World Building

Lots of information in my brain these days, either from my job or activities related to my job, so I'm starting to get the urge to write science fiction (SF) again. Problem is, I write differently now than I did in my 20s, when I was kicking out a story a month. I want to understand the "universe" (or "world") I'm creating better before I just jump in and write. I ask a lot more questions and try to understand the rules of some future society. Here are some of the questions that are coming to mind as I lay the groundwork for whatever might come next:

• What is the weather/climate like (on Earth)?
• What do dwellings/homes look like?
• What's the world population?
• How do most people get around?
• What's the fastest means of transport?
• What does a ticket to the Moon cost?
• How many people live in space?
• What is the family structure?
• How do people spend their time?
• Is there any violence?
• Why do people leave Earth?
• What do people wear?
• What are the norms for beauty?
• What are the norms for romantic relationships?
• What are the major taboos? Jokes?
• How do people relax?
• Is there any privacy?
• What's considered a luxury?
• How is political power determined?
• Who are the popular people?
• How do people treat their parents?
• Who's at the bottom of the totem pole?
• How do people curse?
• How is depression treated?
• Who cares for the children?
• What is school like?
• What is the primary form of entertainment?
• What (or who) do most people aspire to be?
• What are the most important gadgets?
• Who are the worst villains?
• What do people eat?
• What are the arts like?
• How do people evaluate virtue? Vice?
• What's considered impossible?
• What do they take for granted that we would find a miracle?
• What do we take for granted that they would find horrible or primitive?
• What do they worship and how?

So those questions will form one piece of the puzzle. Other factors include economics and technology. That, and I got the SF bug from attending the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop, so I'm trying to think about the people who would willingly join an interstellar expedition if they live in a world of peace, plenty, and progress. It might be as easy as Jean-Luc Picard saying, "The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our society. We seek to better ourselves and the rest of humanity." However, I find that statement a bit elitist and condescending. Is there another way to say that? Might there be other motivations for seeking out strange, new worlds?

A last piece of my current puzzle? Those actual strange, new worlds that telescopes like Kepler are discovering on an almost-daily basis. They are seriously different from Earth, and not in ways that result in just a slightly greener girl for Captain Kirk to flirt with--I'm talking seriously different: much higher gravities, atmospheres, axial tilts, temperatures, landscapes, resources, chemical bases of life. Are human beings really ready to cope with intelligent aliens that speak in sonar (dolphins) or reproduce by mitosis or that have no concept of the individual ego?

The future will be different--how different? How can a writer living very much in this world conjure up what life will be like for future star travelers who have never known hunger? And what sorts of adventures will those people have trillions of miles away from home? Plenty to think about, which is why I read and write SF in the first place.

Why an Interstellar Workshop?

I won’t lie to you: even some of my space-minded friends think it’s a bit impractical to hold a workshop on sending robots and humans to other star systems. Mostly it’s about practicality: “We’re trying to keep SLS funded!” “It’s difficult enough getting to the moon!” “That’s science fiction!” Of course going to orbit with a heavy-lift launch vehicle or sending humans to the moon was once the stuff of science fiction, too.

But seriously: why talk about the stars when we’ve not yet sent humans beyond Earth orbit since 1972? We’ve got some robots out at the edge of the solar system, toying with the dust between the stars, and one machine is racing toward what used to be called the farthest planet, Pluto. Space travel is difficult. It’s expensive. We’re working on more near-term projects right now. And there are important, serious problems affecting our nation and our planet right now. All true. Practical concerns fill our days, and they're often serious.

So let's talk practically. We have energy concerns. Food production takes energy. Transportation requires energy. In fact, most of what we do, from communication to fertilizer production, requires energy of some sort, and energy is a problematic commodity because of its by-products (smog, smoke, and carbon dioxide for petroleum; radiation and thermal pollution for nuclear). A lot of petroleum can be found in unstable parts of the world that don't like the United States too much. And there are a lot of people in the world who would like to live as well as Americans, with access to plentiful food, clean water, and cheap energy. Energy from space can address that problem. The Earth receives 1,365 watts per square meter at this distance from the sun. We're starting to capture some of that energy on the ground, but that solar energy is filtered by our atmosphere, and the Earth rotates and puts up interesting weather (clouds), which block that energy. Solar energy in space is on all the time, and it's relentless. 

Our economy is dependent on satellites: communications, finances, weather reporting, military operations, resource management, ATM cards, air freight services, and many, many others. Do we need better satellites? Yes. And we need to improve our ability to get those satellites into space more cheaply. As my friend Les Johnson put it, "We [space advocates] have succeeded: our economy is now addicted to satellites." Take them away, and our economy would collapse. 

And while we're at it, if we can get satellites up there more inexpensively, we can do other things, like move dangerous asteroids out of the way. We don't want to end up like the dinosaurs. We don't want (as Robert A. Heinlein put it) "all our eggs in one basket." And while we're moving those asteroids, we might want to consider mining them for the metals and water that are inside them--for use in space or for eventual export to Earth. We have deep-pit mines the size of asteroids on our world, and they leak a lot of unpleasant things into our environment. It would be nice to do the mining out in space, on high-radiation rocks with no atmosphere or people around. Stop a mass extinction, clean up the environment: those are things humanity can support, yes? From an energy, environment, and economic perspective, long-term access to space is a practical activity. 

Yet we need to keep our eyes on the stars.

Our telescopes are discovering other worlds around other stars. Earth is not the only planet in the universe--eventually we might (I'd say will) discover that it is not the only one with life on it. We need to learn about that life because that's what we do. If it's intelligent life, we have even more challenges ahead, but a productive, challenge-minded humanity with a multi-world civilization would be much better able to cope with it than one world and limited horizons. Interstellar travel is the ultimate expression of humanity's willingness to challenge and improve ourselves. We can apply the lessons learned in exploring and using the resources of space to improve our home world. If we try to go, we will be saying as much about ourselves as if we stop.

Book Review: Going Interstellar

It's a tough market for trying to "sell space" right now. Budgets are tight for space agencies worldwide, and there's no telling how long it will take for some of our more ambitious missions to the moon, Mars, or an asteroid to come to pass. So it might seem a little outlandish to be talking about missions out of the solar system--to other stars, no less!--but that is the exact point of Going Interstellar, a new anthology of articles and short stories about interstellar travel using current technologies.



The editors (Les Johnson and Jack McDevitt) and writers of this book have decided to throw caution to the wind, daring to talk about how human missions beyond our solar system might unfold. The technical articles in the book are brisk and light on equations or technobabble. In addition to Johnson, who's written extensively about solar sails and other high-tech propulsion systems, Dr. Greg Matloff has added articles on fusion and antimatter starships. They make it clear that the systems needed to span the incredible distances between stars are all technologically feasible, and none of them require "warp drive" or violations of known physics. Of course it should be pointed out that "feasible" is a long way from "doable right now." For instance, the ability to generate every Star Trek fan's favorite, antimatter, would take years. The energy output would be akin to half the world's total current production and would require special facilities out near Mercury's orbit. Hydrogen fusion, another favorite of science fiction writers, is also elusive, but we're at least working on it. "The rest," as physicists might say, "is just engineering."

The stories in this book are quite engaging. In fact, I finished this book over the course of three days. With stories by Ben Bova, Jack McDevitt, Louise Marley, Michael Bishop, Sarah A. Hoyt, and Mike Resnick, Going Interstellar looks at adventures beyond the solar system from a variety of unique perspectives, including an aging astrophysicist, a technologist in an interstellar feudal society, an artificial intelligence program, a teenager, and the next Dalai Lama. Interstellar travel is a bit like other frontiers for writers where there is little known about the place or the experience of getting there. It allows them to impose their own dreams and obsessions on a blank slate, much like Sir Thomas More place his Utopia in America. Intelligent machines? A reborn Tibetan culture? Why not?

What I liked about this book, beyond the brisk pace of the writing by multiple authors, was its willingness to touch on something that sometimes is sorely lacking: technological optimism without "magic." As I noted above, there is no faster-than-light-speed travel, no instantaneous travel between stars. This is a look at what really ambitious human spaceflight could look like using tools and machines accessible to us today, and the stories are informed by emotion, imagination, and technical know-how. In short, it's everything you'd like hard science fiction to be, and it's a pleasure to read.

Potpourri CLIX

Between the day job and the conference, my mind's been all over the place, so if you don't think my links and reads and thoughts don't quite all fit together, you're probably right.

IMF is one of our biggest beggars. If they're asking for a different currency, you know something is awry.
From Tracy:

• John Irving, business inspiration? Yep.
• An online, collaborative writing tool. Looks interesting, but most writers will tell you that writing with other people is a pain in the neck. It's much easier to just put down what you want to say. Any group document is inherently a compromise or series of compromises, not all of them good.

From Lin: an article about the challenges of interstellar travel. As I put it to Lin:

I'd say he hits the problems of interstellar flight dead on. Star Trek notwithstanding, we have no way to travel faster than light. The author actually understates the case. According to relativity theory, as objects accelerate closer to the speed of light, c, their mass becomes nearly infinite due to dynamics that elude me. Pick up Arthur C. Clarke's "The Songs of Distant Earth" for a realistic portrayal of the interstellar travel engineering problem. (The realism of his characterization or sociology are another matter.) We are, I'm afraid, a long way from warp drive. It would be nice to have something, though.

From my space/libertarian friend Berin, a statement about "Do Not Track" legislation:

WASHINGTON D.C. — The following statement can be attributed to Berin Szoka, President of TechFreedom, regarding legislation introduced today by Rep. Jackie Speier that would require the Federal Trade Commission to establish standards for a “Do Not Track” mechanism and require online data collectors to obey consumer opt-outs through such a tool:


Implementing “Do Not Track” without killing advertising won’t be easy. Just as consumers need to be empowered to make effective privacy choices, so too must publishers of ad-supported websites be able to make explicit today’s implicit quid pro quo: Users who opt-out of tracking might have to see more ads, pay for content and so on.

Government cannot design a “marketplace for privacy” from the top down, nor predict the costs of forcing an explicit quid pro quo. It would be sadly ironic if the same FTC that has agonized so much about the future of journalism wound up killing advertising, the golden goose that has sustained free media in this country for centuries.

The market is evolving quickly here, with two very different “Do Not Track” tools debuting in Internet Explorer and Firefox just this week. Ultimately, it is the Internet's existing standards-setting bodies, not Congress or the FTC, that have the expertise to resolve such differences and make a “Do Not Track” mechanism work for both consumers and publishers, as well as advertisers and ad networks.

Other stuff from Lin:

• It's been awhile since I've seen one of these, but it bears repeating: thank our military.
• An intriguing article on the interworkings of science and big universities. The article asks a good question: the universities need science, but does effective scientific research NEED to be performed in a university environment? Before the 20th century, most research was privately funded--think Thomas Edison or Bell Laboratories.
• An editorial on "who fed the tiger" (China). Uh, that'd be us. Or rather, corporate America and their political allies in the White House (Bush I and Clinton). We were told through the '80s and '90s that free trade with the West would moderate Communist China and make them more like us. What happened instead is that it made the Chinese government richer, not more moderate, and while we were selling them the rope with which to hang ourselves, they got a bunch of manufacturing jobs--and technologies--exported to them from the U.S. of A.
• The Navy now has its own carrier-based drone. I wonder if the human pilots pick on the radio-control jockeys for missing that first arresting wire.
• I really liked this one: an obituary for Roger Milliken, a businessman of the old stripe--the kind we're told doesn't exist anymore, so we must depend on government to "take care of the workers." Mr. Milliken's bio will show that such is not always the case.
• An analysis of the Obama Administration's National Security Space Policy. To be fair, I haven't finished reading the Policy yet (it's sitting on top of the pile at work), so I can't comment on the author's arguments. However, I did promise Lin some more thoughts on war in space. Short version: space war would devastate all nations' access to space. Orbital debris of all sizes can whack useful payloads at speeds of up to 20 km/seconds. Without access to space, even basic services like weather or communication satellites would be lost, and we'd be back to 1950s-era tech in some areas.
• Reviewing the state of the world via statistics.

From Kate Down Under: the latest roundtable newsletter on the Battle of Midway.

From a friend who will remain nameless for his own protection, but his attached commentary was too snarky not to share: "Another cleverly disguised study supposedly aimed at helping men but secretly proving women are nuts."
 
And I think I'll end there. At a conservative estimate, I'm processing well over 100 ISDC-related emails a day. N-U-T-S, but making serious progress. Should be a cool conference!