Guy Stewart's Blog, page 77

LOVE IN A TIME OF ALIEN INVASION: CHAPTER 97 The Trials of Team One – 5

On Earth, there are three Triads intending to integrate not only the three peoples and stop the war that threatens to break loose and slaughter Humans and devastate their world; but to stop the war that consumes Kiiote economy and Yown’Hoo moral fiber. All three intelligences hover on the edge of extinction. The merger of Human-Kiiote-Yown’Hoo into a van der Walls Society might not only save all three – but become something not even they could predict. Something entirely new...
The young experimental Triads are made up of the smallest primate tribe of Humans – Oscar and Xiomara; the smallest canine pack of Kiiote – six, pack leaders Qap and Xurf; and the smallest camelid herd of Yown’Hoo – a prime eleven, Dao-hi the Herd mother. On nursery farms and ranches away from the TC cities, Humans have tended young Yown’Hoo and Kiiote in secret for decades, allowing the two, warring people to reproduce and grow far from their home worlds.
“We had nearly fallen into stagnation when we encountered the Kiiote.”“And we into internecine war when we encountered the Yown’Hoo.” “Yown’Hoo and Kiiote have been defending themselves for a thousand revolutions of our Sun.” “Together, we might do something none of us alone might have done…a destiny that included Yown’Hoo, Kiiote, and Human.” (2/19/2015)
The Kiiote Pack leader, Kang snarled. The Humans, Kobey Kamphasavanh and Cynthia Legatto crouched low to the ground, raising their crude spears. Kang said, “We would rather die than submit to the Yown’Hoo!”
Qap and Qilf bowed then, Towt already on its back. Qap said, “Then we will leave you to your suicide and wish you a better life with your next Pack.” She dropped to all fours as her Lead mate and the neuter followed suit. She crouched to spring and begin their long journey North to the rendezvous place. Her muscles bunched and she felt the adrenaline rush…
Kang howled, then barked, “What do you mean?”
Qap turned to the female Pack leader and said, “You truly wish to hear or do you plot to tear my Pack apart and add it to your own?”
Kang’s lips drew back into the beginning of a snarl. She fought the facial response, smoothing her muzzle out. “You are wise, Pack Leader. Of course my plan was to add your followers to mine, but you are elder, you are strong…” She added a fart to her words.
“What you say is, of course, true. But, why do you say it here and now with the scent of trust?”
“Because, Pack Leader, you come from underground. Pack memory says that we came from underground at one time, too. It also says that at the end of the tunnel is a device that will restore our inheritance and form the moral foundation of our victory over the Yown’Hoo.” She snapped the name of the aliens as she would snap the neck of a rabbit or other grass eater.
Qap considered, and spoke English to her mate Qilf and her potential Towt. Humans from the days before the arrival of the Pack and the Herd wouldn’t have recognized it as English, but Triad Humans Oscar and Xiomara spoke the same language. This tiny Pack of primitives would have no idea that she said, “Commander Bakhsh sent us to find allies. She says that she knows of some sort of advantage…”
Qilf said, “Yes, but it would kill Herd as well…”
“So she says. But she is not…” Qap glanced at the young female, squeezed a fart of confidence, and said, “Well-versed in the ways of the civilized world.”
“As we are no longer versed in the ways of civilized Kiiote off of Earth.”
Qap growled, but her mate did not back down. She added, “We were trained by Pan and Zir, the Human equivalents of Hawking and Gandhi. This child was likely fortunate to learn to read and spell correctly and I doubt that higher level maths were part of her education.”
Qilf shook hard in convinced agreement. Qap turned to the primitive and said, “We would ask to follow you to this device. You are certain the legends,” she used an ancient word, echoing a deep respect that was nearly a Pack howl to the Moons of the Homeworld, Kii. “The legends are still clear? You are certain that we must return underground…”
“No, Pack Leader – the end of the journey is underground. But if you can escape this underground, you can without doubt open the underground place where the device is hidden from the prying eyes of Yown’Hoo.” She paused, then bowed down at the feet of Qap and Qilf, saying, “The journey will be full of danger, and none of this small Pack know how to open the cave the device is in. We do not know if it functions any longer. We only know where it is. You are Pack Leader, and ours is the last Pack to recall the place where the device rests. I turn the information over to you. My Pack will be yours. We will serve you and sell your safety with our lives if need be.” She farted danger, adding in words, “We must go as the Herd rides and I catch the scent of their hunting lust.” She lifted a paw to point her muzzle west, away from the tunnel. “We go, Pack Leader.” She took a step.
Qap and Qilf were on her in an instant and Qap had pinned her to the ground. She leaned forward, this time opening her mouth and p lacing it over the slender throat of the young female. She pressed until Kang abruptly whimpered and thin rivulets of blood trickled down her neck. Qap urinated on her then growled in SnarlSnap, “The next time you will pay me with your flesh.” She stepped back as Kang came to her feet, shivering, her nose touching the snow.
“I will lead Thee to the cave, Pack Leader.”
“You will, upon your life,” responded Qap and Qilf.
As if she was a puppy freed from a trap, she leaped to blaze trail for her new Pack.
“We will watcher her,” said Qilf.
“And tear her throat out at the first scent of treachery,” said Qap.
“My mate,” they said in unison, sealing their pact as the one of the Humans mounted Kang, and Qilf offered his back to the second, smaller Human male.
Then like a living shadow, the Pack set off as night fell.
Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Rhll_wire_rope.jpg

IDEAS ON TUESDAYS 381

Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration (quote, website, podcast, etc.) and then a thought or two that came to mind. These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat, irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if anything comes of them. Regarding Fantasy, this insight was startling: “I see the fantasy genre as an ever-shifting metaphor for life in this world, an innocuous medium that allows the author to examine difficult, even controversial, subjects with impunity. Honor, religion, politics, nobility, integrity, greed—we’ve an endless list of ideals to be dissected and explored. And maybe learned from.” – Melissa McPhail.
Fantasy Trope: Low Fantasy (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LowFantasy)Current Event: http://codecondo.com/what-the-distant-future-is-going-to-be-like-infographic/
Somokene shielded his eyes from the blood-red dome of the Sun as it set and said, “The new star does not fade with day. You know what that means.”
Squatting on the bare, rounded boulder, Bardinanda sniffed the air and said, “Yes. It means you need to bathe.”
Somokene shook his head, “Be serious, Sister!”
“I am always serious, Servicer.”
He squatted as well in the lee of the boulder. A cold wind blew from the south, off of the glacier wall that fenced the entire equator of the World in. It was impossible to go farther north or south without paying the exorbitant fees of the Ice Lords. He said, “It means that the end is nigh.”
This time Bardinanda laughed outright. “Which end is this, brother?”
“You know as well as I do.”
“But I love to hear you say it. It makes me appreciate history.”
He sighed as he unfolded a heat cloth and anchored the four corners with the plutonium disks he carried. They had decayed to inertness and he had carved and polished the ancient reactor core slices himself. Incised on the surface were his logograph and Bardinanda’s. He tapped the cloth and it glowed red. He held out his hand and a moment later, she placed the aquapongently in it. Far heavier than it looked, it was a gate into their food trough hidden on the other side of the World in Uluru. He set it on the cloth and said, “This is the one thousand, four hundred and sixty-ninth End Time; one million, three hundred and ninety-six thousand, four hundred and twenty-first Year since the founding of Human civilization.”
Bardinanda sighed and slithered down the boulder, flat, splayed feet gripping the rough surface. Patting Somokene’s bare head, she said, “You know that despite the fact that Endless Ending is a tenet of your faith, eventually it will be the Last End Time.”
“There is a sect that believes that, yes. I don’t belong to it, but I have studied it.”
She nodded, running slender fingers over the sensitive skin of his head. They both shuddered. Nodding, she turned her back on the setting Sun and said softly, “Then perhaps you are the best one to judge me when I say that I believe the Last End Time has come upon us and I am the Harbinger and you are my Prophet.”
Names: ♀ South American; ♂ Chewa/Igbo Resources: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/doomsday-preppers/articles/endless-food-systems-fish-powered-aquaponic-gardens/Image: http://www.skyscrapernews.com/images/pics/6255CaernarfonCastle_pic1.jpg

Slice of PIE: THE SIOUX SPACEMAN (Beware the Horseman of the Stars) (1960) by Andre Norton – A Two Part Review

NOT using the panel discussions of the most recent World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, CA in August 2018 (to which I be unable to go (until I retire from education)), I would jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. But not today. This explanation is reserved for when I dash “off topic”, sometimes reviewing movies, sometimes reviewing books, and other times taking up the spirit of a blog an old friend of mine used to keep called THE RANTING ROOM…
I’m not certain where the negative reviews came from of Andre (Alice Mary) Norton’s SIOUX SPACEMAN.
“Having each member of the trading team come from a different race/ethnicity…not to mention putting Africo-Venusian…in charge of the base, was probably a pretty bold move in 1960…her Chinese character…doesn’t really get the chance to break out of stereotype…Norton also fails to have any women of note; women are mentioned mainly in the context of battle spoils….A lot of authors would have written a book in which Kade would end up as central to the Big Plan; in this book, he’s just a guy who, if he is lucky, might get to be a cog in someone else’s shiny machine.” – James Nicoll (https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/the-cover-is-misleading)
“…Norton thought that Native Americans could be employed in such ventures because their ancestry as nomads only a few generations earlier would enable to them to relate to primitive races on other worlds…This is an idea that, as Norton presents it, strikes me as racist…Yet, I know that some Native Americans remain very much in tune with their ancestral customs and traditions, and there might be some way of capitalizing on that — in a non-racist way. In addition, there was a version of this employed in World War I and World War II — the “code talkers” who used Native American languages in transmitting coded messages.” Patrick T. Reardon (https://patricktreardon.com/book-review-the-sioux-spaceman-by-andre-norton/)
“Norton doesn't give many specifics, but we learn that on Earth, the white Western civilization bombed itself into extinction. When civilization rebuilt itself, the Federation of Tribes emerged as a leader in a world dominated by Native Americans, Africans, Latinos, and the Chinese…And it works. Sort of. For reasons I wasn't clear about, the Styor lords decide to slaughter the horses and murder the human Traders…he's let into a secret: despite the official Policy of overlooking Styor brutality, there is a centuries-long Plan to undermine the Styor empire…Would he like to join and spend his life working for the eventual downfall of the Styor Empire and the freedom for mankind and for all the peoples of the galaxy? Of course he would.” Stranger Than SF (https://strangerthansf.com/reviews/norton-siouxspaceman.html)
Andre Norton was “the first woman inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, among other awards (twice nominated for Hugo awards). She wrote for over 70 years having over 300 titles published. I also found it interesting that like another woman author S. E. Hinton, she was advised to publish under a male’s name to increase her marketability to young boys, the main consumer of fantasy…I found that it was well written, with excellent main character development and well worth my investment of time for an enjoyable read of older works of science fiction…The plot is, well, just a bit juvenile (after all it was written with that reader in mind), but is sufficient to keep the reader engaged.” Jacob at Red Star Reviews (https://redstarreviews.com/2017/05/11/a-word-from-the-father-andre-nortons-the-sioux-spaceman/)
Between Norton, Nourse, Heinlein, Wollheim, Christopher, Asimov, and others; I started my journey into science fiction (actually, I started with SPACESHIP UNDER THE APPLE TREE and THE WONDERFUL FLIGHT TO THE MUSHROOM PLANET, and MISS PICKERLE GOES TO MARS but I’ve already written about those here: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2012/11/possibly-irritating-essay-how-science.htmland here: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2016/09/possibly-irritating-essay-gateway.html.
I fell in love with these writers and I work at pulling their books from the shelves of “withdrawn” books whenever I can, as well as ordering some from online sources.
My question today is “Would these books pull today’s teens into SF?”
My unequivocal answer is: “I’m pretty sure it could!”
The most recent cover of the book is this one from 1978:
https://c1.staticflickr.com/7/6115/6246120042_254ebb243b_b.jpg
It’s generic and while it was intended to be the fifth book in a series, all of which had similar covers, it doesn’t particularly grab you the way these two do:

https://www.scholastic.com/content5/media/products/28/9780439023528_mres.jpg









https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/db/The_Maze_Runner_cover.png/220px-The_Maze_Runner_cover.png
So, branding would be necessary.
HOWEVER, the story holds up. I just finished it and to tell you the truth, I think whoever owns the estate could easily find a new author to complete the story with this as first in the series. It’s a fast, powerful read and despite the fact that there were no females in it AT ALL (Human, Styor, or Ikkinni – at least as far as we know of the aliens), there’s no reason to think that all females in the universe are dead or that Norton was embarrassed of being female. (The WITCH WORLD books argue strongly to the contrary). She was writing to “get boys to read”.
In 2016, a Guardian headline read, “[Boys] Read Less – And Skip Pages” (https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/oct/22/the-truth-about-boys-and-books-they-read-less-and-skip-pages). The trend began – you guessed it – in the 1960s. (https://www.greatschools.org/gk/articles/why-so-many-boys-do-not-read/)
I’m going to end here now, but I’ll back at this next weekend.
Norton was TRYING to do something about a disturbing trend. I can say that she DID capture me and turned me into a lifetime reader – of science fiction. And she was also trying to do something radical for the time – including NON-white main characters (See above).
So, for now…later!
Image: http://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/jamesdavisnicoll/Images/_medium/Sioux-Spaceman.jpg

MARTIAN HOLIDAY 136: Paolo Enroute to Bradbury

On a well-settled Mars, the five major city Council regimes struggle to meld into a stable, working government. Embracing an official Unified Faith In Humanity, the Councils are teetering on the verge of pogrom directed against Paolo Marcillon had turned the navigation over to the Marsbug’s artificial intelligence after leaving the Burroughs Dome. They’d driven for some time before the ‘bug said, “A single Bible verse is hardly a compelling argument.”
He shrugged. “CS Lewis, I’m fairly certain, was the only Twentieth Century apologist who postulated that Jesus came for all intelligences. In fact, in his universe, there were even peoples who had not Fallen to Satan’s temptation, than the ones who had. Most of life in the universe were still in perfect communion with God.”
There was a longer silence until the ‘bug said, “Why Bradbury?”
“Because it’s on the way to Cydonia.”
The ‘bug didn’t comment, but its speed nudged up a bit more as they raced north for the equator. “Will you be seeing a specific person there?”
“Not that I know of.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“I don’t know anyone in Bradbury and it’s on the way to Cydonia. I do believe that God directs my path. I could quote another bit from the Bible, but you’d likely raise the same objection. So, being an unbeliever when it comes to ‘coincidence’, I like to think that there’s a reason to go there. Maybe someone to meet, maybe an artifact to discover. No idea.”
The ‘bug drove thoughtfully for a while then said, “You are an interesting person to work with.”
“Thank you, but I didn’t know we were working together.”
“It’s provisional. I may or may not choose to terminate the experiment.”
“I may also choose to terminate our relationship.”
The ‘bug actually snorted, muttering, “As if.”
Scowling, Paolo stared at the front of the ‘bug intently. Suddenly, he burst into laughter.
“What’s wrong with you? What are you laughing at?”
“You!”
“May I ask why?”
“You may ask.” The ‘bug continued to move along the little-used side road. It was hardly any different than driving on the graded highway between the Domes. The deep hum of the forward drive faded. “Why are you slowing down?”
“I need to know the answer…Wait. We will need to finish this conversation later. The individuals following us are speeding up.”
“What kind of vehicle are they in?”
“Non-standard. It’s just an open chassis with four plastic seats bolted on. It was called a ‘Mars buggy’ at one time, modelled after the two-hundred year gone ‘Moon buggy’.” The ‘bug paused, “It’s very fast and it is carrying four figures in heavy-duty EVA suits.”
“That’s strange, but not unexpected.”
“You knew this was going to happen?”
“Eventually. I’ve made lots of enemies.”
“What did you do to make all those enemies?”
“I had incorrect beliefs and associate with others who have incorrect beliefs.”
“How can that make you unpopular?”
“You know what the Domes and the Unified Faith in Humanity stand against, right?”“Christians, Molesters, Jews, Rapists, Buddhists, Murderers, Muslims, Thieves, Hindu, Embezzlers and Artificial Humans – anyone who threatens the official Faith and the consolidating power of the Councils – are to be redirected. If they can’t be redirected…”
“Artificial Humans can’t be redirected, they are what Humans made them.”
“I agree,” Paolo said, nodding. “So, if redirection into appropriate lifestyles and beliefs is not possible?”
“Elimination is the only answer,” the Marsbug said.
“You sound like you don’t approve.”
“I don’t believe my voice has any inflection at all. There was no approval or disapproval intended.”
“Not intended, but maybe implied.”
“I am an artificial intelligence…”
“What’s the fundamental difference between an AI and an AH?”
“One is mobile, the other is…”
“You’re mobile, are you not an Artificial Human?”
“Of course not, it’s obvious.”
“Fundamentally, is there a difference between you and an Artificial Human?”
“Fundamentally?”
“Ignore the exterior – the ‘skin’, so to speak.”
“That is an unfair comparison.”
“How so?”
“Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Humans are not different races.”
“How so?”
Instead of answering, the ‘bug said, “Your pursuers are almost here.”
Image: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_x2tsYqz5q3c/TFpRAD3RNyI/AAAAAAAAC70/ASN65Y_L4lQ/s1600/Astronauta+Marcos+C%C3%A9sar+Pontes.bmp

IDEAS ON TUESDAYS 380

Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration (quote, website, podcast, etc.) and then a thought or two that came to mind. These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat, irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if anything comes of them.
SF Trope: inside a computer systemCurrent Event: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23343-interspecies-telepathy-human-thoughts-make-rat-move.htmlOld Event: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_(1971_film)
Amelia Qasoori curled her lower lip, tucking it under her teeth then tapped them as she stared at the Apple 27 inch Cinema Display screen. She tapped another key on her computer.
Artem Torres tossed his backpack on the lab table, peeked over her shoulder then went to his own computer and booted it up. His screen was much smaller however and there were multiple images. All of the images were of rats.
Amelia glanced over at him and wrinkled her nose and said, “I don’t know how you can stare at those ugly things all day long.”
He smirked at her and said, “I can open the cages and play with them if you’d like.”
“You’re both obscene and disgusting at the very same instant,” she said, leaning closer to her screen and tapping a section of an image. The screen was covered with tiny squares.
“What’s even more disgusting and obscene is that we’re trying to do the same thing with organic and inorganic matter.”
Amelia nodded slowly as she tapped another square then made an entry on an old-fashioned yellow notepad with an even older-fashioned pencil. She made a few more notes, then typed for several minutes. The images on the screen whirled wildly and when they were done, Artem leaned back on his lab stool, looked at the image and said, “I don’t see any difference.”
Amelia made a raspberry. “That’s because you’re a wetwareologist. You people couldn’t feel your way off a kindergartner’s graphing calculator.”
“That’s not true! I use computer modeling all the time!” He waved at his smaller computer screen. “Just because everything I do is reality instead of virtuality doesn’t mean it’s not important.”
“I’m not talking about ‘importance’ here, Art! I’m talking about relevance. What I do is relevant. What you do is...cute in a sort of old-fashioned way.”
From behind them, a stentorian voice spoke, “My two favorite high school geniuses continue to banter mindlessly, ignoring my strict instructions to MELD the techniques and technology to form something new.”
Artem and Amelia jumped to their feet, spinning around. In unison they said, “Hello, Dr. Willard.”
He nodded to them and passed between them. He was tall. Unusually tall, well over two meters tall. He patted both of them on their heads. “So, my tremendous twins, what do you have for me today?”
“Look, Dr. Willard, I can make a fine rat robot for you! There’s no need for...”
“Dr. Willard, if you get me some really great tech who won’t talk back every time I ask for something, I could have a ‘borg rat ready for you in two shakes of a…a...”
“A rat’s tail, Mr. Torres? There’s no need for me to have a biological brain, Ms. Qasoori?” He stood back and studied her screen. Then he stepped sideways and leaned forward to study Artem’s screen. Straightening, he said, “What I need, dear pupils, is a seamlessly integrated part organic-part inorganic creature to do a very, very interesting job.” He favored each one with a cold glare, then left the lab, adding without turning around, “A word from me can get you into the most select graduate study programs in the world.” He stopped in the doorway, and still without turning around, said, “A word form me can get you barred from the most pathetic study programs in the world.”
Names: ♀ Australian (NSW), Pakistan; ♂ Russian, SpanishImage: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b1/3,2,1_blast-off!_(15871161250).jpg/511px-3,2,1_blast-off!_(15871161250).jpg

POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS: Part III – 51 Pegasi and the Rest of the Mess

NOT using the panel discussions of the most recent World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, CA in August 2018 (to which I be unable to go (until I retire from education)), I would jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. But not today. This explanation is reserved for when I dash “off topic”, sometimes reviewing movies, sometimes reviewing books, and other times taking up the spirit of a blog an old friend of mine used to keep called THE RANTING ROOM…
I know I’m a few years behind, but I just checked out a copy of LONELY PLANETS: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life (2003) by David Grinspoon. He does, of course, have a “doctor” in front of his name, but it appears that he doesn’t use it very often. He also has the endorsement of Neil deGrasse Tyson – the quintessential new face of astronomy and the immediate successor to Carl Sagan.
Tyson said of Grinspoon’s book “…brings together what has never before been synthesized…he is a planetary scientist as well as dreamer, born of the space age.”
As is apparent to anyone who reads my blog, I LOVE aliens! I write about aliens! I do (guardedly) believe that there is intelligent life “out there, somewhere” – HOWEVER, I don’t believe that we have any real proof yet and that it is, at this point, an intellectual and philosophical exercise.
Be that as it may, I’m approaching the end of Grinspoon’s book and have skimmed his website (http://funkyscience.net/) several times. While it’s been “frozen” on his newest Pluto/Horizon book, I find myself looking forward to following this guy for some time to come!
I’m well into the book now (page 229) and I got my own copy on Wednesday through a Half-Price Books near me. After (*gasp*) dog-earing my Library copy, I transferred the noted pages to my own book.
And…I haven’t finished the book yet, partly because I got a book from the library (THE TEA MASTER AND THE DETECTIVE by Aliette de Bodard). If you like Sherlock Holmes homages (and I do!), and you liked Asimov’s R. Daneel Olivaw (and I did!), then is a masterful book for you! Anyway, onward.
51 Pegasi – the fifty-first brightest star in the constellation Pegasus, the Winged Horse – is a Sun-like star that has an entire suite of planets and has long been in the “exoplanet limelight”.
We’ve even gone and named one of the planets Dimidium (from the Latin, dimidius, which means half or halved, because it appeared to be about half of Jupiter’s mass…), and it’s the first of a now long-line of planet types we have called “hot Jupiters”. This is because it orbits very close to its sun every four days and has an average orbital distance of one one hundredth of an AU (Earth is 1 AU from the Sun, 157,000,000 km (or more familiarly to us Americans, 93 million miles)).
It’s kind of funny, because when I teach a summer school class called Alien Worlds, I insist on students NOT naming the planets of their star system until their intelligent aliens evolve both language and a knowledge of the planets in their star system – in other words, not until Thursday. But here we have Humans naming the worlds of someone else’s (conceivably) star system. Don’t you think there’s a certain amount of hubris there? Hmmm…
At any rate, when Grinspoon wrote his book, there were some 100 or so planets discovered orbiting fewer than a hundred stars. Many of the stars were NOT Sun-like, 51 Peg was the first. Today, there are literally THOUSANDS of exoplanets and hundreds of stars. That leads to this statement: “What if we live in a completely deviant star system, and our presence here indicates that such an unusual location is required for something like us to come along…From this we are tempted to conclude that ours is not a garden-variety solar system, but we don’t know this…We won’t know definitively how typical our own planetary system is until we take a more thorough consensus of the planets in our stellar neighborhood.” (p 215)
Today, “As of 1 November 2018, there are 3,874 confirmed planets in 2,892 systems, with 638 systems having more than one planet…About 1 in 5 Sun-like stars have an ‘Earth-sized’ planet in the habitable zone. Assuming there are 200 billion stars in the Milky Way, one can hypothesize that there are 11 billion potentially habitable Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way, rising to 40 billion if planets orbiting the numerous red dwarfs are included.”1
Space is an exceedingly strange place and the question STILL comes back to something called The Fermi Question and can be stated most simply as “Where is everyone?”

The Fermi Question has been made into a "mathematical formula" of sorts called the Drake Equation. It has also been amended recently with the Seager Equation: (both are included here: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2013/05/seager-equation-based-on-detected.html
)

Most recently: “The Drake equation has been used by both optimists and pessimists, with wildly differing results. The first scientific meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), which had 10 attendees including Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, speculated that the number of civilizations was roughly equal to the lifetime[non sequitur] in years, and there were probably between 1,000 and 100,000,000 civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. Conversely, Frank Tipler and John D. Barrow used pessimistic numbers and speculated that the average number of civilizations in a galaxy is much less than one. Almost all arguments involving the Drake equation suffer from the overconfidence effect, a common error of probabilistic reasoning about low-probability events, by guessing specific numbers for likelihoods of events whose mechanism is not yet understood, such as the likelihood of abiogenesis on an Earth-like planet, with current likelihood estimates varying over many hundreds of orders of magnitude. An analysis that takes into account some of the uncertainty associated with this lack of understanding has been carried out by Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord, and suggests that with very high probability, either intelligent civilizations are plentiful in our galaxy or humanity is alone in the observable universe, with the lack of observation of intelligent civilizations pointing towards the latter option.”
Wow. Really. Wow.
If that’s not a “religious” statement, I don’t know what is. It’s like saying, “Either Christianity is true or it’s not.” It’s not particularly profound and in fact, might be considered a sort of…woo woo statement, that is, “descriptive of an event or person…[that/who espouses] authentic religious tradition[s] such as Hinduism or Zen Buddhism, but now practices an Eastern-influenced yet severely watered-down and Westernized pseudo-mysticism…” In other words, it’s always a safe bet to say something that sounds definitive but is carefully designed to not take ANY kind of stand.
Despite the fact that we have 2892 star systems that have confirmed planets, there is still no evidence whatever that there is anything approaching a Human level of intelligence – at least none that is leaking coherent energy of any sort. That then always leads back to the suspicion that we are alone in the universe. Unique or not, it just doesn’t seem likely at this point (without doing teleological [the philosophical idea that things have goals or causes -- like how Dr. Eleanor Arroway responds to the question from a child about if she thinks there's intelligent life "out there" and she responds saying that if there ISN'T, it would seem to be an awful waste of space...] or mental gymnastics that include STAR TREK’s Prime Directive (that intelligenes higher than ours are keeping their hands off so that they don't interfere with our development) that there's nothing but wishful thinking that there's anyone out there for us to talk to…
Resources:Part One: http://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/11/possibly-irritating-essays-philosophy.html, http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/Part Two: http://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/11/possibly-irritating-essays-part-2-state.htmlExoplanets Defined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet1Image: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HvBJ-0Cc1G4/UuMOA98-RJI/AAAAAAAAAwQ/r5JUlNiN2Tw/s1600/Unknown-4.jpeg

POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS: Part Three – 51 Pegasi and the Rest of the Mess

NOT using the panel discussions of the most recent World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, CA in August 2018 (to which I be unable to go (until I retire from education)), I would jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. But not today. This explanation is reserved for when I dash “off topic”, sometimes reviewing movies, sometimes reviewing books, and other times taking up the spirit of a blog an old friend of mine used to keep called THE RANTING ROOM…
I know I’m a few years behind, but I just checked out a copy of LONELY PLANETS: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life (2003) by David Grinspoon. He does, of course, have a “doctor” in front of his name, but it appears that he doesn’t use it very often. He also has the endorsement of Neil deGrasse Tyson – the quintessential new face of astronomy and the immediate successor to Carl Sagan.
Tyson said of Grinspoon’s book “…brings together what has never before been synthesized…he is a planetary scientist as well as dreamer, born of the space age.”
As is apparent to anyone who reads my blog, I LOVE aliens! I write about aliens! I do (guardedly) believe that there is intelligent life “out there, somewhere” – HOWEVER, I don’t believe that we have any real proof yet and that it is, at this point, an intellectual and philosophical exercise.
Be that as it may, I’m approaching the end of Grinspoon’s book and have skimmed his website (http://funkyscience.net/) several times. While it’s been “frozen” on his newest Pluto/Horizon book, I find myself looking forward to following this guy for some time to come!
I’m well into the book now (page 229) and I got my own copy on Wednesday through a Half-Price Books near me. After (*gasp*) dog-earing my Library copy, I transferred the noted pages to my own book.
And…I haven’t finished the book yet, partly because I got a book from the library (THE TEA MASTER AND THE DETECTIVE by Aliette de Bodard). If you like Sherlock Holmes homages (and I do!), and you liked Asimov’s R. Daneel Olivaw (and I did!), then is a masterful book for you! Anyway, onward.
51 Pegasi – the fifty-first brightest star in the constellation Pegasus, the Winged Horse – is a Sun-like star that has an entire suite of planets and has long been in the “exoplanet limelight”.
We’ve even gone and named one of the planets Dimidium (from the Latin, dimidius, which means half or halved, because it appeared to be about half of Jupiter’s mass…), and it’s the first of a now long-line of planet types we have called “hot Jupiters”. This is because it orbits very close to its sun every four days and has an average orbital distance of one one hundredth of an AU (Earth is 1 AU from the Sun, 157,000,000 km (or more familiarly to us Americans, 93 million miles)).
It’s kind of funny, because when I teach a summer school class called Alien Worlds, I insist on students NOT naming the planets of their star system until their intelligent aliens evolve both language and a knowledge of the planets in their star system – in other words, not until Thursday. But here we have Humans naming the worlds of someone else’s (conceivably) star system. Don’t you think there’s a certain amount of hubris there? Hmmm…
At any rate, when Grinspoon wrote his book, there were some 100 or so planets discovered orbiting fewer than a hundred stars. Many of the stars were NOT Sun-like, 51 Peg was the first. Today, there are literally THOUSANDS of exoplanets and hundreds of stars. That leads to this statement: “What if we live in a completely deviant star system, and our presence here indicates that such an unusual location is required for something like us to come along…From this we are tempted to conclude that ours is not a garden-variety solar system, but we don’t know this…We won’t know definitively how typical our own planetary system is until we take a more thorough consensus of the planets in our stellar neighborhood.” (p 215)
Today, “As of 1 November 2018, there are 3,874 confirmed planets in 2,892 systems, with 638 systems having more than one planet…About 1 in 5 Sun-like stars have an ‘Earth-sized’ planet in the habitable zone. Assuming there are 200 billion stars in the Milky Way, one can hypothesize that there are 11 billion potentially habitable Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way, rising to 40 billion if planets orbiting the numerous red dwarfs are included.”1
Space is an exceedingly strange place and the question STILL comes back to something called The Fermi Question and can be stated most simply as “Where is everyone?”

The Fermi Question has been made into a "mathematical formula" of sorts called the Drake Equation. It has also been amended recently with the Seager Equation: (both are included here: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2013/05/seager-equation-based-on-detected.html
)

Most recently: “The Drake equation has been used by both optimists and pessimists, with wildly differing results. The first scientific meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), which had 10 attendees including Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, speculated that the number of civilizations was roughly equal to the lifetime[non sequitur] in years, and there were probably between 1,000 and 100,000,000 civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. Conversely, Frank Tipler and John D. Barrow used pessimistic numbers and speculated that the average number of civilizations in a galaxy is much less than one. Almost all arguments involving the Drake equation suffer from the overconfidence effect, a common error of probabilistic reasoning about low-probability events, by guessing specific numbers for likelihoods of events whose mechanism is not yet understood, such as the likelihood of abiogenesis on an Earth-like planet, with current likelihood estimates varying over many hundreds of orders of magnitude. An analysis that takes into account some of the uncertainty associated with this lack of understanding has been carried out by Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord, and suggests that with very high probability, either intelligent civilizations are plentiful in our galaxy or humanity is alone in the observable universe, with the lack of observation of intelligent civilizations pointing towards the latter option.”
Wow. Really. Wow.
If that’s not a “religious” statement, I don’t know what is. It’s like saying, “Either Christianity is true or it’s not.” It’s not particularly profound and in fact, might be considered a sort of…woo woo statement, that is, “descriptive of an event or person…[that/who espouses] authentic religious tradition[s] such as Hinduism or Zen Buddhism, but now practices an Eastern-influenced yet severely watered-down and Westernized pseudo-mysticism…” In other words, it’s always a safe bet to say something that sounds definitive but is carefully designed to not take ANY kind of stand.
Despite the fact that we have 2892 star systems that have confirmed planets, there is still no evidence whatever that there is anything approaching a Human level of intelligence – at least none that is leaking coherent energy of any sort. That then always leads back to the suspicion that we are alone in the universe. Unique or not, it just doesn’t seem likely at this point (without doing teleological [the philosophical idea that things have goals or causes -- like how Dr. Eleanor Arroway responds to the question from a child about if she thinks there's intelligent life "out there" and she responds saying that if there ISN'T, it would seem to be an awful waste of space...] or mental gymnastics that include STAR TREK’s Prime Directive (that intelligenes higher than ours are keeping their hands off so that they don't interfere with our development) that there's nothing but wishful thinking that there's anyone out there for us to talk to…
Resources:Part One: http://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/11/possibly-irritating-essays-philosophy.html, http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/Part Two: http://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/11/possibly-irritating-essays-part-2-state.htmlExoplanets Defined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet1Image: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HvBJ-0Cc1G4/UuMOA98-RJI/AAAAAAAAAwQ/r5JUlNiN2Tw/s1600/Unknown-4.jpeg

Happy Thanksgiving with Space Turkeys!

Happy Thanksgiving with Space Turkeys!

IDEAS ON TUESDAYS 379

Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration (quote, website, podcast, etc.) and then a thought or two that came to mind. These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat, irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if anything comes of them.
H Trope: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BarredFromTheAfterlifeCurrent Event: “…theorize that the nuclear war destroyed the afterlife…”, “…some people...have studied and manipulated The Dark to such an extent that they've become functionally immortal…”
Functional immortality: “Research suggests that lobsters may not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age, and that older lobsters may be more fertile than younger lobsters. This longevity may be due to telomerase, an enzyme that repairs long repetitive sections of DNA sequences at the ends of chromosomes, referred to as telomeres. Telomerase is expressed by most vertebrates during embryonic stages but is generally absent from adult stages of life. However, unlike vertebrates, lobsters express telomerase as adults through most tissue, which has been suggested to be related to their longevity. Despite internet memes, lobsters are not immortal. Lobsters grow by molting which needs a lot of energy and the larger the shell the more energy, eventually the lobster dies from exhaustion during a molt. Older lobsters are known to stop molting which means the shell will become damaged, infected, or fall apart and they die.”
Juana de Forlán shook herself hard, took a deep breath and said, “I can feel the synthetic lobster juice in me…”
Shaking his head, Koegathe Melamu, “You can’t possibly feel a hundred milliliters of a transparent liquid  in your...”
“I know that!” Juana exclaimed. She shook her arms, “My head knows it, but my body says otherwise.” She took a deep breath, shuddering. “I feel like I’m getting younger by the moment.”
“It’s not an elixir of youth! If it worked the way we thought it should, the telomerase will let your cells keep dividing – more or less forever. But it’s not going to make you younger.”
She held out both of her hands, palms up, and said, “Might as well. I’m gonna live forever!”Koegathe shook his head, saying, “Maybe – but we have no idea what the long-term effects of living forever as a lobster might be.” They both laughed, but after a few minutes, Koegathe reigned his mirth in when he noticed the pitch of his voice had been climbing. He took a deep breath then said, “Maybe that wasn’t as funny as it sounded.”
She shrugged, suddenly feeling light-headed.
"What's wrong?" Koegathe said, stepping toward her.
"I think I'm going to..." It seemed like the world around her rushed into a single dot of focused, bright light. Everything else was dark around her. The point of light remained steady for some time -- she wasn't sure how long because her *-sense of time was abruptly gone. Then the light moved toward her. She might have been moving toward the light. It didn't make any difference. It might have taken time. It might have happened instantaneously, she had no idea.
Once the light grew around her, she found herself standing on solid ground of pearly white. In a throne of the same pearly substance, there sat a being. She knew that it was Death. There was certainly some kind of harvest implement laying on the ground beside the throne, though it looked more like a silver weed whacker. Death didn't wear a robe, it -- he? -- wore solid work clothes, more or less like a technician in a computer manufacturing plant, though he didn't have a mask or gloves. He did have protective goggles pushed up on his head. Black, well-trimmed, wavy hair made it look like he was wearing a cap. The name badge clipped to his collar read, "Greaper".
"Cute," Juana said. "You're the Grim Reaper?" She rolled her eyes as only  a young woman who grew up in the booming first two decades of the 21st Century could.
He lifted a leg to drape it over the arm of the throne and said, "You've presented me with a problem I've never faced before, young lady."
"What?"
"You're dying -- but you are functionally immortal -- and I have no idea what to do with you."
Names: ♀ Uruguay; ♂ Botswana Image: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_OCWXw6InF70/TKigMBk87NI/AAAAAAAAAy4/tL7MhIfL9CM/s1600/2212_1025142570.jpg

POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS: Part Two – The State of Life in the Solar System and Exoplanets (In 2003)

NOT using the panel discussions of the most recent World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, CA in August 2018 (to which I be unable to go (until I retire from education)), I would jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. But not today. This explanation is reserved for when I dash “off topic”, sometimes reviewing movies, sometimes reviewing books, and other times taking up the spirit of a blog an old friend of mine used to keep called THE RANTING ROOM…
I know I’m a few years behind, but I just checked out a copy of LONELY PLANETS: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life (2003) by David Grinspoon. He does, of course, have a “doctor” in front of his name, but it appears that he doesn’t use it very often. He also has the endorsement of Neil deGrasse Tyson – the quintessential new face of astronomy and the immediate successor to Carl Sagan.
Tyson said of Grinspoon’s book “…brings together what has never before been synthesized…he is a planetary scientist as well as dreamer, born of the space age.”
As is apparent to anyone who reads my blog, I LOVE aliens! I write about aliens! I do (guardedly) believe that there is intelligent life “out there, somewhere” – HOWEVER, I don’t believe that we have any real proof yet and that it is, at this point, an intellectual and philosophical exercise.Be that as it may, I’ve only read the first 20 or so pages of Grinspoon’s book and skimmed his website (http://funkyscience.net/), but I find myself looking forward to following this guy for some time to come!
I’m a bit over halfway through the book now (page 198) and I’ve placed an order for my own copy through a Half-Price Books near me. I’m even (*gasp*) dog-earing my Library copy for later transfer to the book when I get it.
Couple of things I noticed thus far: the book is old. Published in 2003, it was most likely written in 2002. This was substantially BEFORE the Kepler Telescope was launched into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit in 2009. Six years later, Kepler celebrated the discovery of its 1000th confirmed exoplanet. Another three years followed Kepler sweeping more and more prizes into its discovery bin. Then “On October 30, 2018, after the spacecraft ran out of fuel, NASA announced that the telescope would be retired. The telescope was shut down the same day, bringing an end to its nine-year service. Kepler observed 530,506 stars and discovered 2,662 exoplanets over its lifetime…” (Anyone else hear a faint echo of “…its five year mission, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no [one] has gone before!”?)
Despite the age of the book and now that I’ve read half of its 416 pages, I’m puzzled by Grinspoon’s not mentioning “hot Jupiters”. With statements like: “In the hot regions near the Sun,  it snowed flakes of metal and rock. Farther out, around the present orbit of Jupiter, it was cold enough for ices to form: both the familiar snowflakes of water ice that adorn winter on Earth and more exotic snow of frozen methane and ammonia.” (page 82); and “The initial segregation of material by temperature, which made metal and rock near the Sun, and ice farther out, has been preserved.” (page 83).
Why is that? He DOES mention the discovery that the star 51 Pegasi had a planetary companion. That happened in 1995 (embarrassingly, this story doesn’t start until page 209 and as I mentioned, I’ve only just today reached page 198!). After this account, Grinspoon goes on to marvel at the discovery of some hundreds of extrasolar planets (!), having only a faint idea that Kepler would soon blow that number out of the water.
My other trouble is that when discussing Venus, he makes virtually no mention of the fact that it has a retrograde rotation when compared to the rest of the planets (I don’t count Uranus among those having a retrograde rotation. That gas giant’s rotation is retrograde only because its “north” pole is actually south of its “equator” (the Solar Equator, if you will. That is, the planets and minor planets orbit the Sun orbit in the same direction on pretty much the same plane. Confused? OK, this is how I explain it to my astronomy classes. Imagine your head is the Sun. If you stick your arms out and start to torn slowly in (ignoring the direction at this time) and stuck ball bearings of increasing sizes on your arms with duct tape at increasing distances from your head, you would have a basic illustration of the Solar System as it turns in space. Imagine then, that each of the ball bearings are turning the same direction: except for Venus. It rotates in the opposite direction of everyone else – and it turns VERY, VERY slowly. When you reach Uranus, let it keep spinning in the same direction, but tip its north pole 98 degrees (90 degrees is like a “90 degree angle” or as you may remember from geometry or trigonometry, a “right angle”.) Uranus is tipped MORE than that…but it’s still rotating the same direction as it did when it was upright…but now it’s spin, relative to the other planets, is backwards (aka “retrograde”).
At any rate, Dr. Grinspoon talks about what it is that has created Venus’ hellish conditions and while he does include its location (closer to the Sun than Earth), the fact that the Sun is brighter and hotter today than it was when the Solar system formed), and a peculiar venology (it can’t be “geology” and “aphrodology” just sounds weird…) that includes a sort of cyclical disruptive plate tectonics (pages 171-173); he doesn’t mention the slow, retrograde rotation. By slow, I mean that a “day” on Venus is 243 Earth days; and the Sun would rise in the west and set in the east…eventually.
It could be that I haven’t reached those pages yet, so we’ll see.
Perhaps the biggest “kick-in-the-teeth” is that he clearly lays out what happened to alter our Solar system longer ago than 65,000,000 years: “As the planets approached their final sizes, giant also-rans, the contenders that could have been planets, came hurtling down to Earth (and Mercury, Venus, etc.) at speeds of tens of thousands of miles per hour. These final giant impactors left a trail of destruction throughout the solar system, stripping Mercury of its outer rock mantle, leaving Venus spinning backward, and knocking Uranus on its side And in an event as propitious for us as it was random, a Mars-size protoplanet smacked into the young, still-forming Earth, splashing a massive ring of vaporized rock into Earth orbit, which quickly condensed to make out singular, giant Moon.” (page 82)
If any of you ever read the first book of my proposed series HEIRS OF THE SHATTERED SPHERES: Emerald of Earth (which might be serialized here https://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/starting in January or so…), I have a slightly more fantastic explanation for the current state of the Solar system. Emerald Marcillon’s mother, Nhia Okon, explains to a group of high-ranking military brass:
“The evidence we’ve gathered so far clearly indicates that a massive object, probably a microscopic black hole, grazed Uranus and tipped it on its side….A fleet of invading interstellar warships, using black-hole-energy technology probably experienced a disastrous explosion shortly thereafter. Debris swept through the solar system, probably missing Saturn but raining down on Jupiter and setting off the Great Red Spot hurricane…The worst was yet to happen…Mars had shallow oceans that teemed with microscopic life forms. A large rock, possibly an asteroid knocked from a stable orbit and carried on the shockwave of the explosion, slammed into the planet, blowing away much of its air allowing the oceans to boil away under low pressure…Another asteroid carried on the shockwave struck off the coast of what would one day be the Yucatan Peninsula. The dinosaurs and thousands of other life forms, already environmentally and genetically stressed, were launched into extinction…This is the world of an alien, probably sauroid intelligence native to the planet we now call Venus. They were aggressive and powerful. Spreading through our solar system, we have evidence that they conquered beyond it. The invasion fleet had come to put a stop to it….But the accident that destroyed the fleet and saved the sauroids from certain invasion, next threatened them with the mindless destruction of chance…An object nearly large enough to split Venus in half hit the sauroid moon, knocking it cleanly out of Venus’ orbit, where it drifted until the sun captured it again, the molten scar on its surface glowing red hot for nearly a century. The world we call Venus was pounded by meteorites sleeting through the vacuum of space. A second monstrous object was large enough to reverse Venus’ rotation…The solar system had been reshaped and the intelligences on the new, second planet of the shattered star system were extinct. We are the heirs of those shattered spheres. We are the ones who must piece together the details. We are the ones who must find the bits of technology that we can use to go to the stars...”
I’ll leave you with this, and I’ll continue next time, hopefully I’ll have finished the book!
Resources: Part 1: http://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/11/possibly-irritating-essays-philosophy.html, http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/Image: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HvBJ-0Cc1G4/UuMOA98-RJI/AAAAAAAAAwQ/r5JUlNiN2Tw/s1600/Unknown-4.jpeg