tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32693064686070442722024-03-12T17:46:49.398-07:00Speculative NonfictionSpeculative Hard Science and Science Fiction. And Metal.Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.comBlogger706125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-3156269195450954352023-10-23T23:56:00.006-07:002024-01-08T10:18:10.936-08:00The Dispossessed by Le GuinIn fiction, people write about things that interest them. This is a trivial observation, but there's more to it than that. Why make up false stories about the things we enjoy? Because by rearranging puzzle pieces to make different but still coherent images, you might learn more. In fact, <a href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2024/01/fiction-is-dreaming-in-print.html" target="_blank">this is one theory for why we dream</a>. If that's true, then fiction is a kind of deliberate dreaming in print. Somehow I've never gotten around to reading <i>The Dispossessed</i> until now. For me, it invites obvious comparisons to four other novels: <i>Dune</i>, <i>Atlas Shrugged</i>, Stephenson's <i>Anathem</i>, and Asimov's <i>Foundation</i>. <br/><br/>
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I'll focus frequently on a <a href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2021/10/why-dune-is-unique-three-reasons-and.html" target="_blank">comparison to <i>Dune</i></a> (that kept recurring to me as I read), but it's worth noting that <i>Atlas Shrugged</i>, <i>Anathem</i>, and <i>Foundation</i> all share with <i>The Dispossessed</i> intentional socities that deliberately separate themselves from their civilization of origin. The tone of the protagonist in <i>Anathem</i> is one of puzzlement at the outside ("saecular") world. In <i>Foundation</i>, the attitude is one of anxiety as to whether the experiment will work and gratitude that, through the founder's guile, the new society has avoided becoming entangled in the rest of the galaxy's collapse. <i>Atlas Shrugged</i> comes closest to the tone of the protagonist and his society in <i>The Dispossessed</i> - a strongly moral, judgmental one. Despite being polar opposites in many ways, Rand and Le Guin also share an interest in the interaction of psychology and social systems, which somewhat betrays the mid-twentieth century careers of each writer.[1]
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<i>The Dispossessed</i> is one of LeGuin's Hainish Cycle novels, the setting for which is a universe where every human world including Earth originated with the Hainish people, a million-year-old civilization that lost touch with its colonies thousands of years ago. Science fiction purists may complain that a) the trope of "humans are actually the descendants of alien colonists" is well-worn, and b) in any event no longer plausible given modern DNA ancestry and phylogeny work, unless Earth is the homeworld; then you have to explain where all the evidence of our previous technology was (either, more advanced aliens seeded us, or it was made of something quickly degradable, like ice as in <a href=https://wordpress.sharrukinspalace.com/2020/12/30/review-the-trigon-disunity-by-michael-p-kube-mcdowell/ target=_blank>Michael P. Kube-McDowell's Trigon Disunity series.</a>) That aside, having multiple human worlds, each with their own unique cultural (and even biological) paths, gave Le Guin a nifty vehicle for "interacting alternate histories", in the best sense of that subgenre as an experiment in the impact of historical commitments. The twin planets of Urras and Anarres ask - what if Earth had a habitable moon, and a social/religious movement with echoes of Mormons, Mennonites, the Greek philosophy schools that often had their own islands (eg the Epicureans) and a leader who died before reaching the Holy Land - and that movement started their utopia from scratch on said moon. (I quite like that each world refers to the other as their moon.) There are also nations on Urras that make clear parallels to Earth's, more obvious to the geopolitical and cultural milieu in the 1960s - A-Io as an America with an overgrown military-industrial complex and a decidedly Victorian bent, and Thu as a communist dictatorship. Consequently, while it's easy to see the novel was written with mid-to-late twentieth century political concerns, this does not detract from its overall themes and it has mostly aged quite well.
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The use of a science fiction setting to explore the intersection between politics, philosophy, and ecology is so obviously parallel to <i>Dune</i> that I was surprised there is not already literature (or even any extensive online discussion I could find) comparing the two. It's been said that <i>Dune</i> is <i>Foundation</i> told from the standpoint of the Mule, or that <i>Dune</i> is Star Wars for grown-ups. I find myself feeling less kind to <i>Dune</i> after reading <i>The Dispossessed</i>. Arrakis could be one 75% imagined planet in Le Guin's universe, and <i>The Dispossessed</i> is<i> Dune</i> for better-read grown-ups. Sand worms, spice, and sand trout - that's your ecosystem? On Anarres we learn about the taxonomy of the planet's native life and how it was influenced to evolve in such a way by the physical environment, from lichen, to the fragile plants of the desert landscape with only three land phyla, and how the people adapted the available organisms. <i>The Dispossessed</i> is the better novel, and there's no serious discussion to be had about the point. It would be hard to be surprised when you learn that the novel won the Hugo, Locus and Nebula.
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And, whatever you might think of her politics, <i>The Dispossessed</i> is worthy of our respect because it more clearly grew out of Le Guin's reading in trying to do something in the real world - as someone protesting the Vietnam War, she began reading about real-world pacifist movements that directly inspired the philosophy in the book.[2] My main objections to Odonian philosophy are that it does not respect human nature enough - given how children are quickly moved out of their family units and raised institutionally, in Anarres would be a planet of people with borderline personality disorder. Also, while "shunning" (the Anarresti Amish- or Hopi-like method of dealing with most criminals and parasites) is adequate punishment in small scale societies, it absolutely breaks down beyond the level of a village, where we're above the Dunbar number and everybody no longer knows everybody. Interestingly, outside of the suppression of dissent, I mostly found myself identifying with the politics of the A-Ioti, and outside of the apparent phobia of emotional bonds (even in parenthood), with the personal morality of the Anarresti. Such a divide would likely have seemed strange to Le Guin or her original audience, and it's interesting how in the intervening half-century, some things have changed, particularly the acceptance of open minority sexuality and the agreement by many Americans on both left and even right that the state should not be part of the institituion of marriage.
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Le Guin does an outstanding job of structuring the novel to serve the narrative and planting seeds throughout that bear fruit later. And some authors give us unreliable narrators, others - restrictive or <i>omitting </i>narrators. Example: in Wolfe's New Sun novels, the reader is (meant to be) startled when Severian casually mentions three novels into the series, that due to the Sun's dimness, people on Earth can now see stars in the daytime. I took this, as so many things in those novels, as a comment on the limitations of narrative. Perhaps similarly - perhaps not - the humans on the various worlds of the Hainish cycle universe have been separated long enough to be noticeably physically different. Urrasti (and the biologically identical Anarresti) are covered in fur. To be fair this is mentioned several times, but always (I suspect) intentionally in such a way as to be dismissible as metaphor - e.g., Shevek describes his young daughter as "furry" at one point, and I took that to mean her disheveled hair (on her head.) It's not until he meets the ambassador from Earth that he explicitly notes the difference - that Terrans only have hair on their heads! - and made me page back to some of the other comments about furriness. Assuming Le Guin was doing this deliberately, it's much more clever than Wolfe - there's no way to know you can see the stars during the day until Severian tells you, but you have to be complicit in your own deception to miss the Urrasti's furriness. (It also nicely simulates the vertiginous experience of suddenly recognizing the previously un-considered, un-noticed marks of one's own nation or religion or other in-group, when suddenly contrasted against a foreigner in front of you.)
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Le Guin doesn't try to paint her ambiguous utopia as perfect. The feeling that humans are hard to organize in big groups, and that any political commitments we make will fall short or make us chafe somewhere, is communicated clearly. She seems comfortable recognizing that even in intentional social systems designed to maximize utility, the terms of the utility equation - wealth, justice, and leisure among them - cannot all be given equal priority. As noted in interviews elsewhere, she is comfortable admitting that the people of Anarres are poorer as a result of their system, but more moral. This is a tradeoff that every socioeconomic ordering has had to make in every civilization and her directness here is refreshing. Furthermore, she recognizes that human nature is not a blank slate and it comes up against the Anarresti "system" throughout the novel, and George Carlin's principle that among humans, "eventually, <a target=_blank href=https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2019/09/complex-dynamic-systems-like-cells.html>everything becomes a racket"</a> is illustrated nicely by how the syndicates gradually become a bureaucracy, and social norms become laws. That said, Le Guin is brave enough not to denigrate the anarcho-syndicalism she explores with false equivalence. She is describing a system that she thinks would be an improvement over the various Urrasti nations, as well as our own; not just for the narrative motive of creating the conflict necessary in a novel but for genuine intellectual honesty, she does not conceal its expected shortcomings.
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Returning to <i>Dune</i>: it's not clear that Herbert was a fan of the idea of feudalism and I took his use of it in <i>Dune</i> as a statement about the unfortunate natural tendencies of humans, that given half a chance, we'll revert to it. But he also doesn't exactly seem disgusted by feudalism either, and doesn't offer any serious improvement on it, other than just to submit to a messiah. And if we can take it as any indication, certainly the fandom of <i>Dune</i> is not filled with people decrying the dystopian injustice of the feudal system, but rather cheering for a different person to control it. In contrast, as an "honest utopian", Le Guin also writes better, more human characters, whose interactions with the system and each other naturally demonstrate how it works, rather than the repetitive ungainly thought-italics of <i>Dune</i>.
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Finally - if I'm comparing <i>The Dispossessed</i> to <i>Dune</i> - the treatment of women in both novels could not be more opposite. In The <i>Dispossessed</i>, they're human, unrestricted in their emotional and social roles and experiences. In <i>Dune</i> they're either the Messiah's mother, or the woman he seizes as property with violence (Irulan), or (possibly most revealing of the author's psychology) weird older ladies whose rituals contain more than a hint of BDSM, who make the boy-protagonist crawl to them on his knees to be tortured.[3] Le Guin also treats sexual minorities as human, whereas Herbert, in real life, disowned his gay son. That seems as good a note as any to close on.
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<b>FOOTNOTES</b>
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[1] It should be noted that like the linguistic parallel of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, there is little evidence for a strong effect of social structure on psychology, and writers lost interest in the question. (But if mid-twentieth century psychoanalytic theories of society are your bag, you could do worse than reading Erikson's <i>Childhood and Society</i>, where he investigated and contrasted the relationship between the environment, social structure, and psychology of the Lakota of the high plains, and the Yurok of coastal northern California. Of note - he studied the Yurok with the famous Berkeley linguist Alfred Kroeber, who happens to be Le Guin's father - the K. is for her maiden name Kroeber.)
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[2] The title of <i>The Dispossessed</i> was inspired by Dostoyevsky's <i>The Possessed.</i> As I haven't read it, my summary of the summaries I've scanned is that <i>The Possessed</i> is about nineteenth century Russian anarchists who've been "infected" with Western ideas; the Anarresti here could be thought of as their descendants, not exorcised of anarchist demons but rather exiled from their homeland. The Russian novel may be of interest to Slate Star Codex types interested in consciousness "software" a la Julian Jaynes spreading through a population, as in this one interesting though highly dubious account of it <a href="https://smoothbrains.net/posts/2022-08-24-planetary-scale-vibe-collapse.html" target="_blank">happening before an observer's eyes in the Andaman Islands</a>. It also seems like it would be popular with modern Russian chauvinists in terms of their ideas of being "Eurasian" and being unique and separate from the West.
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[3] Also of note is that Paul's mother is one of the BDSM nuns. Many male narcissists have difficult relationships with their mothers. And, not unrelated - similar fantasies about older women.
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<b>More discussion:</b><br/>
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<a href="https://lawliberty.org/ursula-le-guin-and-the-persistence-of-tragedy/" target="_blank">Essay on <i>The Dispossessed</i> at Law & Liberty</a>, focusing more on the political arguments<br/>
Public conversation <a href="https://literary-arts.org/archive/ursula-le-guin-margaret-atwood/" target="_blank">between Le Guin and Margaret Atwood</a><br/>
<a href="https://www.tor.com/2017/08/07/ursula-le-guins-the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas-defies-genre/" target="_blank">Genre classification</a> and Le Guin's work
</ul>
Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-47386236074402830102022-12-05T14:18:00.001-08:002022-12-05T14:18:20.833-08:00Why Are UAPs Associated With Naval Aviation?We're more likely to find artifacts from technology-using aliens - self-reproducing (von Neumann) probes - rather than the aliens themselves, or even to recognize and understand their signals against background, if any. Indeed, humans may be just at the technological threshold of building such probes right now, but we're far from any serious discussion of manned interstellar travel, and in fact it may never be biologically feasible. <a href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2010/05/epidemiology-of-cancerous-von-neumann.html" target="_blank">Such objects are likely to be found associated with lower gravity objects, ie the asteroid belt</a>, where they can obtain materials and build more of themselves. The further they are from home, the less likely they are to adhere to some "mission", and the more likely they are to have mutated and been selected merely for fecundity (reproductive ability.) Therefore it's not obvious that they would be particularly interested in finding other examples of intelligence. They could very well be much more interested in finding other von Neumann probes, and humans might therefore not be the most interesting thing in the solar system to them. If this is the situation that obtains, this resolves a contradiction: other technology-using species have indeed appeared before us, but there's little evidence of them here.
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If the von Neumann probes are built from metal, and one planet over the last few centuries suddenly large metal objects moving around its surface (ships) and smaller metal objects moving much faster through the atmosphere - then THOSE might be interesting. You might expect the probes to be especially interested in locations with lots of ship and air traffic, and especially the ones with the fastest air-objects, especially if the fast air-objects come and go from the large metal objects on the surface. It's been observed separately by other writers that, from the standpoint of an off-world but in-solar-system alien observer of Earth's behavior in terms of natural processes, the appearance of metal objects in the atmosphere and then suddenly in orbit is the most interesting phenomenon that has appeared here for many millions of years at least.
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The fact that it's US Navy aviators who have reported many of the UAP sightings is obviously relevant. Given that the reported observations are made by multiple modalities (naked eye, radar, thermal) and official US agency reports describe as likely mostly physical objects, it's unlikely these are glitches: that is to say, either they're real, or they're made up, possible as sort of intelligence or misinformation operation that we civilians are caught in. But if it's real, two questions are important to the hypothesis.
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<i>First:</i> is there really a higher rate of UAP sightings around US Navy aviation areas (as there seems to be so far, with sightings concentrated around San Diego and Virginia Beach) or is this just bias because there are more instruments and observers there? Such is the frequency of these events according to the reports that a relatively low-budget operation with some weather balloons over a low-traffic area could move the needle on whether naval air stations are "enriched" for these objects. (If it does not make any such observations, it would suggest either it's a misinformation campaign, or they're real but concentrated around naval air stations.) Related: do JFK or LAX have similar sightings? Or Heathrow? Narita?
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<i>Second:</i> is it really an American (or mostly American) problem? Is the pattern repeated around the world at other countries' naval air stations? China or Russia might not be interested in sharing this kind of information, but NATO allies might be. That said, if an unfriendly country discloses it is seeing the same thing, and it has no explanation, then it's much more likely that these objects are real, and at least are not human-created phenomena. Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-65513176604007135392021-10-05T23:54:00.003-07:002023-10-24T00:08:29.249-07:00Why Dune is Unique: Three Reasons, and Some Questions<i>(Contains novel spoilers, Lynch movie spoilers, but not Villeneuve movie spoilers.)</i>
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Dune has a lot of very loyal readers who rightly understand its <i>specialness</i>. Both its contents and its place in science fiction as a tradition are unique. I somehow had gone my entire life without reading the novel, or even seeing the David Lynch movie all the way through, and committed to correcting this prior to the release of the Villeneuve version (which as I write I have not seen.) Coming to it late - much like I did <a href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2016/07/a-metalhead-binge-listens-to-led.html" target="_blank">as a metal fan with Led Zeppelin</a> - provided me a unique perspective that might escape those encountering it in late adolescence or early adulthood, though you can see the warts a bit more clearly as well.
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In short, there are three core features that make Dune stand apart, in order of increasing uniqueness.
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<li> The setting echoes early modern Europe or the age of discovery, unlike standard "star empire" stories.
<li>In Dune, religion is <i>real</i>. It's not just that religion is central to the identify of many of its characters; in many ways, its worldview is not a rationalist one.
<li>Above all, Dune is a projection and exploration of human potential, in extension into the far future. It is therefore a <b>hard SF of social sciences</b>.
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<b>The Setting</b>
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Interstellar empires abound in science fiction, but they typically evoke either strong associations with a re-born Roman empire, or a not-so-subtle thirst for the hegemony of a modern-day state (almost invariably the U.S.) expanded out into the wild black yonder. Dune doesn't fall into either category. The setting is politically reminiscent of Europe with a Holy Roman Empire balancing power against multiple other states.[1] Many of the other elements have obvious parallels, e.g. the Sardaukar as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janissary" target="_blank">Ottoman Janissaries</a>. Note this was also the age of discovery, which at first was for spices and gold, though melange is a lot more like oil. The Fremen are often compared to Bedouins or <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=tuareg&rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS660US660&sxsrf=AOaemvJce7yhbZYJy1HpfzoYUkNoxLCqCw:1632377743629&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=2ahUKEwjB4rD8uJTzAhU5F1kFHW1SAMUQ_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1517&bih=677&dpr=0.9" target="_blank">Tuaregs</a>, and Paul Atreides to a Lawrence of Arabia figure. The mixture of elements from different periods is a strength of Dune, since Herbert is not merely retelling history but on another planet with lasers - rather, it opens up discussion of how these forces interacted to produce history, like the best <a href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2017/02/review-of-journey-to-fusang-and-some.html" target="_blank">alternate histories</a>. (Even Asimov wrote a humorous song about himself referring to <a href="https://briangroat.com/asimov-on-how-to-be-prolific/" target="_blank">"cribbin' from Gibbon" for Foundation</a>.)
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<b>Religion Is Real</b>
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It's not just Herbert's focus on concepts from psychology and religion - it's that these things are taken as real and literal in the world that he is showing us. As in most science fiction until thew New Wave (and probably most since then), Fondation's future is depicted as secular, and though Hari Seldon is revered, people have the good sense not to turn it into a religion. But most telling is that both Foundation and Dune have "distractor" religions – the Dark Things spread by the Bene Geserit, and the superstitions spread by the Foundation to keep surrounding worlds in check. But in Foundation, the people on Terminus understand that these beliefs, and indeed superstitions in general, can only be nonsense used to keep the rubes in check - and more important, Asimov assumes that you the reader understand this as well. As he conquers the Imperium Muad'dib speaks of God in what seems a very literal and unironic sense, and his destiny and powers seem to confirm this. Herbert's approach to religion in Dune is not merely to recognize in the manner of a detached anthropologist the importance of religious belief (in the abstract) to humans, but rather to suggest its literal reality, and in so doing paint a picture of a dualist, human-shaped, not fully rational universe where our nature can reach its fullest projection. This is true of very few works of science fiction. Attanasio's <i>Radix</i> has many echoes of Dune but, again tellingly, ultimately the language is that of a comprehensible monism.
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<b>A Hard SF of Social Sciences</b>
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Comparisons with Foundation and Star Wars are obvious and appropriate, but a superficial examination risks missing what is unique about Dune. All three have heroes that struggle against empires which are in some way fraudulent, deceptively unstable, or unjust. The argument has been made that Dune is Foundation, told from the standpoint of the Mule, but to me this isn't so clear; certainly Paul has aspects of both Hari Seldon as prophet, and the Mule as out-of-context conqueror. Both Dune and Star Wars have a hero who is "the one", imbued by his ancestry with special powers that are developed through training.
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The comparison with Star Wars is ultimately not fruitful, because Star Wars is actually a <a href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2020/01/star-wars-episode-ix-review-contains.html" target="_blank">fantasy work that happens to occur in space</a>, and Dune is science fiction - interested as it is with concepts from ecology, politics, religion, and psychology. Hard sf classically speculates about physical sciences - <a href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2021/05/review-of-three-body-problem.html" target="_blank">what if you could manipulate the internal structure of a proton to make it an AI</a>? What if you could build <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld" target="_blank">a habitable ring-shaped megastructure?</a> - and in its best moments, gets us to put down the book and think about the speculative ideas presented, or argue about their plausibility with other readers. In Dune, Herbert takes the same approach, making concepts from these fields central to his world-building. George R.R. Martin borrows heavily from history, but he drops these episodes in for dramatic benefit (wedding massacre, the battle of Cannae, barbarian hordes from interior grasslands) but for Martin these are all stand-alone set pieces, they aren't meshing gears in a machine as in Dune.[2]
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While the proximate trigger for a novel about a desert planet was research Herbert did for an article on sand dunes in coastal Oregon, he spent time as a journalist at the Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, California where he kept company with two psychoanalysts[3] whose influence can certainly be felt in the world he built here. Until Dune, there was really nothing like this in science fiction.
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The Fremen in particular were unique in science fiction up to that point (<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/sojv4/spoilers_all_house_atreides_the_kwisatz_haderach/" target="_blank">Martin's wildlings are a later example of the same type</a>.) If science fiction taking place after an expansion away from Earth includes stateless people at all, they tend to be small groups of bandits or criminals - rather than an entire civilization <i>that is not also a state</i>. The Fremen are very much like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Not_Being_Governed" target="_blank">James Scott’s Zomians</a>: a people who are never absorbed into a state because their terrain is not "legible" (note how the Imperial census on their numbers was unreliable.)
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The following observation deserves its own paragraph: I'm writing this a few weeks after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. If ever life imitated art, it's now. I don't like comparing my country to the Imperium or Harkonnens, but if a Taliban fighter watches Dune, you can be certain he will enthusiastically see himself as a Fremen. I think this is a major scotoma on both the part of Herbert and readers in the West. The Fremen are explicitly called jihadis. They are religious fanatics. They do not have a rationalist, monist view of the universe - fitting with the themes of Dune, but nonetheless, not people who I imagine would think about equality, between the sexes or anything else, the way you or I do.
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I think the absence of both intelligent aliens and thinking machines was a deliberate choice on Herbert's part, to be able to create a universe that was "humanized", where only human consciousness is projected onto and shaping the cosmos. The Buterlian Jihad and consequent absence of AIs is the more important of the two, and serves twin purposes. First, Herbert might have thought that a world where humans co-existed with thinking machines for thousands of years would be either too hard to build, and/or too disorienting for readers to be interested. Second, a world without thinking machines forces us to <i>develop human potential</i> - and we see how physical and mental disciplines have grown over the centuries. This gives us the mentats, and Bene Geserit, and navigators, and the weight of practices and aphorisms that are probably the most specific identifying feature of the book. It should also be noted that as technology is retarded by the absence of computers, the human race recedes to its base-state of feudalism,[4] predictably in a world of stagnant economic growth. You could even argue that the entire Imperium suffers from the <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/resource-curse.asp#:~:text=The%20resource%20curse%20mainly%20occurs,also%20result%20from%20government%20corruption." target="_blank">resource curse</a>. The Holtzmann Shield is the final trick to build this stage, removing large scale missile weapons from the picture, returning us to an age where physical, martial prowess means something.
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You might correctly point out the Foundation series was about an empire's collapse and the natural laws that govern civilizations - <a href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2013/08/asimovs-foundation-meta-cult.html" target="_blank">an idea that has influenced readers for decades</a> - and object that Herbert's hard social sf was new or unique. But Asimov did spend a fair bit of text on positronic brains, hyperspace, and logic puzzles. The world he built was a tidy, rational and comprehensible one, and the fundamental approach of Hari Seldon was that of a physicist, studying humans as particles - an analogy his characters make frequently.[5]
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The linguist and cultural critic John McWhorter wrote<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Our-Own-Thing-Degradation/dp/1592400167" target="_blank"> Doing Our Own Thing</a> about the transition in American culture from formality (in music, in film, in speaking and fashion in culture in general) to informality. He provides countless examples, even pointing to specific performers whose output changed during this period - and points to a specific year when the transition occurred in earnest: 1965.[6] He gives examples of performances which were stylistically "mid-transition", referring to these as cultural archaeopteryxes. Before I looked up the year of Dune's publication I guessed it would be 1965. It is. My argument is not that Dune's tone is somehow more informal, but rather that it's the archaeopteryx for science fiction. The tone change in science fiction in the U.S. was in some cases a stylistic move toward less formality, but moreso a migration in topics toward social science. In the U.S. the changes were clear enough that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wave_science_fiction" target="_blank">it was being discussed by 1967</a>. Dune still uses science, but has transitioned partway to a post-rationalist, post-scientific worldview - that, more than the concern with social science concepts, is what makes it an archaeopteryx.
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<b>Problems with the Novel</b>
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There are difficulties with science fiction that are not unique to Dune. When you create a world from scratch, you have to choose between "info dumps", or confusing (or boring) the reader. To me, novels with entries from a Galactic Dictionary, or "italics sections" at the start of chapters, are actually enjoyable. But it's the geopolitics of the Landsraad as revealed through grinding dialogue that lose me. My own bias is that if I'm going to invest time reading about complicated politics, I'd rather read about the real world. The level of detail in these discussions frustrated me in the extreme, even more than the infamous long-winded tree descriptions in Lord of the Rings. My reasoning is partly that an economy or a civilization are such complex entities that, when you make one up, you will always leave holes or commit contradictions no matter how great your effort. So just give us a sketch and fill us in as need be. Related to this, the random and inconsistent insertions of various characters' internal thoughts was really irritating, and did not add anything that could not have been done in a different way (just state it - it doesn't have to be dialogue.) It is here that I will confess <i>that I did not actually finish the novel</i> - but I did read lots of secondary sources, and the Appendix. (If one of my points here is actually answered in the novel or in a later book, please comment.) The two main reasons I couldn't continue were the dialogues about politics, and the internal monologues in italics (see below.)
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Something as complicated as an economy is impossible even to model. To make something up from scratch, there will inevitably be contradictions or gaps that an alert reader can find. In general, there's too much reliance on the spice's miraculous powers; and if the spice really is that important, it seems that something as critical as the transfer of control over spice production would be a bit better attended to by other Houses, and in fact there would be a lot more presence on or around Arrakis by other Houses. It makes the Dune universe, for its otherwise rich canvas of invented social structures, in this respect feel a little one-dimensional. Though it's briefly addressed, characters seem remarkably incurious about the inability to manufacture spice, or its connection to Dune’s ecosystem i.e. the worms. It's also hard to understand how certain things like the stillsuits can be manufactured by Fremen who are essentially hunter-gatherers.
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Maguffins like spice are not uncommon in fiction, but it's worth pointing out that Herbert wrote multiple other stories with a maguffin with these characteristics:
<ul>
<li>It can only be obtained in one place
<li>You can't make it, you have to harvest or extract it
<li>It is involved in mental activity - the substance results from it, or stimulates it (often but not always)
</ul>
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While I haven't surveyed his entire output, here are some examples:
<ul>
<li>The psychoactive compound Jaspers in <i>The Santaroga Barrier</i>
<li>The glandular secretions mined by aliens (important enough to have to hypnotize the human race) in his first published short story "Looking for Something"
<li>Oil in <i>The Dragon in the Sea</i>, his first published novel.[7]
</ul>
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For a novel that supposedly emphasizes ecology, there's very little actual discussion of the native flora and fauna of Arrakis besides sandworms and sandtrout. Only later do we even learn why Arrakis has an oxygen atmosphere (worm metabolism produces oxygen.) I do like the observation that Earth's desert plants from all deserts became naturalized there, but this is not discussed as a tragedy of invasives displacing natives; rather the description takes the tone of Arrakis as a (good) desert preserve for Earth's desert organisms.[8] Related to this, worms attack rhythmic motion because they're defending their territory – from what? Other worms?
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Herbert is not alone in having his characters speak in the stiff and unnatural manner that can be called "mythic-speak", the first rule of which is that contractions are not allowed. Fantasy novels often adhere to this convention as well. We know they're not speaking English; therefore, you might consider just having the characters talk like your audience. Even Hemingway made this mistake in For Whom the Bell Tolls with his whole thou and thee convention to reflect use of <i>tú</i> instead of the formal second person, and it is similarly jarring.
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If faster-than-light travel is possible without spice (if a bit slower than space-folding), and there are working non-spice-dependent FTL ships, why the stranglehold by the Spice Guild? Why don't the Houses build their own? If the Guild does control space travel so tightly, how have the Fremen migrated? If non-spice-based FTL travel is possible, what stopped renegade houses from expanding on their own to a new habitable planet?
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I'm quite confident that in a hundred centuries, no names now familiar to us will still be in existence. There will be no Duncans or Pauls or Jessicas. I see what Herbert may have been trying for with the surname Idaho - many people in the New World carry a surname of a faraway land that they may not even know is a real place - but no one has a surname of a place from a hundred centuries ago.
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Why don't the other types of spice users also have blue eyes like the Fremen (ie the navigators?)
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Why do people have to go into space to get folded by a navigator? Why not just sit in a warehouse on one planet, then get folded to another?
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<b>Criticisms of the Lynch Movie</b>
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Most people don't care for the Lynch movie, so I'm hardly taking a risk panning it. The choice of Lynch as director is actually the first mystery: he wasn't a science fiction director, and didn't particularly like science fiction, and it showed. He also wasn't able to make the movie he wanted to. Even so, confessing my bias, I'm not much of a Lynch fan to begin with, and even his fans mostly concede that Dune wasn't strong work. (In the same vein, I'm a fan of much of John Updike's work but his attempt at science fiction <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toward_the_End_of_Time" target="_blank">Toward the End of Time</a> fell quite flat.) Amazingly, Lynch was apparently considered to direct Return of the Jedi, and even as someone who doesn't love the original episodes as much as most, I think that would have been a mistake.
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A positive: given the limitations on travel between planets, I would expect massive genetic drift. I actually liked the physical differences between the imperial family, the Harkonnens and the Atreides and hope the Villeneuve movie expands this.
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I also liked the costumes, at least for the emperor and nobles and higher ups in House Atreides, who have a definite 1800s European imperialist flair.[9]
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I did not recognize Sean Young until late in the movie, despite Blade Runner being one of my favorite movies.
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I am somehow always surprised by Patrick Stewart being in this movie. Since Max von Sydow was in Episode VII of Star Wars, that makes actors in both franchises. In the Villeneuve movie there is a DC franchise actor (Jason Momoa) along with no less than five MCU actors (Zendaya, Stellan Skarsgård, Oscar Isaac,[10] David Dastmalchian, and Dave Bautista, the latter two having also been in <i>Blade Runner 2049</i>.)
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The most inexplicable decision to me was keeping one of the worst features of the novel - the voice over - which are just the movie version of the italicized internal monologue we're occasionally forced to read in the novel. Princess Irulan's narrations were okay if a bit jarring in places, but the random whispered "paroxysmal third person omniscient" moments are just horrendous. (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE_-0IdWioU" target="_blank">South Park's treatment</a> was just about right.) And they thought the added voiceover in the U.S. theatrical release of the original Blade Runner was irritating?
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The special effects are one of the few aspects of the movie that are regarded positively, but I don't understand why. Even comparing to contemporaries - they mostly seem inferior to Return of the Jedi, which came out the prior year.
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A lot of the Lynch movie feels very claustrophobic, which is the opposite of "epic". It seems like Lynch built big sets, and barely used them, and we're up close to the characters in small corners half the time.
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The battle scenes were disorganized messes and the fighting itself often seemed like people flailing randomly.
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The directorial decision on how to portray Vladimir Harkonnen was unfortunate. He's not scary, so much as gross. I would be afraid to be in a room with Darth Vader, but with the Baron, I just don't want him to touch me. Being charitable, his homosexuality as a sign of decadence is an unfortunate hallmark of 80s big studio movies trying to be edgy (see also, Bright Lights, Big City.)
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All that said, Dune is a long and difficult novel to film. Then again, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFMo3UJ4B4g" target="_blank">Ted Chiang stories are tough to film</a>, and Blade Runner fans (like me) were <a href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2017/10/review-blade-runner-2049-containing.html" target="_blank">ready to hate 2049</a> - and both were outstanding. If there's anyone who can make a good Dune movie, it's Denis Villeneuve.
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<b>FOOTNOTES</b>
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[1] A major difference from the Dune universe and 17th-19th century Europe is the existence of a religious authority separate from political ones - the Holy Roman Empire was not the Vatican, and though the two were closely connected, <a href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-roots-of-universal-moral-authority.html" target="_blank">one was a moral authority and the other a secular authority</a>. This may have been one of the major differences in the history of Europe in the second millennium as compared to the Middle East, and while Herbert is clearly interested in the relationship of politics and religion, he does not seem to have been considering this problem specifically. It is also worth noting that religion in Dune is syncretic - there are Bene Geserit both living among the Zensunni Fremen and marrying into the Orange Catholic noble families.
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[2] Neal Stephenson's <i>Baroque Cycle</i> is science fiction, and does take place in early modern Europe. In this case, they are gears, not standalone single-act plays, and not surprisingly, Stephenson strongly agrees that despite the era of its setting the Baroque Cycle is science fiction, not fantasy. These two characteristics are related.
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[3] No doubt his virtue was corrupted by the ordeal of keeping company with such unsavory characters.
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[4] A standby plot fix for any movie with a historically familiar, but unlikely to occur in the future scenario, is that it is taking place in a simulation or curated theme park run by AIs, unknown to the human characters. In other words, the Butlerian Jihad was actually theater produced by the machines for the benefit of humans, and they have kept a section of the galaxy for humans to play their little political games in the ways most comfortable and familiar to them, while the machines colonize the rest of the outside universe. I don't think this is what Herbert intended but it does seem a good match here, given that the computers magically gave up and said, "Okay humans, you win! Now go impose a strikingly antiquated social system on an alien universe with remarkable ease!" In-universe cryptohistory I guess.
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[5] I would also argue that when Asimov wrote the first three Foundation novels it was also too early to be talking about subgenres, and it had not fragmented yet. Similarly - was Elvis country or rock and roll? <br/> <br/>
[6] I would argue that this transition will happen in any post-scarcity consumer society as farmer norms revert back to hunter-gatherer norms (see <a href="https://www.overcomingbias.com/2017/08/forager-v-farmer-elaborated.html" target="_blank">Robin Hanson</a>), and in fact even further, as beyond a nuclear family we can pick and choose who we associate with without impact on our survival, and therefore we have little need to be even momentarily uncomfortable for the sake of observing common norms.
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[7] In <i>Dragon in the Sea</i> he described an idea which actually inspired a type of real-world carrier called a Draconis.
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[8] This is an interesting question - over time on Earth, most likely even widely separated areas with the same climate e.g. Mediterranean will end up with the same flora and fauna - California has ice plant from South Africa, eucalyptus from Australia, and grasses and other plants from Eurasia and North Africa, which have badly displaced native organisms.
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[9] Another interesting design decision in the Lynch movie is the almost steam-punk look of the technology. The translation device used by the Spice Guild "stewards" looked like a 1930s radio microphone. It raises the question of an alternate history (and present) without our thinking machines. Consider freezing "computing" technology at World War I levels – what would history look like without the Enigma machine, or vacuum tubes, or microchips?
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[10] Oscar Isaac was in an X-Men movie and will now be in Moon Knight; this may be the <a href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2018/05/make-your-own-genre-crossovers-by.html" target="_blank">crossover Disney uses to save Star Wars with the MCU</a>.
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Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-25729019712273316672021-05-15T07:56:00.006-07:002021-12-25T01:16:44.691-08:00Review of Three Body Problem<i>Warning: spoilers.</i>
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<b>The Good</b>
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Western readers will inevitably learn a lot about the Cultural Revolution period and the attitudes about it people are comfortable expressing in print today. During <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/24/liu-cixins-war-of-the-worlds" target="_blank">this interview</a> and in his postscript to the American edition, Liu distances himself from any reading of his work as cultural critique, maybe a bit too strenuously. Whether he should be credited as pointing us to a Straussian reading or this is just pragmatic avoidance of political attention is not clear to me.
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Related to this, Western readers in particular are keen to find parallels between Trisolaris and Earth to China and America. Again Liu himself states this isn't what he's doing, and in any event it's not clear which planet would stand for which country. Trisolaris goes through cycles of death and rebirth not unlike China's dynasties (in fact, in the in-novel video game, represented literally as China's dynasties) and Ye is even explicitly described at one point as emerging from the chaotic winter of the Cultural Revolution. The regimented, autocratic aliens of Trisolaris are coming to dominate the naive Earth - the easy-going, beautiful Earth that fluorished in ignorance, as a Chinese author might imagine America. But this doesn't really fit. For one thing, Liu certainly doesn't come across as having any romantic fantasies about America; and Trisolaran sabotage of Earth's rapid advance also smacks of Chinese resentment at perceived Western interference in its rise. If two opposing narratives can fit so well, then I think we're probably crowbarring them into a story where they don't belong. Then again, a symbolic scheme need not be entirely consistent. Case in point, in District 9, are the aliens Soweto residents, or clueless interlopers like the Afrikaaners? Likely both, at various points.
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The single best feature of this novel is its explosion of this idea that any technologically advanced civilization must necessarily be a moral one; that humans are inherently and uniquely bad; and that therefore, contact with starfaring aliens can only improve our lot. (This idea of humans being uniquely evil is actually grossly anthropocentric, morally pre-Copernican, invariably casting the <i>rest</i> of humanity as evil, except of course for the enlightened individuals lecturing the rest of us. It smacks of teenagers claiming to be Satanists. Why not just reject Christian symbolism entirely? Because that doesn't make your parents as mad.) Things did not work out well for the natives of the New World, and that was contact between the <i>same species.</i> And Cortez and Pizarro were surely more technologically advanced than the Aztecs and Incas, so why were they not also morally superior? Hence the moment when the police officer almost can't wait to show Ye the content of the messages they found on the Adventists' secret ship and destroy her "beautiful fantasies." It's worth pointing out that almost every cosmologist or astronomer who has a position regarding sending messages to other stars says <a href="https://www.dispatch.com/article/20100504/OPINION/305049703">that if the space-phone rings, we should not answer.</a> <b>And yet in the real world, <a href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2018/07/attempts-at-interstellar-communication.html">many such attempts to advertise our presence have already been made,</a> <i>on at least one occasion frivolously as an art project.</i></b>
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The constant frustrated attempts to understand Trisolaran seasons raises a genuinely frightening implication of the problem of induction as it relates to life on Earth. Once the Age of Enlightenment arrived, the idea that we did not understand our world (or could not understand it) in some very relevant way became terrifying. Early strange fiction like Hodgson began to explore this horror of the irrational, of a universe which at its base could not be understood. Philosophically speaking, there are two categories of incomprehensible universes:
<ul>
<li> Type 1: We don't understand the universe merely because we have not had the chance to observe a full cycle or the full domain, but ultimately, the universe is still lawful. Asimov's Nightfall is an example.
<li> Type 2: We don't understand the universe because <i>we cannot.</i> The universe <i>is</i> fundamentally irrational, or at least unknowable to narrow human intellects. Lovecraft's Cthulhu novels are an example; also, frequently, <a href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-dying-earth-genre-as-horror-of.html">Dying Earth stories.</a>
</ul>
In both cases, encountering the fundamentally irrational can bring about the collapse of civilization, insanity upon directly observing the unknowable, and sometimes even the dissolution of physical reality. However, the problem of induction and horror of the irrational were not ultimately examined here - on this count the novel ended up being disappointingly mundane for reasons detailed below. Still, in the real world, at the very least Type 1 encounters with the irrational asteroid impacts, Carrington events, and gamma ray bursts are scary enough - at this writing, there is an Oort Cloud object possibly hundreds of kilometers across moving toward the orbit of Saturn that had until now escaped notice.
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Ye is the tragic character, obviously, and she is the best-drawn. This woman suffers so much trauma, but the worst is that she realizes possibly the worst thing that anyone has ever done in history is her own action - she sacrificed her husband and accepted the loss of her daughter, then found that what she thought was the one meaningful achievement of her life, turned out to likely to mean the end of the entire human race at the hands of equally immoral beings.
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The frustrations introduced by the sophon particle is reminiscent of the Sisyphean problems plaguing CERN and keeping it from finding the Higgs boson (which we know eventually was found.) But it's worth pointing out that in 2009 there was an apparently serious proposal that time travelers (or the Higgs boson itself) were <a href="https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.023755/full/">interfering from the future with CERN</a> to prevent some catastrophe that the Higgs boson, if created, would foment. Alas, we still exist.
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I usually enjoy unexpected pacing and structure if I'm being surprised rather than bored or confused, and in this case, I was more often surprised. For one thing, this is a two-protagonist novel (Ye and Wang.)
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<b>The Bad</b>
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You will note the novel shares a number of the following weaknesses with the genre in general. First is characterization. Outside Ye and to some extent Shi, we barely know who these people are. In Wang's case, we only find out he has a family when he goes home, then he doesn't think about them again, even as he travels around the world, or in the face of mortal danger to himself, or even a threat to the entire human race. He finds out that we're dealing with aliens, and he barely reacts at all. Even a Dan Brown protagonist at least wanders around a novel imbuing the revelations with a sense of wonder and profundity. Wang isn't even a mouthpiece for ideas.
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Liu offers very few sensory descriptions of anything, except the village outside Red Coast. Ye's experiences there are described in conspicuous sensory terms that stand out. It should not be a surprise then that Liu grew up in a poor rural village.
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For any reader familiar with near-Earth stars, it wasn't a surprise that Trisolaris turned out to be Alpha Centauri.
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If we're applying hard science fiction rules, then it's too great a coincidence that the aliens are within a few millennia of our own technological level. Aliens are much more likely to be either trilobites, or "phyla beyond [human] knowing" to use Benford's term, than something at all cognitively similar to humans that comes here on metal ships. This is a point that many readers of science fiction will not mind, but will bother anyone familiar with current academic thinking regarding the Fermi paradox. The fact that they even feel the need to insult us - "YOU ARE BUGS" projected on our retinas - makes them seem a bit too human-like. In fact the entire description of the "real" internal behavior of the Trisolarans is far too anthropomoprhic. There was some mention of the "living computer" having been a real thing there, and their movements being much faster than humans', so I hope I'm missing some slight of hand like the one Vinge used in Deepness in the Sky (the spider-aliens were in fact much more alien than they were portrayed earlier, with some internal narrative-style sleight of hand justifying this.)
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Plot problem - if the goal is to disable scientists, then the sophons could do a lot better than create a spooky countdown in someone's visual field. You could blind them, or cause them to hallucinate. In the real world, hallucinations and even tinnitus alone can effectively disable people. Sensory disruption is much more effective than some higher order cognitive interference introduced by undermining ideas in a lawful universe. Furthermore this suggests a shockingly detailed knowledge of human psychology on the Trisolarans' part.
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In the end I did not find that there were really new ideas developed in the novel; what looked like it would be an interesting exploration of the problem of induction or the rational nature of reality (see above) turned out to be industrial sabotage done by aliens instead of human enemies. The use of entangled programmed fundamental particles is interesting but so far beyond anything we think might be real that it's effectively fantasy. China Mieville has advanced the idea that the authorial voice of science fiction is one of radical authority - effectively, "here is how reality itself works. Accept it as possible in order to continue reading." (You might argue that limiting the ideas to known physics either elevates hard sf to the "correct" genre, and/or that it can only produce fictional worlds of straight line extrapolation that people in the future will regard as the early twenty-first century's answer to steampunk. But science and actual speculations thereon rather than just word play is what we know is real, and sticking to the rules of the real world is what keeps a story from being fantasy. This is why <a href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2020/01/star-wars-episode-ix-review-contains.html" target="_blank">Star Wars is a a fantasy movie, masquerading as science fiction</a> by giving its wizards and barbarians spaceships.)
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A wild idea couched in the language of science even if the work is really fantasy, or even comedy (see: infinite improbability drives) can still be a good vehicle for thought, but <i>unless you're showing us how to actually in real life unfold and program a proton, you don't need to devote so much space to it.</i> This isn't a screed against exposition, which I think is unfairly devalued in science fiction. If you're introducing a new idea, you either have to stop and unpack it, either in the characters' voices, or through direct description. But the sophon programming section is unnecessarily long and actually became quite boring, the science fiction version of John Galt's sixty page monologue, and had nothing to do with actual science. Maybe this is a tendency of modern Asian fiction - Murakami's Hard Boiled Wonderland has a curiously long-winded description of skull-tapping and at the time I gave the author credit for doing something that I just wasn't getting, but I'm much less sure this is the case in a less literary novel.
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I have a personal distaste for fantasy worlds inside science fiction novels. Spacetime folds that take characters back to their childhoods, neural interfaces that make their subconscious a real place, or in this case, a VR video game. It removes constraints from what the writer wants to do and becomes literary expressionism, which in novels (particularly those low on sensory description) seems watery and uncompelling.
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In the end, after the hype, I was a bit disappointed. I'm glad I read it but the novel's strengths were really its different setting on Earth and historical perspective of the author. If this were an American science fiction novel it would be clearly mediocre.Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-74275467490018506142021-04-06T14:52:00.002-07:002021-12-25T01:46:51.128-08:00We Are Definitely in a Simulation; Also the Simulation Argument is Poorly-Defined With Many Unjustified AssumptionsPeriodically I re-write an argument about both the relevance of the simulation argument, as well as its poorly defined nature. This leads to people overextending its meaningfulness and smuggling in other assertions.
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First, here's why it's irrelevant - <i>because we're all already in a simulation, with high certainty, just not the one you think.</i> People who lived in the middle ages believed the world was flat and there were dragons and trolls. This is a form of simulation. If you're outraged at this assertion, then tell your definition of a simulation. Full sensory immersion like in the Matrix? Why a sensory-only simulation? While we're using science fiction for our thought experiment - are the robots in Westworld not in simulations? On witnessing any potential epistemological disturbance to their world (e.g. being shown a picture of the late twenty-first century cities) they don't register it, instead saying "it doesn't look like anything to me".
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This means that all of us - all of whom have <i>some</i> false beliefs - are in a simulation. An extremist position would be that to have any beliefs at all, even if they are accurately based on prior observation, is to be deluded, because your perception of here-and-now is polluted by past experience. Leaving that aside, pain, pleasure and emotions are entirely contained within nervous systems and do not represent anything in the external world - meta tags at best - and yet they are inextricably part of our experience of the world.
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Even assuming we are living in a Matrix-like sensory immersion simulation, and we find some way to detect this and pierce the veil as it were - we would still be in a single, unitary material universe, albeit one with more complicated rules than we realized that led us previously to a distorted understanding. Isn't this what science has already been doing for centuries? The Egyptians thought the sky was a ceiling with holes letting in light from heaven, then we built lenses to pierce the veil of the inadequate model our naked senses had given us.
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Second, these arguments often smuggle in simulators with agency. (Here is where we can more clearly see the clear parallels between theology and simulation arguments – always suspicious when familiar outlines re-emerge in high-status, low-data discussions, probably revealing more about the shape of the human mind than the universe that mind inhabits.) Why must there be simulators? Certainly there were no demons actively hiding the Milky Way from us. What we now call a simulation might be a natural feature of the wider universe that has so far tricked our senses.
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Third, even assuming simulators - how can you know their nature and intentions? Often an argument is made that if we ever did figure out one way or the other that we're in a simulation, the simulators would adjust things so we forgot. So why are we bothering to talk about this then? (Boy does the discussion start to sound like religion at this point.) It also doesn't follow, at all, that the simulators would not want us to know we are being simulated. Maybe that's the point of the experiment!
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And fourth, assuming we can know the nature of the simulators, why assume that they would be palatable to us, or relevant to our choices? There's an obvious track to monotheism's goal to learn and glorify the desires of the one true god, which are assumed to be (curiously) similar to the morals of the worshippers. But we're still arguing whether human morality is generalizeable between humans, much less to hyperintelligent 13th-dimensional squid aliens. They might not care, any more than a human scientist cares about the E. coli in a petri dish. Their sense of morality, if such a concept even applies to them, might be (it seems mostly likely) completely inscrutable to us. It might be grotesque. And again, should the E. coli (or one of your video game NPCs) suddenly figure out your morality, so what? What can they really do for you; what can we do for squid-god? If I had to pick, I would want a simulator that doesn't care, because their desires are likely to be repugnant or incomprehensible to us. Living in a universe created by a simulator that cared, and actually wanted us to do something, would be the same as every being in the universe being kidnapped by sadistic terrorists and turned into brains in a vat, utterly at their mercy.
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It should not be missed that these are exactly the same questions an atheist asks a believer. I ask my many fellow atheists who are proponents of poorly-defined versions of the simulation hypothesis why they miss asking these questions; I also ask religious believers who may have accepted these arguments regarding the simulation hypothesis, why they don't turn them on their own beliefs. After all, don't you want to know the truth about whether there's a supreme being, and what they're like, and what we should do as a result? Isn't that the point of many religions?
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Expanding on the fourth point, here's a problem not unique to the simulation argument, but to any "super" being. If you're a utilitarian (greatest good for greatest number), there's a familiar problem put forth by Robert Nozick, the utility monster, a being who experiences sublime pleasure (and suffering) that "swamps the signal" of the collective happiness and suffering, so that you spend all your time pleasing and avoiding hurting the utility monster and neglecting everyone else. A simulator who cares could be such a utility monster, and on learning of their existence, you must give up caring about anything or anyone else, and bring glory to their name (or whatever it is they
want you to do.) You could waste your time on improving the pale blunt emotions of the primitive beings in your family, or the sublime simulator squid-god. Indeed this is what aesthetics do.
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Fortunately, based on the best empirical evidence, our present preferences do not appear to influence the type of universe we're already in. We are definitely in some kind of simulation, owing to the way our nervous systems work; in fact it’s not clear how it could be otherwise. If we find this is true more than we knew beyond even the functioning of our brains, it could well be a revolution in science, but would not overturn the brute fact of monist reality.Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-2484584875918006892021-02-23T23:09:00.005-08:002021-02-23T23:12:58.435-08:00Unfit to Rest, No Haven (2020)<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="243" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SnVUIoN9xWE" width="432"></iframe>
<br /><br />Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-74473424217072614762021-02-16T17:55:00.005-08:002021-03-14T16:58:23.779-07:00Rejoice, We Conquer! <i>Metellus Celer recalls the following: when he was Proconsul in Gaul, he was given people from India by the king of the Sueves; upon requesting why they were in this land, he learnt that they were caught in a storm away from India, that they became castaways, and finally landed on the coast of Germany. They thus resisted the sea, but suffered from the cold for the rest of their travel, and that is the reason why they left.
<br/><br/>
Pomponius Mella, A.D. 43</i>
<center><br/>* * *<br/><br/></center>
Standing at harborside in Toltecatlan, Diving Eagle was shouting himself hoarse at the sailors loading his new flagship. He was clearly a very hands-on Sea-Prince, and not because he was trying to impress anyone. Early in the day he had thrown off his cape and shell collar and stood in only his robe, yelling and pointing and running between ships. The sailors were all very green, and if the way they'd just loaded that war-animal was any indication, not many of them knew what they were doing. The deep blue-green of the tropical harbor extended from the wharf to the horizon, where the Carib Sea met the sky, and it did nothing to calm Diving Eagle. A single island jutted from the warm sea, just big enough for two palms and a black-stone fort. Another new warship moored to the small fort-island dwarfed it as the ship sat high in the water, waiting to be loaded. As Eagle sprinted back and forth on the wharf dodging crewmen, he dripped with sweat and impatience. The humidity was not like Tenochtitlan's weather, and Diving Eagle wanted to be underway.
<br/><br/>
Eight-Grass appeared out of the stone-and- wood sprawl of the harbor town behind them. Eagle saw him out of the corner of his eye. Eight-Grass was clearly aware of the contrast between his own bony frame and feather headdress against Eagle's squat muscularity and Grass approached the military man awkwardly as he hurried along the old jetty. He asked: "Can I re-check something?"
<br/><br/>
"Yes, what." Eagle's eyes didn't leave the load that was being hoisted up onto the deck of his flagship Sabertooth.
<br/><br/>
"Is my second load of books on board?" Eight-Grass said.
<br/><br/>
"Yes."
<br/><br/>
"The second load."
<br/><br/>
"Yes. I personally made sure it was on the ship and in your quarters."
<br/><br/>
"They're important," Eight-Grass said nervously.
<br/><br/>
"I know," Eagle said.
<br/><br/>
"I don't mean to question you."
<br/><br/>
"No worries. This may be a very long voyage and we can't afford to damage or lose anything now." For the duration of their exchange, Eagle's eyes hadn't left the load being hoisted up onto the deck. Now Eight-Grass looked up at it too. The object was wrapped in cloth and it was relatively small.
<br/><br/>
"What's that?" Eight-Grass said.
<br/><br/>
"My table." Eagle added, "It's the same one that was in my quarters on the Sea Snake during the war. I planned all our invasions on it and ate many bad meals on it. If I can't have the Sea Snake as my flagship at least I can have my table."
<br/><br/>
"Superstition?" Eight-Grass tried to ask amicably.
<br/><br/>
"No. It's a good table." Grass said nothing, and turned to count the warships out on the bay, still waiting to be loaded. Diving Eagle saved him the effort. He said, "These are the final sixty-eight."
<center><br/>* * *<br/><br/></center>
<i>When we hominids were still exclusively an East African animal, the playing field between us was level. Everyone lived in the same few thousand square kilometers. No flooded land bridges or spreading deserts had yet isolated our genes and cultures to ferment in isolation, to accumulate chance discoveries, to develop resistance to some germ or a new trick of warfare or metal-working so we could conquer our neighbors. If the human story to date had unfolded only within the small realm of our first biome, history might have been much more even-handed, and things might have gone differently.
<br/><br/>
But things did not go differently. Like colonies of primates growing in test tubes, we unknowingly quarantined ourselves in jungles and steppes and forests and tundras, and in each isolated corner of the Earth the historical accidents began to pile on top of one another, and the unfair odds piled up along with them. Of course, in reality Earth has no corners; and inevitably, soon there was nowhere new to go. Inevitably, every new horizon across an ocean or mountain range was an old one to someone else, already filled with other faces. In this way the quarantines ended. In the ensuing collisions, millennia of these accumulated accidents would come crashing down, like current through a suddenly closed circuit.
<br/><br/>
Today, we're fascinated with accounts of early encounters between those breeds of primates – like Lewis and Clarke in the Northwest, or Captain Cook in the Pacific. These supposedly true stories are interesting enough that we can't help embellishing them or outright making some up. We scour history for the tiniest scraps of evidence. We squint at supposed Norse rune stones found in a field in Minnesota, or we read claims of medieval Japanese ships landing in Hawaii, or stretch the words of Roman historians until we think they were writing about Native Americans blown off course to ancient Europe. Occasionally, we even indulge the historical conceit of imagining new chains of events differing from the one we're actually standing in. What would an Enlightenment Africa have looked like without three centuries of globalized slavery? What would Persia have become if it hadn't been broken by Alexander? What if Europeans didn't discover America until the industrial age? These exercises typically ignore the massive suffering of the people whose cultures were on the wrong side of the circuit, in favor of more high-minded academic questions. History reads very differently depending on the color of the skin you live in, and how history has treated that color.</i>
<center><br/>* * *<br/><br/></center>
It was a strange time in Mexico then. The end of the Carib War had brought both glory and poverty to all of Nahuatlan. In Tenochtitlan, for the first time in decades, there was real hunger, and no work for all the young men returning from their island-hopping campaigns across the Carib Sea. Everywhere there were heroic murals of the celebrated Second Navy Sea-Prince Diving Eagle being presented with flowers and roasted hearts by High Speaker Angry-Coyote, with the ceremonial First Navy stretching away behind them in colorful rows on Lake Texcoco. The figures on the murals were giant, and they were everywhere. And they were everywhere looming over huddles of small, hungry people in tlaxcala-lines.
<br/><br/>
Diving Eagle had been back from the war scarcely a year when a messenger had rowed through the floating gardens to his estate in Xochimilco to tell him that "something had been found". Eagle's impatience turned to understanding the following day when he stood before Angry-Coyote once again, in a torch-lit lower meeting room underneath the Palace, the walls crawling with painted snakes. The Speaker's minister Eight-Grass was there, and Diving Eagle had intently examined the small thing Eight-Grass handed him, the thing which had washed up on Farthest Carib Island.
<br/><br/>
Eagle had held the thing in one hand, squinting. It was a rectangular board, thin like bark, firm and light. A maze of green and gold lines was minutely etched on its surface, almost as if printed. There were small chips of black embedded in the surface of the board. The decorative gold lines were curiously asymmetric, and the pattern didn't repeat.
<br/><br/>
"What is it?"
<br/><br/>
Eight-Grass responded, "The only theory so far is some kind of pottery shard. And that's unlikely." Eagle had continued to examine it and Grass had said, "The point is, we have no goods like it from any nation we know of. And whoever made that has wealth and well-developed art." Eight-Grass added, "Based on the sea currents near Farthest Carib Island, I have deduced the area it must have come from."
<br/><br/>
Eagle had quickly seen where this was heading, and how he may profit. "If great Angry-Coyote wishes it," he said with full deference, "the Second Navy will sail again."
<br/><br/>
"Ah. Angry-Coyote wishes a Third Navy," the Speaker had said, tapping a prepared scroll on the table. "We go in strength. If this new nation's strength is equal to the Nahuatlan, we leave Eight-Grass and some other men as an embassy. If not, we don't." He let the two-way implication speak for itself.
<br/><br/>
"It's done, your highness." Angry-Coyote unrolled the scroll on the dark wood table and smacked it with his bone butterfly stamp. It was done.
<center><br/>* * *<br/><br/></center>
<i>If I ask you whether our world, our history, is the best of all possible worlds, you would probably be hard-pressed to say yes, and harder-pressed to tell me coherently why, whatever your answer. But I bet you’re still secretly, circularly relieved that things turned out as they did. For all the remorse expressed over the conquest of indigenous Americans, few white Americans have advocated giving the land back, at least outside of the reservation system. And if you visit a reservation, you’ll find that modern native life does not resemble any romantic vision you may have. Then again, for my part, I like living in California, and I don’t want to move to Europe where my ancestors came from three centuries ago, and I don’t want to start paying tribute to the Ohlone or Kumeyaay either.
<br/><br/>
Unfortunately, today it’s hard to imagine how the specific times and places and players in these initial collisions could have mattered to how things ended. The tides of whole civilizations were driving these events, and they’re driving us right now. Perhaps the world would look different if some of the primate breeds had collided after more quarantine, or less. But that’s not what happened. Exactly which man met which man, and in what city, and on what date, could have made no difference in the long run. The flood would still have come, and the circuit would still have closed. History is as it is, and the remaining red people have little choice but to get over it. The players are just the foam on the waves, and their famous quotes are in reality inconsequential. But because they announced the floods, their words still ring in the heart of the world.</i>
<center><br/>* * *<br/><br/></center>
Eleven days out of Toltecatlan they sighted the arc of islands that extended southwest from the Swamp-Peninsula, and the lone fort built during the war on the farthest. Diving Eagle came up on deck under blue skies and full white clouds to watch it go by, and nodded to Eight-Grass, who was even skinnier after days of losing his meals over the side. The local building material was poor so the fort was all sand-mud and wood, not black-stone. The building looked lonely and brave sitting there, a speck at the edge of the flat sandy island when the fleet sailed past. Though he didn’t announce this to Eight-Grass or any of the crew of his own vessel, Diving Eagle had never been past the tip of the Swamp-Peninsula and out of the Carib Sea, into the Great Sea. As far as they knew, no one had.
<br/><br/>
Eagle shouted a few things to the oar slaves and the men were suddenly busier with the sails as the Sabertooth moved into new currents, and then without saying another word to anyone, he went back below to take his supper at his old table.
<center><br/>* * *<br/><br/></center>
Ten days later, the breezes died, and they had their first real weather, a windless mild rain that frayed tempers despite its softness. When it cleared, the ships were dragging through a zone of massive seaweed tangles. The countless great warships suddenly looked very heavy and slow, and up on deck Diving Eagle found himself stealing glimpses at the supply ships, trying to gauge how high they sat in the water, calculating how much food the war-animals took and when they should start slaughtering or throwing them overboard. He said nothing of this to Three-Bat or any of his officers. Shadowy things splashed and swam in the tangles they passed through the ocean-forest, and the Sea-Prince overheard rumors from the crew about monsters hanging onto the ship from beneath, slowing them down; about poisonous fish and visions of ancestors warning them off. He ate supper up on deck with the crew to calm them, and made a point of eating a fish in front of them that had been caught out of this strange and alien sea, showing that it did not poison him. He also locked away in the hold the most excitable crew member, a lazy rumor-mongering Zapotec who Eagle thought probably just wanted to convince the fleet to go back to Mexico. Eagle observed that this Zapotec became taciturn after an extended beating. Zapotecs usually did.
<br/><br/>
In the evening as Diving Eagle studied charts in private, Eight-Grass came to his quarters. Grass’s scrollish chestnut-brown paleness had become noticeably darker from the sun.
<br/><br/>
“You look good!” Diving Eagle said. “You’re a bit thin, but I told you the fresh air is good for you after all.”
<br/><br/>
“Still no land,” Eight-Grass said simply.
<br/><br/>
“Yes, and?” Diving Eagle was impatient with Grass’s worrying, as he was with everyone, and looked back down at the chart. He had spread a sabertooth pelt over the old table to protect the worn old bark scrolls from wearing against the pitted, splintered wood.
<br/><br/>
“Maybe the land bends to the north here. It does at least along the Swamp-Peninsula.”
<br/><br/>
“Yes, it does bend to the north here, even north of the Swamp, but not that much. Weren’t you the one who said the object came from this direction?”
<br/><br/>
“Yes, but I don’t know how far.”
<br/><br/>
“The Great Sea is just another enclosed sea like the Carib Sea, surrounded by land. Just bigger.”
<br/><br/>
“I’m not so sure about that,” Grass said.
<br/><br/>
“You know a lot from your maps and books, but things feel a lot different when you’re in the map, don’t they?”
<br/><br/>
“Or off it, in this case.”
<br/><br/>
“Try to generalize,” Eagle said. “Doesn’t this seaweed remind you of the Carib Sea’s southern edge, when you’re approaching the coastal marshes? On the Warao Coast? I’m telling you, we’re approaching land.”
<br/><br/>
“I’ve never been there. To the Warao Coast.”
<br/><br/>
“I have. It looks just like this.”
<br/><br/>
“But there are strange things going on.”
<br/><br/>
“Like what,” Diving Eagle muttered.
<br/><br/>
Eight-Grass said haltingly, “The seaweed and the creatures – we’re coming to the edge of the real world. After this we’ll be in another reality. In – in some alien version of nature. Where maybe we can’t survive.”
<br/><br/>
“Look at me.”
<br/><br/>
“I’m looking,” Eight-Grass said.
<br/><br/>
“Into my eyes.”
<br/><br/>
“I’m looking.”
<br/><br/>
Diving Eagle leaned toward Eight-Grass. “There is no evidence to suggest anything of the sort, you old woman. None. We’re going through seaweed and it’s slowing us down. That’s all.” Eagle sighed. “Grass. I appreciate your knowledge.” His voice lowered and his eyes darkened. “But ships require discipline. That’s difficult to maintain, and with the ambassador-to-be expressing these kinds of doubts, it’s impossible. If you are saying these kinds of things to anyone but me, there will be consequences.” He didn’t like having to take the hard line with officers so soon in the voyage. It was a bad sign.
<br/><br/>
Grass quickly genuflected and left. Eagle had thought he recognized in Grass the expertise to know when his leader said he wanted to hear conflicting opinions, but didn’t actually want to hear conflicting opinions. Eagle never bothered to pretend he wanted to hear conflicting opinions.
<br/><br/>
In two more days, the patches of seaweed ended, and still they didn’t see any land.
<center><br/>* * *<br/><br/></center>
Their days of decent weather ended when a frightening purple storm blew up to their west. Diving Eagle had no choice but to order the fleet north and further east to be away from it. The oar slaves rowed tirelessly to escape the tempest, until a strong current caught the fleet and propelled them away from the storm and further out over the endless water. In his quietest of hearts, Eagle began to doubt the closed-sea theory.
<br/><br/>
Another evening Eight-Grass came into Eagle’s quarters. Grass’s visits had become much less frequent, but no less blunt. Eagle was eating at his old pine table and reading in Mayan from a faded scroll of star positions. It pleased Eagle to wonder if it surprised Grass that he could read Mayan.
<br/><br/>
“We’re lost. There’s no way we’ll ever get back,” Grass said.
<br/><br/>
“I see you’ve been appointed Fleet Optimist,” Diving Eagle said around a mouthful of boiled dog. He added, “There must be land eventually.”
<br/><br/>
“You don’t know that. The sea could go on forever.”
<br/><br/>
“Fine then,” Eagle said. “We’re being pushed east. Fast. What would you do?” Grass was silent. Absently Eagle reached into a pouch and produced the green-and-gold board that had launched the fleet, tracing its thicker etched pathways with his finger. “That’s right. There’s nothing else to do. Either we give up and jump into the sea, or we keep on until we come to land.” He paused for effect. “We will come to land soon.” He hoped his voice didn’t ring so falsely in Grass’s ears too.
<center><br/>* * *<br/><br/></center>
Three-Bat had been Diving Eagle’s head land-fight-leader during the war. Although they’d served together for years, they had never talked much. They never had to. Three-Bat was from a high family, higher than Eagle’s, but Eagle knew that Three-Bat’s rank wasn’t owing to his blood. Bat really was a good land-fight-leader; his unscarred face was testament to skill, not inexperience.
<br/><br/>
It was for that reason that Eagle gave more mind to Three-Bat’s concerns than Eight-Grass’s. Three-Bat came to see him when they were still in the endless open sea, gray-streaked hair braided simply behind him.
<br/><br/>
“It’s the animals,” Three-Bat said. “The keepers are having trouble with them. There were two maulings yesterday. We’ve never had them at sea for this long. During the war the longest was two weeks.”
<br/><br/>
“Restrain them.” Eagle knew almost nothing about the keeping of war-animals.
<br/><br/>
“This is why I wanted better trained men for this. It’s a hard job. They can step on you.”
<br/><br/>
“We’ll be there soon, Three-Bat.”
<br/><br/>
“How long?”
<br/><br/>
“Days, Three-Bat. Days.”
<center><br/>* * *<br/><br/></center>
Although Diving Eagle had encouraged his men to fish for food and he tightly rationed the freshwater in the rain-tanks, their supplies were getting low, and little things began to make the Sea-Prince snap at his men. It wasn’t until the fifty-ninth day past the Swamp-Peninsula fort that they saw driftwood – then two days later, birds. Two days after that, Eagle was disturbed from his breakfast by a wild cheer. Hurrying to the deck, he saw that sunrise had revealed rugged ridges distant on the horizon. The Sea-Prince commanded the riggers and oar slaves to make for it, and ordered his obsidian throne brought up to the deck.
<br/><br/>
On closer approach, Eagle saw that there were two high promontories growing out of the quiet water, brown sandstone dusted with green, and a wide strait that lay between them. There were no forts, no smoke trails, no roads cut into the side of any of the rock. The first warships cautiously entered the strait, and when the Sabertooth entered Eagle saw that the water was calm as glass. Dolphins stirred the water to their north.
<br/><br/>
Eagle ordered that half the fleet anchor on the north side and half the south side of the strait. The Sea-Dukes commanding the other ships had their men land and the parties on the north side reported that they’d found freshwater creeks, taken some game, and pastured the war-animals. The land reminded some of the men of the northern part of Nahuatlan, along the Great Western Sea. There was no sign of men, but plenty of deer, and good wood. There were some other strange animals, ugly with flat noses, but the men found that their roasted flesh tasted good. Diving Eagle tried some that they brought on board and found it pissy and disagreeable, spitting it out, to the good-natured jeers of his ship’s crew. Despite their protests, as a precaution Eagle insisted the men return to the ships and the great fleet anchor for the night off the coast.
<br/><br/>
“See?” he said later to Grass. “Virgin forest. Perfect.” Only later did he wonder where the pot-makers were if there was no one cutting down forests or burning wood, but no one else seemed to wonder. In the absence of anyone to ask what the north-side land was called – frankly, in the absence of any interest to know what any natives might call it – Eagle named it New Mexico. The scouts mapped the land and coastline, but they found no cities. Diving Eagle began daily briefings with his land-fight-leaders.
<br/><br/>
The next afternoon as Diving Eagle readied for supper, a land-fighter, trembling, was brought to Eagle by his personal guards. In private the fighter told Eagle that in some coastal scrub he’d found an old fire-ring. The man insisted he had told nobody, in a way that Diving Eagle knew meant he had told somebody. The next day it didn’t matter, because while Eagle was eating with his men on the long boards set up on deck, two small sailboats appeared on the horizon. They approached, then turned and slowly moved off. Eight-Grass, eating in his quarters, came up on deck at hearing the commotion and came to Eagle’s side while they watched. Eagle noticed Grass’s pouting silence as they watched the boat disappear on the horizon, over the crew’s murmuring. Armored rowers on patrol in long canoes came up alongside Diving Eagle’s flagship asking whether they should pursue, but he said no – the little boats were too far away. It could be a trap, Eagle thought, and based on what he’d seen so far, he wasn’t too worried what the locals could do to him, even with advance knowledge.
<br/><br/>
His face purple, Eight-Grass retired to his quarters. Eagle pretended not to notice.
<center><br/>* * *<br/><br/></center>
The next day, they sailed further east, and the strait quickly opened wide. Naming it the Far Eastern Sea, Eagle ordered the riggers and rowers to keep to the northern coastline from now on.
<br/><br/>
That evening Eight-Grass came to Diving Eagle’s quarters. Eagle was meeting with the land-fight-leaders. “We’re almost done,” Eagle said to him when the guard brought him, and turned back to the officers.
<br/><br/>
“To re-emphasize, we’re doing something different from the way we did it in Guanahani. Yaoyotlcalli, then the animals, then the infantry. Go it?” Murmured assent. Eagle risked annoying them with apparent condescension. “Not good enough. Repeat: yaoyotlcalli, then the animals, then the infantry.”
<br/><br/>
The land-fight-leaders chanted: “Yaoyotlcalli, then the animals, then the infantry.” They finished their meeting and the landers glanced at Grass as they filed out, like they were looking at the younger kid they had to pick for their Ollama team. Eagle noticed the body language but didn’t need to address it.
<br/><br/>
“Quickly,” Eagle said to him. Though busy, Eagle knew was anticipating the campaign and could see in himself a jovial mood; that is to say, an abusive one. “I don’t have much time, and I got a splinter from my table during the meeting. Please tell me, what mysterious catastrophes await us now, wise one.”
<br/><br/>
“This is completely unknown land,” Grass immediately burst out. “We could be walking into suicide. It shows supreme arrogance and naïveté to see a ship and say ‘they’re barbarians’ and let them go. It shows arrogance to assume you’ll be able to march in and dispatch the natives so easily.”
<br/><br/>
“Every time I’ve marched in before I’ve dispatched the natives so easily.” Eagle bit at the splinter on his thumb. Eagle saw Grass’s eyes go to the strange green-and-gold board sitting on the pine table in front of him.
<br/><br/>
“Look at that,” Grass said, pointing at the object. “We have no idea what that is or what it does. It may be some kind of machine or weapon. For all we know there may be massive cities of ghosts, men with machines and magic that we can’t understand at all.”
<br/><br/>
“I’m glad I won’t have to listen to your shit for much longer.”
<br/><br/>
“What do we do if we land and there in front of us there are huge castles and metal-plated armies? What if these plates were finding are parts to a machine we can’t even understand?” Diving Eagle rolled his eyes and waited for Eight-Grass to finish. “We won’t just be backing away politely and getting back in our ships, that’s for certain.”
<br/><br/>
“You’re worried about meeting gods, is that it? Gods with weapons like potted thunder that can strike you down in mid-stride from across the battlefield?” Eight-Grass said nothing, annoyed that his objections were being cast into such a ridiculous light when they were controlled by someone else’s mouth. “Listen up, Taino-woman. In the real world there’s no magic. There are no ghosts. We’ve seen no evidence of cities or real civilization. These are just more dog-people, like they always are outside of Mexico, and in the end we’ll be amazed they can make even these trinkets.” Eagle waved at the board on the table before him. “And anyway it’s a little late to indulge these worries unless you’re going to swim back.”
<br/><br/>
“All I know is charging in like this, trouble is what we’ll get.”
<br/><br/>
“Fine. We’re not going to get in very much trouble if we don’t know where anyone is and we can’t talk to them. That’s why the first thing we talked about in our meeting before you came was catching us one of those sailboats.”
<center><br/>* * *<br/><br/></center>
Only twice after entering through the straits did they see more ships. Small things, relying on puny sails, they became less impressive the closer they got. The small vessels kept well clear of the Mexican warships. So far, there was no indication, from the scouts or anywhere, that Eight-Grass’s fears of thunder-gods would be realized; the ships that had visited the southern coast of the Eastern Sea found it even more deserted and primitive than this one, more desert-like and devoid of any civilization. The third time they saw one of the little sailboats, very close to them as they emerged from a strait between an island and the eastern shore of the Eastern Sea, the Sea-Duke Three-Bat led them in their efforts to pick one up, running it down with one of the smaller faster eagle-ships.
<br/><br/>
It was over quickly. The strange-looking men on the boat didn’t give it up without a fight, if the blood on the men who came back to the Sabertooth was any indication. Eight-Grass had seen sacrifice but never real fighting and he was horrified at the aftermath when the dog-people were brought aboard. The men in the boat appeared to have been fishing. There had been four of them, and now there was only one. They were pale, sick-looking, like the underbelly of fish, and Eagle ordered the bodies and the living one be handled with blankets since they looked so ill. They smelled terrific, that much was certain.
<br/><br/>
Diving Eagle came down to one of the dank cells in the ship’s belly, flanked by two jaguar-knights, and played the game he liked to play with the people on the islands of the Carib Sea. Grass watched through a knot in the wood. In the torchlight, the frightened dog man’s eyes were a bizarre blue color. As Eagle and his guards sat in the cell inspecting the dog-man, another of the knights entered with a small wooden chest, from which he produced a gourd.
<br/><br/>
“Water,” Eagle enunciated to the frightened man, poking him with a tepozmacuahuitl. “Water.” The knight poured water out of the gourd onto the boards. The man made some noise. “Water!” Eagle shouted, and a knight slapped the dog-man’s face. The dog-man looked up again and painfully, gutturally sounded out “water”.
<br/><br/>
“Heart.” Eagle pointed at his own chest. Again the man stammered the word. Eagle laughed. The grunting native was obviously having had trouble with the –tl’s at the ends of words.
<br/><br/>
Diving Eagle smiled, and pointed to his bracelets. “Gold,” he said. The fish-bellies would learn the connection between those last two.
<center><br/>* * *<br/><br/></center>
They caught a few more boats-worth of the pale dog-men along the coast of this cool forested land, and a whole tribe of them along the Eastern Sea’s edge, learning their first local place name: “Itlia”. Soon they ran out of room for more captives. Most of the natives cooperated after a bit of poking; some of the more intractable ones were dispatched to Quetzalcoatl in quick ceremonies. The Mexicans soon learned that they had not come to the eastern edge of the sea but they were actually rounding a peninsula, and their captives were making decent maps which showed the locations of villages, including one that they’d just missed. One of the returning eagle-ship crew, a kid named Tonatiuh who Diving Eagle had made one of his official messengers, ran excitedly to tell the Sea-Prince that on one of the boats they pried open a box filled with the green-and-gold boards, but the Mexicans still couldn’t figure out what they were for, and the fish-belly couldn’t or wouldn’t explain it. Eight-Grass overheard this exchange and asked Diving Eagle to speak to him in private.
<br/><br/>
“On deck will be fine,” Eagle said.
<br/><br/>
“Fine,” Eight-Grass aid. “On deck, in front of your men. I defy you to explain the things your men are reporting.”
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“Like what?”
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“Soldiers flying like birds. Chariots that can go up or down hills by themselves, talking treasure chests, even half-man half-beast soldiers. That’s just the beginning. You–”
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“Where are they?” Eagle demanded. His voice rose to a shout and he gestured grandly at the coast. “Where are they?! All these ridiculous hallucinations you’re having!”
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“Then explain the function of any of the artifacts that were confiscated from the tribe on the peninsula! It won’t seem so academic a question in the middle of a battle!”
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“Tell you what, Grass,” Eagle said. “I’ll command my fleet, and you spend your day trying to learn what ridiculous spirits the fish-bellies pray to. That’s the last time I tolerate your disrespect. Now go talk to more dog-people.”
<center><br/>* * *<br/><br/></center>
Diving Eagle was finally satisfied that their “interviews” with the pale men were producing consistent maps. When finally he’d learned of a place where two of these fish-belly tribes were busy fighting each other, he sent messages out to all the lander-boats. At noon the next day he took a canoe across to the closest lander boat, where his land-fight-leaders were to line up for the ceremonial inspection. The Sabertooth shrank behind him as the rowers took him across toward the creaking hulks of the lander boats, their strong animal-smell coming across the water. Eagle climbed the rope ladder to board one of the squarish wooden landers, careful not to lose his red cape and feathers and shell collar into the water in the maritime breeze. As he climbed onto the deck all the Sea-Dukes and the dozen land-fight-leaders were all at attention in full armor.
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Diving Eagle asked Three-Bat, “Are the yaoyotlcalli ready?” The exchange was purely ceremonial; the real inspection had passed in the morning.
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Three-Bat said, “They’ve <i>been</i> ready.” One of the massive things stood in its bay behind Three-Bat, rude bronze angles and planes glowing dully in the sun.
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“The war-animals are fed and dressed?” Before Bat answered, something heavy rumbled against the stall behind Eagle and stomped. He turned to crane his head upward to the top of the stall behind him and despite themselves his men laughed.
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“Yes, and impatient,” Three-Bat said.
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“I can see that. Me too.” Eagle had planned and rehearsed for every contingency, every mistake, but now was not the time for such thoughts. He breathed deeply. He thought about Mexico, and he pictured the upflung obsidian-streaked skyscrapers of glorious Tenochtitlan, the tallest in the world, and he thought about the glory that would be his.
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“Two days, men.”
<center><br/>* * *<br/><br/></center>
It was a clear early afternoon. The black line of the rocky coast was to their north, and from where Diving Eagle stood on deck with Three-Bat he could see the now-detached lander-boats spread out in lines, oars twitching to keep them in formation. The warships were lined up facing east and moving toward the land, where their village would be damaged by the tribal skirmish they’d found out about. The locals were already fighting. The smaller, slower ships their informants had told them about were there in front of them, but they were far off and sailing southeast. There was smoke swirling on the surface of the water around them, under the blue sky.
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“Where are those ships going?” Diving Eagle said.
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“I don’t know,” Three-Bat said. “We expected them either to stay or to attack us.”
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“Maybe they lost,” Eagle said.
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“The fish-bellies seemed pretty sure that the ones coming by sea would win.” Bat paused to count. “There are a lot of them,” he said cautiously.
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“Look at these ships.” Diving Eagle gestured to their own fleet. “Now look at those.” He tossed his head toward the numerous but small and tattered canoes they were watching drift out of the steep-sided harbor. He paused for effect. “I don’t think it will be a fair fight either way.”
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“We’re proceeding as planned.”
<center><br/>* * *<br/><br/></center>
<i>Suppose that maybe ten thousand years ago, things <b>did</b> go differently than you and I learned they went. Maybe there was a meteor impact; after all, it’s happened often enough. Maybe it was the biggest one since the end of the Eocene. Maybe what would have been Arabia and Syria ended up at the bottom of a crater, along with most of Turkey, Egypt, and Mesopotamia.
<br/><br/>
For months you could have looked south from the Caucasus and seen the cooling crater rim glowing red at night if you’d survived the shockwave and onrush of burning air after the impact; you would have heard hissing where the waters of the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf and the Caspian rushed together and boiled above the huge wound in the Earth. There’s a new sea at the crossroads of the Old World, but no Fertile Crescent, and no Silk Road. This new sea is encircled with high mountains, keeping the few surviving neolithics in the surrounding continents from crossing the crater, or even the singed wastelands of shocked quartz and melted glass that surround it. The dust and steam block the sun, the Earth cools, and most of what’s left of Eurasia is glaciated within a few years. The ice sheets finally roll back maybe a dozen centuries ago, leaving mammoths and lions still wandering around landscapes you might even recognize. Unless of course you’re in the Middle East.
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Of course, had this happened, you also wouldn’t exist to read this story. And I wouldn’t exist to tell it. The impact, both literal and historical, would be enough to render the subsequent passage of history unrecognizable. For millennia after such an impact, if you listened, whether from the tortured remnants of the Peloponnesus or within the upflung obsidian skyscrapers of the great metropolis Tenochtitlan, tallest in the world, you would not even hear the sound of the floodwaters hissing as they boiled away. Whatever immortal lines the pre-literate bards of Eurasia had written about it would be inconsequential. You would hear only the sound the impact had made in the heart of the world, still ringing.</i>
<center><br/>* * *<br/><br/></center>
A thin, short man crested a meadowed hill and ran down through the pines on the other side, sweat-salt crusted on his tanned face. He slackly stared into the distance as he pounded down the narrow dirt path. An hour ago his mind had wandered, imagining that he was pushing himself up the slope of the distant curving rim of mountains that encircled the deep Central Sea that separated Greece and Persia. But now, he pushed so hard that there was no life to spare to fuel his mind, and he was only nothing. He knew only the distant goal of Athens toward which he ran, twenty-five miles from the battle, and he knew his legs, which churned automatically underneath him to get him up and down these dusty pine-strewn hills. He had become an empty vessel that moved over the Earth toward the city, carrying the good news of two words. The sounds cycled in his mind until like a mantra they were sense-impressions only, like an animal call or another language, without meaning, distant echoes:
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<i>Chairete! Nikomen!</i>
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He ran and ran and ran, past more trees and wooden fences and small farms and over hills now safe from crushing foreign feet. He ran so far that he couldn’t possibly remember the whole route. When finally he looked upon the hazy white figure of the distant Acropolis, the bridge in front of him into the city almost surprised him. It snapped him back to the reality of his body; his chest hurt and his throat was swelling shut. There was a taste in his throat like blood and bad shellfish. He was dizzy; his chest felt like a bull was sitting on him. He wondered if this was what it felt like when your heart fails.
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Feet still pounding, he called with precious breath to the boys guarding the bridge into Athens:
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“Rejoice! We–”
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“Philippides! Haven’t you seen them?”
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His blurry mind didn’t follow what the boy was saying. Philippides realized dimly that he knew the boys, that he had paid them to break horses for his family. The boy was pointing past the pines and the rocks and the breakers on the rocky beach, out into the sea past the mouth of the small river. Philippides ground to a stop and painfully turned toward the bay, squinting, and finally he saw pointed clouds over the water – no, he saw that the bay of Athens was filled with massive, high-sided ships with monstrous sails. They seemed to spread to the horizon, and they were definitely not Greek. The Persians must have had a second navy.
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Philippides’s eyes rolled in his head and he collapsed. The boys rushed to his side, and in their arms his heart ceased its labors.
<center><br/>* * *<br/><br/></center>
Eight-Grass appeared on deck behind Eagle and Three-Bat, who were watching the first landing-boats approaching the shore. Eagle had almost forgotten Grass was still on the ship. Eagle said nothing to him.
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Unable to contain himself, Eight-Grass finally said to them, “Your arrogance is about to pay off. I think we’re about to see our war-animals cut to pieces by this village’s weapons.” Grass pointed to the village, where they could already see the roofs spread out from the coastline, and high on a hill behind them, hazy with distance, a monument of snowy white stone, sitting on gray cliffs.
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Eagle didn’t look at him. “Shut up.” Then to his personal guards, “Take this idiot down and lock him up with the surly Zapotecs. We won’t be needing an ambassador, I think.”
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The boy Lysimachos cradled Philippides in his arms, talking softly to him, trying to revive him. He called despairingly to Nikostratos for the good Punic vase that he’d taken from his mother to carry water, the one with the tiny, intricate green and gold engraving, and dripped cool water on Philippides’s lips. It was no use.
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As the minutes passed, the wet skin and lean muscles against Lysimachos turned ashen, cooled, and stiffened. With tears in his eyes, he set the runner’s light body gently down. He imagined it seemed lighter now that the soul had left it. Numbly, he closed the man’s eyes.
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“He did well,” Nikostratos said, trying to ease his friend’s tears. Lysimachos’s robe was stained with the sweat and dust of the fallen messenger. “Philippides died in service to Athens.” Lysimachos looked down at Philippides and wept.
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The sound of shouting broke through their mourning. It was the men posted on top of the great rock jutting from the beach, calling up to the hills to the west for more men. The strange Persian ships were moving. They were coming for the land. The wide-eyed adolescents turned to see dust rising from the inland hills. The tired army had been called by messengers from the coastal forts, and they were forced-marching to the landing sites.
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“We should get swords,” Nikostratos said earnestly.
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“How could the Persians have brought another fleet here so quickly?” Lysimachos said.
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“I don’t know, but we should get swords. We have to fight.”
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“There aren’t any swords left,” Lysimachos said quietly. “They have them all,” he said gesturing to the sun-streaked dust-cloud rising from the hills. In fours and fives small groups of shouting men were running past them through the meadows down onto the beach and drawing their bows.
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“If we can’t fight here then we go to the hills,” Nikostratos said. “We can drop rocks on them. Anything.”
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Scrambling up the hill toward a jumble of rocks, they watched over their shoulders as the boats came toward the beach, large square things with oars coming out like beetles’ legs, and the first ones were entering the breakers. Arrows fired from the thin line of men assembled on the beach, sticking into the wooden sides of the great squares like men’s whiskers. Then the square boats were aground, and they opened like the mouths of horses. Things thundered forward from the boats, things like squat bronze elephants of metal surrounded by swirling pointed blades, lumbering up onto the sand, cutting the charging Greek defenders into red flying meat. Then behind those there were other elephants, mounted, shaggy, huge, bigger than the Persians’. Then there were dark men wreathed in bright armor and feathered hats coming in another wave, leaping from the boats into the water and forging forward out of the breakers and onto the sand. Arrows bounced from their shields. There was the sound of splashing and alien screaming. The invaders cut into the line of Greeks, and through it.
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“The Persians must have brought an army from India,” Nikostratos said. “Look at their skin.”
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“Look at those elephants,” Lysimachos said. “Look at those bronze land-ships. These aren’t men. These can only be gods. They’ve come down from Olympus to punish our hubris.”
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Nikostratos told him to be silent, and clutched a rock in his sweating palm.
<center><br/>* * *<br/><br/></center>
<i>The Elenatecs, though their whole nation was already prepared for war, didn’t fight in any disciplined formation, and their tepozmacuahuitl (if they even deserved the name) were simple and straight and not serrated, and far too heavy to be fast. The battle was over quickly. Negotiations with the other chiefs in the “civilized” parts of New Eight-Grassland, including the already-defeated Parsatecs, were almost ceremonial, especially as the diseases we brought began to decimate the continent.
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It should seem stranger to us now, living in Elenatlan or Itlia five centuries later – not all that long on the scale of all human history – that we see so few white faces in all of North Grassland, notwithstanding the Set-Aside Districts in northern New Michoacan. For that matter, even the Goteca of that region don’t quite live like kings, unless it’s as kings of coca powder. Unfortunately it’s hard to imagine how history could have turned out differently for the soft and naïve cultures we found. There were no sacrifices to maintain community, indeed no discernible social order at all – insanely, Elenatlan was a place where any landowner could speak to a king as an equal. This seems to us today a frightening and unsustainable social mess. The Yurotecs frequently governed themselves in “council” form, making group decisions, and the Elenatecs were only one example. It’s still debated how they ever managed to fight off the Parsatecs, and in fairness we probably treated them better than the Inca would have. But much of our concern is the result of our own cultural myopia. Of course, we’re reflexively most comfortable in the world as it actually happened.
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Looking back, even in the hardships that they encountered post-contact, the Yurotecs managed to rally behind heroes. Two significant rebel leaders have been studied to death. Of course there’s Aleksatl – the White Moctezuma – whose tactical brilliance has only recently come to be appreciated – and of course Annipal, mostly taught by his native white mother. Annipal is more recent and captivates us more, not only because of his clever use of our war-animals, but because he set in motion the events that would break colonial Cartago free from the imperial rule of faraway Mexico. Despite their brilliance, both men were doomed. They were like foam on the waves of the ocean. History is inevitable; yaoyotlcalli, disease, and obsidian can’t be resisted for long.
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Today, there’s a new consciousness of the culture which passed before us, the ruins of which in the case of Elenatlan City are literally under our feet. The recent popularity of the plays of Esctli are testament to this, and suddenly we’re scolded if we call them fish-bellies, as we did in a less enlightened time. Would Aleksatl care about our new manners? But it’s always easy to be respectful to a safely vanquished foe. The fact is, Yurotec culture in general is a museum piece, and what we have today are the trappings of the moribund civilization – its bas relief carvings, its metalwork, and its haunting marble temples. It’s often pointed out that their blood survives in us – and it’s likely that you and I are both part Yurotec, though we don’t usually discuss it in polite company – but this is a meaningless observation. The surviving purebloods play by our rules, allowed to express themselves only within closely proscribed, largely academic boundaries. That’s why we still use third person to refer to the Yurotecs, centuries after we overran their land and absorbed their genes. We can spend our days trying to imprint the past with modern morality, but we still have to live in the present. I don’t know about you, but I like Elenatlan and I’m not moving back to Mexico anytime soon.
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For the Yurotecs, unfortunately, the only choice is to get over it, because this year marks the five hundredth anniversary of the distance-rowing race that commemorates the canoe-messenger Tonatiuh. After the Battle of Elenatlan, he raced 36 xicatetli to carry the news back out to the Sabertooth, with the words that still ring in the heart of the world: <b>Xiahahuiacan, tipehuah!</b></i>
Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-4131754791220146252020-10-10T11:54:00.004-07:002020-10-10T11:54:47.331-07:00Roko's Basilisk in the Form of a Metal SongWhen Metallica writes a song about the singularity, it's probably close. "Stop breathing, and dedicate to me - stop dreaming, and terminate for me."
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<br/><br/>Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-85433921751969742772020-10-02T23:46:00.114-07:002020-10-03T18:12:31.943-07:00Prediction: Venusian Phosphine is a Metabolic Product of Living Cells Already Detected As Unknown AbsorbersThe last two years have provided us with the strongest evidence ever assembled of extraterrestrial life:
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<ol>
<li>Prior theories about relic ecosystems surviving in the more Earth-like parts of Venus's atmosphere.
<li>Detection of UV absorbers the size of bacteria in Venus's atmosphere, with no explanation as to their identity.
<li>Prior, independent advancement of phosphine as a biosignature gas.
<li>Detection of phosphine in the Venusian cloud decks with no explanation for its persistence.
</ol>
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Here I propose that Venus had an iron-sulfur ecosystem with a chlorophyll-equivalent that absorbs closer to the UV spectrum rather than visible light - essentially, "UV-synthetic" Venusian cyanobacteria. The oceans boiled away and Venus became hotter and more acidic from volcanism and possibly, their own Great Sulfuration (or Sulfur Oxidation, equivalent to Earth's Great Oxygenation.) The only survivors were the UV-synthetic Venusian archaebacteria that now live in the upper atmosphere. Today these have a life cycle like that described by Seager et al (2020), powered by UV and producing phosphine - <b>Unknown Absorber Phosphine Producers (UAPPs.)</b> They are likely related at great time depths to life on Earth. Initial research question is to see if areas of unknown absorbers correlates with phosphine, which can be done from Earth. Probes that collect material in the upper atmosphere could fairly straightforwardly check for aspects of biochemistry using an onboard instrument, and a sample return mission could be extremely productive.
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<b>Phosphine Production in the Clouds of Venus</b>
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If you're reading this you likely know that phosphine (PH3) was detected in the atmosphere of Venus - <a href="https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/9/18/21443635/phosphine-on-venus-discovery-life-venus-clouds" target="_blank">Vox explainer here</a>; <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4" target="_blank">original paper by Greaves et al here</a>. The measured concentrations are at biology-consistent levels, at an elevation where the pressure and temperature are similar to Earth's. <b>This is by far the strongest evidence of extraterrestrial life yet discovered, with evidence from multiple sources.</b>
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Phosphine has been advanced as a possible seed compound delivered to Earth on comets or asteroids early in its history. But the chemistry of its formation in space (or on gas giants) is not mysterious. It's in the Venusian atmosphere where so far we can't explain its presence without some process that continuously replenishes it. One criticism of speculation about possible Venusian biochemistry is that just because we don't know how to make phosphine under Venusian conditions, doesn't mean we're looking at alien biology. True; but among these criticisms have not been any suggestions so far about what it might be. (Either way, we're about to learn something.) It's suggestive that this data is not completely unexpected - it can be fitted to prior hypotheses. We've been speculating more and more concretely for decades about how life might survive in the atmosphere of Venus for decades (see <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/2151259a0" target="_blank">Morowitz and Sagan 1967</a>.) A <a href="https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2020.2244" target="_blank">fairly elaborated model of microbial life</a> in the atmosphere of Venus was advanced recently by Seager et al, consistent with observations so far. This should also increase our confidence in the Venusian-cloud-life hypothesis, that even before phosphine was detected, <a target=_blank href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.05224" target="_blank">Sousa-Silva et al suggested phosphine as a biosignature molecule</a>, independent of finding it on Venus.
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<b>A Related Mystery? The Unknown Absorbers</b>
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<img width=99% height=99% src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwbOHyCU4VTEdrSYl41JG_0_kSXnGs4S5e74dciNFx45jmKAAI4m6ndfumqBVK4We8fNaHC7pFfRrb-_RTiamUi-MIVwXuu3gP9dBfBtpIJjUVO0Zg7mivZyH2zEkjLPgIiJLaT2AkSiE/s0/venus_uv_optical_ir.jpg"/></img>
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<i>In visible light and false-color UV absorption. It's unusual to have such contrast in absorption at different wavelengths. Image credit syfy.com</i>
</center>
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For decades we have known that there are partciles about 10^-6 meters (the size of bacteria) in the Venusian atmosphere at a similar altitude (at 47 to 64km) as the phosphine detection above (at 57km and above). The dark bands we can see with the naked eye in the Venusian atmosphere contain more of them, but as you can see above in the UV image, they are much higher contrast (more absorbant). As with the origin of Venusian phosphine, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6150942/" target="_blank">the identity of the absorbers remains controversial</a>, and Venusian biology had been advanced previously as a candidate explanation (Limaye et al 2018). The phosophine paper points out that there is more phosphine at mid-latitudes than the equator or poles, which by naked-eye examination of images of Venus, seems also to be where the absorbers are. It seems a relatively straightforward study to correlate the two, but as the absorbers move on a scale from minutes to days, data would have to be collected simultaneously. The stronger the correlation (especially within the same latitude) the more our confidence in the UAPP hypothesis of Venus cloud life would be increased.
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<b>What About Bacterial Life in Earth's Cloud Decks?</b>
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Earth's clouds do indeed contain lots of bacteria, and not just incidentally - some of them clearly evolved to take advantage of the precipitation cycle and indeed to deliberately cause ice to enucleate around it, like <i>Pseudomonas syringae</i> (this is actually economically relevant as the water ice-enucleation proteins produced by this species is used in the water fed into snow guns at ski resorts.) Bacteria have been found all the way up to 28 miles above the surface, where the pressure and temperature are both much lower and considerably less hospitable even to Earth's own life than the cloud decks on Venus. While we can't say there is an actual bacterial ecosystem in Earth's clouds (one which persists without interacting with the surface), we haven't really looked for one either; most of our interest in these organisms thusfar comes from studying plant pathogens that spread through weather events. It's worth pointing out that there is <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1352231003002024" target="_blank">phosphine in Earth's upper atmosphere as well</a>, with no clear mechanism for how it forms there. It should be noted that there is less in Earth's upper atmosphere by about 3 orders of magnitude; the levels in Venus's atmosphere are more similar to that found immediately around actively metabolizing bacteria on Earth's surface.
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<b>Toward an Evolutionary History of Venus</b>
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Why would life exist on the most hellish world in the solar system? The answer is that for at least 75% of its lifespan, Venus was a much more Earth-like planet with cooler temperatures and oceans.
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There are two possible, not mutually exclusive stories that explain how this planet came to be the Venus we know today.
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The first is that Venus was a little too close to the Sun, which caused its oceans to evaporate, plate tectonics to cease, and subsequent cataclysmic volcanism. As the oceans evaporated, the water vapor trapped the heat and accelerated the process. The deuterium/hydrogen ratio on Venus is about 150 times higher than Earth, where comets have at most a 3 times higher ratio than Earth, suggesting a very gradual loss to space of hydrogen from water and preferential retention of the heavier nucleus. <a href="https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2001AGUFM.U21A..09S/abstract#:~:text=Water%20plays%20an%20important%20role%20in%20mantle%20convection.&text=Percolation%20of%20water%20from%20the,crucial%20for%20maintaining%20plate%20tectonics." target="_blank">Water lubricates plate tectonics, per Solomatov 2001</a>. Climate modeling suggests that <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00706" target="_blank">Venus may have had a habitable climate with liquid water at the surface until 715 MA ago</a> (Way et al 2016.) The subsequenct evaporation of the oceans resulted in a planet where plate tectonics ground to a halt, and with no crustal mechanism to dissipate heat, and finally between 700 and 500 MA ago, Venus erupted in planet-wide massive flows that resurfaced the planet, utterly dwarfing any similar events on Earth (like the Siberian Traps.) This released the massive amounts of sulfur that we see today. This is the received wisdom and could entirely explain the modern state of Venus, and may alone be enough to explain all the sulfur.
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There is another version of the story which reverses the causality - eruption causing evaporation, advanced by <a href="https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EPSC-DPS2019/EPSC-DPS2019-1846-1.pdf" target="_blank">Way and Del Genio in 2019</a>. It's worth noting that Venus has a thicker crust than Earth, owing to its lack of a large moon; therefore we should expect that the flows,
when they do finally cause the crust to fail, are much stronger than in the parallel situation on an evaporated Earth.
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The second possibility is obviously more speculative, a parallel to the Great Oxygenation in the history of life on Earth. In Earth's history, anaerobic cyanobacteria produced so much oxygen that they effectively poisoned themselves, but also set the stage for aerobic life. This could have been a great coincidence - there may just have happened to be genes close enough in design space to assemble oxyidation defenses and an aerobic metabolic pathway, and without such a coincidence, that may have been the end of life on Earth, or it may have settled into a simple bloom-and-bust oscillation as our bacterial mats may have for hundreds of millions of years evidenced by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banded_iron_formation#:~:text=Banded%20iron%20formations%20%28also%20known,oxygenation%20of%20the%20Earth%27s%20oceans." target="_blank">banded iron formations</a> found in ancient rocks where they persist at the surface. (See discussion of <a href="http://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-singularity-will-be-extinction.html" target="_blank">endogenous extinctions here</a>, which this section partly recapitulates.)
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While an interesting idea, by Occam's razor we should spend no further time considering a possible Great Sulfuration, as we can explain the death of the Venusian surface ecosystem entirely based on abiotic meteorological and geological processes as above. It's also the case that the presence of increased CO2 relative to Earth can be easily explained by abiotic processes as well. Using ingenious reasoning about the necessary atmospheric pressure for flying dinosaurs' wings to function as well as the known rates of deposition of CO2 as carbon in continents and the ocean, we can arrive a figure of the equivalent of <a href="https://levenspiel.com/dinosaurs/" target="_blank">85-100 bars' worth of CO2 trapped in the Earth's crust</a>, similar to what is currently in the Venusian atmosphere. Presumably the atmospheric pressure of Venus was lower during its oceanic period owing to the same process, and rose subsequent to the evaporation, but I am not aware of any modeling retrodicting from oceanic evaporation 500-700 MA ago to the current pressure and mass of CO2 on Venus.
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All this is to say that life on Venus may have gone a different way, but started quite similarly. We're now fairly confident the <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6095482/" target="_blank">first metabolism on Earth</a> was<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron%E2%80%93sulfur_world_hypothesis" target="_blank"> sea vent iron sulfur organisms</a>, using sulfur in what is now oxygen's chemical role. The Great Oxygenation may have only happened when it did, a full 1.5 billion years after the first life and at least 800 million years after photosynthesis appeared, because an asteroid delivered molybdenum, allowing nitrogen fixation and more efficient anaerobic metabolism. Whatever the reason, had this happened prior to photosynthesis, we may have ended up with an Earth poisoned with sulfur or at least with a massive amount of oxidized sulfur.
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<b>Two Obvious Problems for the "UAPP Cells" Hypothesis for Life on Venus</b>
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There are two major hurdles to overcome in any argument that there is life in the cloudtops of Venus. The first is the question of how life operates without water, or with very little water; this would actually be a more stunning find than merely life which can tolerate high acidity! The second is the failure thusfar to detect any organics in the atmosphere. Without water and organic molecules, it's very hard to see how this won't end up being an interesting abiotic route to phosphine production along with some crystal we weren't anticipating at that altitude. That said, organic compounds on Venus may not be as unlikely as one might think - there was a Venusian equivalent of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment" target="_blank">Miller-Urey experiment performed,</a> where <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-010-2239-2_40" target="_blank">under conditions of the Venusian atmosphere, organic compounds including amino acids were produced</a>.
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Furthermore, there remain arguments for an abiotic explanation for the unknown absorbers, <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019103517307406?via%3Dihub" target="_blank">specifically ferric chloride</a> (Petrova 2018). Interestingly, this is partly advanced to explain another mystery which is the presence of rainbows ("Venus glory"), <a href="https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/glory-spotted-venus" target="_blank">first observed in 2014</a> in the Venusian atmosphere.
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<b>Implications for Evolution in General and the Future of Life of Earth</b>
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It is more likely than not that life on Venus will be distantly related to life on Earth. A massive amount of material has been transferred between bodies in the solar system, <a href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2019/03/putting-numbers-on-panspermia-material.html" target="_blank">with actual numbers calculated here</a>; at that same link you will see reference to the survival of uncontrolled re-entry during the <i>Columbia</i> crash by not just bacteria, but animals (<i>C. elegans</i> worms, found alive on the ground weeks after the crash.) This is actually the more boring possibility, because we would learn much more about the basic principles of evolution and the possibilities of biochemistry beyond Earth's provincial commitments, if we really had a novel origin. Either way, if there is life on Venus, the likelihood of life on Mars, Europa, Enceladus and even Titan jumps dramatically, even if it's "just" a long-lost relative. I expect that ultimately the impact of finding life on Venus will be some neat new biochemistry (the old extremophiles will seem quaint) and a bit more information about how evolution can proceed.
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It is unclear how we should feel about Venusian cloud UV-cyanobacteria in terms of the <a href="https://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf" target="_blank">Great Filter</a>, which suggests that the more life we find in the universe and the closer in terms of evolutionary stage to humans, the more concerned we should be - because the more likely our own extinction is before we can colonize planets beyond our own. If further exploration of Venus yields trilobites or vertebrates and these cells are all that are left, we should worry much more. In contrast, if Venus never got past vast floating bacterial mats (either in its clouds or ancient oceans). that's a bit more comfortable for us.
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<b>REFERENCES </b>
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Bains W, Petkowski J, Sousa-Silva C, Seager S. <a href="https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/124611" target="_blank">Trivalent phosphorus and phosphines as components of biochemistry in anoxic environments.</a> Astrobiology 19, 7 (July 2019): p. 885-902 doi 10.1089/AST.2018.1958
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Glindemann D, Edward M, Kuschk P. <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1352231003002024" target="_blank">Phosphine gas in the upper troposphere.</a> Atmospheric Environment Volume 37, Issue 18, June 2003, Pages 2429-2433
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Greaves JS, Richards AMS, Bains W, Rimmer PB, Sagawa H, Clements DL, Seager S, Petkowski JJ, Sousa-Silva C, Ranjan S, Drabek-Maunder E, Fraser HJ, Cartwright A, Mueller-Wodarg I, Zhan Z, Friberg P, Coulson I, Lee E, Hoge J. <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4" target="_blank">Phosphine gas in the cloud decks of Venus</a>. Published: 14 September 2020. Nature Astronomy (2020)
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Levenspiel O, Fitzgerald TJ, Pettit D. <a href="https://levenspiel.com/dinosaurs/" target="_blank">Was the Atmospheric Pressure Different at the Time of Dinosaurs</a>? Chemical Innovation, December 2000 Vol 30, No.12, 50 – 55
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Limaye SS, Mogul R, Smith DJ, Ansari AH, Słowik GP, Vaishampayan P. <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6150942/" target="_blank">Venus' Spectral Signatures and the Potential for Life in the Clouds.</a> Astrobiology. 2018 Sep 1; 18(9): 1181–1198. Published online 2018 Sep 12. doi: 10.1089/ast.2017.1783
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Morowitz H & Sagan C. <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/2151259a0" target="_blank">Life in the Clouds of Venus</a>? Nature volume 215, pages1259–1260(1967). 16 September 1967.
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Otroshchenko V.A., Surkov Y.A. (1974) <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-010-2239-2_40" target="_blank">The Possibility of Organic Molecule Formation in the Venus Atmosphere.</a> In: Oró J., Miller S.L., Ponnamperuma C., Young R.S. (eds) Cosmochemical Evolution and the Origins of Life. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2239-2_40
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Petrova EV. <a target=_blank href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019103517307406?via%3Dihub" target="_blank">Glory on Venus and selection among the unknown UV absorbers</a>. Icarus Volume 306, 15 May 2018, Pages 163-170
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Seager S, Petkowski JJ, Gao P, Bains W, Bryan NC, Ranjan S, Greaves J. <a href="https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2020.2244" target="_blank">The Venusian Lower Atmosphere Haze as a Depot for Desiccated Microbial Life: A Proposed Life Cycle for Persistence of the Venusian Aerial Biosphere</a>. Astrobiology. Published Online:13 Aug 2020. https://doi.org/10.1089/ast.2020.2244
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Sousa-Silva C, Seager S, Ranjan S, Petkowski JJ, Zhan Z, Hu R, Bains W. <a href="https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2018.1954" target="_blank">Phosphine as a Biosignature Gas in Exoplanet Atmospheres</a>. AstrobiologyVol. 20, No. 2. Published Online:31 Jan 2020 https://doi.org/10.1089/ast.2018.1954
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Way MJ, Del Genio AD, Kiang NY, Sohl LE, Grinspoon DH, Aleinov I, Kelley M, Clune T. <a target=_blank href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00706" target="_blank">Was Venus the First Habitable World of our Solar System?</a> Geophysical Research Letters. First published: 11 August 2016 https://doi.org/10.1002/2016GL069790Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-36436112826156503922020-09-12T19:44:00.000-07:002020-09-12T19:44:33.826-07:00All Attempts to Broadcast Our Presence to Nearby Stars Should Be ForbiddenHere you can find<a href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2018/07/attempts-at-interstellar-communication.html" target="_blank"> a list of when there might be a response to known prior contact attempts within a century</a>, assuming immediate light-speed response, and whether there are known terrestrial planets around the stars. This is incredibly dangerous and reveals the presence of intelligence on Earth to anything that might be listening, and should be immediately stopped (see <a href="https://www.sciencealert.com/stephen-hawking-warns-that-we-might-not-want-to-reach-out-to-aliens" target="_blank">Stephen Hawking's take on this here</a>.) Granted, astronomers' definition of habitable - "terrestrial planet orbiting in liquid water temperature zone" - leaves a lot to be desired.
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Until now. Measurements of terrestrial planets can now show if there is an atmosphere and it contains hydrogen, oxygen, and N2, making at least some water quite likely (<a href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspa.2020.0148" target="_blank">Konatham et al 2020</a>.)
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We can update the list of stars where we've already broadcast contact attempts, with these new stricter criteria. There are two planets with atmospheres and likely water that we have deliberately broadcast to: <b>Teegarden's Star</b>, a red dwarf (with two planets with likely water), with a response possible by 2036; and GJ273b (Luyten's Star), with a super Earth with likely water, responding at earliest 2043.
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Two facts to modify our enthusiasm:
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<li>Both are red dwarfs, which have a habit of flaring. However, Luyten's Star is quiet by these standards.
<li>Also, aliens looking at our solar system using the same definition would keep both Mars and Venus on this stricter habitable list. Both do have atmospheres and some water.
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Proxima Centauri is the closest star but in this more-strict list of habitable planets, but we haven't deliberately targeted it. It's worth pointing out that even if there were a twin Earth there, we still wouldn't be able to hear them (the <a href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-c-index-how-far-away-could-we-hear.html" target="_blank">C-index</a> - a rule of thumb, assuming that strength of a civilization's emissions and ability to detect increase in concert.)
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(Encouraging to amateurs: Teegarden's Star was discovered by a group of non-professional astronomers poring over data online, without access to telescopes.)
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Konatham S, Martin-Torres J, Zorzano M. <a href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspa.2020.0148" target="_blank">Atmospheric composition of exoplanets based on the thermal escape of gases and implications for habitability.</a> Published:09 September 2020https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2020.0148Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-38989922160556375292020-09-12T17:40:00.001-07:002020-09-12T17:40:20.161-07:00Unexpected Ejection of Material from Asteroid BennuOf obvious interest to any panspermia hypotheses, especially those which favor <a href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/search?q=gravity" target="_blank">replicators (Von Neumann probes or otherwise) using organics on low-gravity bodies as building blocks</a>. <a href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019JE006229" target="_blank">Paper here</a>. Abstract:
<blockquote>In early 2019, the OSIRIS‐REx spacecraft discovered small particles being ejected from the surface of the near‐Earth asteroid Bennu.sww Although they were seen to be ejected at slow speeds, on the order of tens of cm/s, a number of particles were surprisingly seen to orbit for multiple revolutions and days, which requires a dynamical mechanism to quickly and substantially modify the orbit to prevent re‐impact upon their first periapse passage. This paper demonstrates that, based on simulations constrained by the conditions of the observed events, the combined effects of gravity, solar radiation pressure, and thermal radiation pressure from Bennu can produce many sustained orbits for ejected particles. Furthermore, the simulated populations exhibit two interesting phenomena that could play an important role in the geophysical evolution of bodies such as Bennu. First, small particles (less than 1 cm radius) are preferentially removed from the system, which could lead to a deficit of such particles on the surface. Second, re‐impacting particles preferentially land near or on the equatorial bulge of Bennu. Over time, this can lead to crater in‐filling and growth of the equatorial radius without requiring landslides.</blockquote>
<i>McMahon JW, Scheeres DJ, Chesley SR, French A, Brack D, Farnocchia D, Takahashi Y, Rozitis B, Tricarico P, Mazarico E, Bierhaus B, Emery JP, Hergenrother CW, Lauretta DS. JGR Planets. Dynamical Evolution of Simulated Particles Ejected From Asteroid Bennu. First published: 18 May 2020 https://doi.org/10.1029/2019JE006229</i>
Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-17797334214602371082020-09-10T07:22:00.000-07:002020-09-10T07:22:01.324-07:00San Francisco 2020 With Blade Runner 2049 Score<center>
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<i>H/T Mr. Black</i>Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-17125456153950198972020-08-30T17:59:00.000-07:002020-08-30T17:59:00.097-07:00New Approaches on What the Fermi Paradox Means for the Future of HumanityI was lucky to attend a video lecture by James Miller, economist at Smith College, facilitated by Joshua Fox. Thanks for having this event! I contacted James to let him know I would be posting this and to let him proofread my recapitulation of his argument so as to avoid mis-paraphrasing him; my thanks to him for taking the time to correct me on several points. Of course any errors are mine.
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Much of this is familiar terrain for those of us who spend our time considering X-risk and the Fermi paradox. Miller's thesis is that we are at a critically important point in human history, a window where we think that in the near future we can start colonizing the galaxy (the year 2614 at earliest, <a href="http://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2020/01/timeline-of-manned-interstellar-travel.html" target="_blank">by this calculation</a>) but at the same time where we are smart enough to destroy ourselves. Since it is not obvious that the galaxy has already been colonized by other civilizations, there may be a Great Filter stopping this from happening. Miller uses the analogy of a person about to climb a mountain, believing that everyone else who has attempted it has died in the process.
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Several challenges were discussed by attendees. (If you attended the lecture and want to claim credit for your question, please comment below, thanks.)
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<li>It's too early to say there are no civilizations; it may not be so easy to detect them or rule them out. We're still discovering <a href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2009/02/where-to-find-von-neumann-probes-and.html" target="_blank">metazoans in Manhattan so it seems a little early to rule out von Neumann probes on low gravity bodies in the solar system</a>. We've barely begun to catalog the fauna of our own ocean floors. We could not detect a twin Earth emitting the same radio energy (the <a href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-c-index-how-far-away-could-we-hear.html" target="_blank">C-index</a>), even if it was orbiting Alpha Centauri. Miller points out that even if there were only a few civilizations in the Milky Way preceding us, "the galaxy is older than it is big", and these earlier civilizations could have colonized it already. <br /><br />
</li><li>He made the point that the things which prove advantageous in the midst of evolving on a single planet might have no such advantages in terms of galactic colonization. Very true; I would argue that we are much more likely to find alien artifacts, than the aliens themselves, as all of us meat-creatures might be stuck on our planets while our machines colonize the galaxy. To that end, (my point) it's entirely plausible that the Solar System could be littered with space probes and we haven't found any yet, or did, and just <a href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/search?q=neumann" target="_blank">didn't know what we were looking at</a>.<br /><br />
</li><li>I would therefore extend Miller's analogy like this. Only in the process of climbing the mountain, does our climber develop wilderness skills and begin to see things that resemble his own boot tracks, etc. and finally as he approaches the summit realizes that lots of people have climbed it, come down the other side, and their descendants have built large villages which due to his previous ignorance he has not been able to locate. (Or, maybe just some of their livestock, trained birds-of-prey, etc. have made it.)<br /><br />
</li><li>Active attempts to bring ourselves <a href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2019/03/stop-meti.html" target="_blank">to the attention of aliens have occurred (METI)</a> and been roundly criticized. Miller notes that the risk of extinction from aliens over the next few centuries is lower than eg bio-terrorism or an intelligence singularity. True; but we still may be making life more difficult for our descendants. Related to this, he proposes an ingenious experiment that for a month we should shout our heads off electromagnetically, and see if there is any strange activity. While I agree it's unlikely we'll get invaded next week, I still think the risk:benefit does not work out and there are just too many unknowns, and we may be screwing our distant descendants. Miller suggested that enforcing a moratorium on METI-like activities is probably impossible.<br /><br />
</li><li>He argues that technological singularities of the paperclip maximizer variety are unlikely to be a major contributor to the Great Filter, because we would be able to see the boundary of it as it expanded (unless it was doing so at light speed.) My concern with this is that, while an AGI might be much smarter than its creators, it is still not omniscient, and the impact of its actions could in principle still outstrip its ability to predict that impact. This is the story behind the rise of human intelligence and the sixth great extinction that we're living through, but has happened in pulses of<a href="http://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-singularity-will-be-extinction.html" target="_blank"> endogenous extinctions</a> throughout Earth's history (the rise of superpredators every fifty million years or so, the Oxygen Catastrophe). The lesson of evolution here on Earth is that the smarter things are, the faster their behavioral plasticity "catches up with them" in exactly these sorts of disasters, so to suppose that alien paperclip maximizers are immune to this problem is to argue that a qualitative change in ecological dynamics has occurred.<br /><br />
</li><li>There were two (possibly unappreciated) related questions asked: one about civilization perhaps being bad for sustaining civilization (witness declining birth rates in the developed world) and another that intelligences might prefer virtual reality - involution - to expanding into space. Miller points out the passive version of the "baseball bat" problem: you can live in heaven, but if a bad guy comes and bashes your server with a club and you as you sleep in your VR pod, that's the end of it. (Related: dynamic complex systems like minds, in principle, <a href="http://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2019/09/complex-dynamic-systems-like-cells.html" target="_blank">tend to drift toward delusion and suffer inherent cyclic crises</a>.) It's a thesis for someone in psychology or a related field to note whether there is causation or just correlation between the increasingly encompassing virtual reality-like entertainments available in the developing world, and declining birth rates.<br /><br />
</li><li> One questioner asked about the distinction between intelligence and civilization - humans have had a "civilization" only since agriculture. This was a really original line of thought. Therefore, there could be many alien intelligences, but few or no civilizations. One solution for humans avoiding the Great Filter would be to abandon civilization and go back to hunting-gathering - not directly suggested, but this is the only implication of such an argument I could think of. The extreme number of assumptions built in to discussion of alien civilizations should always be pointed out - civilization is something that collections of human nervous systems do, and it is not clear it is a necessary consequence of intelligence. (As a physician I ask: do we assume the aliens will have similar EKG waveforms and liver enzymes as us? No, because that's ridiculous. So we do we assume that the even more complex activity of another organ, that we don't even share with other animals on this planet, is automatically going to be meaningfully similar?)
</li>
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There's also a psychological point to be made about "big picture" arguments (the singularity, the Fermi paradox, the simulation argument, etc.) They have a tendency to converge on either prophetic religion-like conclusions (e.g. the singularity as the rapture for nerds) or Lovecraft (the estivation hypothesis, which was mentioned in a question and made me think about this.) When we talk about these things, there are many many unknowns. In such discussions, I think there is a tendency for the resulting arguments to resemble the internal contours of the human mind, more than any future events in the actual external world; hence their regression to religion-like conclusions. This does not mean such an argument must be incorrect, but it should make us suspicious when a big-picture argument hews too close to our "ontological test pattern. "<br /><br />
Consider in contrast cosmologists' models of the distant future of the universe, which concern physical objects which we can now observe and characterize, using rigorous mathematical rules. These models often seem boring, meaningless, difficult to understand, and unsatisfying. This is exactly how we should expect most models will seem of things outside our own and our ancestors' experiences, or beyond the scale of time and space to which we are accustomed and which we are built to perceive; the further outside their experience, the moreso. This occurred to me when we were discussing the estivation hypothesis, though overall Miller's arguments do not set off many alarm bells for this quick-and-very-dirty heuristic.Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-68541534790763297122020-08-30T17:52:00.000-07:002020-08-30T17:52:46.130-07:00Lazerhawk - Redline, 2013<center>
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</center>Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-37585793456639065722020-08-30T09:16:00.000-07:002020-08-30T09:16:01.138-07:00Origin of Life in RNA Computing: Independent Suggestion of Organic von Neumann Probes<p><br /></p><p>Previously I had advanced the idea that, if intelligence has arisen elsewhere in the galaxy, it is likely to have colonized the galaxy in some form, and therefore we are more likely to find their artifacts here in our solar system than hear or understand their EM signals. Specifically I argue that <a href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/search?q=cancerous" target="_blank">von Neumann probes are more likely to be entities of organic chemistry we find on low gravity bodies</a>, that as natural selection is universal law that such entities - even if dispatched to gather information - would eventually be selected for fecundity; that is, they would inevitably become cancerous. If the water that seeded the early Earth contained such entities, whether or not they were intact, the tumor detritis of these cancerous von Neumann probes would provide the template for life on ancient Earth. </p><p>We have not nearly approached the amount of solar system exploration, or elaborated an abstract theory of how to recognize life or its artifacts, to be able to say we have absence of evidence. Indeed we find nucleobases on asteroids, though so far we have no evidence so far that they originated from processes beyond the natural ones we are aware of. </p><p>In a new paper, Hessameddin Akhlaghpour makes the observation that while the RNA information processing behavior of life on Earth is not Turing complete, with some additional (not implausible) molecular machinery, it would be. He then argues that <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.08814" target="_blank">life originated with such a molecular machine</a> and we have not yet found it. (H/T Marginal Revolution)</p><p><i>Akhlaghpour H. <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.08814" target="_blank">A Theory of Natural Universal Computation Through RNA</a>. arXiv:2008.08814</i></p><p><br /></p>Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-68879881294864752292020-07-05T11:12:00.002-07:002020-08-30T11:11:12.488-07:00Evergreen - Eye in the Sky (2018) (Cover of Alan Parsons Project Song from Eponymous Album, 1982)
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Here's the original for comparison. It's interesting how many really well put-together songs tolerate export to other genres, and others which just fail (as in an otherwise great band covering themselves here.)
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And while we're at the game of metal versions of 80s songs, just for fun here's Leo Moracchioli featuring Rabea and Hannah.
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Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-45239765843983769602020-06-28T19:43:00.001-07:002020-06-28T19:45:41.509-07:00The Earth Has Not Been Disassembled for Computation - Percent Utilization of Phosphorus and Nitrogen on Earth by Living ThingsA <a target=_blank href="https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002168">2015 paper by Landenmark et al</a> estimates the total number of DNA bases in nature as 5.3x10^31 megabases. This of course leads to questions like: how much of the elements on Earth is life on Earth using? I'm aiming for an answer within an order of magnitude. This has implications for concerns about AI takeoff that I will return to at the end.
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<b>NITROGEN</b>
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Living things occupy slightly more than a billionth of the planet's nitrogen in our DNA (0.000000115%). Living things occupy 0.0023% of the planet's nitrogen overall, the lion's share of which of course is in protein. (See my assumptions below if you like.)
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<b>PHOSPHORUS</b>
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Living things are using only 0.00047% of the planet's phosphorus in our DNA - but that expands to 4.7% of the planet's phosphorus in living cells overall. This is a much more significant fraction.
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Does this difference exist because life on Earth has chosen phosphorus as, effectively, energy currency to manipulate gradients? Or because nitrogen is harder to make biologically available? Even now we rely on relatively few bottlenecks to fix it.
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<b>IMPLICATIONS FOR AI TAKEOFF</b>
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There's no reason to assume that these numbers represent a global, rather than local optimum for resource utilization for replicators on Earth. That said, we've had four billion years to optimize. This is relevant because of the concern that AI taking off without regard to human welfare would disassemble the Earth into atoms for computation - the farther we are from truly optimized resource utilization, the more an intelligence explosion would be disruptive to the status quo. I found the Bar-On paper on amount of DNA in the biosphere from a link in a discussion about the computational efficiency of nucleic acids in cells. The latter paper suggests that protein translation is several orders of magnitude faster than the fastest current computers, and <a target=_blank href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5686401/">only an order of magnitude under the Laundauer limit</a>. Of course, resource utilization and computing speed are two different variables, but it seems computation is getting near optimized already - and yet, no disassembly of the Earth for phosphorus. Not even 5% of the energy currency atoms are put to work! Of course, an AI would be qualitatively and quantitatively different in unpredictable ways from what came before, in which case there is no point in discussing this - but the replicators that exist in reality make the best starting point for such a discussiong.
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What's more, protein translation is computation in the service of replication. It is quite likely that AIs would end up being selected in much the same way as cells have, with limited resources to be dedicated to refining the model of the universe (getting smarter.) The ivory tower AI super-minds would be dominated by the silicon bacteria. Of course, this is still no reason to think a hard AI takeoff could be disastrous for all life on Earth, an extinction like we've never seen - <a target=_blank href="http://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-singularity-will-be-extinction.html">which the AIs themselves might not have the foresight to survive</a> - but if they do, the best bet is that they will "revert to the mean" of all replicators, with making copies as the goal.
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<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFS7A_NHBkKqc8d_SNfG3Pk5lCkvrX7GxpxSaFtxqJUMewBlYCPzpWHgOBoOHP5S_LH4zZta3JdCC_dG0bOcxEnOAExQRJnCKpXa7MO_7gImSuh8fZNBph5Ii9oLdYXefvHvAhLWHRsd8/s1600/tetris.jpg" width=66% height=66%></img>
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<i>An imperfect analogy. In nature, you have to make do with what's there. The shapes aren't friendly for efficient packing and there are a lot more holes.</i>
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<b>Assumptions:</b>
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I could not find estimates of the overall mass of nitrogen and phosphorus in the biosphere, so I used the percentage weights in living cells, and derived from a paper <a target=_blank href="https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506">estimating the mass of carbon in the biosphere at 5.5x10^14 kg</a> (Bar-On et al 2018), along with carbon being <a target=_blank href="https://www.livescience.com/3505-chemistry-life-human-body.html#:~:text=Oxygen%20(65%25)%20and%20hydrogen,%25)%20is%20synonymous%20with%20life.">18% of the atoms in living things</a>.
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For both I used 2884.6 kg/m^3 mass of the Earth's crust (weighted the differently dense continental and oceanic crusts at 0.3 and 0.7 resp.) My number for nitrogen comes from nitrogen in the atmosphere, plus nitrogen in the top meter of the Earth's crust, estimating mass of the atmosphere as 5.15*10^18 kg, of which 78.09% is nitrogen, and abundance in the crust as 0.002% by mass (there was some conflict over this between sources actually of up to an order of magnitude; but there is so little nitrogen in the crust compared to the atmosphere, about 347,000 times less using this number, that it's still a rounding error. I assume that there are an equal number of A T C and G which means 3.75xnitrogen atoms per base.
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For phosphorus, I used a crustal abundance of 0.1% mass, ignoring the negligible phosphorus in the atmosphere. There is 1xphosphorus atom per base. The major "slop" in this figure occurs because different organisms have different fractions of phosphorus, for one thing since phosphorus is used in structural molecules like bone (85% of phosphorus in humans is in bone; even the same organism at different ages differs substantially, e.g. 0.5% in infants, close to 1% in adults.) Bacteria come in at 0.9% (3% dry weight, assuming 70% water mass per cell) so I used that figure, since bacteria outweigh us by a factor of a thousand, and the number is intermediate even for the values for vertebrates.
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<b>REFERENCES</b>
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Bar-On YM, Phillips R, Milo R. The biomass distribution on Earth. PNAS June 19, 2018 115 (25) 6506-6511.
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P. Kempes CP, Wolpert D, Cohen Z, Pérez-Mercader J. The thermodynamic efficiency of computations made in cells across the range of life. Philos Trans A Math Phys Eng Sci. 2017 Dec 28; 375(2109): 20160343.
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Landenmark HKE, Forgan DH, Cockell CS. An Estimate of the Total DNA in the Biosphere. PLoS Biol. 2015 Jun; 13(6): e1002168. Published online 2015 Jun 11. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002168
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Michael Schirber. Chemistry of Life: The Human Body. Livescience.com. https://www.livescience.com/3505-chemistry-life-human-body.html#:~:text=Oxygen%20(65%25)%20and%20hydrogen,%25)%20is%20synonymous%20with%20life.
Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-78310919433441202092020-06-17T23:42:00.000-07:002020-06-28T12:31:04.735-07:00New Estimate for Number of Active Civilizations in the Milky WayA summary:
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<li>At a lower bound, it's estimated on average there is one 17,000 LY away. The number that is being reported is that this means at least 36 civilizations in the galaxy.<br/><br/>
<li>They mention the problem of relying on M-class stars as abodes for life - because they're quite unstable (flares). I have not read the paper in detail, but it seems hard to understand, if there are only 36 star systems, why those couldn't all be G-class stars.<br/><br/>
<li>They also estimate a lower bound of communicating for only a century (since we've been communicating for that long so we know it's possible.) If it's only a 100 year period, if we're hearing them now, they were active before agriculture. <br/><br/>
<li>There's also the problem of being able to discern signal from noise at that distance - and not knowing what type of signal we're looking for. A useful thought experiment is the <a target=_blank href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-c-index-how-far-away-could-we-hear.html">C-index</a>, which is the distance at which we could detect a twin Earth with identical EM emissions. By most estimates, even if there were a twin Earth orbiting Alpha Centauri, we still today could not hear them. This leads the authors to conclude that interstellar communication is for all intents and purposes impossible. <br/><br/>
<li>Therefore, any persisting civilization is plausibly more likely to be detected by self-replicating artifacts. <b>This all reinforces the greater relative importance of <a target=_blank href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/search?q=neumann">looking for artifacts in our own solar system</b></a>, which is something we can conceivably do with known technology in the near future, with less of a signal-to-noise problem.<br/>
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<i>Westby T. and Conselice CJ. <a target=_blank href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab8225">The Astrobiological Copernican Weak and Strong Limits for Intelligent Life</a>. The Astrophysical Journal. 2020 June 15.</i>
Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-59539470133417912252020-06-09T20:57:00.002-07:002020-06-09T21:08:25.083-07:00The Asimov Library, and the Idea CatalogHat tip Marginal Revolution for both of these.
<ol>
<li>the nucleus of it is starting with this man, who as a labor of love <a target=_blank href="https://blog.archive.org/2020/04/20/suspicious-activity-in-the-national-emergency-library-no-just-the-best-kind-of-activity/">is collecting/cataloging all of Asimov's work</a>. Thank you Steven Cooper!<br/><br/>
<li>Catalog of science fiction ideas by year appearing - I've linked to the <a target=_blank href="http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/ctnlistPubDate.asp">nineteenth century</a>.
</ol>Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-46588856629456937702020-06-07T20:31:00.001-07:002021-04-06T14:56:25.153-07:00Review: Ad AstraInitially I was excited to see this, not sure why it got so little fanfare, and now I know. Critics were surprisingly positive. I notice that any time Brad Pitt is in something, they give the film as a whole an inflated grade, even if he turns in consistently good performances. I can see why critics get a warm glow from his projects - he's a good actor, he's good-looking, he's a nice guy and he takes his profession seriously. But that can't save everything, and a movie with him, Donald Sutherland and Tommy Lee Jones that isn't a home run strongly suggests there's a problem with the script.
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And there is. This is a movie that can't make up its mind. Are we a near-future hopeful thriller, or a nostalgia film, or a dark reflection on the qualitative differences of the new frontier and whether humans are up to the challenge. (It is possible to be all three, but this film ended up with a few confused moments of each and executed on none of these themes.) Do we want to be a plot coupon-collecting adventure, or a psychological exploration? (It's hard to tell which was central in the writers' minds, and which was added to support the other, because both are so unsatisfying.) The reasons many scenes take place are thin and barely coherent.
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Keep in mind SPOILER ALERT I only watched to the part where he contacts his father from Mars, and read about the rest of it online to avoid investing another hour of my life in it.
<ol><br/>
<li>The most realistic portrayal of space travel in film? That's a serious assertion made by the creators of this? 73 days to Neptune and a week or so to Mars...come on. Very little in the way of considering automation. It seems like they took the aesthetic of the Apollo era and extended it to the late 21st century, except the rockets were magically faster.<br/><br/>
<li>Action sequences are overall, again, crow-barred in as well, to keep it interesting. The only one that seemed interesting was the fall from the exploding antenna at the beginning. Reminds you of the drop onto Vulcan in the first Star Trek reboot-meets-Baumgartner and Kittinger. <br/><br/>
<li>The journey across the Moon is where it really started to lose me. Why again do they not just land there initially, or failing that, at least take a rocket? Oh yeah, the Moon pirates. Surviving on the Moon takes a massive amount of infrastructure. So where are these Moon pirates hiding out that they're undetected, and how do their supplies get to them without detection? Within minutes of their appearance they're wiped out from over-the-horizon artillery, so it's hard to explain how a major operation like a Moon-base could get very far. Apparently it took a human seeing them to detect them (and not a satellite - ???) It's this and many other things that make the movie just seem like a cobbled-together set of action sequences with very little thought. We have almost zero background on the world situation at the time, which is made most obvious by these events (if the Moon is a war zone, who's at war? Over what?) <br/><br/>
<li>Why does a biomedical station have to be in interplanetary space between Earth and Mars? What do they get out there that they can't get in Earth orbit? This is where the movie more or less lost me.<br/><br/>
<li>Why again do they have to go to Mars to transmit to Neptune? And at closest, the one-way light speed communication time is four hours. Even if there is some hint I missed that in fact he's sitting there for hours, this is not conveyed well.<br/><br/>
<li>The "psychological" aspect to the movie - the father-son relationship, the protagonist's personality structure - is so trite and ham-fisted and again feels so crow-barred in that it's simultaneously irritating to have to sit through, and annoying at how ineffective it is. I thought the psych evals were going to be a clever plot twist and Pitt's character was fooling them.<br/><br/>
<li>Antimatter flares heading toward Earth and destroying all life? Even if this <i>were</i> the most realistic depiction of space travel, the liberties taken with other aspects of science dominate. It's a poor man's <i>Interstellar</i>, right down to its less effective attempts to carry on in the tradition of <i>2001.</i><br/><br/>
<li>The philosophical implications of being the only, or the first intelligence - unless there's something really subtle that the summaries missed, this movie really missed an exploration of a theme that's under-explored in science fiction in general and especially in movies.<br/><br/>
</ol>Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-8923013381705060922020-05-14T12:15:00.000-07:002020-05-14T12:15:35.883-07:00Reinstate George Anderson at Oakland Music Center<center><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlVAmYQdRPkAbod2fp0tSwDXR-iNG2WGX58WaXBlWimP8DLD9YsVig0pbGqHHnnf2eB7BRWzTPhUz_h18dxAKtrIdj_iS-aIGDS_wuEeDWQF4B1KXA4VPkH6CJGs7-qdXhMGyLMk4MmUw/s1600/fromhellband2014_638.PNG" width=99% height=99% /></img></center>
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<a target=_blank href="https://www.metal-archives.com/artists/George_Anderson/131770">This is George</a> in <a target=_blank href="https://www.amazon.com/Pure-Down-Factor/dp/B00005S81J">Down Factor</a> and <a target=_blank href="https://twitter.com/FROMHELLband?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor">From Hell</a>. (Second from right - next to Paul Bostaph from Slayer.) I had the good fortune to know George, wow, over 15 years ago through a series of coincidences. He's a really good guy and a huge part of the East Bay metal scene. (Here's <a target=_blank href="https://youtu.be/_VjPju6rVaM">Walking Dead</a> off Ascent From Hell.)
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He should remain at Oakland Music Center. You should help make this happen - <a target=_blank href="http://chng.it/SGJnrBH6tV">Change.org petition is here</a>.<br/>
Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-63249797024253475612020-02-04T22:21:00.000-08:002020-04-15T08:15:56.573-07:00The Singularity Will Be An Extinction Event, and an Endogenous OneThere have been exogenous extinctions, ie not from an ecosystem's "internal contradictions." Examples are massive magma flows like the <a target=_blank href="https://mdk10outside.blogspot.com/2017/01/volcanoes-in-berks-county-pennsylvania.html">Central Atlantic Magmatic Province</a> at the Triassic-Jurassic boundary, or the asteroid strike like the K/T Boundary. These were at least partly caused by out-of-context events that life on Earth did not influence. Then there are endogenous extinctions, which were caused entirely by the actions of the system itself, with no external disturbance. The best example is the Great Oxygenation Event, where the cyanobacteria inadvertently poisoned themselves, and paved the way for a whole new kind of metabolism. <a target=_blank href="https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.71.052902">About every 26 million years, a superpredator develops and kills everything</a> – <a target=_blank href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction">humans are filling this role currently</a> – and even if there's not an extinction, there's a local minimum in biodiversity and ecological robustness.
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Since we're the aerobic beneficiaries of the Great Oxygenation, we like to narrativize this in the form of a teleologic happy ending. That is: the story becomes, yes the cyanobacteria poisoned themselves, but it was to make way for the glory of oxygen-breathing life. That oxygen they fatally polluted themselves with turned out to be an improvement, a new fitness landscape. Any endogenous extinction clears the way for evolutionary progress!
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This is false. Of course the Great Oxygenation Event turned out to be survivable, because we're here looking back on it. But choose any other model example of a closed ecosystem where the endogenous activity of the local organisms is rapidly changing their environment, and you are unlikely to find that the majority of them are success stories. Things poison themselves, and end up with no descendants that can survive. (There is no argument to exclude humans from this phenomenon. Both deforesting Easter Island and the ongoing <a target=_blank href="https://www.darrinqualman.com/atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-co2/">Great Carbonization Event </a>are good examples.)
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Two implications follow:
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<b>1. The reason for the Great Silence (ie <a target=_blank href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/search?q=fermi+paradox">the Fermi paradox</a>) could be that there are many watery worlds out there which evolve local cyanobacteria, but they have their own endogenous shocks, and these do not result in a survivable planet, or at least in a richer potential fitness landscape.</b> As in <a target=_blank href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscillator_(cellular_automaton)">Conway's Game of Life</a>, if they're lucky they either settle into a simple oscillating system (bloom, mass extinction, bloom, same kind of mass extinction, ad infinitum) or the ecosystem collapses completely and ends.
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Speculation regarding this: we're fairly confident <a target=_blank href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6095482/">the first metabolism on Earth</a> was <a target=_blank href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron%E2%80%93sulfur_world_hypothesis">sea vent iron sulfur organisms</a>, using sulfur in what is now oxygen's chemical role. The Great Oxygenation may have only happened when it did, a full 1.5 billion years after the first life and at least 800 million years after photosynthesis appeared, because an asteroid delivered molybdenum, allowing nitrogen fixation and more efficient anaerobic metabolism. Whatever the reason, had this happened prior to photosynthesis, we may have ended up with an Earth poisoned with sulfur or at least with a massive amount of oxidized sulfur.
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In an interesting parallel observation: we're also confident that Venus was once a wetter, cooler world that had a runaway greenhouse effect. One of the mysteries of Venus is the origin of all the sulfur in its thick atmosphere; to a first approximation all sulfur on Earth's surface is assumed to be from volcanoes, but why so much more on Venus? Another mystery is the identity of the <a target=_blank href="https://phys.org/news/2019-08-mysterious-cloud-absorbers-venusian-albedo.html">small UV absorbers</a> (about the size of bacteria) that form the dark bands in its atmosphere; one idea is that they're cells descended from ancestors that evolved at the surface and now can only survive in the more benign lower temperatures and pressures of the high clouds. If indeed these are the survivors of a Great Sulfuration Event, while the event did not result in total extinction, it limited the Venusian ecosystem to oscillate on a barren fitness landscape, just from the bad luck of having richer crust contents or earlier impacts with potential-enzyme-cofactor-bearing asteroids that allowed more efficient iron-sulfur metabolism.
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(Recent evidence however suggests a massive volcanic event 700 MA ago that resurfaced the planet after massive flows; this which may be enough to explain all the sulfur. A gradual boil off of water remains quite likely, for two reasons – the D/H ratio on Venus is about 150 times higher than Earth, where comets have at most a 3 times higher ratio than Earth, suggesting loss to space of hydrogen from water and preferential retention of the heavier nucleus; and that such a massive volcanic event could have been caused by the loss of water, and the cessation of plate tectonics which allow a cataclysmic buildup of heat. It's interesting that the Siberian trap flows and CAMP happened during a period on Earth when the continents were crammed together and perhaps less efficient at letting out volcanic heat, though these events were still nowhere near what happened on Venus.)
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<b>2. If a technological Singularity occurs, it would be an endogenous extinction.</b> In this case <i>we</i> are the cyanobacteria, and our extrasomatic adaptations are the contradiction internal to the system, and the AIs are our oxygen-breathing descendants. Like them, we produced the conditions that destroyed us and paved the way for the next phase of life. It's true that cyanobacteria and anaerobic organisms persist but do not dominate the world as they did in the Archaean. Even if cellular life survives the Singularity, being relegated to the role of cyanobacteria is unappealing for most.
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But then there is another possibility, in which the AIs drive themselves extinct too. Think of this as the super-pessimistic case. Singularity optimists think we can benefit from or at least co-exist with superintelligence (becoming the equivalent of cyanobacteria is actually optimistic in this scheme.) Singularity pessimists think the event will kill all biology. Here, I suggest the super-pessimist position, which is that the Singularity may kill us, then also itself, in the final, most spectacular ecocide of Earth's history. Why? One theory is that any self-improving superintelligences will necessarily disassemble matter, including whole planets, into atoms that can be used for computation. But there is no principle stating that intelligence must always exceed power; that is, that impact of behavior must grow more slowly than <i>ability to predict</i> impact of behavior. Certainly it didn't happen with cyanobacteria, and given the sluggishness of our response to global warming it might not be happening with humans. Even if the AIs are in fact superintelligences, they are still not omniscient. As they're disassembling everything, they may get to the end of a predictive computation and realize that part of the code has gone cancerous and is replicating out of control (and consuming matter in the process) and can't be called back, or they're going to run out of power before they get to the next planet or star system, or overheat, or whatever problem an AI might run into.
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Therefore, if the Singularity does happen, it would be just one type of endogenous extinction. If in a hundred million years, aliens or their <a target=_blank href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/search?q=neumann">self-replicating probes</a> visit the solar system (if such things ever occur in the history of the universe) they might find its dusty, partly-disassembled remains, and file the data under "ecosystems that ended with behavioral/artifactual singularities" and then move on. Interestingly, we have already found old planetary systems that <a href="https://www.space.com/15255-comet-massacre-fomalhaut-star.html">are far dustier than we would expect</a>, with no explanation for the inner dust ring and a some constant replenishment process. Even this assumes that the self-replicating alien probes can get there before becoming cancerous dead-ends themselves.Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-27563192127909894142020-02-03T22:15:00.000-08:002020-02-03T22:15:56.596-08:00Gamma Ray Bursts as a Reason for the Sterility of the UniverseOne answer to the Fermi paradox is that we are in fact alone, because life - at least intelligent life - is vanishingly rare or completely absent. If we ever get probes to other star systems, we may well find that any water world has its local cyanobacteria, but nothing beyond that.
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And what exactly is it that this star system has been so lucky to avoid by accident? Gamma ray bursts are an obvious candidate. A 2014 paper by <a target=_blank href="https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.231102">Piran and Jimenez</a> use the known frequency and distribution of GRBs and calculate the likelihood of an ecosystem-annihilating one. What they find is that for systems within 13,000 LY of the galactic center, there is a 95% chance of a lethal GRB in the last 500 million years, and out where we are it's about a 50% chance. They speculate that some of our past mass extinctions may well have resulted from a GRB (the Ordovician-Silurian extinction event has been speculated without much evidence to be such an an extinction.)
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So, it may well be that the <a target=_blank href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2012/11/intelligence-itself-as-great-filter.html">Great Filter</a>, or at least a major component of it, is not something endogenous to the sequence of evolution, but rather something completely random and external. It is therefore meaningless to talk about the Great Filter being "in front of" or "behind us."
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This may also mean that we really are alone in terms of intelligences which, though boring, is the options we should wish for, it were up to us.Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-76411307478821000392020-01-07T22:04:00.000-08:002020-01-07T22:04:21.146-08:00Phantom Hound, Northern Face (2019)<center>
<iframe width="432" height="243" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/q_6dxD-mVTk" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</center>Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269306468607044272.post-79949709184349294912020-01-05T15:11:00.002-08:002020-01-05T15:20:39.626-08:00Terraforming Venus; Venus-forming EarthTerraforming Venus would require taking almost all of the CO2 out of its atmosphere, so it becomes breathable, doesn't crush us (currently 90 atm pressure) and cools the planet down. Using our current mechanical carbon scrubber technology may seem simplistic and unimaginative, but the other options that have been discussed feature <a target=_blank href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus">similar science-fiction-level ideas</a> (crashing outer solar system ice moons into it, locking carbon into the crust down to a kilometer deep, or getting theoretically present hydrogen out of the mantle.)
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<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhmIZmUC486GetfFTtHehtZ_6vuSWOIzhnDaHTmoRGtMi9MjjgXiQSzxCl39-cHAibUeUH_b1N5U4b-7kMU-iQvtizk-3Wp2IiKeOyz3OZayCpHrPqZq73byMAT9_VgOxAgUOPA924OY0/s1600/terraformed+venus.jpg" width=99% height=99% /></img>
<i>This is <a target=_blank href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_fallacy">less likely to happen</a> than being able to move moons around the Solar System.
Image from reddit.com/r/mapporn.</i>
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Let's make many optimistic assumptions:
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That we can build self-replicating independent carbon sequestration plants; this minimizes transport costs and covers the planet.
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That they can build and fuel themselves from materials available on the surface of Venus.
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That they can withstand conditions on Venus (when the longest any machine we've put down has lasted is on the order of an hour.)
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Current carbon sequestration plants are the size of a cargo container, and sequester 900 tons of carbon per year. Assume that this is the rate at which they operate on Venus, and that self-replicating carbon sequesterers are 100x bigger than the real, non-self-replicating ones we have.
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Assuming near 100% working replicas, and a one-year self-replication cycle, it would take 40 years to cover the entire surface of Venus with these - after which they would take 2000 years to clean the atmosphere of CO2. (This would still leave a nitrogen atmosphere several times higher pressure than Earth's.)
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Venus is not the best candidate for terraforming or habitation, and humans will not settle its surface for thousands of years at least. We should concentrate on terraforming planets in our solar system, building self-replicating technologies, and having <a target=_blank href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/17/acc-should-we-colonize-space-to-mitigate-x-risk/">humans in isolation from Earth in case of some sort of collapse</a> (most easily, on the Moon.)
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On the other hand, here on Earth, <i>just to keep even with carbon emissions <a target=_blank href="https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions#annual-co2-emissions">at the 2017 level</a>, <b>we would need 40 million of the scrubbers we currently have</b></i>. That means no matter where you went on Earth, there would be one within less than two and a half miles of you. <br/><br/>
<center>
<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOK2zOArySRh-ZXY5EmVV64zL3zGFgaWxNbtPasUGnVCzFu6R5xMo5wZd8hLtsEuaJa5kkcEI_1h3Wj-ilt1K0a_7vMfAnogLembBP52N20QWFpsTWN4i3wHIw3-kJWK84K1PYk4cWFPI/s1600/venusforming.jpg" width=99% height=99% /></img>
<i>We do have machines that are Venus-forming Earth, by making more CO2. They aren't self-replicating, but they seem to have a relationship with one species (unclear if parasitic or symbiotic) and in places they cover the surface just the same. </i></center>
<br/><br/>Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0