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I love the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, and feel that we really got a major return from our taxes with these two robots.  However, I have a request for NASA.  I want them to send a robot that films its Mars roving adventures in HD at 1080p so watching the video will feel like walking on Mars.  That means, the cameras need to be at head height, and the vehicle needs to move along at the same clip as an average walker.  We could call it the Mars Hiker mission.

Oh, and I want sound.  I don’t know if there’s much sound on Mars, but I want to hear what’s going on, even if it’s just the whir of the robotic motors.  And while the NASA’s engineers are at it, provide readouts at the bottom of the screen for temperature, air pressure, wind speed, time of day, etc.  Anything to help me feel like I’m rambling around on Mars.  And it would be unbelievably cool if the rover actually walked like a man, and could climb up places that a rover couldn’t go.  It doesn’t have to be a technical mountain climber, but I’d want the Hiker to visit places equivalent to hiking around Yellowstone Park.

I don’t know if it’s possible, but I’d love to see the night sky on Mars, and what the stars and Milky Way look like from such a dark planet.  Another thing I’d like the Mars Hiker to do, is walk up to a Viking lander.  For my final wish, I’d like to watch the robot build something on Mars.

I suppose we haven’t had videos from Mars, the Moon, Titan and other landing sites because the bandwidth is beyond what NASA can send back home, but we have a lot of Geek power on planet Earth, so I’m hoping tech wizards can solve that problem.

I don’t want robots to have all the space traveling fun.  I understand it might be too expensive, dangerous and impractical to send humans on these missions, but I NASA could make their missions more of a collective exploration experience.  I wonder if engineers could design a helmet to wear while communing with the Mars Hiker, so that we could have an even more immersing experience?  I would have loved to have worn such a helmet during the recent Hubble repair mission.

I’ve resigned myself to never becoming an astronaut, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t treasure the vicarious thrill of remote viewing.  It’s pretty pathetic to have robot envy, but hey, I’ll take my space kicks any way I can.

JWH – 6/4/9

I don’t know how many people caught the documentary last night on ABC, Earth 2100, but I hope it was everyone with a TV.  If you didn’t catch the broadcast, follow the link and watch it online.  The show uses an imaginary biography of a woman named Lucy, born June 2, 2009, the day of the show, and follows her to the year 2100.  Lucy’s life is shown in anime-like graphics, interspersed with very famous talking heads.  Well famous to me, since I read a lot of books on climate change, and also watch a lot of science shows featuring these same big brains Wizards from Oz..

The show is two hours long, and I’ll spoil the ending for you.  Things go very bad.  But that’s the point.  The producers want to scare us, and their scenario is very scary.  Imagine spending a lot of your life like those poor bastards at the stadium in New Orleans after Katrina.  Throw in the Mad Max flicks, Waterworld and The Postman, and you’ll get the picture. 

The producers of Earth 2100 claimed they were giving the worst case projection, but I’ve read and imagined far worse.  In the last ten minutes of the show the producers pull back and plead, “It doesn’t have to be this way, if we act smart now.”

I’m afraid my first thought was of last broadcast of the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and his Jaywalking routine.  I’m not trying to be a holier-than-thou snob.  I just read The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time by Will Durant, and I’ve been feeling like total dumb-ass all day as it is.  The world is loaded with brilliant people, but most of us aren’t so Einsteiny.  The happy alternative ending to Earth 2100 only works if the average billions of ordinary boob-tube addicts start acting a lot smarter than we have been up to now.  Is that even possible?  As long as a good percentage of the population refuse to even accept we have a climate change problem, the odds of avoiding the coming dark ages is betting on a long-shot.

Within the show they bring up the conservative belief that, “The American Way of Life is Not Negotiable,” which is a fascinating philosophical stance.  But that’s like a junky declaring that giving up heroin is not negotiable.  A way of life that is totally self-destructive shouldn’t be one you want to keep, unless you are deluded that it’s one hell of a high that you can’t live without.  If only it was an American problem!  The Earth might survive just our abuse.  The trouble is the rest of the world wants to copy our way of life.

At one point in the show they have a graphic that basically says, “Whoops, we just had 6 billion people die.”  But that leaves the remaining 3.1 billion living in Hell on Earth.   For decades we have sat in our wealth and watch African famines on high definition TVs and don’t do shit.  But what if the American way of life becomes one of living in a refuge camp, starving with flies buzzing around our faces, and waiting all day for the water truck so we can riot to fill our plastic buckets?  It’s one kind of ethical crime to ignore dying people half-way around the globe, but it’s a whole other monumental ethical failure to not help yourself and your family when you do have the resources.

Of course, prophets have always yelled that Hell is coming to town, but anyone who studies the Old Testament actually knows how many people pay attention.  Who knows, maybe one day in the far future when a new civilization chronicles our looming dark ages, they will give credit to Earth 2100 as being some kind of 21st century televised Isaiah.

JWH – 6/3/9

Science fiction has a long history of exploring the theme of religion.  Childhood’s End, A Case of Conscience and Stranger in a Strange Land are a few standout examples.  Arthur C. Clarke even has two very famous short stories that depend on religion for O’Henryesque gimmicks, “The Star” and “Nine Billion Names of God.” 

Two contemporary theistic science fiction stories I’d like to explore are The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons and the recent cult TV series, Battlestar Galactica (BSG).  There is a curious overlap between these two epic space operas.  Both tales are long, with the four Simmons books taking 96 hours on audio, and Battlestar Galactica running 65 hours on DVD.  Both stories deal with galaxy spanning human populations in conflict with AI descendents.  Both stories explore religion in a super-science context.  Both stories have human/AI babies playing important roles.  Both stories have a woman leader of the human occupied galaxy.  Both stories features AI minds inhabiting human looking bodies (Cybrid and Cylon).  Both stories depend on easy FTL travel.   Both stories feature heroic fighting women.

Of course, the lists of differences are just as interesting.  BSG’s humans chose not to live with computer networks.  The Hyperion Cantos emphasizes English literature, with the first novel structured like Canterbury Tales, and featuring a cybernetic recreation of John Keats, with many characters often quoting William Butler Yeats and other poets.  BSG plays up astrology, Greek myths, and parallels 9/11 and other early 21st century politics.

Hyperion, the first book in the series came out in 1989, while Battlestar Galactica began airing in 2004, so I have to wonder if Dan Simmons influenced Ronald D. Moore?  Or do these stories just reflect the evolution of science fiction in general?  But why do both stories deal with the intersection of religion and artificial intelligence?  I was totally blown away when I discovered the Cylons were followers of monotheism and hated the humans for not follow the one true God, but strangely enough, the humans of BSG play out the role of the twelve tribes of Israel.

Finally, both stories end up affirming the supernatural and the power of love.  Are they making a philosophical statement about the sacred and the future, or are these just ingredients to make best selling stories by playing up to the public’s sweet tooth for spiritual mumbo-jumbo?  I’m a lifelong atheist, but I love both of these tales, and find the religious underpinnings of the stories to be absolutely juicy storytelling.  In fact, if these stories had been totally secular, I might not have liked them.  Why is that, I must ask myself.

After a few episodes of watching Battlestar Galactica, I wondered how long I would watch the series if it was just a bunch of murderous robots out to exterminate the poor humans.  Ditto for the world of Hyperion.  Another war of AI versus people would be ho-hum.  But as soon as a the Cylon babe in red mentioned her obedience to the one true God, I went, “Whoa!  This is new.”

So are these Astounding Stories science fiction?  I think John W. Campbell would have loved both of them, but I think H. G. Wells would have sneered down at each.  Both yarns play up to sentimentality while being very unscientific.  If you compare their science fiction to the science of Rare Earth Hypothesis, which Dan Simmons prefigures at one point eloquently in his story, we have to consider these stories as escapist fantasies.

This is why I ask if these stories are the direction that SF evolution is moving.  I was totally enthralled by the stories, but they completely lack any realism.  Has science fiction become another hopeful heaven, a new opium of the masses, in which millions dream of escape from the unromantic details of this reality?  Time and again, it has occurred to me that science fiction is a substitute for religion, with promises of far out living up in the sky.

I believe artificial intelligence is in our future, but not faster-than-light travel.  I see religious belief slowly declining in our secular world, so it shouldn’t play a role in speculative fiction about the far future.  Science fiction writers always predicts humans at war with robots, but I can easily imagine that artificial intelligence does evolve, but AI machines leave humans on Earth, and they travel to the stars without us.  Now, that still leaves plenty of room to speculate as to whether AI life will take up religion.  Simmons goes into this, but I don’t want to spoil his story.  But I find it hard to believe that intelligent machines would ever consider something real they cannot detect with science and technology.

Would future robotic civilizations really want to exterminate homo sapiens?  Why do we believe so firmly in that idea?  Is it guilt?  Do we feel that Earth needs to be disinfected from us human vermin?  Is the appeal of Battlestar Galactica and Hyperion Cantos from some deep rooted psychological condition?  Do we secretly fear machines?  Many of my hardcore science fiction friends hated the angelic implications in BSG, but lots of people ate it up.  We’re a nation that loves UFOs and angels.   We want our FTL spaceships and immortal spirits. 

Should science fiction play to this weakness of ours, or should it explore reality in the same way as science?  I can write off my enjoyment of these stories at the expense of believability by saying I’m just having fun.  They are Ben & Jerry’s New York Chocolate Chunk for my brain.  But I’ve always justified my science fiction diet by claiming it’s educational, but the sad fact is science fiction is no more real than a reality TV show.  I just have to accept that I’m getting fat on SF sweets.  I think I’ll go have some more Ben & Jerry’s, though.

JWH – 6/2/9

The first edition of The Book of Genesis was written during a time when our survey of reality was quite small.  We now know that reality is  fantastically larger in size, so I’m wondering if someone should rewrite The Book of Genesis and give it a bit of updating.

¹In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

²And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

³And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

⁴And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

⁵And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

⁶And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

⁷And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

⁸And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

⁹And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

You see, we have a problem, right from verse 1.  Is God just the architect of planet Earth, and Genesis only the chronicles of creation for our local neck of the woods, or are we starting the story late, after God has done a whole lot of other work?  Wouldn’t it be better if we start with verse 3?  “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”

That might go better with our knowledge of The Big Bang.  But it also has some problems.  When the biblical authors mentions light, are they only talking about the visible spectrum?  It took mankind another few thousand years to learn of the existence of the entire electro-magnetic spectrum.  If the line was written now, would it say, “And God created space and time, matter and energy, and all the forces of nature.”

For many decades scientists thought The Big Bang was the beginning of all of creation, but now cosmologists dare to entertain a time before The Big Bang, with multiple universes, which makes reality a whole lot bigger still.  Because we all love to think in terms of cause and effect, shouldn’t the first verse of The Book of Genesis be something like:  “From out of nothing came something.”  Or maybe, “Reality is infinite in all directions of time and space.  Our existence proves the impossibility of nothingness.”  But this boggles the mind.

Any new editors of The Book of Genesis will need to thoroughly understand cosmology, because of our knowledge of creation is quite vast, and more than that, it has deep philosophical implications.  When our most distant ancestors wrote the first edition of The Book of Genesis they only covered their nano-tiny corner of existence, and pictured God manlike, able to trod Earthly paths.  Later writers and editors of the Bible pushed God up into the sky.  Does this mean, with our current knowledge about a universe 13.7 billion light-years across, that God has to stand outside of this creation?  Can God be smaller than his art?

The science of astronomy is going through a renaissance right now, and they know a whole lot about creation and how it evolved.  Fundamentalists may foam at the mouth when they hear the word evolution, but if you look at our knowledge of reality there is a common thread that runs throughout the history of everything that can only be thought of as evolving.

Absolute nothingness should have been the order no time and space.  Reality never should have gotten started.  But it did, and if you study the relentless development of our universe from Big Bang to Big Brains you will see a spooky force seeking greater organization.  This force is more like gravity than a deity.

To get just a taste of what I mean, read the Rare Earth hypothesis, based on the book Rare Earth by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee.  I’m sure theists will see this as the hand of God, and scientists will consider the same concept as one hell of a lucky streak for random events, but I wonder. 

How long has reality worked to create you and me?  How many universes and dimensions did it take to produce Earth?  If The Book of Genesis was rewritten to take in the knowledge within Rare Earth, with it’s ever growing list of almost impossible requirements to produce a planet with animals, the new Book of Genesis 2.0 would be far more inspiring than 1.0.  Theists who are too lazy to study more than one book of knowledge really need to get into science.  The trouble is, science takes reading dozens of books just to get a glimmer of what’s going on.

If modern scientists wrote The Book of Genesis today, they might condense what they know about the miracle of evolution down to something the size of The Encyclopedia Britannica.  But that would only get you Evolution for Dummies.  Some theists are all hung-up on mankind descending from apes, but hell, that’s almost the end of the story of evolution.  Even if you ignore where the Big Bang comes from, just getting from hydrogen to the rest of the periodic table of elements is a fairly long and complex story, a tale that is omitted from The Book of Genesis 1.0.

Every element beyond hydrogen took a great deal of stellar evolution to create, and that took billions of years.  Getting from tiny particles to stars is another long story.  After that is the evolution of heavier elements, so planets could evolve.  Getting to land, air and water is another epic adventure.  Then we must chronicle the rise of complex molecules, and then to the miracle transformation from inorganic to organic chemistry.  That gets us to a few billion years ago when this spooky force that I’m talking about, through apparent random events, came up with the beginnings of life.

At every step of this long evolutionary path, randomness chooses order over chaos.  Why?  There is no real reason to believe an even higher ordered force existed to guide this randomness.  If that was true we’d have to ask how it evolved first?  The only thing I can imagine about this reality after reading Rare Earth, is forces of nature have been trying to produce humans for a very long time, much longer than our 13.7 billion years in this universe.  How many eons of creating sterile universes did it take before one had this spooky force that keeps driving forward turning chaos into order?

And the absurd tragedy for this unknown force’s effort, is us,  a species hell bent on turning exterminating the beautiful order that this force took so long to create.  It took eons to evolve an Earth that’s capable of evolving complex life, and our western civilization is going to destroy our magical planet in a couple hundred years.  Go figure.

The purpose of the Old Testament was to teach about obedience to the will of God.  If you want to know the will of reality, I’d suggest studying science and the history of the universe from The Big Bang until The Book of Genesis was written.  If you want to tag it Intelligent Design, then go ahead, I don’t care.  Call that spooky force God, if you want.  But it’s no personal God. It doesn’t offer salvation or promise answers to prayers.  It doesn’t even care that we exist.  If it expects anything from us, I would imagine, it’s only desire would be for no one to break its extremely long lucky streak.

There is no afterlife or Heaven so far in this long chain of evolution, because all Creation does is create more order, and we’re apparently its mostly complex accomplishment.  It would be amazing if it could evolve spiritual beings and heaven.  Maybe us thinking of such a concept drives the spooky force onward towards such an even more complex ordering.  Who knows what future eons will bring.  Maybe immortal souls won’t happen in this universe, but might in the future, half an infinity of universes from now.  But it won’t happen if we fuck up this planet.

JWH – 5/28/9   

What’s with the new obsession with time travel?  By the way, if you haven’t seen the Lost Season 5 finale or the new Star Trek film, don’t read this, because I’m going to talk about concepts that will spoil the shows.  Is it me, or did the new producers of Star Trek just reboot the franchise, using time travel so their new actors for old characters wouldn’t be annoyed by having to live lives consistent with Star Trek’s history? 

I remember the summer of 1966, when NBC first ran ads for Star Trek, and how excited I was for that new season to start.  The 1966-1967 TV season was my all-time favorite.  I grew up and got married and eventually watched all the Star Trek shows through Voyager, and some of Enterprise.  I’m not a fanatic fan, but seeing the new movie stimulated many nostalgic rushes.  I wasn’t bothered by the changes in the new characters, and really liked that Spock was hooking up with Uhura, but when Spock’s mom died it rattled my brain because I wondered how they were going to fix the plotlines to all those classic episodes, so the Star Trek world that we know and love could unfold properly.  Evidently, we’re living in a new Star Trek universe.

But I don’t like time travel paradoxes.  If bad Romulan Nero goes back in time and destroys Vulcan, wouldn’t Spock 2.0 know not to be late in his future date to save Romulus, and thus piss off Nero for a second time, which would start the loop all over again?  Or will future history lessons on Romulus teach young Nero in school that one day he will travel back in time, destroy Vulcan and be killed by Captain Kirk?  That sounds like something Kurt Vonnegut would write.

And now, let’s turn to Lost.  Is it me, or did Jack and crew, murder a horde of people just to solve their own sniveling little problems?  I’m totally into the story, so I’m trying not to be critical, but I’ve just got to worry about the ethics.  Here’s the deal, if setting off Jughead, the H-bomb in 1977, seals up the mysterious energy source that will pull Oceanic Flight 815 from the sky in 2006, the TV show that we know as Lost never gets to happen.  (Are we expected to forget we ever watched it?) 

Ignoring the obvious time paradox, what about the murder of all the people on the island in 1977 that weren’t there by time travel.  They are dead, and they will have no future timeline at all.  And how many people and their timelines does this event avert?  How many people never get to come to the island after 1977?  And how significant might these changes be to the entire history of Earth?

I’m getting to hate time travel stories.  Time travel plotting totally hosed Heroes.  I’m worried about Lost and Star Trek.  Wouldn’t Star Trek have been much better if the new stories fit within the existing Star Trek universe? 

Finally, were there no line of command officers on the Enterprise?  There should have been dozens if not hundreds on a ship that size, so why does the punk Kirk get to go immediately to the Captain’s chair?  Weren’t there any career officers busting their butts for decades to be in line for command?  This new Star Trek reminded me of the old Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland movies where the high school kids get to throw together a Broadway musical in two weeks.  In other words, this new film feels like the Star Trek kids get to take over the Enterprise and save the world.

JWH – 5/17/9