Tag Archives: science fiction

No Singularity

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Last week I talked about missing out on the next big revolution in fiction, and how that can make it hard to make future fiction hard to write believably. However, if you thought I was going to go so far as to predict the impending technological singularity, you’re wrong.

The supposedly approaching technological singularity is some point of exponential advancement that changes the game so much, we cannot really see past it, and depending on the exact definition, I’ve seen it predicted to occur as early as 2011 and as late as 2050.

Well, I disagree. Depending on the more precise definition of this technological singularity, I say maybe, no, and Hell No. If you’ll bear with me on this rather long entry, I’ll explain why.

AI: the Easy Singularity

The tamest definition of this technological singularity is that we will create a computer intelligence that is more intelligent than the smartest humans. On the face of it, this seems believable. Given the advancements that Moore’s Law brought to computational power in the last fifty years, it might even seem to be inevitable.

In specific areas, we have already reached this. Notably, computers can play some games perfectly, i.e. they cannot be beaten. For other games, they can beat the best human players. Chess was a recent and notable triumph for the silicon team. But they are still losing other games to human players. (See this informative and humorous XKCD comic )

But skill at games is not the only measure of human intelligence. Visual and speech processing are still difficult for computers, though they are improving. Creativity is hard to measure, but with the exception of some isolated problems, computers have not shown much creativity. A sense of humor still seems a long ways off. The brass ring, of course, is the self-aware computer. That’s the real cogito ergo sum moment.

If Moore’s Law continues, we may reach the required processing power within the predicted timeframe, but I foresee a couple of problems to the hyper-intelligent computers of the singularity prediction.

The first problem is that reaching the level of even human intelligence is probably harder than it looks on paper. It’s about more than just processing power. Specifically, it’s going to require that we reach an understanding of how human intelligence works in the first place, and we’re simply not there yet. How is it that these sporadic neurons firing translate into the subjective experience of sentience? How important is the structure of the human brain that has evolved from more primitive brains? How do the chemical regulators keep our neural nets in good operating condition? It’s not just a matter of connecting enough transistorized neurons and flipping the switch. There’s structure and a billion years of Darwinian design at work.

The second problem is this notion of hyper-intelligence. Briefly consider qualitative aspects of intelligence vs. quantitative aspects of intelligence. A human is qualitatively more intelligent than a lizard. He thinks about problems, designs tools to solve them, and ultimately eats the lizard. Mmmm, that’s good lizard. Some humans (my wife, for example) are quantitatively more intelligent than I am. She can solve mathematical problems much faster than I can, but given enough time, I’ll get there eventually.

The upward ramp of Moore’s Law gives us a lot of hope for computers that could be quantitatively more intelligent than humans, but I don’t think automatically provides a qualitatively higher intelligence. Certainly, the old Church-Turing thesis is often interpreted to suggest that any calculation that can be performed (i.e. the human experience of consciousness) can be performed by a Turing machine, and that interpretation is one of the strongest arguments that increasing computing power will lead to human-level computer intelligence. However, the Church-Turing thesis also makes it clear that there are some problems (e.g. the halting problem) that are beyond the ability of a Turing machine.

Thus, it seems to me that while computers may become significantly quantitatively more intelligent than humans, there may be a real upper limit on qualitative improvements in intelligence. What would that look like? I would expect it to be like talking to someone who knows pretty much everything and can answer hard questions quickly, but they would still be just as clueless as we are on questions like “will I be happy with Sue?”

Of course, the zero-eth problem with all this is that Moore’s Law may not continue long enough to reach this singularity. For the last twenty years, I’ve been reading predictions that Moore’s Law only has another five to ten years left in it. Eventually, they’ll be right. I’m not saying that we’ll never get the required processing power – after all, evolution managed to crank it out – but we might have to give up on the notion of getting exponential results in logarithmic time.

So, will we see this easy singularity of artificial intelligence by 2050? Ehhh, maybe. Maybe not. I think we’ll see it eventually, but I don’t know if we’ll ever get that qualitative advance.

Impenetrable Wall: the Medium Singularity

More advanced definitions of “the singularity” typically say that once we build these hyper-intelligent computers, they will change the world in ways that we cannot imagine, and hence, we cannot see into the future past that event. After all, we only have normal intelligence, so how can we possibly guess at where hyper-intelligence is going to lead us?

Personally, I don’t think that gives human imagination enough credit. Scholarly study of this question leads to possibilities ranging from utopia to human extinction and all manner of possibilities in between. Utopias are fairly easy to imagine, though the road to reach them is hard. Human extinction has been over-imagined, from the Terminator to the Matrix. I think we’ve also seen plenty of in-between’s. One of my favorites is the Poul Anderson series ending in the Fleet of Stars, where hyper-intelligent computers simply want to manage humanity into a safe, peaceful, and boring existence.

We don’t seem to have any trouble imagining futures with hyper-intelligent computers, and face it, we’re getting by in this area on the odd-balls, the kooks, the SF-writers. Put some serious policy wonks on it, and we’ll soon be talking about the best tax strategies to manage Skynet’s homicidal rage.

Ah, but it’s not enough just to imagine the possibilities, is it? In order to foil this aspect of the singularity, we have to predict what’s going to happen beyond that impenetrable wall of exponential change. How on earth can we lowly humans do that?

Well, we can’t.

But we can’t predict what’s going to happen on this side of that impenetrable wall of change either. Who’s going to win the U.S. presidential election this fall? Will Iran build a nuclear bomb or fall to a populous revolution? Will wireless broadband ever reach parity with physical cables for the last-mile problem of connectivity? Will solar panels ever get cheap enough to drive us towards a privately-owned distributed power system, and if so, when? Will the Cubs ever get back to the World Series?

The only thing I can grant the singularity camp is that predictions beyond the achievement of hyper-intelligent computers will be more difficult, just as any significant change makes predictions more complex. The creation of the personal computer threw technologists for a loop. Ditto with the creation of the Web. However, some things remain the same, no matter how much change we throw at them. Top among them is human nature.

My predictions for a post-hyper-intelligent-computer world: Humans will be noble but petty. They will be greedy and charitable. They will love, and they will hate. Fathers will want to play ball with their sons, and daughters will declare that their mothers have RUINED THEIR LIVES!!! These things haven’t fundamentally changed in ten thousand years. The arrival of hyper-intelligent computers, friendly or not, won’t change them either.

Unless…

Post-Humanism: The Really Hard Singularity

In fairness to the original singularity camp (Vernor Vinge, etc.), this kind of thing was not in their definition of the singularity. They were making what they felt were reasonable predictions up to the point where they felt they could no longer make such predictions. They didn’t sign on for humans becoming immortal demi-gods.

But I include this here because enough post-humanists (or trans-humanist, take your pick) have hitched their miraculous transformations onto the computing singularity bandwagon, and they’re making predictions in the same timeframe as the computer singularity folks. What’s more, I’ve run into too many woo-woo technology lovers who have looked at a few exponential charts and convinced themselves that the techno-rapture is at hand.

So, what the hell am I talking about here? Some folks believe that we’re on the verge of changing human nature in big ways. The most aggressive think that we’re going to download our minds into computers at the earliest opportunity, shedding our physical bodies like gas-guzzling SUV’s. Others think that life-extension is advancing rapidly towards the point that life expectancy will grow by greater than one year for each year that passes – essential immortality, even for those of us alive today. Still others think that we’re a generation away from engineering children who are as far in advance of us as the hyper-intelligent computer is ahead of my laptop.

To which I say: Bullshit, not likely, and not soon.

The notion of downloading into a computer has been around for a while. I can’t say when I first ran into it, but when I saw it dealt with in SF (again by Poul Anderson) it seemed an old concept to me. Old yes, but practical, no. The first thing I’ll throw out there are the technical problems with non-destructively reading a brain’s complete state, building an electronic system that can match it, and duplicating all the chemical support systems electronically. But they landed a man on the moon, so I won’t make it a sticking point.

The second problem, though, is a messier one. Would you really want to live as a computer? In most of the ways I’ve seen this envisioned, the downloads live virtual lives with no physicality. Perhaps they interact some with the physical world, but only at an intellectual level. Is that really enough for you?

I direct your attention again to that games diagram from XKCD. One of the games that computers will never play better than humans is “Seven Minutes in Heaven”. I think a human mind living in a computer would go mad without the comfort of physical touch, without the sensation of the wind and the rain, without the taste of food or the smell of freshly cut grass. I believe this goes beyond a mere craving. I think our minds need that physicality. It’s part of who we are. We are animals of flesh, not free-floating motes of intellect.

We could, of course, turn ourselves into robots, but they would have to be exceptional robots. More properly, they would have to be androids with at least all the senses and capabilities we have today. Again, that’s another technical challenge, but I’ll waive it here in Wonderland. Still, if we do manage all this, how different is our human nature? Haven’t we just turned ourselves into immortals with an off-site backup?

That brings me to that second notion of post-humanism: biological immortality through life-extension techniques. Again, there are technical problems, though before I waive my objection, let me point out that we know far less about manipulating biology with precision than we know about silicon, and there’s no Moore’s Law pushing us along here. Still, life expectancy is increasing. How far can it go?

The real problem is that we’re kind of fighting evolution here, or at the very least, evolution is not our friend in this case. We’ve been bred to breed and then die. Pass on our genes to the next generation, and evolution is done with us. At best, we’re useful to make sure that our genes continue on to a second or even third generation, but before long, we’re standing in Darwin’s way.

So we’ve been designed to not last that long, or at the very least, we’ve not been designed to last that long. Planned obsolescence at the genetic level. To get around that, we have to solve some problems that evolution has never bothered to try, and we’re trying to do it for people who are already up and moving. Personally, I think we’ve got a better shot at downloading into androids.

But perhaps that third post-human notion has some merit, eh? Design our kids to be immortal, immune to disease and age and any human frailty we want to edit out. How about that? We’ve mapped the human genome. Let’s start writing some new code.

I don’t think so, and for once, I’m not going to put the strongest barrier at the technical level – though be assured, that’s no cake walk either. Instead, it’s human nature that’s going to slow us down, and ironically, I think it will be parents’ love for their children that will limit the gifts that we give them.

Think about it. You and your spouse are about to start your family. This is today, or perhaps it’s a year after the hyper-intelligent computers have dropped by to say “dude”. Now a doctor tells you that he wants to significantly rewrite the genetic code of your offspring so that he’ll be smarter, healthier, and immortal. “Sounds great,” you say, but then you ask the first question any potential parent would ask. “How many times have you done this?”

“Ummm… well, never. You’ll be the first.”

“I’m sorry, but you need to get the fuck out of my house.”

Sure, sooner or later, someone would give it a shot, but 99.99% of parents would wait until that first 0.01% had grown up and designed some kids of their own. Then maybe another one or two percent of that next generation would try it. It would grow, generation by generation, until there would be a tipping point of everyone doing it, and the poor would be demanding universal genetic health care. But it would not happen overnight, and it sure as hell won’t happen in the next couple of generations from now as a number of folks are predicting. This will take a century or more, especially for some of the more radical proposals.

Still, in all three of these post-humanist scenarios, I think they fail on the impenetrable wall of unpredictability. People will still be people, even if they’re androids or immortal meat-bags. We can hope that they will be better people, but we’ve already known better people: Mother Theresa, the Dali Lama, Martin Luther King Jr., and of course, Tom Landry. (Go Cowboys!) We can readily imagine stories in a world filled with these types, just as we can imagine worlds filled with their opposites. Utopian and dystopian fantasies are a staple of the SF genre.

So, no, we’re not on the verge of some biotech rapture which blinds us to the future.

Story-telling: the Non-existent Singularity

But as much as I may poo-poo the likelihood of any of these singularity events, I don’t ignore them. Even if they never come to pass, they’re fun ideas to play with, simply because we SF geeks like to think about odd scenarios and then ask, “What happens next?” Because they postulate such a different world, we’re drawn to the other side of that impenetrable wall to explore, have fun, and tell stories.

It’s because of that imaginative drive that I don’t think any change will ever present us with an impenetrable wall.

And I also think it’s that same drive that gives us any chance of ever reaching those theoretical walls in the first place.

What Are We Missing?

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One of the least avoidable dangers of writing about future worlds in science fiction is missing the technological revolution that’s just around the corner. Certainly, it’s equally easy to forecast a technology that never arrives, but that doesn’t date the story. A story written in the 1930’s with flying cars can still feel like the future, but one that leaves out computers is fatally dated.

Missing the Call…

The most glaring example of this that I’ve run into in recent memory was Connie Willis’ 1992 “The Doomsday Book”. It is an excellent novel and won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. It involves some time travel back to medieval England from the year 2054. It wasn’t the time travel that bothered me though, since that still feels like future-tech. No, what kept throwing me out of this future world of 2054 was that they had no mobile phones.

Certainly, they had advanced video phones, but all of them were tied to landlines. Normally, a little thing like this would have been easily ignored if it remained in the background, but it had a significant impact on the plot. Specifically, characters were trying to get hold of one another, and they kept missing each other because one or another was away from their desk or office when the call arrived. Not being able to get hold of various people was rapidly escalating into a life and death situation. I even recall one scene where someone is told to wait by the phone no matter what. Really – glued to the landline!

When I read it five or six years ago, I’d had a mobile phone for eight years or so, and in that time, they had already gone from miniature bricks that businessmen carried to the early smart phones that were well on their way to becoming ubiquitous. Now mobile phones are everywhere, from grandmothers to African bushmen, and it’s only been twenty years since Willis’ book was released. The notion of not being able to get hold of someone in an emergency because they’re away from their desk now seems ludicrous.

In fairness, it’s hard to fault Willis. In 1992, mobile phones really were bricks, and they were most common as car phones. Even then, they were idle toys for the rich or politically connected, not everyday tools for the common man. It wasn’t just that the technology got so much better so quickly. It’s that the demand that wasn’t there at all in 1992 became rampant in just a decade.

A Fleet of Missed Boats

But Willis is not alone in having missed out on the shape of technologies around the corner. Plenty of authors in the 1960’s familiar with room-sized computers completely missed the desktop computer that arrived just ten to fifteen years later. While several authors in the 60’s and 70’s talked about computers networked together, I don’t think many (or any) of them foresaw the massive peer-to-peer impact that the web has had on personal communications. And I think most everyone missed the pending collapse of the Soviet Union pretty much right up to summer of 1989.

Are We Forever Doomed?

So where does that leave us now? What technological revolutions are just around the corner waiting to mock today’s science fiction writers? Are we on the verge of common and effective anti-viral treatments, i.e. no more common cold, influenza, or AIDS? Are computer implants about to become not only possible but turn into the mobile phone of the next generation? Are we about to get that peace-loving world government, not through war or democratic revolution, but through that unexpected philosophy to be named later?

This is pretty hard to guess at because not getting caught by the unexpected revolution means guessing not just one thing but all things. Miss one life-changing advancement and your story could be like Connie Willis’ with everyone playing phone tag, afraid to get up from their desks. With possibly changes looming in computers, genetics, medicine, politics and more, it’s hard to know where to jump. Certainly, you can jump too far without much penalty since your flying car will be either commonplace or still futuristic, but if you don’t jump far enough in the right direction, you might start looking foolish in just a few years.

Singu-what-ity?

This might seem to be an endorsement of some variation on “the coming Sigularity”, but it’s not. I’ll talk about that in more detail next week, but for now I’m going to say that yes, this kind of guesswork is hard now, but it’s always been hard. It was hard for writers back in the 50’s, just as it was hard when Connie Willis missed mobile phones in 1992. Probably the biggest thing that’s changed in the last 60 years on this front is that now we have a real appreciation for how hard this kind of guesswork is.

But still, any tips for the future would be nice. What life-changing advance is waiting around the corner, hoping to make me look foolish in twenty years? I’d like to beat it if I can, but even if I can’t, at least I’ll be in good company.

SFF Sports?

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In light of last night’s Super Bowl game, I got to thinking about sports and games in sci-fi/fantasy. Alas, I could hardly think of any. Harry Potter’s Quidditch is the only popular example that comes readily to mind, but with a little googling, I found that there are literally hundreds of others. Most of them I’d never heard of, but quite a few sounded familiar.

They seem to fall into a couple of categories: variations on existing sports vs. entirely new games. The variations are often to accommodate the changes that make this fictional world different from our own. Scott Sigler’s Galactic Football League has had to accommodate receivers who can leap a dozen feet into the air as well as carnivorous linebackers. Sometimes it changes to incorporate the character of the world. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Chessman of Mars combined chess and gladiatorial combat. I would also put Star Trek’s 3D chess in this realm. While Podracing in Star Wars may seem like something new, this is really just chariot racing in disguise.

As for brand new games, Quidditch is probably the most famous, but we also have Battlestar Galactica’s Triad, Star Trek’s Strategema, Tron’s light cycles and disc wars, and of course, the practice battles in Ender’s Game. While these might have recognizable elements from soccer, basketball, etc., they’re sufficiently different to feel like a completely new game. As such, they do a wonderful job of putting us into the not-here, not-now setting.

The challenge with these sports, though, is that the audience has to care who wins, and to do that, I think we have to understand the game well enough to follow the characters towards victory or defeat. That either means keeping the game extremely simple or going to some length to explain the rules. Even then, I think of all the time spent explaining Quidditch’s Golden Snitch rule and yet the game is not really all that complicated compared to such real world sports intricacies as football’s rules surrounding the forward pass or baseball’s forced out or infield fly rules.

On the other hand, I don’t think we particularly want to have to understand a fictional sport as complex as football. The official NFL rulebook for this past season is 244 pages long. Certainly, readers don’t need to know the legalities of hitting the golden snitch with a bludger in inclement weather, but even if we had to read a tenth of such a rulebook to comprehend a fictional game, it wouldn’t be worth it. So it seems that the best solution is to keep it simple and gloss over any messy details.

But then real sports still crop up in a lot of our fiction as well. Both Star Trek and Babylon 5 had love affairs with baseball, and I’ve seen various forms of boxing, fencing, and tennis show up, too. I suppose in those cases, they’re less to provide that feeling of other and more to tie them back to our own experiences. That alien isn’t all that different from us. He’s a hopeless Cubs fan just like me.

So, any fictional fans out there? Do you think the Rigel Zostik’s have a shot at the galaxy cup?

Review: The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

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I caved to mob pressure and finally took a look at this one now, rather than wait for the movie to ruin it:

I confess I went in with low expectations. I’d seen lots of people raving about it but with very little detail. About all I knew was “teenage gladiatorial combat”, and that didn’t really thrill me. I thought perhaps this was some odd dystopian tale of the perfect society that every now and then tossed some of its children into the meat grinder for fun, perhaps a bit like The Lottery but more cruel.

Well, yes and no. I’ll put in a mini-spoiler here that is revealed quite early in the book, and that’s the fact that this is far from a perfect society, and the tossing of kids into the ring is an intentional act of cruelty by an oppressing victor over its vanquished foes. Once that became clear, these games took on an entirely different feel to me.

And then… Wow!

The protagonist is imperfect but very likeable, responsible but frail, and angry while still compassionate. Yeah, lots of contradictions wrapped up in one amazing character. I found her very compelling.

And the story kept me guessing. One of the drawbacks to writing stories is that you get a good understanding of how stories work, how they flow, the build and release of tension and all that literary crap. It also means that I don’t get surprised all that often anymore. And while our protagonist’s dilemma is presented fairly early, my guess of the resolution kept changing the further I got in. Oh, betrayal! No, it’s going to be sacrificial! No, wait, it’s something else! Where is Spartacus??

So, I say definitely check it out. It’s got action, tragedy, ingenuity, more tragedy, and some bittersweet victory. The real villains, of course, are those who run the games, and with two books to go in the Hunger Games trilogy, I have some hope that those villains will get fitted for a nice spit.

Review: Firebird, by Jack McDevitt

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I returned to Jack McDevitt’s Alex Benedict series fairly quickly this time, thanks to a Christmas present from my wife.  Again, reading on the Kindle sped things up as I tore through this during a very busy week.

I reviewed the previous book in this series, Echo, back in November.  I had felt that while it was quite good, the scope of the book was smaller than previous books, and that had disappointed me somewhat.  However, it was more than made up for by toying with the beloved characters with the kind of angsty cruelty that only a few authors can pull off.

In Firebird, the scope was back up to the grand scale, and the cruelty was still up at a high level.  We’re not talking about hacking off limbs or anything as bloody as that.  No, he’s going after the characters where it really hurts: regrets, guilt, and the reopening of old wounds.  And despite all that, he managed a happy ending.  In fact, the finale (in the epilogue) knocked it out of the park with a bittersweet homerun.

I hope he’s planning at least one more, because the end of the book implied a future event that I would very much like to see, both because it would be satisfying in a happy-ending sort of way, but also because I think it’s going to introduce whole new levels of strife into our character’s lives.  Yeah, something of a contradiction, but it has potential for, “Yah, now we get to light outselves on fire!”

Now, before I give it a complete fan-boy thumbs-up, I will say that there were a couple of points where I felt a bit of author-preach come through.  If you don’t know what I mean by that, then you haven’t read enough Heinlein.  However, in this case, I didn’t mind the preaching so much because 1) it was reasonably subtle, and 2) in this particular case, he was preaching to the choir.  Notably, the message was that it’s frustrating when people get overly attached to their opinions/conclusion.  It’s not that they believe what they believe.  It’s that they cannot even entertain the notion that they might possibly be wrong, and that even suggesting that possibility is taken as a personal attack.  Lord knows I’ve run into that scenario way too many times in politics, religion, and science.  So yeah, enough said.  Preaching to the choir.

So, if you’re already into the Alex Benedict series, check it out.  If not, go back and start at “A Talent for War”.

Review: Alleluia Files, by Sharon Shinn

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I recently read this one in paperback, and it was a delight. It is book three of what I think is now a five-book series, but I don’t know if it’s complete at five or heading towards six or more.

This series is an odd mix of SF and Fantasy. The land of Samaria is ruled by mortal angels, who invoke the power of the god Jovah through song. But lest you think he’s just a figment of the collective imagination, Jovah regularly demonstrates his power through the weather, grain and medicine falling from the sky, and even the occasional wrathful thunderbolt to strike down the wicked. He’s as real as the angels that fly from their mountain-top holds.

But is He really quite what He seems?

That’s the mystery that’s been slowly unraveling over the first three books of the series, but it’s not just philosophers sitting down over coffee to debate the nature of God. There’s action, intrigue, conspiracy, and romance. Actually, quite a bit of romance.

Mind you, I wouldn’t be caught dead reading a Harlequin, but I’ve been known to get a little squishy in the realm of the romantic, and these romances are pretty good. However, I will say that one of them here tripped over one of my cliché alarms, but it didn’t hit it hard. I’d say which cliché, but that would be a spoiler.

All in all, I enjoyed it, but I confess I did not like it as much as the first two. It wasn’t as gripping as I found the first two, and frankly the stakes didn’t seem as high. Also, there was something of a big reveal late in the book that seemed pretty obvious to me from the get-go, so I spent a certain amount of the book waiting with decreasing patience for the characters to put it together.

So, I’d definitely recommend the series, but I’m hoping the next two pick it up a bit.

Just What’s in that Gas Tank?

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Whether it’s liquid hydrogen or Mr. Fusion, our various spacemen of SF are always playing around with some exotic energy sources, leaving our old petroleum ways to the dinosaurs. But just what energies are they using?

Pedestrian but Practical

Let’s start with some pretty tame ones, namely those already in use. Our own rockets use all manner of fuels, ranging from liquid hydrogen and oxygen to exotic hypergolic fuels such as hydrazine plus dinitrogen tetroxide. These have been used since the fifties in a variety of chemically driven spacecraft.

The only nuclear power currently used in space is via radioactive decay in what they call a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. These turn radioactive decay into heat and then heat into electricity. Most use Plutonium-238 which emits alpha particles at a half-life rate of 87 years, giving your spacecraft reasonably steady power for decades. It’s great for all those interplanetary probes we’ve sent out over the years, but it’s unfortunately quite toxic – handle with care.

We currently use solar power in a couple of different ways. Notably, we use it for pure electricity via photovoltaic cells. A number of satellites and inner-system probes have used it. Another use of solar power is to use the solar wind for thrust via a lightweight solar sail. This has long been hypothesized and was recently tested on two different flights, one a probe to Venus and the other a testbed for Earth-orbit maneuvers.

New Nuclear

Various ideas for nuclear propulsion have been around since the late 1940’s. My reactions to them have ranged from “are you kidding me?” to “but of course”. I think the area where I have the biggest problem is in those designs that talk about setting off small nuclear explosions behind the ship. I’ve read enough to know that these were serious and reasonable designs, but I confess they fill my head with visions of Wile E. Coyote at the helm of an ACME Atomics rocket sled.

The most notable of these was the old Project Orion which intended to set off small fission explosions against a large steel plate mounted on big shock absorbers. As crazy as that sounds to me, it is still considered a reasonable design, capable of reaching Mars in a month. However, various complications in the design and the, ahem, fallout, mean we’ll likely never see this one. A slightly less crazy version involved throwing the bombs forward towards something like a solar sail which would catch more of the explosions energy than a steel plate, and the cables holding the sail would act as more effective shock absorbers than anything they had before.

A later proposal, Project Daedalus, suggested using nuclear fusion to provide thrust. Instead of bombs, tiny fusion-fuel pellets would be passed into the target zone of a laser or electron-beam array, compressing them to the point of fusion. The resulting explosion of fusion-driven plasma would be controlled by magnetic field and mostly shoved out the back of the engine, thus providing thrust. This seems to be a much more controlled ride than dropping bombs out the back door, but in truth, its main advantage is the additional energy from fusion.

Both of these engine types were much more efficient than current chemical rockets. Specifically, they were ten to two hundred times as efficient as the main engines on the shuttle. (Geekery: engine efficiency is given in “specific impulse” which is the number of seconds you can get a certain thrust out of a certain mass of fuel. This is critical in engines where you have to carry your fuel with you.)

A somewhat less exotic form of nuclear propulsion is a nuclear thermal rocket. You put a conventional fission reactor on your ship, and you use its heat to heat some liquid propellant into a hot gas, likely hydrogen, and shoot the hot gas out the back of your engine. The design of the nuclear reactor varies, and the efficiencies range from twice to ten times as efficient as the current chemical rockets. However, the weight of the reactor makes this not terribly good for initial lift-off. It’s more useful out in space where you’re more concerned about efficiency over prolonged thrust than you are with the high thrust-to-weight ratios necessary for lift-off.

And then going back to the other end of the exotic is the Bussard Ramjet. Here, you’re actually less worried about the efficiency of the engine because you don’t have to carry your fuel with you. Instead, you scoop it up out of the interstellar medium, that not-quite-vacuum of interstellar space. Typically, you would use a large electromagnetic field to direct the gas into your vessel, and then you would use fusion to heat it further and shoot it out the back. (Or back out the front once you’re slowing down.) There are a number of technical difficulties here, notably with the make-up and density of interstellar gas, but Larry Niven made this a staple of SF in his Known Space stories. Even if it turns out to be as impractical as warp drive, it will forever work in fiction.

Insert Tech Here

Moving past fission and fusion, we start getting into some real hand-waving fuel technologies. Let’s start with anti-matter. I’ll grant you that anti-matter is quite real and is a terrific energy source, but most anti-matter stories ignore the sticky question of where it comes from. I know of one author (Poul Anderson) who did at least talk about the laborious processing of collecting anti-matter from solar-wind impacts, but for most folks it’s simply there. They do frequently talk about the dangers of storing it (a.k.a. “we’ve got an anti-matter containment breach!”), but for all I know they order their anti-matter through Amazon.

Related to anti-matter power is quite simply “matter conversion”. While you get anti-matter power by annihilating matter and anti-matter, matter conversion skips a step and simply converts matter directly into energy. As magic as this sounds, there has actually been a fair amount of research into this occurring naturally in a process called proton decay. So far, however, proton decay has never actually been observed. (Though I once saw a nifty Law & Order episode where competing proton decay theories formed the motive for murder. Major geek-out!)

Not quite as potent as matter conversion is fission via the manipulation of the weak force. The idea is to cause many (or all) of the neutrons in the atomic nucleus to undergo beta decay, emitting an electron and thus becoming protons. A heavy element (say lead on up) suddenly converted to an all-proton nucleus would fly apart almost instantly. This gives you more energy than typical uranium fission, possibly even more than deuterium-tritium fusion. (I think the best yield comes from when the resulting particles end up in the iron to nickel range as they have the lowest nuclear energy states.) The only time I’ve ever seen this in fiction was in a mild reference in Niven’s old Protector novel, and frankly I’m surprised I haven’t seen it more often. Then again, it may be too much of an uncomfortable marriage between the hard science of nuclear physics with the hand-waving of unspecified force manipulation.

Then there’s zero-point energy. The basics of zero-point energy are weird but fairly well understood by physicists in the appropriate fields, and the basics are that there is a certain energy level in any given system that you cannot drop below. That is, no matter how low energy a system gets, it is required to still have some in place. Of course, there’s nothing that says you can get that energy out. In fact, you kind of can’t – that’s the very point of zero-point energy. The energy limbo bar doesn’t go any lower. But then there are a few ways of looking at it that suggest the energy available there is actually infinite. The physics of that are beyond me at the moment, but with SF hand-waving glee, I can inverse polarity on the ZPE matrix and bind it to an altered ground state, thus making that energy easily accessible in my hand-held infinite-energy ZPE battery. The best attempt I’ve seen at the technical appreciation of this was in Arthur C. Clarke’s Songs of Distant Earth, in which a bored physicist on a dying Earth reviewed the millennia old conclusion that zero-point energy was inaccessible and discovered a simple math error so that the various terms did not, in fact, zero out. “Mankind was handed the keys to the universe – and barely a century in which to use them.”

An odd variation on ZPE that I ran into (though I’ve forgotten where) was that while the amount of energy you could extract from empty space was negligible, once you got up to higher and higher speeds and passed through more and more empty space, that negligible amount starts to pile up. I have to give it points for style, but somehow this seems to violate the spirit of special relativity (i.e. ain’t no such thing as a true frame of reference”) in so many ways that it stops being funny.

But as long as we’re waving our hands, one idea that I’m toying with is tachyon energy. In my various SF stories, I like to use the idea of tachyon sails for FTL propulsion. (Don’t worry, I’ll say more about that in a future survey on different types of FTL.) The idea being that the universe is awash in tachyons (FTL particles) left over from the inflation stage just after the big bang. As long as I’m using them for riding between the stars, I may as well extract some energy from them, a bit like having a windmill atop the masts of your sailing ships.

While there are certainly advantages to sticking with the standard tropes of SF, I imagine there are hundreds more alternative energy sources tucked into Spaceman Spiff’s rocket pack. What have you guys run into that I haven’t?

The Buck Stops Where?

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“Ten thousand? We could almost buy our own ship for that!” Clearly, Luke thought Han Solo was ripping them off, but what I want to know is, ten thousand what? Dollars? Rupees? Turkey feathers? Just what currency were they using?

One of the things that I angst over in my writing far more than seems reasonable is what to call the currency in a science fiction setting. If I call them dollars, it feels too pedestrian. If I call them looshanks, no one knows what I’m talking about. And so, more often than not, I settle on the boring currency name that has spread through our SF universes like kudzu: credits.

But I hate credits. I hate credits with the passion usually reserved for Einsteinian purists railing against warp drives or hyperspace. Credits are boring. They are completely bland. They have no national flavor. You expect their coins to be brightly colored plastic, like gaudy chips from a cheap casino. “Remember, the fuchsias are worth twenty.” They make the value of currency seem even that much more of an illusion.

Of course, currency is an illusion and has been for a long time. The silver and gold standards started to collapse during World War I, and they officially ended in 1971. Dollars are effectively “credits” in that they are not backed by a specific commodity but rather by their mutually agreed upon purchasing power. I don’t want to get too deep into the monetary policies or mechanisms except to say that when they operate well, they preserve that purchasing power. In that sense, our currency is backed by the economy, not by gold.

But dollars still sound better than credits.

In fantasy settings, we can fall back on commodity-based currencies like the silver pound, but I have a hard time carrying that forward. Star Trek made an attempt with that via “gold pressed latinum”, but that always fell flat for me. Supposedly latinum could not be replicated, and so it had real scarcity, but again that fell flat. If you can beam it over on the transporter, you can replicate it. That was the deal. Still, I have to give them… uh, credit for not falling back on credits.

I confess, though, that I like the sound of using some mass-based currency. Sure, you’d still be using paper bills and electronic swipe cards, but using some mass amount for the denominations sounds cool. “I handed him a twenty-gram note, knowing full well I could have gotten it for ten back on Earth.” But twenty grams of what?

About the only thing I’ve thought of that would make for a good mass based commodity is anti-matter. It’s effectively an energy-store, small, difficult to acquire or produce, and useful in a variety of energy-hungry applications. However, it’s extraordinarily dangerous and difficult to store. And given how rare it would likely be, even when mass-produced in industrial settings, the example above would be far more likely using nanogram or even picogram notes. Hell, they might even be denominated in individual anti-protons. Clearly, in a system like that, individuals would not carry the anti-matter commodity with them, relying instead on the anti-matter equivalent of Fort Knox. I’d hate to live near there in case of a containment loss.

But even then, I suspect that the same economic forces that drove us off the silver and gold standards would drive us off an anti-matter or even gold-pressed latinum standard. And I think that’s OK. Once we’ve accepted the value of paper currency as being backed by our mutual agreement to use it, it doesn’t really need a specific commodity to back it. We’re already using the bland plastic credits in fact if not in name.

I just wish we could have a better name. Looshanks anyone?

Review: Echo, by Jack McDevitt

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I’m starting off this new spot in my blogging schedule with one of my favorite authors, Jack McDevitt. Specifically, one his more recent Alex Benedict novels, Echo.

Echo, by Jack McDevitt

Before I get into it, I want to say a few words about the reviews I’m going to be doing. First of all, I’m going to do my best to try to remain spoiler-free. After all, who wants a book suggestion that ruins as it recommends? Second, I’m not striving for great literary criticism. These are simply the books I’m reading, and I’m talking about whether I liked them. And lastly, I’m not the fastest reader in the world. My awesome wife, for example, reads upwards of 150 books each year. My count is somewhat less than that. Ok, a LOT less than that. We’ll see if that picks up as I try more books on the Kindle, but let’s just say I’m not making any promises that this one will be a weekly feature.

So, Echo is the fifth novel in McDevitt’s Alex Benedict series. Alex is an antiquities dealer in the 110th century, but in addition to buying and selling them, he also does a certain amount of investigative archaeology. In that respect, he’s a bit like Indiana Jones, except that he’s not all that concerned with saving these pieces for the museum. Starting from the second book, though, the novels have been told from the point of view of his partner and pilot, Chase Kolpath. I won’t say too much about the earlier books except to tell you to GO READ THEM IMMEDIATELY!

All of these tales (including Echo) are a kind of historical mystery. They’re not tracking down artifacts from our history, but rather from our distant future. They frequently start with some object or event that stands out as an enigma. Often it’s a relic of some kind, but there’s something odd about it. Maybe it’s a tea cup or a jacket, but there’s something about it that just can’t be explained. Before long, Alex and Chase are digging deep into events from 20 to 9000 years before, struggling to find the root of this little mystery, and like most mysteries, there’s usually someone who doesn’t want you to solve it.

In Echo, it starts with an old stone tablet at the house of a man who had spent his life unsuccessfully searching for aliens. He retired decades ago and died shortly thereafter. But what does the tablet’s inscription mean? Does anyone even recognize the letters or language? And what was this old kook doing with it?

I liked Echo, and I tore through it faster than usual. I confess there was a slow patch in the middle, but that was more because bad things were happening, and I just didn’t want to see the bad things happening. I think that was more indicative of how much the story was getting to me rather than any hint of poor writing. While the previous book had played out on a vast scale, this one was much more personally visceral. I saw it in the way it affected the characters’ lives as well as in how it affected my emotions. While I have always cared about how the story played out, I think this time more than anything I cared about what was happening to characters I had grown attached to.  (See my earlier column about all the fictional people in my monkeysphere.)

So, I highly recommend it, but do read all the previous ones first. It’s not that the books aren’t stand-alone tales. It’s just that you’ll appreciate the characters and the world that much more, seeing the background.  For the record, those books are: A Talent for War, Polaris, Seeker, The Devil’s Eye, and Echo.  Book six (Firebird) was just released.

Starship Troopers and the Right to Vote

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Tomorrow is election day here in the U.S., though it’s an off-year, so it’s mostly local elections, bond votes, and the occasional state constitutional amendment. I plan on voting, and I vote every chance I get. In fact, it’s a bit strange that I haven’t already voted because I’ve become a big fan of early voting in the last few years. (Notably, I had to bust out of the hospital to vote in the 2008 presidential primary, so I don’t like to leave things until election day.)

Voting and science fiction almost inevitably brings up Robert Heinlein’s novel “Starship Troopers.” In that novel, the voting franchise was limited to “veterans”. A “veteran” was not necessarily someone who had been a soldier, but rather someone who had volunteered for a two-year stint in “Federal Service”. Whether a soldier or not, these service jobs were apparently all fairly hazardous. Only after retiring from federal service could you vote or hold public office. The book focuses mostly on the soldiers, so both fans and critics tend to look on the rule as “only combat veterans get to vote,” even though the book made it clear there were non-military paths.

The argument for this was that the responsibility of voting should be reserved for those who have demonstrated an understanding of individual sacrifice for the greater good, i.e. voting is not about getting something for myself but about getting something for everybody else. Whether or not Heinlein himself felt that the voting franchise should be so restricted, the book makes a fairly passionate argument for it.

Critics have often equated this with fascism or military dictatorship. The 1997 movie of the same name was perhaps the greatest critique along those lines as it showed the Terran leaders as being active-duty military officers wearing remarkably Nazi-like uniforms. The movie also varied from the book in enough other ways that I don’t consider it to be a valid representation of Heinlein’s original argument on restricting the franchise to those who have already served. (The director has stated that he read only the first few chapters of the book.)

However, one thing that the movie did do was to bring up this argument again for a new generation. I was at a WorldCon in Baltimore (1998, I think), and I attended what was supposed to be a late night panel on Starship Troopers. Instead of a proper panel, it devolved into a roundtable discussion between all attendees. The arguments pro and con went round and round, complete with epitaphs of “Nazi” and “commie” and what have you.

I had not said much at all in that discussion, mostly just observing. (As a side note, I grow weary of the vitriol of many folks who are so fixed in their positions they are unwilling to entertain the notion that they might be wrong, and this discussion was filled with that kind of vitriol.) But eventually, someone turned to me and said, “You’ve been pretty quiet. What’s your take on it?”

I replied, “It seems to me that those of you arguing for the veteran-only vote are people who would be willing to make that sacrifice to earn the right to vote, while those of you arguing against it are people unwilling to make that sacrifice and just don’t want to agree with a system that would deprive you of the right you currently enjoy.”

I got two reactions. From those arguing for it, I got a chorus of “Fucking A!” From those arguing against it, silence.

I wasn’t surprised by the response from the pro-Heinlein crowd, but I was disappointed in the response from the others. I had hoped that instead of arguing against the likely results of such a system (again, the Nazi or militarism arguments) they would offer an argument for the right to vote for those unwilling to give up two years for some level of community service, that those voters deserved the right to vote or that they offered a unique and valuable voice that would not come from those who had already served.

Personally, I’m a little torn. I like to think that if I found myself in the world of Starship Troopers, I would have signed up and done my two years. However, in this world, I have never done so. I considered it strongly after high school, but pressure from my parents pushed me into college, and after that marriage, job, and kids kept me away from such a choice. I find that as the years go by, I regret that more and more. I still seriously consider making the switch to some kind of community service job in my later years, perhaps teaching. But I continue to vote now, without having made that choice.

I’ve gotten into the habit of closing these with a question, so my question to you is this: If you did have to do two years of community or military service to earn the right to vote, would you do it, and what kind of service do you think you would do? Don’t feel you have to restrict yourself to Heinlein’s choices of soldier or medical test subject. Instead, consider the many thankless jobs we have in today’s society.