Author: jameswharris

Rethinking Interstellar Travel for Science Fiction

If you read science fiction we live in a small universe, but if you read science, the universe if horrendously huge.  There is no way with words to convey the immensity of space – even math fails to give us a feeling for the size of reality.  If we drove over to Proxima Centauri in a Camry it would take 50,000,000 years and if Voyager 1 was going that way, it would take 76,000 years.  Of course, if we could travel as fast as light it would take a mere 4.28 years.

So what does it say about our SciFi fundamentalist belief when we imagine Hans Solo or James T. Kirk making the trip in a matter of hours?  How close is this to believing a man in  a red suit can visit every house in the world in one night?  Now I know all the science fiction true believers will come back at me with testimony about a short-cut to the the stars can be discovered any day now.  Just for the sake of this argument, lets assume Albert Einstein is right (we have no real other reason to believe otherwise).  Hell, even if there were no FTL speed limits we’d find it it damn hard to build anything that could travel even at 1/10th the speed of light.

Let’s say we create the technology that gets that trip down to Proxima Centauri to 100 years, and thus need to rethink science fiction.  (My personal feeling is we’ll have tremendous trouble getting the trip down to 1,000 years, but none of us will ever know that final answer.)  To get an astronaut to another star when the trip takes 100 years means either using generational ships, extending the life of the astronaut or developing some kind of suspended animation technology, or so the SciFi gospel has preached so far.

I have some weird alternate ideas – I mean, there’s always more than one way to skin a flat cat.  We could send machines that have the ability to grow people from an in vitro culture.  Imagine being born on a spaceship in its last years approaching the target stellar system?  Of course, if the destination lacked a habitable planet, those poor souls would be doom to a limited existence – but it might  make for a fantastic philosophical SF novel.

Another idea is just give the job of interstellar travel to robots.  Then whenever they find a potential womb for biological life they could whip up a DNA soufflé from a recipe book inspired by life on Earth.  Our AI children could be the Johnny Appleseeds spreading carbon life forms across the galaxy, and given enough time, intelligent life would re-evolve.  We just wait for our star children to phone home.  OK, we’ll need to develop some real patience.

Using our SciFi minds I think we could all come up with many kinds of seed pods to shoot at the stars.  We could even engineer life to live where our kind of DNA couldn’t.  But that doesn’t sound like much fun for us, does it?  What if we built huge robotic telescopes to launch in all the directions of the celestial compass that we could tap into as a hive mind VR input and commune with the stars?  We could become cyborg space minds – I’m sure this will appeal to the Spocks among us more than it does to the action oriented Kirks types – those guys can invent STL travel and crawl to the stars.  

The more I study science and cosmology it feels like life on Earth is about as practical as one atom somewhere on Earth becoming conscious and wondering why none of his buddy atoms ever talk back.  If life is important, why is it such a tiny aspect of reality?  If life isn’t common, maybe it’s our duty to spread the complexity. 

Life is all around us, so living things dominates our awareness, but if we measure our world against the rest of the universe, life is freakishly well hidden.  If there is a God, why did she make us so small compared to the rest of existence?  We’re hardly the center of the universe.  From our perspective, if we played God, comparing the size of the Universe to the Earth, the children of Homo Sapiens would live on a world no larger than a charm quark in size.  Good luck getting our little beings to spot us.

My guess is we don’t have a creator other than reality churning through all the possibilities.  Intelligent, self-aware life, is a fluke that may exist elsewhere in reality, but maybe not, or maybe not close by.  We are doomed to be snuffed out with the same indifference by reality as all the other millions of species that have become extinct on this planet so far.  Interstellar travel could extend humankind’s lifetime a few billion years, until we needed to travel further afield.

Travel between galaxies is well beyond speculation but imagine if we could spread our species across the entire universe, so it was finally obvious that our strange self-aware kudzu filled the universe, would any being outside our reality take notice?  Maybe there is no one to impress or judge us, but isn’t it a better aspiration than letting ourselves go extinct while assuming we get to live in another reality after this one.  Like man, what are the odds of our personal self-awareness striking two existences in a row?

Star Trek’s Enterprise like space travel will probably soon be seen as a fun fantasy like It’s A Wonderful Life angels or Harry Potter wizards, so I think science fiction needs to rethink interstellar travel.  From Doc Smith to Stephen Baxter, we’ve had some fantastically fun science fiction, but just how realistically visionary has it been?  When science fiction fans die, and their last thoughts are on future possibilities, is Star Trek really any better than fantasies of Heaven’s streets of gold and immortal life with wings?  We can’t know the future, but it’s science fiction’s job to try harder than we’ve done so far.

JWH – 10/12/9

The Loneliness of Facebook Friends

We all know people who tell us they have hundreds of friends on Facebook, but do people really have that many good friends?  Friends that would pick them up at the airport or take them to the doctor’s when getting a colonoscopy?  Now don’t get me wrong, I do believe Facebook is a marvelous invention for tracking all the people you meet throughout life, and if it had been invented before I was born, I may have paid more attention to the folks I associated with at each stage of my life.

I think young people today grow up more social than I did back in the 1950s, belonging to all kinds of groups, starting with their daycare centers.  Some kids today seem to move through life in cohorts, and Facebook is perfect for them.  I moved around so much that I can’t remember any individual classmate before the 5th grade.   My memories are of neighborhood kids I played with after school.  I only have one friend on Facebook from all my K-12 years, but then I’m 57 and not really part of the Facebook generation.  However, I do know lots of people my age that are reconnecting with old names from their memories.

As my wife Susan told me, when I mention I was writing about Facebook, she thinks the young of today are adverse to talking to one-another directly, but instead love to tweet, text and write on each other’s walls, as if email or phone calls provided TMI.  In other words they prefer scads of friends to share bite-size facts with frequently.  I’ve never texted or tweeted, but then I’m a verbose bastard, and even feel silly typing a simple snappy line on someone’s wall.

I’ve yet to find much value in Facebook, to be perfectly honest.  When I scan my Facebook home page and read what all my “friends” are doing it makes me lonely because most of my “friends” are people I never see, especially not daily.  It makes me sad that I don’t want to keep up with all the tiny details of their lives, and I worry I’d bore these folks if I wrote about the little things in my life.  Or would they be bored?  Is it heart warming to follow a group of acquaintances – like watching a favorite soap opera?  I have to wonder if Facebook provides a kind of mini-fame, so the young feel good about the number of people that follow their lives.  But I have to ask, do people read as much about their friends as they write to them? 

I like seeing my friends face-to-face, like last night when Anne invited me over for dinner when Susan went to play trivia at Swanky’s.  We listened to the original cast recording of Phantom of the Opera while she cooked me a wonderful dinner and then she made me soothing herbal tea for my cold.  So, should I describe our evening on Facebook?  Would my other friends want to know what Anne and I did on Saturday night?  Since there was no hot sex would they find our chit-chatting boring and again, too much information?

The question I’d like to explore is:  How well does Facebook help with maintaining current friendships?  Is it a good tool for genuine friendships?  My wife loves Facebook because it’s useful for keeping tabs on all our nephews and nieces and other extended family members, and I know other women in our generation that use Facebook in the same way to follow children and grandchildren.  We have so many friends that never had children we could create group just for them, and Facebook seems perfect for this task of keeping up with relatives.

Of course, how do all the kids feel about their old Aunty keeping track of their doings?  Maybe they would prefer it to their Aunts interrupting their lives by calling them once a week to get the news.  In my day my mother made me write my Aunts occasionally “Dear Aunt Sissy, How are you?  I am doing fine” kinds of letters.  I wonder if they would have loved Facebook?

I have to wonder if people really enjoy tracking the daily events of their old classmates.  I’m curious about what happened to them all, but I’d just like to read a summary like those short where-are-they-now updates for each character at the end of American Graffiti.  My memories are stuffed with fond recollections of childhood, but I don’t think I could regain paradise by tracking down old friends.  A cooler invention akin to Facebook would be Photobook where everyone could register their old group photos to share with forgotten people in the photos or Memorybook where you could chronicle a memory of an event featuring past friends hoping they would chronicle the same event from their point of view.

If people are truly friends they stay in touch.  I think a cool feature of Facebook would be the chance to collaborate old memories, but I doubt I’d want to make new memories with old acquaintances.  Is that sad?  I wouldn’t mind apologizing to some old teachers for not pulling my weight when they were trying so hard to help me, but I’m guessing those teachers, if they were alive, wouldn’t even remember me.  

I know a number of people my age that joined Facebook and then quit after a few months.  Is it just a fad for the youthful that will disappear in a few years, or will a new generation grow up and maintain lifelong contacts via the web?  Will Facebook become as integrated into society as the telephone?  I shall stick with Facebook a bit longer even though it makes me feel lonely to use it.  I hope I’m an old dog that can learn new tricks.

Currently, I think I have two kinds of friends.  The people I will spend real time with, either in person or on the phone, or those folks who I commune with via blogging.  I tend to think blogging is my Facebook, but most of my real life friends don’t blog or read my blogs.  Blogging seems to be a communication technology that has limited appeal, rather than the mass appeal of Facebook, Twitter or texting.  What this all implies is we have many kinds of friends, and many ways to communicate with them, Facebook is just one tool in the toolbox.  One that I haven’t trained with thoroughly, or learned its advantages.

Theoretically this means we can have Facebook Friendships that never overlap the real world.  At this time I have no idea what value such friendships would bring, but then no one can predict the future.  I love the TV show, The Big Bang Theory.  I suppose I could use Facebook to find other folks who love the show too.  I assume young people already do that.  But do such friends reduce loneliness?  Are people happy just having Facebook friendships?  If Facebook has real value, what will it be like in 50 years?

JWH – 10/11/9

The Invention of Lying

The Invention of Lying is the funniest movie about our society since Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.  Oh yeah, that would be a lie.  I was more excited to see this new Ricky Gervais film than any other film in a long time, but at one point I wanted to walk out because of boredom, and later my date told me she had gone to sleep.  Unfortunately, I’m talking here like the people who live in this fantasy world where lying didn’t exist until Mark Bellison needs to pay his rent.

Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t see The Invention of Lying, it is quite clever and reasonably funny, but while watching this movie I really wanted it to be another It’s A Wonderful Life, it had that kind of potential.  The setup, of a world untainted by lies, fiction or any other kind of make-believe, including religion, is a brilliant concept, but ultimately, the results feel like a rough draft hacked out by Saturday Night Live writers. 

The weak writing was obvious early on when Ricky Gervais’ character Mark, walked down the street whispering lies to people and changing their lives.  If the writing was great we would have heard the lies he told and admired their brilliance.  Instead we just had to take the smiles on people’s face as our proof.  The best exploitation of the concept was how movies were made in this world without lying – because in this alternative reality people went to see films with a man in a chair reading historical essays – even historical dramas would be lies.  Now that’s very astute when you think about it.  The trouble is the writers didn’t take this bit of speculative vision and stretch it over their entire make-believe world.

I’m sure my God fearing friends will wonder why a world without lying isn’t heaven.  The writers failed when they assumed a lie free world would have the same history as our world.  No, I don’t think honesty would have created a utopian ideal, but the world without lying had no religion until Ricky Bellison invents it – so that timeline would have had fewer wars, or much different wars to shape its history.  Their present was too close to ours to be believable if lies never existed.

This movie’s premise, although, is perfect for exploring philosophical fantasies.  The film left me thinking the writers wanted us to believe that we need lies to make us happy, and thus lying is beneficial, but Mark ultimately won’t lie to achieve his personal desires, such as scoring with Anna McDoogles, played by Jennifer Garner.  Time and again in the show we are told that Mark is fat and has a funny nose and that Anna wants beautiful children.  All Mark had to do was tell her that their genes blended together would produce gorgeous brats and they would have been married, but he didn’t.  Even in a movie about lying, truth is sold as the best policy.

If this movie had been more sophisticated, Mark would have found a funny way to convince everyone that lying was wrong, and undid all the changes he brought to his world.  Which is better, to die happily and calmly with a lie, or face death with the truth?  If you see the movie you can answer that question.  For this movie to achieve the greatness I thought it could have achieved emotionally, only the Ricky Gervais character should have seen the secret of lying and before the end of the film he would have experience a number of lessons to convince him to put lying back in Pandora’s Box.  He should have discovered that telling the truth sometimes takes kindness or empathy, or at least a little tack.

I know I’m sounding like Pollyanna, and I’m just mincing words about a silly little film that will soon be forgotten, but I actually think this flick accidently brings up an important philosophical subject, because if we look at it inversely we realize how many lies we live with in our world.  What would our reality be like without the lie about the man in the sky and all the related ones, like those convincing us about the good place and the bad place we can go to after death.  What if the filmmakers made a movie called The Invention of Honesty.

JWH – 10/9/9

The Good Wife – Dating a New TV Show

The best TV is evolving, becoming more sophisticated, especially when comparing today’s shows against those from decades past.  Imagine a science fictional time signal sending The Sopranos, Big Love or Deadwood back in 1969, and what a contrast those shows would make to viewers of The Brady Bunch and Marcus Welby, M.D.  Most of my Netflix discs are modern TV shows – which I prefer over movies. 

I see 2-3 movies at month at the theater, but for my meat and potatoes entertainment, I really enjoy contemporary TV.  I think I like the length and pace of TV seasons over two hour movies, they’re closer to the length of novels.  But getting involved with a new network show is chancy, because we never know when tuning in each week if our new friends have been murdered by bean counters.

TV producers have a tremendous challenge creating new TV series because they compete with the best shows of TV history, either with shows a few channels over in syndication or collected on DVDs.  Its far safer for a viewer to go steady with an old show then risk their heart with a new one.  I hate getting emotionally attached to a new characters that could just disappear on me.

One way producers fight competition with past shows is to create new shows with actors from older hit shows.  So we see old faces like Julianna Margulies from ER, Chris Noth from Law & Order and Sex in the City, Josh Charles from Sports Night and Christine Baranski from Cybil, making it easier to try The Good Wife.

However, for The Good Wife (2009), success rests on the shoulders of Julianna Margulies which causes me to wonder how far TV has come since ER (1994), a very groundbreaking show.  Poor Julianna opens in each series as a tragic figure – an attempted suicide in ER and as Alicia Florrick, the wife of a corrupt sex-sandaled imprisoned politician, Peter Florrick (Chris Noth), in this new CBS show on Tuesday nights.  ER went on to become one of the greatest TV series of all time, but I doubt The Good Wife will see season two unless it evolves very fast, but then I betting against the rave reviewers.

I’m quite sure CBS hopes to be as successful with its new show as NBC was with ER, but I have my doubts.  ER succeeded because it followed an ensemble cast of fascinating diverse characters, whereas The Good Wife relies heavily on the title character.  Most of the shows that wowed me in recent years have been ones featuring gangs of great characters, like Big Love, Freaks and Geeks, Mad Men, Lost, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, Heroes, Law & Order and so on – or even shows I don’t like but others do, like CSI, Gray’s Anatomy, Brothers and Sisters and Desperate Housewives. 

The most compelling single character driven show I like is Dexter.  Even shows like Dexter, that are dominated by a central figure, have good surrounding characters, and it’s too early with only two episodes of The Good Wife, to know if the lesser characters will bloom – but remember the pilot to ER and how riveting it was from scene one.    Right now the gripping aspect of The Good Wife is Julianna Margulies, and what drives me to watch is how she will play out the hand dealt to her by her scandalous husband.   It’s not a good sign that in two episodes I’ve yet to see much depth to her character other than common clichés.  The writers are spending too much character time on the legal drama, and those court room stories feel like very watered down Law & Order.  Everything is glitzy about this show, the set, cinematography, costumes, the beauty of all the cast, but I worry about such slickness. 

The reason why I gave up on Gray’s Anatomy is it wasn’t a very good show about medicine, and the soap opera relationships just got too silly.  If The Good Wife is going to be a mediocre show about lawyers, it really needs to be a fantastic show about relationships.  It has the potential to do that.

What piqued my interest the most so far, are her two kids and how they are reacting to daddy being in prison with their lives shattered by lurid TV clips.  The son Zach Florrick, played by Graham Philips, intercepts photos intended for Alicia.  Viewers are shown a scene where Alicia, the good wife, attacks her husband’s prosecutor for showing sex films on TV to make him feel guilty for hurting her and her children.  The prosecutor defends his actions by claiming he held back evidence to stay within good taste.  We viewers assume the photos Zach sees are some of what was held back, including photos of their dad doing drugs.  But Zach believes the photos are Photoshop fakes.

Now here is the crucial point on whether or not I’m going to like or dislike this show.  I want this story to be emotionally honest and realistic.  The setup is good, how a corrupt man hurts his family.  I don’t want a razzamatazz conspiracy plot to complicate an essentially genuine emotional landscape.  We have the lives of a good wife, her two children and Peter’s mother hijacked by the bad husband, father and son.  I know the husband isn’t going to be all bad, but I don’t want pulp fiction narrative stringing me along episode by episode trying to trick me into caring about him because he was framed.

If Peter Florrick isn’t like every other politician caught with a three thousand dollar an hour hooker, then it undermines the premise of the good wife – we see Peter Florricks in the news all the time, the story everyone wants to explore is why their wives stand beside them during the press conferences when they confess.  Unfortunately, The Good Wife’s writers will only be able to string that story line along for maybe one season if they are lucky.  I expect Peter to get out of jail and be reunited with his family, and thus the title of the show can be carried into new realms of good wife-ness when Peter continues to explore new ways of hurting his family.

Now here’s the six-four thousand dollar question:  Should I watch The Good Wife now?  I could wait until it succeeds and finishes its first season, gets a guarantee on having a second season and rent the first season on DVD.  Because of the endless TV season of DVD shows, why watch any new show?  Well, if everyone did that networks would stop producing new shows.  What the networks need for their new shows are fans willing to date the series and commit.  Any show getting such fan support will have time to shake out the kinks and beef up the story lines so fans will fall in love with attractive, complex characters.

I’m doing my part by trying The Good Wife, FlashForward, Cougar Town and Modern Family.  All have potential but each are very weak at grabbing my attention.  Compared to HBO and Showtime favorites, like Big Love and Dexter, that hooked me completely with their first episodes, these new shows can’t even be called mildly narcotic.   To be be frank, I’m getting very close to giving up on network TV completely, and just live off DVD TV from Netflix.  But I worry, what if everyone felt that way?  This would be a whole new level of time-shifting, much different from VCRs and DVRs.

JWH – 10/3/9

Toshiba DR570 DVD Recorder

I bought a Toshiba DR570 DVD Recorder to be my poor man’s DVR.  After theorizing about saving money by giving up cable TV, I quickly learned that I missed having a DVR after living without cable.  I love  having fewer channels, but I do miss the on-screen guide and being able to record one show while I watch another, or to record a show when I’m not home. 

DVD Recorders aren’t popular like the old VCRs once were, but they function in the same way – the media you record on, the DVD, is just different, but the setup and operation is the same.  You have to program the timer to record a future show, or go to the show and hit record to snag what’s showing on screen now.  It’s no where near as convenient as a DVR – but if the DR570 had an electronic programming guide, it would be close.

A DVD recorder works just like the old VHS machines, and the switch to digital TV has affected them too.  You can no longer use old VHS or DVD recorders with analog tuners.  I had a perfectly good Samsung DVD recorder that worked with analog signals and my Comcast DVR, but doesn’t work with over-the-air digital TV – and that’s why I had to buy the DR570 – it has a tuner to receive over the air digital signals.

Because the DR570 has a digital tuner and my Samsung DLP TV has a digital tuner, I can record one show and watch another.  One antenna works for both.  The indoor HDTV antenna plugs into the DR570 DVD Recorder, and then a second coax cable goes from the DR570 to the Samsung TV.  This pass-through arrangement doesn’t interfere with the reception on the TV when the DR570 is off or while recording.  The DVD Recorder has a HDMI output, so switching to it just means pressing the Source button on my TV remote.

There is a picture quality difference between the two tuners which makes me think there might be a lot of variation in the electronics to digital tuning of over-the-air signals.  The DR570 picture seems softer than what I get from the Samsung TV, but quite nice.  The recorded quality varies greatly between the 5 recording modes (1, 2, 4, 6 and 8 hours).  Two hour mode is OK, but one hour mode is so impressive that I try to use it exclusively.  I can accept two hour mode, but four, six and eight hour modes are unacceptable by my picky standards.  Now my wife wouldn’t complain about four hour mode, but at the four hour mode I see  artifacts from fast moving elements of the picture – even people’s lips moving when they are talking, I find this annoying. 

I’ve also learned that turning on progressive mode within the DR570 settings menu greatly improves the recorded results.  One hour mode is as good as a DVD on a high definition TV, but not Blu-Ray quality, about equal to HD DVR output.  The output fills the wide screen HDTV and looks like high definition TV. 

Neither of my two digital TV tuners comes with the over-the-air TV Guide.  My friend Mike just got a new digital HDTV with a TV Guide brand on-screen guide built in.  I wonder why neither of my digital tuners has this feature because it would make living with over-the-air TV so more of a luxury.  It would also make recording a show on a DVD Recorder a snap, like using a DVR.  The David Pogue article I link to above suggests that manufacturers don’t want to compete with the cable TV industry, and this might be true.  The broadcast of a electronic program guide is required by the FCC, but the display of the guide by TV makers is not.  Bummer. 

If free over the air TV came with an electronic program guide that worked with a cheap hard-disk recorder I wouldn’t miss cable TV at all.  A TiVo would be the perfect over-the-air DVR solution, except TiVo wants $12.95 a month for their program guide, which jinxes the deal for me.   Many people make their own TiVo by building a Home Theater PC and using one of the many Internet program guides.  I might do this in the future, but for now want to avoid complexity and cost.  My goal is to stay on the path to simplicity – if you can call our high tech world simple.

The DR570 has turned out to be a good solution as my poor man’s DVR, but if it had come with the TV Guide On Screen feature it would have been fantastic.  DVD disks clutter my TV stand and are annoying to keep up with, but they do the job – I don’t miss my TV shows, and I can record now and watch latter (and skip commercials).   The TV purist in me wishes I’d only watched TV in real time and just let go of the anguish of missing TV shows.  My Zen mind tells me to let go, and let time flow naturally, but I’m still a grasshopper.

DVR +R or –R discs are dirt cheap.  Recording isn’t as convenient as a DVR, but if you don’t do a lot of recording it’s no big deal.  Recording three or four shows from one evening on one disk in four hour mode is possible, but it’s work, and the quality of the results is poor.  An electronic programming guide would reduce the work, but not improve the video quality.  Four-hour quality is OK if you don’t want to miss your shows, but not to save them or show off high definition TV to your low definition TV friends.

The DR570 cost me $159.95, or ten months of DVR service on Comcast.  I selected this Toshiba unit at Amazon sight unseen because many customers gave it positive reviews.  However, I agree completely with all the complaints about the terrible remote.  The buttons are small, oddly arranged, with hard to see labels.  Engineers working on the next model should overhaul the remote and add TV Guide On Screen.  A killer device would be to add a DVR drive to the mix with a dual digital tuner.  That way you could record to disk for convenience, and burn to DVD when you want to save a show or make sure your friends didn’t miss something cool.  Content creators will be horrified at this idea.  A DVD Recorder/DVR combination designed to work with over-the-air broadcasts and over-the-air TV Guide would probably convince a lot of people they really don’t need  their cable/satellite services.  I have no desire to see these businesses go under, but there’s a lot of people out there that don’t want or need the fire hose blast of hundreds of TV channels.

One nice side-effect of the DVD Recorder is if I record a show and want someone else to watch it, I can just give them the disc.  That’s better than a DVR.  Or I can save it to watch again in the future.  I keep a Sharpie by the TV and mark my discs as I record them and store them on an empty DVD spindle.  The DVD Recorder can use DVD-RW discs if you want to watch, erase and record again, and I have some of those, but I’ve found in my quest for watch less TV, to also try and record less.  The DVR made TV watch too easy, encouraging the bad habit of cramming huge amounts of TV into my life.  Moderation is now my goal.  I like to think before I record any show:  Is it DVD worthy.

 

JWH – 9/26/9