause enormous damage, and even extinctions, because of greed, vanity, covetousness, fashion, lack of foresight, and a host of other motives that can be lumped under the general term “stupidity”. But none of those things enters into digital thinking. We should feel secure that no computer intelligence, no matter how smart, will ever do things out of a sheer lust for power. That just isn’t rational.

For a more technical description of the case for AI, here’s an open letter signed by many dozens of AI researchers.

We can imagine a form of digital intelligence that would see all biological life as unnecessary. We do so for fun, the way we imagine werewolves and vampires and bogeymen to scare ourselves, and yes, also to warn each other to be careful when playing with fire. But the rational case for such a thing is weak. If we’re afraid of a new entity arising on Earth that could supplant us, I’d say there’s much more danger of that from our genetic tinkering.

But that’s a whole other blog post.

THE BATTLE BETWEEN SPACE FACT AND SPACE FICTION

Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

We live in an era when a spacecraft can send us pictures of the surface of Pluto that are nearly as good as what we’d see out the window of a jetliner flying over our own planet. Take a look at some of the newest images processed by NASA’s New Horizons team—they’re astonishing. Mountains, gulleys, long running cliffs. As a science fiction writer I could place an astronaut on the dwarf planet, maybe climbing out of his crashed utility ship and hiking toward the nearest outpost, and I could describe real ridges and crevasses he’d have to cross on the Sputnik Planum, foothills and passes between ice mountains that he’d have to traverse. No invention necessary, just a close look at some high resolution photographs. What’s more, I would do that to add authenticity. The downside? No playing fast and loose with Pluto’s geography or geology now that we actually know what it is. If I had written such a story a few years ago I’d be second-guessing myself and wondering if I’d blown it by featuring a feature that’s not really there.

Of course, that’s been the case for stories set on Mars for decades now and the Moon before that. Still, Pluto?

Oh well, at least there are other solar systems to play with, right? Sure, except now with the Kepler Space Telescope and new sensing techniques, scientists have found nearly two thousand planets around other stars (as of this writing the count according to NASA’s Exoplanet Archive is 1,916 confirmed with another nearly 5000 candidates). We know a lot about some of these planets, like roughly how big they are, whether they’re likely gas giants or rocky worlds, how close they are to their sun (giving a good idea of their surface temperature) and sometimes more. I’ve written stories and novel manuscripts that feature an expedition to another star system or even a colony there. Until they’re published I have to keep checking to see that reality hasn’t overtaken fiction—if it suddenly turns out that there are no planets where I’ve placed mine, or even that I’ve put an Earth-type world where there’s actually a Neptune-like planet, some major rewriting would be in order (once they are published I’m stuck eating crow, at least until the next edition!) The writers of the new Star Trek series will have to check the latest stats on each star system before the Enterprise warps in and sends an away team down to the surface of a planet that doesn’t exist, because you’d better believe there are viewers who will check (and probably flame them on social media if they screw up).

As if the situation weren’t tricky enough, the James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled for launch in October 2018 and will not only be able to see small planets that Kepler and the Hubble telescope can’t, it’ll be able to study the atmospheres of planets Kepler can barely detect. That’s power. It will be amazing. It could also be responsible for a sudden rash of science fiction writers with strange patches of missing hair.

You might say, no big deal, we still enjoy stories by Arthur Conan Doyle even though we know there are no hidden plateaus in South America where dinosaurs live. True, but no science fiction writer wants their work to be relegated to that category in their lifetime, believe me.

What’s to be done? I suppose we could set our stories farther and farther away from Earth, decreasing the likelihood that new facts will outdate our old fiction, but to my mind the near impossibility of reaching somewhere like the far side of the galaxy would be a more serious breach of scientific knowledge than the odd invented planet. Perhaps we could create tales of human beings placed a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but then you’re entering the realm of fantasy rather than science fiction (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Really, though, it’s no different than having to keep up with the amazing progress being made in other branches of science—all we as writers can do is embrace the excitement of new discoveries, be inspired by them, rejoice in our progress as an ever-curious race, and do our level best to get it right. And readers can forgive us our transgressions. We hope.

Here’s to new eras of scientific discovery and great science fiction.

HUMAN ENHANCEMENT AND THE LAW

The University of Oxford will host an important conference January 7-8, 2016 at St Anne's College called “Human Enhancement and the Law: Regulating For The Future”.

You see, we’re entering into an era that will see widespread biochemical, genetic, and technological methods of giving a boost to the human body and mind. It’s critical that our society’s regulations and laws keep up, or better yet, get ahead of the game for once. Our laws and law enforcement agencies fell far behind in the explosion of communications technology, especially the pervasiveness of the internet. The result has been a huge upheaval in the entertainment industry thanks to rampant piracy, serious threats to personal privacy from government and business, cyberbullying, identity theft, and cyber terrorism. Let’s hope we can do better when it comes to enhancement science. But it is every bit as complex.

The moral question of genetically engineering embryos to create human beings with improved abilities or even just to correct genetic errors that cause inherited health problems is a vast territory, too big for me to cover here. But even leaving out moral considerations, there are still many legal questions that crop up. How would you regulate the providers of such a service and monitor their outcomes? What lifelong responsibilities would they have to the “customer”, especially a child produced by such methods—would a company be expected to offer warranties? Who would be the customer—the parents or the child? Since the child had no say in the matter, could they sue their parents or the genetics lab? Or perversely, would the child have an obligation to the genetics company? After all, cloning and gene-splicing processes are almost certain to be patented, and might even involve some residual presence in the child’s body. What does that say about the ownership of the results—would a genetically-enhanced human have to pay a license fee to a corporation for the use of their own body? That’s not such a stretch—companies have already applied to patent living cells created in their research laboratories.

Many of these same questions arise when considering chemical or hormonal enhancements and technological augmentations like prosthetic limbs, mechanical hearts, lab-grown organs, or computer implants connected directly to the brain. Apart from the patient’s right to sue a manufacturer for unwanted side effects or the outright failure of a procedure, what about the company’s right to sue the patient for abuse of the “product” (when your heavy cocaine use produces a stroke and makes the manufacturer of your artificial heart look bad)?

Where would criminal law come in? Questions of negligence or manslaughter would be a nightmare to push through the courts. Imagine a person dying of liver failure—how would you determine if their artificial kidneys were to blame, or the stem cell treatments they took to ward off cancer, or a mistake in the lab when their genes were being edited as an embryo?

The question of obligation is a huge one, too. When enhancement technologies become widely available, will they become a right? Could a child sue his or her parents for not providing enhancements for them? Parents are obliged to provide the necessities of life, after all. Would companies be allowed to require employees to have special enhancements for certain jobs, or refuse a candidate who is “only normal” and therefore might be less productive than an “improved” worker?

What are our rights when it comes to the integrity of our bodies? What if new technologies could eliminate health problems that are very costly to society (because of medical expenses or loss of productivity)—would a citizen have the right to refuse such an alteration of their own body? Where would the rights of society outweigh the rights of the individual in such cases? The whole debate over vaccinations is just the first taste of what’s to come on this front.

In one of my novel manuscripts awaiting publication, I explored the question of brain-computer interfaces implanted in a person’s skull. With an internet-capable computer connected directly to one’s brain there could be horrendous privacy and data-protection issues. The potential for abuse by direct marketing is frightening, too, and the prospect of control of such devices by government security organizations is appalling. But we’ll only be able to prevent such things by thinking about them well in advance and ensuring that the necessary legal safeguards are in place.

If you’ve got a headache by now, I don’t blame you. These are terribly complex questions and the stakes are enormous. And we know from experience that laws are never perfect.

Scientific research offers fantastic possibilities for the improvement of the human condition, but the potential for a huge range of unpleasant consequences can’t be ignored. It’s critical that we carefully examine all of these questions and many more, and make decisions about the kind of society we want before changes are forced on us by the pressure of progress.

Hats off, and the best of luck to the conference participants in Oxford this January!

SPACE MINING AND THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

The US senate just passed some legislation that will make space mining more attractive to private companies. Or at least it will if other countries follow suit. The legislation, called the “Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act of 2015” still has to pass one more round in the American congress and then approval by US president Obama in order to become law. Among its most important features, it will give companies the rights to the material they mine from asteroids, though the companies could not actually own an asteroid. That’s similar to the model that mining companies use on Earth—they may not actually own the land, but their mining rights mean they own the resources they extract from that land. Private companies like Planetary Resources are already cheering this latest news. Why not? It’s not like any government can afford to get into space mining on its own.

Mind you, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 says, among other things, “No one nation may claim ownership of outer space or any celestial body.” So it would be a bit questionable for the US to unilaterally grant companies mining rights to celestial bodies that the United States cannot, by treaty, own. That part of the new legislation will be meaningless unless other countries agree to it. Fortunately, those who drafted the bill were careful to make clear that it does not mean the US is claiming sovereignty over any celestial body by granting such rights.

Will we want space mining companies to be like the big mining companies on Earth? Doesn’t it kind of rankle to think of wealthy companies and individuals being given special rights to something that is no more theirs than it is ours? A parallel on Earth would be companies mining on government land—land ostensibly owned by all citizens, including its resources. Yet only the mining companies’ shareholders profit, not citizens (except for the minimal taxes that are collected on any surface buildings). That model came from a time when we couldn’t imagine anyone wanting the patches of distant wilderness where mining companies set up their operations, and we didn’t worry about the places we lived being affected by anything such companies did so far away. But with large scale pollution we’ve discovered that Earth isn’t such a big planet after all. The concept of companies being responsible to remediate land they’ve torn up and polluted is a pretty recent development, and I don’t expect any early space legislation will force businesses to tidy up an asteroid and put it back the way they found it once they’ve extracted all of the metals or water. Who would care? For now.

Mining operations in space will have to be largely self-policing, not only regarding their industrial practices or pollution, but also in the way they treat labourers. Just as governments can’t afford to build and operate mining facilities in space, they can’t afford a constant police or military presence either. And anyone who thinks a phone call will bring the cavalry swooping in within a day or two has never studied physics. So we may be allowing private corporations to set up their own fiefdoms without much prospect of serious oversight. I’m reminded of any number of movie westerns with powerful landowners and downtrodden ranch folk!

Unlike a parcel of land on Earth, where a company’s pollution or damming of a river might cause serious harm elsewhere, an artificially-controlled asteroid or any broken-off parts could become the ultimate planet-killing weapon. It’s not easy to see who should be entrusted with that capability. And that same potential risk means that asteroid mining might not be practical for actually providing resources for those of us on the surface of the Earth. It wouldn’t be especially costly or difficult to sling blobs of ore or metals back to the home planet, but the potential consequences of a mistake are so horrific, who could ever afford the insurance coverage? It doesn’t bear thinking about what could be done with such facilities in the hands of maltreated workers, rioting prisoners, terrorists, megalomaniacs, or any other “bad guys” you could name.

OK, but wait now…haven’t I always sounded like I was in favour of asteroid mining and other space activity by private companies? Yep.

The fact is, we’ll never be able to build colonies away from Earth, or starfaring spaceships, without mining the materials out there—it’s simply too expensive to carry it all up from down here. Governments will never be able to afford to spend the kind of money involved to mount those mining operations, and it isn’t their job. So it will have to be done by private companies.

I just think it’s important to look at all of the implications of technological progress. And I like to point out the scary stuff. That’s what writers do.

On a totally different front, I’ve often written here about space colonies (including my last post) and I deeply want to believe we’ll someday colonize worlds around other stars. Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2015 novel Aurora is a compelling account of a generation ship sent to create just such a colony, and the things that go wrong. I highly recommend it as a great read, but you should also read this excellent feature essay by Robinson on Cory Doctorow’s blog explaining why such colonization will never happen.

I really wish he hadn’t done such a good job of it.

SHOULD WE BUILD COLONIES IN SPACE BEFORE MARS?

Image from http://spacecolonization.wikia.com/wiki/O'Neill_Cylinder

Recent data sent by NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft is bad news for those who hope to someday open up Mars for human colonization.

We already knew that the Martian atmosphere is very thin (about 1% as dense as Earth’s at sea level). To make the Red Planet suitable for humans to live on we’ll have to drastically thicken the air and also heat it up. There were hopes that carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, could be freed from the soil and ice caps of Mars to produce a good atmosphere for trapping heat and feeding plants, which would then produce oxygen. It had been thought that much of Mars’ lost atmosphere had been absorbed into the soil, but the new MAVEN data (short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) suggests that most of that ancient atmosphere vanished into space, stripped away by the solar wind and solar explosions after Mars’ magnetic field died about four billion years ago. It’s gone and can’t be retrieved. That might not affect plans to build domed or underground cities on Mars, but terraforming the whole planet will be a lot harder.

Terraforming Mars was never a short-term project anyway, and the biggest drawbacks to colonies there include gravity and distance. We still don’t know if regular exercise and other methods will mitigate the potential health problems of living in a low gravity environment. And trying to build up the population of Martian colonies will require a lot of very long trips—about nine months one-way as technology stands, but that’s when Earth and Mars are in the right alignment, which only happens every couple of years. That’s a slow process. If our goals are to protect a sampling of the human race from potential disasters on Earth, ease population pressures on Earth, and make use of resources and manufacturing advantages that space provides, we’ll want something quicker.

If we build manufacturing complexes on the Moon, we can make the materials and air to build free-floating colonies in space, possibly in orbit around Earth or the Moon, but more likely where the gravity of the two bodies balances out at the so-called Lagrange points. That doesn’t mean that colonists would live in zero gravity (although they could get to it when they wanted to do a little recreational flying perhaps). One of the popular concepts is a gigantic rotating space wheel like in the movie Elysium that would produce artificial gravity on its inner surface from its rotation. The best-known example is called a Stanford Torus. But my preference would be a miles-long cylinder that would produce a gravity effect by spinning along its long axis. Its inner surface would alternate bands of habitable space with long windows to let in sunlight. In the 1970’s Gerard O’Neill proposed cylinders 32 kilometers long that would provide almost 1300 square kilometers of living space for several million people. Maybe my preference has to do with my love for the Arthur C. Clarke classic Rendezvous With Rama.

These colonies would avoid the concerns about low gravity and be close—only a few days travel from Earth. Research funded by NASA in the ’70’s said that such things could be built with the technology of the time, but materials, knowledge, and tech developed since then would make the job even more feasible.

So while I’m all in favour of Mars exploration for the sake of knowledge, I think the human race would be better served by focusing our colonization plans on free-floating near-Earth colonies or the Moon for the near future. If you think I’m off-base, let me know. Maybe you just have more patience than I do.

The good news this past week? NASA will accept applications from Dec. 14, 2015 through mid-February 2016 for their next class of astronaut candidates. Applications will be accepted at:

http://www.usajobs.gov . It’s only for U.S. citizens (unfortunately) but you could end up working on the International Space Station, a couple of spacecraft being produced by commercial companies, or even NASA’s Orion deep-space exploration vehicle.

The final frontier…but you know all that.

WEATHER CONTROL--HOW MUCH DO WE REALLY WANT?

Science fiction writers are expected to predict future trends, but I think it’s also our job to show the implications of those developments. Sometimes that might be the main focus of the story (like the dangers of artificial intelligence), but it doesn’t have to be. Any story will be richer and more authentic if it shows different facets of a particular choice by society.

Take the weather, for example. An old saying declares “everybody talks about it but nobody does anything”. Of course, in stories set in the future it’s not unusual to have the weather controlled by advanced science, either planetwide or by enclosing the spaces where we live in giant domes. But I’ve rarely seen an author go into much depth about the advantages or disadvantages of weather control.

At first blush, it would be great for beach resorts who could guarantee uninterrupted suntanning and cruise lines who wouldn’t have to worry about high waves and seasick passengers (just food poisoning and norovirus). If your picnic or outdoor wedding was ruined by rain you’d only have yourself to blame for not checking the weather schedule (“That was your only job!” “No, I had to keep the groomsmen away from the booze too.”) There would be no more killer blizzards or crippling ice storms, no tornadoes or hurricanes. Heck, some expensive urban infrastructure like storm sewers, drainage ditches, and streets wide enough to hold ploughed snow might not even be needed. The expenses caused by seasonal weather (like heating and air conditioning) could be significantly reduced, or at least regularized.

With full weather control, the amount of sun and rain could be optimized for crops, so farming would be much more predictable and economically secure. Expensive irrigation methods might be unnecessary in some places, while in others only deliberate irrigation would be used under non-stop sunshine. Solar power would get a big boost (though wind generation would probably collapse).

It wouldn’t all be good—every major change has a cost. Lots more sunny beach weather would increase the rate of skin cancer, for instance (and kill the umbrella industry).

Because of the expense, weather control will most likely be applied according to crop needs rather than personal preferences and, if so, would be optimized for the most lucrative cash crops, like corn, soy, cotton, and rice. Lovers of fresh berries, tomatoes, and leafy green vegetables might be out of luck. That’s why it will be better to apply it region by region rather than planetwide. And since you can’t please everyone, it may never be practical to control the planet’s weather as a whole anyway.

So say we’ve got regional weather. If you love sunshine but your home territory is designated as a forestry zone, your tan will look a little pale and wet. Since seasons are inconvenient for both urban business and commercial farming, say goodbye to those cool, bug-free autumn days and crisp winter frosts. I have a feeling, too, that extreme swings of temperature would be discouraged, which would mean the end of bright Fall colours on the trees and seriously challenge the production of maple syrup. More seriously, if we channel all of the atmosphere’s moisture where we want it, everywhere else will suffer drought and eventually turn to desert. Long before that happens, our weather compartmentalization will have badly reduced the populations of most birds and animals by forcibly shrinking their ranges into specialized pockets with limited numbers of species. Imagine how it will mess up the instinct to migrate.

Plants like grasses that depend on the wind to spread their seeds will become much less diverse and therefore badly vulnerable to blights. The same thing might happen to nearly all plants as our specialized zones cause less dispersion of DNA and less variety (though our increased monopolization of crop production is doing a good job of that already).

On a purely aesthetic note, homogeneous and predictable weather could mean the end of much beauty: the glory of an approaching storm and the majesty of fierce lightning. Fewer clouds mean boring sunsets. Controlled rainfall could reduce the number of rainbows. And let’s not forget the way weather fuels our creativity. There might be no more songs about looking at clouds from both sides now, answers blowing in the wind, or dancers singin’ in the rain.

Control of our planet’s atmosphere may one day become a reality, but whether it will ultimately be a good or a bad thing is as unpredictable as…well, the weather.

LHC LOOKS FOR PARALLEL UNIVERSES

If you read about a super high-tech science facility smashing atomic particles together at fantastic speeds and you picture a growing black hole that devours the Earth (!)…you might be a science fiction writer. Either that or a B-movie addict. Or a protestor at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland.

In the coming weeks the LHC will do its best to produce some black holes, but they’re not mad scientists planning to destroy the world. Really. What they are hoping for is evidence of parallel universes. As in, universes that exist beyond the four dimensions we know (length, breadth, height, and time). New theories suggest that gravity may leak from our universe into other dimensions (and is the only thing that can travel between them) and the experiment at the LHC is looking for the proof. If microscopic black holes are produced/detected, they will be evidence of the existence of these parallel universes.

Don’t confuse this with the “multi-worlds theory” of quantum mechanics from Hugh Everett in the 1950’s. That theory claims that slightly different universes are being spun off every moment because of all of the possibilities that can exist when a traveling particle comes to a fork in the road and goes both ways. (That idea has inspired lots of alternate history stories and TV shows like Sliders, but it’s not provable.) No, a researcher with the new LHC experiment describes the parallel universes they’re looking for as if our universe is a sheet of paper in a stack of many more sheets of paper.

Of course, I’m always looking for the science fiction take on stories like this. The giant Earth-gobbling black hole is one possibility (and worried enough people that they filed lawsuits to try to stop the Large Hadron Collider from being built). But the idea of micro-miniature black holes intrigues me too. Imagine a series of mysterious deaths in Geneva and their corpses are found to have microscopic tunnels like wormholes tunnelled through them! Of course one of the victims would have to be the lover of one of the experiment’s lead scientists—just to add extra emotional depth, don’t you know. Or maybe gravity goes weird and the city starts looking like the famous M.C. Escher lithograph “Relativity” (with no consistent up or down). What if the combination of the LHC’s magnetic field and the black holes pulls asteroids out of space into collision with Earth? (Some conspiracy theorists are apparently already claiming this.)

Parallel universes offer even more fodder for imagination. Maybe our own universe originally came from one of those. Or perhaps life originated there instead of here. Or perhaps we somehow go there when we die.

OK, OK…most of these are still sounding like B-movie ideas, but you have to admit that the thought of protons smashing together at 99.9% of the speed of light with energies of nearly 12 Tera electron volts does fire the imagination.

The likely reality? The LHC team will detect some things never seen before and add to our knowledge of the universe. The world won’t even hiccup. And that’s good too.

THE MARTIAN IS A MODEL FOR SCIENCE MOVIES

Movie poster for The Martian from 20th Century Fox

 If you’ve read the bestselling SF novel The Martian by Marty Weir, you’ll know it’s not a stretch or an insult to describe it as MacGyver On Mars—the plot depends on stranded astronaut Mark Watney using every piece of available technology, biology, and chemistry in creative ways to help him survive the hostile Martian environment. Weir does it brilliantly, with just enough human touches to keep the reader fully invested in Watney’s survival in spite of numerous technical descriptions that some will find dry. Translating such a science-heavy story into glossy Hollywood entertainment for today’s average moviegoer would seem to be as daunting a challenge as surviving on Mars.

Congratulations to Ridley Scott & Co. for pulling it off with flying colours. I hope Hollywood will take the movie version of The Martian not only as proof that science movies can be successful but as a model for how to do them well.

When a ferocious sandstorm forces a crew of NASA astronauts to cut short their stay on Mars, Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) is injured and thought to be dead. The crew is forced to leave him behind and return to Earth. The next Mars mission can’t happen for another four years—Watney has enough food and water for a couple of months. His personal survival and any attempt by NASA to rescue him appear to be impossible. Both will require the utmost in human determination and ability to achieve.

In The Martian nearly every character is a scientist—Watney himself is a botanist as well as an astronaut—yet the movie shows that they can be every bit as committed, stubborn, inventive, defiant, funny, sweaty, and courageous as any spy, cop, or soldier. They’re not superhuman, instead they show the best qualities of real human beings and the astonishing things we can achieve. The story isn’t about great feats of daring and stamina (though there’s certainly some of that), but using human ingenuity to overcome seemingly insurmountable problems one step at a time. As the implacable universe throws up each new roadblock, Watney, or the NASA team trying to bring him home, uses brainpower to figure out a way around it.

The scientific explanations are necessarily brief but not absent. When a risky course of action is suggested, the pros and cons are explored honestly. The unpleasant realities of both physics and economics are given fair representation and, true to the book, The Martian escapes being propaganda for the USA by giving an important role to the Chinese space program. I’m deeply impressed by how Ridley Scott has crafted a slick and suspenseful Hollywood offering while keeping it so well balanced. Others have pointed out that it is a rare movie full of optimism. Sure, it has moments of carefully-crafted theatre, but it’s inspirational in a true sense and not just emotionally manipulative.

I can’t talk about a movie like this without mentioning the special effects and they are terrific—eye-popping and authentic (OK, we wouldn’t hear rocket engines in space and the Hermes spacecraft wouldn’t have such big windows, but otherwise…). The Martian vistas are stunning, well worth the extra price of seeing them in 3D. The movie reportedly cost $108 million USD to make and it shows on the screen. Not all of that is Matt Damon’s salary, though he certainly earns his pay by giving Watney just the right amounts of stoicism and nerdiness to grab the audience and hold them—it could so easily have failed in the hands of another actor.

The Martian is a movie without any killing, martial arts, fleets of helicopters, contrived romance, explosions meant to destroy or terrorize, inane humour, super powers or supervillains. So it’s truly a breath of fresh air. I hope box office numbers will show Hollywood that there’s an appetite for this kind of movie and at least one director who knows how to make them.