Category: Space Travel

Manned Space Flight – Is it even on your radar?

During the glory days of NASA, between President Kennedy’s great 1961 proclamation committing the United States to going to the Moon within a decade, and Apollo 11 landing on the Moon in July 1969, there were three great space programs:  Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.  Each manned rocket launch during those years was covered by all three television networks.  ABC, CBS and NBC would stop broadcasting game shows and soap operas and the missions would become  national events.  The 1960s represented a tremendous time for the public’s interest in the space program. 

Next month marks the 40th anniversary of mankind’s first landing on the Moon.  Popular interest in space exploration appears to have dwindled significantly ever since Apollo 11, with even Apollo 18, 19, and 20 being cancelled.  Our lunar exploration years only lasted from July 1969, through December 1972.  And when was the last time you took off from school or work to spend the day watching television of a space mission?  I would have taken vacation days to watch the recent Hubble repair mission if any of my damn 200 cable stations had covered it live.

Since 1982, the Space Shuttle has been our vehicle for traveling into space, but it’s scheduled to be retired next year.  The Space Shuttle never left low-earth orbit (LEO).  I wonder how many people know about our next manned space system that’s currently on the drawing boards?  It’s called the Constellation Program, that will use the Ares 1 rocket combined with the Orion space capsule, both in early design development.  It is a dramatic change from the 30 years of Shuttle flights, in that Orion will eventually leave LEO. 

The Constellation program was conceived officially in 2005, and scheduled to blast-off in 2015, with the exciting goal of returning humans to the Moon by 2020.  How many Americans know about this, and do they care?

NASA plods on, year after year, with a decent budget that’s prone to suffer booms and busts depending on the political weather.  NASA goals are constantly up for debate.  NASA is a prestige agency for the United States.  Space flight has always been political, and the only real reason we rushed to the Moon was not for science, but as competition in the cold war.  The current Constellation plans probably came into being because of China’s new space program that’s aiming at the Moon, with India and Japan echoing Chinese ambitions. 

Like atomic bombs, manned space missions are the symbol of national pride.  Only the most elite of nations belong to the club.  Even though NASA doesn’t get a lot of public support, it’s budget will never be zeroed out because the President and Congress fear the United States would be seen as a declining world power if it did.  Within Congress and NASA the debate has always been how to get the biggest political and scientific bang for our buck.  There are two factions fighting for dollars:  those campaigning for exciting manned missions and those who advocate scientific robotic missions.  Robots have been our real space explorers, going where no man has gone before, or likely ever.

Many scientists, and maybe most of the public would be fine with letting robots have all the glory when it comes to space exploration.  Let’s be honest here.  The only real value of exploring space beyond thumping our nationalistic chests, is science, and it appears that the public has little interest in real scientific research.  NASA’s web site for the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have had millions of unique visitors, showing the biggest peak of interest in space exploration since the 1960s, but how many people does that represent?  

Let’s say seven million.  There are nearly seven billion people on Earth.  Do the math.  1 million people is 1/1000 of a billion.  Let’s even say NASA has seven million hard core fans world-wide.  That would give them one tenth of one percent of popular support.  Probably more people spend time thinking about drinking beer than exploring space. (If NASA only had the money people spent on getting high.)  Seven million people seems like a big political block, but really it’s just a tiny sub-culture.

And are there really 7,000,000 people on Earth who actively spend a lot of their time thinking about space exploration?  That’s saying 1 person in a 1,000 has a serious interest in the final frontier.  These people would keep up with news on Space.com, read books about space exploration and technology, sign up for Twitter news feeds covering space vehicle development, and are members of one of the many space societies, like The Planetary Society, The Moon Society or the National Space Society.  But membership in The Planetary Society is only around 100,000.  What if the real figure is only 700,000, or .01%?

My guess that real world-wide space advocates number far less than seven million.  “Revision for Space Vision?” from MSNBC’s Cosmic Log, a blog by Alan Boyle, gives a listing of recent news articles about the Ares rocket that’s being built for the Constellation project, and other related news stories that would interest space advocates.  When I ask my friends if they knew there was space program in development to return men to the Moon, they say no.  For all I know, we could return to the Moon in 2020 and most of the people of the world won’t even notice this time.

Why is something as exciting as the universe get so little attention?  Why does the latest iPhone get more press than NASA’s latest lunar mission?  Did you even know about the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that’s scheduled to reach the Moon on Tuesday?  Or about Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite that will crash into the Moon in October hoping to discover water ice?  The orbiter will take photos so detailed they will be able to see the tracks left by the Apollo astronaut’s rovers.  A lot is happening on the Moon right now, with spacecraft from many nations exploring it remotely, or will be in the near future.  But how many people care?

Within the very small community of humans that are interested in space exploration, the Moon is becoming a hot destination.  There is even a web site, Moon Daily, for keeping up with all the activity.  Over at Asimov’s Science Fiction, James Patrick Kelly has an story in the current issue set on the Moon, “Going Deep,” which he reads for an MP3 audio edition, so the Moon is still of interest to science fiction writers and fans.  And NASA recently held an art contest called “The Moon: Back to the Future,” with a very nice gallery of winners.

Hopefully, between now and 2020, the public will take a fresh interest in lunar exploration, but is that being too hopeful on my part.  Most people consider learning about the Moon as exciting as studying rocks, and geology has never been one of the glamour sciences like astronomy and biology.   (And when was the last time you met someone at a party talking about those topics???)  The public is probably more than willing to let scientists play with the Moon as much as their little hearts want, as long as they aren’t asked to listen to any of the boring facts.

I’ve always cherished the assumption that space was the final frontier, and the manifest destiny of humanity was to explore the cosmos, but I’m starting to believe that is a false assumption on my part.  I’ve started writing a novel about colonists on the Moon, but I’m wondering about its potential audience.  If I want to make any money, I’d need to call it “Vampires on the Moon.”  Science fiction is very popular in pop culture, but interest in science fiction doesn’t translate into interest in space exploration.  I wonder if space exploration was as popular as rock music or professional sports, if humans would have already visited all the places our surrogate explorers, the robots, have reached?

JWH – 6/21/9

Heinlein’s 13th Scribner’s Novel

There are legions of Robert A. Heinlein fans out there that grew up reading the 12 canonical Heinlein young adult novels published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in the 1940s and 1950s, that if we were ever given three magical wishes would use our first wish to get the 13th novel.  Many science fiction writers have tried to write that 13th Scribner’s novel hoping to pay it forward for the immense rewards they were given from reading the original 12 Heinlein juveniles, as they are now called.

In 2003 the Heinlein estate gave Spider Robinson the chance to write that 13th juvenile based on an outline and note cards Heinlein had developed in 1955.  In 2006 Variable Star came out with Robert A. Heinlein as the first author and Spider Robinson as the second printed boldly across the top of the cover.  I immediately bought the hardcover edition thinking I’d read it as soon as it arrived from Amazon, but I didn’t.  I wanted it to be the 13th Scribner’s, but feared it wouldn’t.   It’s taken me two and a half years to get ready.

Over the decades I have read many essays by all kinds of people explaining how their lives were affected and even shaped by reading the twelve Heinlein juveniles.  Spider Robinson wasn’t specifically tasked to write the 13th, and he even explains in the afterward that he was given leeway to write pretty much anything he wanted, but I feel from reading the results that he wanted to write another Heinlein juvenile.  Since Robinson includes profanity, sex and drugs, we know he wasn’t seriously writing a novel that Alice Dalgleish, Heinlein’s editor, would have accepted back in the 1950s.

On the other hand, there is so much Heinlein in Variable Star that it is obvious that Robinson does want to write a novel that Heinlein fans will love, and maybe even praise as a novel that Heinlein would have written.  This is a dangerous task to take on.  What if you were a writer and William Shakespeare’s estate asked you to write a new play that they could sell to the fans of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet?  I think Robinson intentionally hedged his bets and put enough of his known style and favorite topics into Variable Star so if reviews were really bad he could claim he wasn’t crazy enough to imitate Heinlein completely.  But this book is stuffed to gills with Heinlein cliches.

I am 57 years old and I still try to understand why those twelve Heinlein books imprinted so strongly on my adolescent psychology.  It is enticing to think about Heinlein’s formula.  And it would be a fun challenge to analyze those 1950s books and try and recreate updated versions of them for the 2010s.  So here’s a quick overview what I think were his essential ingredients:

  • All the books are about boys of high school age
  • In most of the stories the boys are free of parental control
  • Girls and romance are not part of the story
  • No sex or profanity
  • All the stories involve outer space travel
  • Most of the stories involve exotic aliens
  • Success depends on the boys and their talent
  • Science, math and engineering are of supreme importance
  • Violence is often a solution
  • Great things can happen to kids if they are ready

Robinson breaks several of these points in Variable Star.  Joel Johnston has finished junior college and wants to get married.  He drinks, gets high, has sex, and he and his friends cuss.  But if Robinson had jettison the insanely stupid romantic plot, cut the boozing, drugs and cussing, this book could have been very much like a Heinlein juvenile.  Robinson appears to be as romantically tone deaf as Heinlein.  Many of Heinlein’s later books had characters wanting to get married ten minutes after they meet, and Robinson’s writing follows later Heinlein in dealing with the same silly male and female relationships.  Both write romances that feel like they were written by eleven year old girls trying to write about sex and love.

Variable Star is not the 13th Scribner’s juvenile by Robert A. Heinlein.  Alice Dalgleish would have wanted to edit out Heinlein’s reproductive organs if he had submitted this novel to her back in 1955.  I will admit Variable Star had many of Heinlein’s pet ideas from the time period, and the novel is somewhat structured like a Heinlein juvenile, but it’s more of a structural copy of Starship Troopers, because both are essentially one long first person monologue.  I love Starship Troopers and have read it many times.  Heinlein was at his best talking straight to the reader with Starship Troopers.  It’s a very hard writing style to pull off, and he never got away with it again, at least in my opinion.  Sadly, it’s the number one fault of Variable Star.  Since I listened to the book on audio it was all too obvious how much the narrator told the reader information and how little came through real dramatic action.  I wished Robinson had copied the more restrained and dramatic first person style of Time for the Stars.

Heinlein was great on coming up with far out science fictional ideas, but he was a damn poor writer when it came to dramatic scenes and plot, and Robinson marches right along in his footsteps.  For all the wrath Heinlein fans give poor Alice Dalgleish, I feel she kept Heinlein from boring his readers.  Alice Dalgleish is an evil woman among Heinlein’s true fans for censoring the master’s words, but I don’t think she deserves their scorn, nor does she deserve the evil portrayal of her as Alice Dahl in Variable Star.  To me grumbling from the grave is just whining after you’re dead.  Google Alice Dalgleish, she’s rather obscure, but she had a major impact on children’s literature.  Heinlein fans should worship her for giving them twelve cherished books from the leading American literary publisher of the time, that won all kinds of awards for their children’s line, were these books were published.

Most of the juveniles are stories written in the first person, heavy with info dumps, but they were kept under control, probably by Alice, and in the juveniles the info dumps were just long enough to teach and inspire kids without sounding like lectures.  Later Heinlein and in Variable Star, all too often the story comes to a complete stop so the author can pontificate.

Variable Star should have been published with only Spider Robinson’s name on the cover.  Many of my criticisms of the book would have been removed if that had been the case.  Of course we’re all savvy enough to know that writers estate’s want to maximize their profits by pulling various literary gimmicks.  If Variable Star had been published with only Robinson’s name on the cover, but with an intro about how he was given the Heinlein outline and note cards in a forward I would have had much more respect for the estate.

Since I bought the book in hardcover and audio, I also feel cheated that neither edition contained the actual Heinlein outline and notes.  I would have had much more respect for the Heinlein estate if they allowed Robinson to publish that working outline and notes in the back of Variable Star.  The book is a gimmick, and we should be allowed to see how good Robinson was at playing the game.  Also, with Heinlein’s name on the cover, we should have gotten some actual Heinlein words.

Now if Variable Star had been published with only Robinson’s name, and no mention of Heinlein at all, and I read the book for its own merits then my judgment would be totally different.  I think the book has many serious literary flaws, but it also has some fantastic science fictional speculation.  If I had read Variable Star as a book with no link to Heinlein on the cover, or within, I still would have thought it was inspired by Heinlein and figured Robinson is one of his literary descendents.  And I would have called him out on several 1950s Heinlein ideas that I feel are invalid for science fiction written after the year 1988.

Using telepaths for ship to Earth communication on slower than light spaceships following all of Einstein’s rules was a far out idea when Heinlein did it in his book Time for the Stars.  And from what Robinson said about the various names Heinlein considered for Variable Star I’m guessing he didn’t use that outline because Time for the Stars is the book he wanted to write with those ideas.  Since science has thoroughly trashed the concept of telepathy in humans in the succeeding decades it’s rather silly to bring back the idea.  ESP is only suitable for fantasy stories, not modern science fiction.

Science has also killed many other Heinlein ideas from the 1950s, like farming on Ganymede, people being able to do astrogation calculations in their head, and faster than light travel.  For Robinson to have near light speed travel, much less FTL, he has to resort to mystical mumbo-jumbo of the silliest kind.  Now I don’t fault Spider Robinson too much on this though.

Diehard Heinlein true believers have total faith that FTL travel is possible even though they are reduced to counting the number of FTL drives that can fit on the head of a pin.  Their religious faith depends on science finding a way around all the physics we currently know today.  I’m willing to concede there may be a God, Heaven and Hell, life after death and faster than light travel, but the odds are about equal for all of them.  I try not to be too critical about people’s deepest desires, but if Robinson wanted to write a cutting edge 2006 science fiction novel he should have stuck to all the rules of known science today.

Now it might seem like I’m totally trashing this novel as unworthy of reading, and I don’t want to do that.  I think Variable Star does have some merits, some even equal to the sense of wonder of the 1950s Heinlein juveniles, but I can’t discuss them in detail without spoiling the story.  There is a core tragedy that if the novel had been written differently could have made this novel into a major SF classic.  This part of the novel made me feel totally satisfied with my purchase, even counting that I bought the book twice.  Sadly, I consider it a shame that these great elements were stuck inside a gimmick novel.

Robinson narrated the audio book and did a great job.  Usually I don’t like audio books read by their authors.  He also includes an afterwards that makes me really like him, so I hate to be critical.  We’re both lovers of Heinlein’s juveniles, which I consider a stronger bond than blood relationship.  However, I’m not like many of the spiritual children of Heinlein because I rebelled against the old man.  Many of my Heinlein brothers and sisters hate me for the things I say about Heinlein’s later books.

The true believers raise their hackles at any criticism of Heinlein.  I had a different take on the old man.  Heinlein preached science, and the lesson I learned from him is go with what’s logical and real.  Heinlein threw out many hypothetical ideas to research.  Most didn’t pan out, no big deal.  Science moves on.  Heinlein always believed mankind was the toughest varmint in this neck of the galaxy, and you can’t be tough living in your naval gazing on fantasies.

Variable Star’s many faults remind me of later Heinlein, and I can almost imagine a much older Heinlein writing Variable Star trying to recapture his glory days at Scribner’s.  I think Robinson missed the mark at writing the 13th juvenile but still came very close to writing a Heinlein like novel.  This can be seen as praise and insult, since I think later Heinlein is a bloated parody of younger Heinlein.  I truly hate stories like The Cat Who Walks Through Walls where Heinlein dredged up cherished characters I loved in adolescence turning them into silly kissy-kissy wife-swapping swingers.  I give Robinson great credit for not doing this.  Robinson is far more liberal than Heinlein, and I admired those liberal qualities in Variable Star, but I wonder what Heinlein would have thought though.

This is going to sound weird, but those twelve Heinlein juvenile novels from the 1950s are sacred to me.  As much as I would love to read another one I can’t.  The world of 2009 is too different.   Heinlein vastly improved my troubled childhood with his stories, and I will always love them, but I had to grow up.  I don’t think anyone can write the 13th 1950s Heinlein Scribner’s novel in 2009.  I think Alexei Panshin came closest with his 1968 novel Rite of Passage but that novel worked because I was still in my teens.  Maybe a 2009 teenager will find Variable Star just as magical as I found Time for the Stars all those years ago.  I think that’s possible.  But for us old Heinlein fans, I don’t know.

If I was going to write a series of young adult science fiction novels for the 2010s, that I hoped would be as inspirational as the 1950s Heinlein stories had been for me, I think they should include these elements:

  • The lead characters could be boys or girls
  • The main character would still be high school age kids who find some way to live independent of their parents
  • Science, math and engineering would still be vitally important
  • I would accept the importance of sex and romance in these stories because realistically sex and romance is a huge part of teenage life, but the primary subject of the story would be sense of wonder and the future
  • I’m not sure what role violence would play
  • I could skip profanity, although I think editors accept it now in young adult novels
  • Success of the plot would still depend on the kids
  • Nearly all the ideas Heinlein had about space travel have turned out to be wrong, so it would be vitally important to invent new realistic explorations of space that kids could evaluate

This is where Robinson really missed the boat with Variable Star.  By focusing on Heinlein’s peak ideas he seems to have forgotten they are over a half century old.  Heinlein speculated about many things that we’ve since come to realize as completely wrong.  Kids can’t built atomic rockets that take them to the Moon.  There is no intelligent life on Venus and Mars.  Just the radiation will keep us from farming Ganymede.  And all the forms of space travel Heinlein envisioned are no more realistic than Tinkerbell’s fairy dust as a mode of transportation.

Just because science has outpaced science fiction doesn’t mean those twelve Heinlein juveniles aren’t great stories, still readable today.  They have just migrated to the world of lovable childhood fantasy stories.  The job of the next Heinlein is to write speculative fiction based on the science we know today.  Like I said, there are some core elements of Variable Star that does this, unfortunately Robinson ruins it with a fantasy invention that fits in a plot that’s based on a sequence of way too many coincidences to be believable.  I’ve read that Robinson has gotten the go ahead to write three sequels to this book.  I would have loved to read those books if they were based on Variable Star’s core problem, and if the book from chapter 19 on had been different.

The idea of developing many colonized worlds through slower-than-light travel is excellent speculative matter for current science fiction.  Having the main event of chapter 17 affect those worlds is another great idea for science fiction to explore.  But the story needs to do it without telepathy or breaking the speed limits imposed on information.  That would be a far out story worthy of many books.

Finally, hey Spider, one mention that a door dilates is cool homage to Beyond This Horizon, mentioned over and over again is just story stopping agony.  One unbelievable coincidence in a novel is forgivable, but one per chapter is authorial suicide.

JWH – 4/25/9

Science Fiction: 1951

We like to think we live in the present, interacting with the now, but how much of our conscious awareness is influenced by the past?  Much of Christian thought can be tied to the year 1611, when the first edition of the King James Bible was published.  But the stories in that book go back to the dawn of civilization.  Last year when I was listening to the Old Testament on my iPod I realized I was listening to thoughts that were thousands of years old.  Wouldn’t it be fun when recalling a thought if we also visualized its inception dates?

Every external idea in our mind originated sometime in the past, and for many big ideas we could probably date their origin, like the heliocentric hypothesis of Copernicus from 1514.  Actually, there can be two dates for each idea, the first, for when it was created and the second, for when we acquired the idea ourselves.  I didn’t hear about Copernicus’ revolutionary insight until grade school in the 1950s.

H. G. Wells invented the time machine in 1895, but when did you discover it?  Wells’ idea came to me via the classic movie in 1962.  Our minds are filled with ideas of all sizes, from tiny fleeting thoughts about reorganizing the kitchen cabinet, to magnificent giants like evolution.  They can be scientific, religious, political, philosophical, personal and so on.  And ideas are hard to transmit, often coming to us in fragments and distorted.  For those people who reject Darwin’s brilliant vision into how mother nature works, it could be because they never experienced the thousands of ideas that Darwin discovered before he formulated his hypothesis.  Nor have they experienced the millions of ideas  scientists have explored to verify that evolution is far from theoretical.

Let’s pretend I want to write the most brilliant science fiction novel for the year 2011.  This is a much smaller ambition than understanding evolution, but still quite complex, so let’s also pretend that lazy-ass me is willing to to do some major research.  I could start with the year 1818, for when Mary Shelley created Frankenstein, and try to make a list of all the great breakthrough science fictional ideas that were put forth since then.  After doing this research I’d have a good genealogy of the science fictional tree of knowledge and whatever branch I followed to place my novel, I should be in good shape for imagining the next bud.

Well, I’m not going to actually do that, I don’t have the time, but it would be a wonderfully fun project.  Instead, I’m going to test the idea out on 1951, the year I was born, and build a list of science fiction books that were published in 1951 that I consider major, and are still remembered today, and add to that list any major story that appeared in a SF magazine in 1951 that’s I’ve read or can research, and finally ice the cake with important science fiction movies from the same year.

ASF-Nov51

I’m a science fiction addict, which explains why I’m intrigued with the idea of dating all the great science fictional ideas, but you could do this too with your own favorite subject area.  Hell, this idea itself popped into my mind when I noticed that the book I’m reading, The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury, came out in 1951, the year I was born.  This got me to thinking about the state of science fiction that year.  Bradbury is a cautionary writer, so his science fiction seems afraid of the future, but then again Heinlein’s The Puppet Master didn’t paint a rosy picture either.  Nor could you find upbeat escapism by going to the movies and watching The Day the Earth Stood Still, When Worlds Collide and The Thing From Another World.

How in the world did I grow up thinking science fiction paved the way for exciting futures?  The most famous science fiction novels of the 20th century to the world at large are Brave New World, 1984, A Clockwork Orange and Slaughterhouse Five.  When did the future become a Disney destination – well certainly not in 1951.  Or maybe all the gosh-wow sense of wonder stories of 1951 where not the big public movies, but the cherished stories that only the fans embraced.

All around the world in 1951, but mainly in the U.S. and Great Britain, science fiction writers were creating their visions of the future.  Few people took them seriously.  Some of their tales are still in print today, The Illustrated Man is set for its second movie production, and a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still came out last year.  Why is science fiction from 1951 still being read and seen today?

I’ll work with these books:

And consider these anthologized stories from the magazines:

And use these memorable movies:

We stand 57 years into their future and know what will happen.  We can judge the hopes and fears of the people of 1951 and psychoanalyze their paranoia.  The opening story in The Illustrated Man, “The Veldt” is about a high tech nursery that is a lot like the holodeck from Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Bradbury’s story worries that technology will change the children of his times.  How do you interpret a story where the kids kill the parents with their futuristic nursery?  But wasn’t Bradbury right?  The innocent minds of 1951 don’t exist anymore.  If Ray Bradbury could have known what the Internet shows the children of today wouldn’t he have written an even scarier story?

Juveniles delinquency was one of the major problems people feared in the 1950s, so what if Bradbury could have foretold the Columbine massacre?  I include Catcher in the Rye in my list because it was probably the best literary novel of the year, and decade, but it also represented the same kind of fears about children changing that Bradbury was writing about.  Children were rejecting innocence, turning against the status quo and their parents and this scared the bejesus out of the conservatives of the times.

What we have to do is imagine what it would be like to be an average Dick or Jane in 1951 encountering these stories for the first time.  My father and mother, George and Virginia, didn’t have a clue about science fiction, but let’s imagine them going to see The Day the Earth Stood Still.  How many Americans, much less citizens of the world, really believed in aliens from other planets?  The UFO craze started in the late 1940s, so the idea was in the news for people to ponder.  Of course there had been the 1938 scare when Orson Welles broadcast H. G. Wells story of The War of the Worlds that terrified millions.  Even my parents told me about that when I was little.

By 1951, anyone in the U.S. that wasn’t too poor to have a radio or TV set had been exposed to the idea of aliens from other planets.  Another popular movie of the year was The Thing From Another World.  With two movies, three major science fictional concepts were inserted into the public mind:  interstellar flight, wise powerful beings not mentioned in the Bible, and intelligent robots.  Science fiction readers had known about these concepts for decades, but in 1951 the number of SF readers were very small.

Because of the atomic bomb in 1945, the idea of a man-made end of the world event had also been introduced to the public.  That idea was more powerful than alien visitors, because Klaatu and Gort’s real purpose was to warn us not to wipe ourselves out.  Then George Pal produces When Worlds Collide to let us know there were other ways for life on Earth to end, and John Wyndham gave readers yet another idea of how human life could be threatened.  Heinlein even combined the fear of Reds with the fear of aliens.

Many of the SF books and movies that came out after 1951 were about the end of civilization, or the end of mankind, or the end of the world.  The paranoia of the 1950s is very hard to top, but occasionally a writer will try, and Cormac McCarthy recently succeeded vividly with The Road.

Fritz Leiber’s classic a “A Pail of Air” reminds me of the film When Worlds Collide, because they each have a roaming astronomical body coming into our solar system and changing life on Earth.  In Leiber’s story, a dark star pulls Earth out past the orbit of Pluto, and in When Worlds Collide, a movie based on the 1933 book by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer, two planets from outside our system get captured by the Sun, and one destroys the Earth.  Ever since I’ve been reading science fiction as a kid I’ve been living with hundreds of ideas on how our world might be destroyed.  I guess that’s no big deal because before science fiction, religious people lived with the idea that God would stomp our world.  Maybe science fiction end of the world stories are just variations on biblically inspired end of the world tales.  However, to me, rogue stars and atomic wars seemed far more real than the wrath of God.

Science fiction is never very far from religion.  In “The Quest for Saint Aquin” Anthony Boucher, the legendary founding co-editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, pictures a future where religion is threatened.  This story promotes the great science fictional idea of machine intelligence, and even suggests if pure AI thinking can believe in God, then why shouldn’t humans.

Now here’s an original SF idea that has not been carried forward to the present and evolved?  I guess people don’t believe that AI and robots will also believe in God?  I’ve never thought they would, but what if they did?  Here’s a potential story idea.  However, this reminds me of a famous joke from the 1950s.  Scientists wanted to know if there was a God, so they built a giant IBM machine and fed it all knowledge and typed in the question:  Is there a God?  They got back:  There is now.

1951 was a long time before most people thought that space travel could be real.  Most of the public when they thought of rocketships to the Moon and Mars pictured them from what they learned in the Sunday comics reading Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon.  They didn’t know they were just six years from the Russians orbiting a satellite and a decade before the Russians put a man into orbit.  The future was closing in far faster than anyone knew, except for Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov.  These men ruled 1950s science fiction as a triumvirate.

Heinlein’s 1950 classic film Destination Moon helped the public to realistically picture the first mission to the Moon.  Clarke and Heinlein wrote stories and books about early space explorers to nearby destinations.  Asimov thought huge and promoted the major SF idea of a galactic civilization, much like the Roman Empire, but spread across thousands of star systems.  Asimov’s vision wouldn’t attain wide public recognition until Stars Wars in 1977, with a good bump from Star Trek in 1966.

By 1951 Heinlein and Clarke were writing stories that realistically tried to show astronauts working on the Moon and Mars.  In the tiny world of science fiction fans, these ideas were ancient, but I think Heinlein and Clarke felt if a fictional idea was ever to give birth to reality they needed to promote space travel to millions.

How does someone born in 1966, the year of Star Trek, and 1977, the year of Star Wars, feel when they discover these ancient ideas for the first time?  1951 is Darwin voyaging on the Beagle, while 1969’s Armstrong’s giant step for mankind is science fiction’s 1859’s On the Origin of Species publication.   It’s the time between a few thinking about an idea till when the idea hits the public in a big way.

If you turn on Turner Classic Movies and eventually watch every movie from 1951 except for a handful of SF films, you will begin to get the idea of just how little that world of 1951 thought about the great ideas of science fiction.  In 2009 you can’t escape these ideas unless you live in that proverbial cave like a fundamentalist Muslim, and I bet even cave dwelling terrorists have thought about aliens from other worlds, space travel, and intelligent robots.

The question is, will in 2051, or 2151. how many of the great science fictional ideas of the 20th century will still be around?  How many will have come true and how many will be thought of as quaint fantasies of ignorant people of the past, like the Oneida Community?

And what if I continued my research, could I show how 1911, 1921, 1931, 1941 and 1961, 1971, 1981, 1991 where different from 1951 regarding the evolution of science fictional ideas?  It would take a lot of work, but I think the answer is a definite yes.  Could I write a novel to be published in 2011 that would stand out with radically new evolutionary science fictional traits?  I don’t know if I can do it, but I’m hoping someone will.

JWH – 2/14/9

Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku

Every science fiction fan should read Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku.  Kaku surveys all the famous concepts of science fiction, often referencing when he first encountered the idea in famous science fiction books, movies and television shows.  With each idea, aliens, starships, light sabers, death rays, robots, and so on, Kaku sets the stage by bringing the reader up to speed with the physics behind the idea.  He carefully explains what we know, what current experiments relate to the concept, and what future science might still discover.

I bought Physics of the Impossible on audio and liked it so much that I bought a hardback copy for reference.  This week, the Science Channel is rerunning the three episodes of Kaku’s Visions of the Future which makes a perfect visual supplement to the book, showing Kaku going around the world visiting labs working on these cutting edge breakthroughs that will lead to our science fictional future.  Many of the experiments Kaku talks about in the book can be seen in these videos.

Michio Kaku divides his book into three areas:

Class I Impossibilities – “These are technologies that are impossible today but that do not violate the known laws of physics.”

  • Force Fields
  • Invisibility
  • Phasers and Death Stars
  • Teleportation
  • Telepathy
  • Psychokinesis
  • Robots
  • Extraterrestrials and UFOs
  • Starships
  • Antimatter and Anti-universes

Class II Impossibilities – “These are technologies that sit at the very edge of our understanding of the physical world.”

  • Faster than Light
  • Time Travel
  • Parallel Universes

Class III Impossibilities – “These are technologies that violate the known laws of physics.”

  • Perpetual Motion Machines
  • Precognition

Kaku is very generous here in his categorizations.  For example telepathy.  He doesn’t try to make a case for what most people would think of as telepathy, one person reading another person’s mind.  Instead he shows how close we might get with machines that can scan minds and read vague conceptual patterns in the scan.  By chance, 60 Minutes ran a segment on Mind Reading this week. 

Follow the link to see a video that illustrates exactly what Kaku was covering, and presents even newer findings.  They show people in a MRI machine drawings of basic objects like a knife or hammer and scientists can record the brain images and analyze them with a computer.  The 60 Minutes’ producer volunteered to be scanned and was shown ten objects.  The computer program then analyzed her brain scans, correctly identifying 10 out of 10 objects.  This isn’t telepathy, but it’s pretty darn amazing.

The book does this over and over again, referencing dozens of cool contemporary science experiments.  There have been many books like this one, for example, The Physics of Star Trek back in 1995 by Lawrence M. Krauss.  The Kaku book is just the latest, so it has the most current survey of neat science tech.  I love to read such books every two or three years to catch up on the latest discoveries.  These books are sobering for the science fiction fan, and they explain why I give such bleak predictions about science fiction in my recent essay, Science Fiction in My Lifetime.

I gave far better odds on intelligent robots than Kaku.  I based my prediction on models in nature.  For example, before there were airplanes we watched birds, so we knew something could fly.  Consider faster than light travel.  We have never observed any object traveling faster than light, so I consider FTL travel an extreme long shot.  We know biological machines can be intelligence and offer a continuum of examples from the lowest animals to humans.  Airplanes are not like birds, but they fly.  I think we’ll eventually invent a pattern recognizing artificial neo-cortexes that can match and surpass our intelligence.

I highly recommend Physics of the Impossible for people who love science fiction.  It’s very well written and understandable.  You don’t even have to be particularly science minded to enjoy the book.  And if you don’t read science fiction, this book will catch you up on a lifetime of far out ideas.  Physics of the Impossible would make a fantastic eight part documentary for PBS.

JWH 1/6/9

Science Fiction’s False Assumption?

Since the earliest days of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon the public has assumed the future of mankind included space travel.  The inherent assumption was humans would extend the range of civilization into space, across planets and moons, and then out to the stars.  I’m starting to wonder if that’s a false assumption.  From commitment to landing, the United States went to the Moon within a decade.  We spent the next four decades going nowhere.  Why?

Answering that question could take volumes.  Most people’s quick response is money, but our society waste billions upon billions with little effort.  It’s obviously not technology, we have that in spades.  Nor are we lacking in visionary scientists and dreamers.  Have we reached the limits of our frontier exploring impulses?  Could the dreams of space civilizations be built on false premises?  Science fiction presents thrilling fantasies that are endlessly entertaining, but does anyone really want to live them?

When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut because I loved science fiction.  Since then I’ve read dozens of books by and about astronauts and it’s quite obvious I don’t have the right stuff.  I couldn’t even be a mission specialist.  I would love to live that life, but in all honesty I never had the intelligence and drive.  Could that be a clue to science fiction’s false assumption?  Space travel is for the very elite, the very best, the most driven, the most focused, and that leaves the rest of us ordinary folk off the crew list.  Would NASA get more money if it reserved seats on their spaceships for normal people?

When it comes down to it, there is only one reason to build a space civilization, to protect the human species from extinction.  And since most of humanity wants to go to heaven rather than Mars they don’t buy that reason.  Leading normal lives of marriage and family is far more important to people than living in space.  All the astronauts had emotional conflicts between missions and marriages.  Few people would leave their families if offered the chance to colonize the Moon or Mars.

I now wonder if the premise that the future always includes men and women living in a space is just a false assumption.  That somewhere back in time we developed that premise, a false one, and we’ve all been working off that bad hunch ever since.  The reality is living in space is extremely difficult, if not impossible.  We won’t know if it’s impossible until we try. We blithely assumed it was possible, but that might another false assumption.

The other day I wrote “Is Colonizing the Moon Possible?” and I have received some interesting email comments.  Some people don’t believe we’ll ever build industries on the Moon to make a colony self-sustaining.  Others have suggested that the reason why science fiction never portrays the pioneering days of building a lunar civilization is because people don’t care about such boring details.  If you asked a 1,000 high school kids if they wanted to work  at manufacturing steel would any raise their hands?  I was hoping in my essay that if we rephrased the question by asking how many would like to design a robot to produce steel panels on the Moon a few might raise their hands.  But that might be another false assumption on my part.

Most science fiction fans love the dream and tell me it’s just a matter of waiting for the right time, that conditions will be different in the future.  Is that another false assumption?  I’ve been waiting forty years for something new to happen.  In all those forty years there have been endless books and documentaries predicting the glories of space travel that are just around the corner.

I’m constantly watching HDTV documentaries with beautiful animations of astronauts building habitats on the Moon and Mars.  They are quite awe inspiring!  I’ve been watching such futurist documentaries since the 1960s and grew up admiring paintings of the future like those of Chesley Bonestell.

bonestell_450

Are those animated plans any different than science fiction?  We know what kind of payloads the Saturn V and the planned Ares V can deliver to the Moon, and those wonderful animations show lunar outposts with equipment that would take dozens and dozens of rockets to ship to the Moon or Mars.  The United State flew thirteen monster Saturn 5s over a period of six years (1967-1973).  Budget cuts kept a two more from flying.  The public lost interest with Apollo 12.  The big space race was over, so why watch a rerun?

mooncolony

To build scientific stations on the Moon or Mars, and I’m not even talking about self-sustained colonies, but Antarctica like research habitats, like those in space documentary animations or pictured in space book illustrations, would take years of launchings, with each year blasting off the entire historical fleet of Saturn V rockets.  Will this ever really happen?  It could, and without much of a budget increase to NASA, but only if the public demands it.

President elect Obama is planning on spending several hundred billion dollars to create millions of jobs, but so far he isn’t looking to NASA as a jobs agency.  But even in flush economic times, no President has wanted to expand NASA’s budget by much.  This shows there is little public demand for space exploration.  Congressmen are often quoted as saying they see zero support for space projects.

I guess two things can happen.  One day we’ll collectively wake up and say to ourselves, “Hey, whatever happened to that vision of space travel,”  and get busy.  Or, next century people will look back on the era of manned space flight like we look back on 19th century whalers.

I’m too tied to my science fiction heritage to imagine what the average person on Earth thinks about space exploration.  Sales of hard science fiction books are quite small.  And even though science fiction movies are among the top money makers in Hollywood, few movies are made about space travel.  The public accepts the idea that space travel, but they assume it’s in the far future.

There is a vast difference between science fiction and the reality of space travel – just read the biographies of the twelve men who walked on the Moon.  Space is an extremely harsh environment.  If you think this winter is cold, imagine 250 degrees below zero in a vacuum.  Or more radiation than any nuclear plant worker sees in a lifetime.  And you know how you seldom see space suits in Star Trek and Star Wars, it’s because they are brutal to wear.  Living in the worst slums of Earth is paradise compared to the limited life in a controlled space environment.

Now all of this may sound like I’m a naysayer about space exploration, but that’s completely wrong.  I’m just saying it will be viciously hard and almost impossible but we need to do it.  Can you imagine a future where we never go to Mars or create a civilization in space?  Imagine humanity never leaving Earth but solving the problems of war, environment, hunger, disease, and we build a steady state economy where life is comfortable and secure.  Do we wait around until the race is snuffed out by an exploding Yellowstone, visiting comet or mutated virus?  Is that all there is?

Anyone who studies science knows that mass extinctions periodically visit Earth.  This weekend there were many scary stories going around the Internet about the Yellowstone super-volcano exploding and I wondered what would happen if it was true.  Do we accept the death of our species in the same way as we accept our own death?  We were born out of nothingness and we shall return to nothingness.  Do we just accept that?

Most of humanity answers yes.  There are a few extreme thinkers who say no.  To those thinkers, we are born out of nothingness and we will do whatever it takes to cling to existence.  If this world goes, we’ll find another, if our universe goes dark, we’ll wormhole our way into another.  The universe may lack meaning, but our purpose is to survive.  That’s the drive behind science fiction’s main assumption.  The question you must ask yourself:  Is that a false assumption?

It is the true dichotomy of humanity – life on Earth and life off Earth.  To most men and women, the ultimate question is:  Do you believe in God and eternal life?  To atheists, the question is:  Do you want to survive?  To future intelligent robots the question will be:  Is there a reason to keep the switch in the on position?  Developing a space civilization is asking the human species:  Do you want to avoid extinction.

JWH 1/3/9

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