Michael C. Goodwin's Blog, page 13

The Problems with Extraterrestrials

I have worked on my fourth science fiction novel for the past five years, off and on. It has all the big reveals of what has really been happening in the first three novels and looks to be the last in the current series of which happened back in 1972 for my characters. I have also started a fifth book in the series that takes place 45 years later, (just to confuse the issue), but not to digress, my problem has been, all along, aliens.

I went for some simple solutions; there is established space warp technology, very limited faster-then-light communication and a thriving set of extraterrestrial civilizations some 1,200 light-years nearby. I even threw in a causality loop that created some serious problem for all involved. The reptilian aliens I created are called the Na, pretty much a direct steal from my old friend, Alan Dean Foster and his Humanx Commonwealth series. One of his alien races is called the AAnn, (so therefore my Na, just backwards), and they are of course, reptilian. I know rather quite a bit about Alan’s work since I co-wrote and fan published a Concordance of his epic series. But, once again, I digress.

In reality, I do not believe that we would ever have any kind of peaceful contact with extraterrestrials. In fact, my book aliens barely decided not to knock down human civilization and just preferred to wait until the great filter had its way with us. I have blogged on this subject before and so in short, the great filter is that all civilizations will self-destruct in one way or another through environmental degradation, war, pollution, using up all available resources, population expansion, climate change, famine, disease or others. And this is looking more and more possible on our planet. Unless we have the will to face all of this, then yes, we do have a more then likely possibility creating unsolvable problems. So once we immolate ourselves, they, (my aliens), will come to save us from ourselves. Though why any other group of creatures would want to govern us is way beyond me, we can’t govern ourselves and having someone completely different around would be a definite cause for war. So why not just eliminate us all and let the planet heal and come back in a hundred years and occupy it for themselves?

Good question that, we are such an infantile group that contact would be an extreme trial, and why would you put up with the equivalence of a bunch of termites ruining everything in the house? Perhaps I should write a more realistic novel where the aliens want nothing to do with us? Pretty boring that, and why should I assume that other creatures would be anything like humans? Perhaps there are some smart, nice people out there, now wouldn’t that be a novel twist and a big surprise?

(Maybe I am just projecting off the recent elections and it’s aftermath. But God forgive me, I would just like to see some common sense and intelligence around here for a change. ET, don’t phone home, we are beyond help.)

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Future Humor

Since the exceedingly grim presidential election is just two weeks away, I have a desperate need to find something amusing in my life. As I have recently blogged about romantic movies, I have now settled on science fiction movies to distract me, and not only science fiction, but comedy SF.

Out and Out Parody: The other night I happened on Spaceballs, which I haven’t seen for quite some time. Mel Brooks classic SF 1987 comedy, far from being ridiculous, was quite amusing with some really clever satire through much of it. Of course, there are a lot of misses and silliness, but this Star Wars parody really does work. Equally satisfying is Galaxy Quest, the ultimate 1999 Star Trek sendup on everything from SF conventions, geeks and stuck-on-themselves actors, and of course, the good guys save the universe in the end.

Time Travel Comedy: There is really one great standout here, Back to the Future. Engaging characters, great story and a DeLorean time machine make this a 1985 move a must have in every home library. A 1973 gem that is much overlooked these days is Woody Allen’s Sleeper. Woody wakes up 200 years in the future in a dystopian society and is recruited to help overthrow it with plenty of wisecracks and visual humor along the way. A stellar cast in 1981’s Time Bandits make this a funny, witty and intelligent spoof of historical proportions.

Romantic SF comedy: This is a tough one, first you need to be a science fiction movie and then a romantic comedy. Much, much more fantasy then SF, The Princess Bride from 1987 is a fractured fairy tale of more then a few giant problems to overcome for our heros. Will Westley and Buttercup survive scheming villains of every kind to finally find true love? The Fifth Element from 1997 has it’s tongue firmly in it’s cheek. it’s sleek and visually stunning all throughout and Corbin Dallas and LeLu must fight their way through impossible odds in the future to find love together.

Animated SF Comedy: A robot left behind on a deserted and polluted Earth, 2008’s Wall-E, collides with a future probe and brings back the pampered humans to finally deal with their planet. The Incredibles from 2004 is an incredible animated movie that is better then most of the dozens and dozens of superhero movies made over the last 20 years. It also combines elements of spy movies and domestic comedies in an exceptionally wonderful and entertaining way.

Action Adventure SF Comedy: The most fun Marvel movie ever made is 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Space pirates, homicidal raccoons, a monosayibalic moving tree and aliens galore people this highly amusing action adventure. Who you gonna call? While the Ghostbusters from 1984 is highly entertaining enough I will watch Men In Black, another great 1997 movie every time. Groundbreaking in its day, how much more deadpan could K, played by Tommy Lee Jones, ever be?

(My list, my opinions, which of course everyone else will not agree with, but that is the fun of lists, we all have our favorites. I have already voted so I will keep my head down now and wait for the results. Please vote like the future of our democracy and our very planet depend on it. It actually does.)

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The Trouble with Time

Having been quarantined here at home since the middle of March, time appears to be crawling slower then normal. But that is, of course, silly. Time does not crawl, or leap, or even fly, Time just is. We are the ones that assign specific parts to time; years, (one earthly revolution around the sun), days, (the interval between one rising of the sun and the next), and various separate parts to that, (hours, minutes, seconds).

There is no absolute time, Albert Einstein said, (creating the concept of spacetime). His time and my time would not the same depending on how fast we are moving away from each other. The faster we go, the greater the effect of time dilation we would experience. But in normal life, we do not experience any changes of time since we are not moving fast enough. To make matters worse, years later, in his Theory of General Relativity, he said that massive objects such as stars and planets can warp and distort the fabric of spacetime and the motion of such a body and its gravity can slow time. So if we passed by a gravity heavy black hole, we would experience time at a much slower rate, while the rest of the universe continued on normally.

The Theory of General Relativity does not explain why we experience time as a continual flow, (Times Arrow). Because, at the subatomic level, atoms and particles show no preference for time. They would function just as well going forward or backwards in time. On a human level there is an obvious direction from the past into the future, we all age, and will all eventually die and decay. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that any system will increase its quantity of disorder over time, in other words, entropy will always multiply, so is that what time is? No one is really sure.

Time is said to exist all at once, past, present and future, but our human brains clearly have a preference to perceive time as now. That appears to be good enough for most everyone, since we all interact with each other now, but we can imagine ourselves interacting with someone in the future so we must be aware of time as a whole since we can certainly recall past events with perfect clarity as well. If we were somehow able to disconnect our minds from now, would we be able to roam around time at any point in our lives? And would that be good for our mental stability? Probably not, we are driven relentlessly by entropy from one high point to one low point, and that should be good enough for one life. I really couldn’t handle a few more.

(Thankfully we have constructed lives around the imagined passage of time, Apple and my i-watch says so.)

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Who Has Seen the Wind?

One of the things that amateur historians, (like me), like to speculate on, is the course of our civilization, (most commonly called our Western Civilization). According to many real historians, there are two main factors that actually matter when describing whether or not nations will survive; ecological stress and economical stratification. Those seemingly inside and outside forces, if you will. The ecological problem is probably more easily understood if you look at the depletion of natural resources such as fisheries, farming and the soil with groundwater and other water contamination, forests and clean air, not to mention growing limitations in mineral resources. All of these are considerably worsened now by the growing effects of climate change.

Internal disaster happens when the elites of our society hoard huge quantities of wealth and much of those limited resources, and not sharing and keeping it out of the hands of the majority of the population that does the actual work creating all that wealth. Three men in this country, 3, own as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent, half of all Americans! In FY 2019 federal discretionary spending, ($1.38 trillion), $730 billion or 53% of the budget went to the military. In the FY2020 budget request, 57% of the budget was directed towards the military. Now, I am for a strong national defense, but the drag on the economy from defense spending is beginning to become a real problem. And since tax cuts were enacted in 2017, there has been a growing national deficit equaling $1 trillion dollars a year, getting close to what the government takes in to normally run the country. And the pandemic is certainly not helping the situation, the government has had to borrow $3 trillion dollars this year for Coronavirus related relief, blowing up the national debt to $27 trillion. (Check out the national debt clock sometime, it is truly frightening).

The wind is blowing, you cannot see the wind, of course, but you can feel it. Change is needed, someone who will begin to enact some serious solutions to some extremely serious problems. But it is also a normal human response to problems to just kick the can down the road so to speak, someone else will take care of things, sometime in the future, sometime when it really becomes a problem. Unhappily, the future of our civilization is that the rich will grow richer and the poor, poorer. It is not a cliche, it is a real problem as the elite will blame the poor, minorities, other religions, and other races for the problems of all the non-wealthy people. Further divisiveness will only continue to pull us apart as a country, and with everyone else struggling for a smaller and smaller piece of the pie, (limited resources, food and shelter amid a deteriorating and disastrously warming landscape), then we will have some real dangers to face, and it won’t be as simple or silly to solve as just having to wear a mask.

(The wind blowing over the mountains here can be quite strong and damaging at times, but the wind can also be harnessed to drive wind turbines to create energy, there can be solutions within our problems.)

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Hot and Cold Numbers

Historian Will Durant, (‘Story of Civilization’), wrote in the first volume of his epic series, “Civilization is an interlude between ice ages: at any time the current of glaciation may rise again, cover with ice and stone the works of man, and reduce life to some narrow segment of the earth.” That was, of course written almost 60 years ago and events on this planet have moved on somewhat. Few scientists at that time had a good idea of what was happening to the climate as it was accelerating it’s warming. That we would eventually tip into another ice age was almost a given, after all, we had gone through four or more major ice events in the last million years, so why not another one?

CO2, (carbon dioxide), is a gas which helps adjust the amount of heat retained in our planet’s atmosphere, more CO2, more warmth, less CO2, it gets cooler. During the ice ages the average amount of CO2 in the air was 180 parts per million (PPM) and the average temperature was 8 degrees Celsius less, or 14.4 degrees Fahrenheit lower then average. More modern temperatures such as what they were in pre-industrial revolution times, (early 1800s), the CO2 levels were around 275 PPM. So if we look at what the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere currently is, we might be able to see where we are trending. As of October 7, 2020, the amount of CO2 in the air was 411.08 PPM, up from 408.20 PPM a year ago. Doubling pre-industrial CO2 levels, we could raise the temperature by as much as 4 degrees Celsius, or 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit over past averages. So I guess we can pretty much kiss the next ice age goodbye, not that we would want it anyway.

Will Durant understood very well what the effects of climate on civilization were, how floods, droughts and deserts could displace nations and their people. He said, “To the geologic eye all the surface of the earth is a fluid form, and man moves upon it as insecurely as Peter walking on the waves to Christ.” A warming Earth is a uncertain place, as weather patterns we have come to count on during the last several thousand years are readjusting, we may be in for some unpleasant surprises. We are just getting to know some uncertainty in current droughts, floods, stronger storms and hurricanes, widespread wildfires and different growing seasons for our crops. We did not raise up our civilization until the last ice age ended. Will we be able to balance between the cold periods of the past with the hot periods of the future? We live in the middle of a somewhat narrow band of temperature extremes, perhaps we should stop pushing ourselves in a direction that will not be conducive to us and our planet’s well-being.

(My photo of a bison on Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake, which is a remnant of a much larger ice age body of water, Lake Bonneville. It covered most of western Utah at the end of the last ice age and shrank down to its current size just 8,000 to 10,000 years ago.)

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Shakespearean

“There’s no trust, No faith, no honesty in men. All perjured, All forsworn, all naught, all dissemblers.” Romeo and Juliet.

It is hard to imagine a more tragic time in our recent lives, unless of course you had to live through the great depression and World War II. My parents did and they never really talked about it to us kids, and I have often wondered why. Weren’t there many lessons to be learned from those times, tales of ignominy and heroism? Yet, until I pressed my father much later in his life, he never talked about his experiences growing up and serving in the Navy during the war. I guess there wasn’t really much to say, they worked their way through the great depression in the best way they could, relying on their own strengths and of their families. During the war it was a clear path, to defeat their enemies they had to serve their country, there was absolutely no question about it.

Currently we are fighting against economic depression and a bitter war against a viral plague. The big difference is that we have a leader and his party that pretty much refuses to do anything about it. What if then President Roosevelt decided to tell the people of this country that the Germans and Japanese are very fine people and we shouldn’t be concerned about fighting them and to go on with our business as usual? It makes absolutely no sense, and now, just because it is old people and minorities that are dying most from Covid, we shouldn’t worry about anything?

The president, having seemingly gotten over his Covid infection easily, has now become the worst thing that could have happened to us. He considers himself a prime example of manliness and perfect health and now knows everything there is to know about Covid and the rest of us know nothing. It is a setup for a massive Shakespearean tragedy, and we now have to live it. The last seven months have been rough, but with typical fortitude, the American people have survived and carried on with mostly good grace and strength. But the next few months will now test us to the upmost limit of our abilities, and I have a bad feeling about all of this. “By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.” Macbeth.

In the end, will we have succeeded or failed, and will any of it matter? “Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Macbeth.

(Below, an old woodcut depicting the Shakespearean play, Macbeth. The play itself shows what the damaging physical and psychological effects of political ambition are on those who seek power for its own sake.)

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History Lesson

I did a lot of reading when I was younger and one of my favorite books was ‘The Lessons of History’ by Will and Ariel Durant. Since we are approaching what many think is a historical point for our country with the upcoming presidential elections, I thought I would re-read the book again and see how it differs from my much younger perspective to my current, much older one.

The Lessons of History was written by historians Will and Ariel Durant in 1968. The Durants had finished an epic 10-volume series of the history of mankind, ‘The Story of Civilization’ and then decided to distill out of it, an overview of the lessons observed from the 5,000 years of world history looked at from a dozen different prospectives: geography, biology, race, character, morals, religion, economics, socialism, government, war, growth and decay, and progress. Will Durant stated that he and Ariel “made note of events and comments that might illuminate present affairs, future probabilities, the nature of man, and the conduct of states.”

In the chapter about government, They had left a warning to all democratic societies, which I did not even notice in my youth, but now, 50 years after they wrote the passage, it leaps off the page with gut-wrenching force. “If race or class war divides us into hostile camps, changing political argument into blind hate, one side or the other may overturn the hustings with the rule of the sword. If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all; and a martial government, under whatever charming phrases, will engulf the democratic world.”

It was a warning, (or a prediction), for any people who did not keep vigilant about their society and what it could possibly evolve to, and we have now become that people. If we do not heed the words of historians and philosophers then we will most likely, repeat the same mistakes as other societies did. We are making many mistakes right now in allowing a party of men, (a minority party at that), to dictate to us how to treat each other by race, culture and wealth. They seek to divide us in order to control us. We cannot allow that to happen, we are all in this together, as we always have been throughout history.

(They received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1968 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. Will and Ariel Durant both died in 1981.)

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The Point When we Lose

As we get closer to a presidential election again, there are seemingly no filters as the lies fly thick and constant. The effort to minimize the impact of mail-in balloting by subverting the Postal Service is in high gear. And you would think, from hearing what the president is saying, that the Republicans were never in charge over the last 3.5 years and all of our county’s problems were caused by the Democrats, (who are not the majority party in the Senate or Executive branch and certainly not in the Judicial branch of the government).

Of course the biggest issue is the Coronavirus which has now killed over 200,000 citizens and continues unchecked throughout the nation. From it stems all of the economic problems, unemployment, health care and civil unrest issues that we are now facing. That a majority party would willingly lie and downplay the seriousness of a deadly disease is way beyond my comprehension and then, of course, deny that there is a problem at all. Covid is now the third leading cause of death in the US this year, behind heart disease and cancer.

It is almost certain that when the presidential election votes are counted, the Republicans will contest the vote numbers, and declare that the majority of votes cast are fraudulent in an effort to confuse and deny who actually won. The fact that they are willing to trash the Constitution of the US and try to hold on to power that they have not legitimately earned seems to me to be the height of treason and I hope it will be treated as such if such things come to pass. They have also stirred up the supporters of the president to armed intervention if things do not go the way they want. Good luck to that, Sunday cowboys against the US Army or Marines, I wouldn’t want to be around when that happens, if indeed it would happen to save the country. But would the military support the constitution or an illegitimately elected president?

If the Republicans actually win the presidency, then we really have lost. Environmental controls will disappear completely, all science and climate issues will be completely ignored. Healthcare will be legislated out of existence and social security will vanish leaving senior citizens without a lifeline. Human rights will be squashed and white supremacy will rule all, and democracy itself may become a thing of the past when there are no checks on political power. With the judiciary in control of the Republicans. it will become a tool to suppress all dissent and honest discourse will be totally diminished, not to mention a place were all political crimes are winked at. If you don’t believe me, just look at what has happened so far in 2020. How about having that for the next four years or the next decade?

(I have lived through a lot of good times in this country, I absolutely hate to see what it has become recently. In comparison, the next four years could be a picnic in a California forest.) (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

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Monkeyshines

As we get closer to a presidential election again, it is time for the annual onslaught of monkeyshines from the parties involved. Every dirty political trick in the book and many new ones are in play to keep the incumbent president in power. In fact, any day now will see them calling in the flying monkeys.

In looking at the origin of the flying monkeys, I found many interesting things. Flying monkeys is a term used in popular psychology, mainly in the context of narcissistic abuse, to describe people who act on behalf of a narcissist towards a third party, usually for an abusive purpose (e.g. a smear campaign). The phrase has also been used to refer to people who act on behalf of a psychopath, for a similar purpose. (Wikipedia). Okay, that explains a lot of things having to do with the current presidential administration.

Winged monkeys (often referred to in adaptations and popular culture as flying monkeys) are fictional characters created by American author L. Frank Baum in his children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). They are jungle monkeys with bird-like feathered wings. They are most notably remembered from the famous 1939 musical film by MGM. Ever since, they have taken their own place in popular culture, regularly referenced in comedic or ironic situations as a source of evil or fear. (Wikipedia). So the winged monkeys were never referenced in the books as flying monkeys, that seems to be a typical corruption of an actual literary reference. The term is from the winged monkeys used by the Wicked Witch of the West in the book, (and the subsequent films based on it) to carry out evil deeds on her behalf.

If I remember my reading of the book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, from many years ago, the winged monkeys were actually helpful to Dorothy after being servants of the Wicked Witch, (Actually they were controlled by a golden cap and whoever had that hat, commanded the monkeys). But Hollywood loves to rewrite everything they get their hands on, I guess they feel the need to juice things up. And of course there are a multitude of meanings and theories assigned to the books, parables, allegories, spiritual, monetary and naturally, political overtones.

(I scan the skies daily for signs of the flying, (winged), monkeys, but I guess I will have to wait until the presidential election gets closer. Meanwhile, I remain concerned and worried about my sense of reality becoming more and more distorted by it.)

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Arbitrary Numbers

It is, unfortunately, that time of year again, when I have to deal with another birthday. There is of course, nothing wrong with birthdays, unless you are getting much older. But the numbers we use are arbitrary, it is just the way we have of measuring our time here.

So let’s play around with some numbers and see what happens. Our year is defined by the time it takes for our planet to revolve around the sun once. That length of time is 365.25 days and every 365.25 days we are said to have passed through another year. So what if the time we spent going around the sun were longer? Say 512 days. Within that year, the age of 80 would suddenly be the age of 57 in a longer solar revolution with the 512 days. And a shorter rotation period of say 243 days would yield a lifetime of 120 years instead of the normal 80. Mind you, we are still living the same amount of time, we have just changed the way we number it. (A shorter year would give you a lot more birthdays and more parties, presents, cake and ice cream.)

Other factors too, could advance or shorten our lifespans. A planet with heavier gravity would shorten our lives while with a little lighter gravity it would probably lengthen them. Oxygen was a deadly poison to early life, so would less oxygen in the atmosphere prolong our lives or make them shorter. Much less stress would certainly help and proper habits of exercise and eating always make things better for us.

When we settle a colony on Mars, (and we will one day), will we adopt the martian year of 687 days or keep the earthly numbering? A lifespan of 80 years on earth will only yield a similar life of 42.5 years on Mars. I guess martians will always be thought of as perpetually younger then earthlings. Also since Mars gravity is 38% of Earths, there would be a lot less stress on the human body, would that help with the life span? Hard to say, since we are used to the full impact of Earth’s gravity, other effects will come into play without that heavier pull. I would say that no matter the length of a years time, I still have to say to myself, Happy Birthday, you made it around the sun another year.

(Things were simpler when you are younger in the number of years. You generally have to bake your own cake when you get older.)

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