M. Thomas Apple's Blog, page 49
February 7, 2020
Forget Mars, Head to Europa?
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“I think we’ve got a better chance of having slightly higher forms of life on Europa, perhaps similar to the intelligence of an octopus.”
Hmm. Maybe. It seems more like that any life would be of the microscopic or worm-like variety. But we still have to get out there first to find out…
February 4, 2020
All My Love, Johnny – a true WWII love triangle in my family’s history
[image error]I should be finishing the SF novel I’ve been working on (and off) for the better part of four years now. Instead, I’ve found myself obsessed with letters recently found in my dearly departed mother‘s possessions…letters written from my grandmother’s first husband, John Hart, while he was in the US Army in the 1940s.
He died. This ain’t no story of heroic sacrifice or rah-rah patriotism. This is reality.
We have only a few photos of him. Lots of my grandfather. And tons of anecdotal evidence and stories passed down during the past six decades.
Friends before the war. Married during it. Widowed then married again. Families torn apart, feeling betrayed and publicly feuding at funerals.
I can only imagine the conflicting, wrenching emotions they must all have felt. And how that affected my mother, and then my siblings and me.
An unconventional love story? A history lesson? An examination of intercultural / intergenerational / international conflict?
Maybe yes to all the above. Think I’ll give it a go.
February 2, 2020
Super Bowl 2020: All the space-themed commercials
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“Being able to get humans on Mars and actually collecting one of these samples would be such an incredible moment, I would kind of hope it would almost bring us back to the moon days of everyone being glued to the TV.”
Um. Well. OK. TV is dead so we’ll all be watching it streamed on our smartphones, but the point is taken.
And how much did they pay for this? 
January 31, 2020
Artificial intelligence-created medicine to be used on humans for first time
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“This year was the first to have an AI-designed drug, but by the end of the decade all new drugs could potentially be designed by AI.”
Philip K Dick would have had a field day with this. Imagine what will happen once we start ingesting nanobots…
I, for one, welcome our AI drug overlords.
January 25, 2020
O Captain My Captain Picard—Be Optimistic
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Why oh why do I bother to read “reviews” of shows I like? It’s not as if they’ll tell me anything useful, interesting, or helpful to understand the content. And it’s much more likely that they’re written by people who don’t understand the show and/or are chomping at the bit to be as snarky as possible to show off how brilliant they are at criticizing others with more talent.
So. Picard. My quick review: I’ve been waiting for real Star Trek to return. It has. Despite the reviewers. And I can’t wait to see more.
The biggest complaint of the pompous pontificators is the “information dump” (i.e., the use of an interview to fill in what’s been going on the last 20 years in Star Trek‘s “prime universe”).
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But you know what? So what. The idea that we’re going to find out what’s been going by having to watch the main character run around getting bits and pieces fed to him over the entire first season clearly doesn’t work (not that it hasn’t been tried). Let’s get the “information dump” and then get the story going already.
Most reviews were positive anyway.
The lists of “what to watch before Picard” are interesting, only because they often contain episodes that have really very little to do with the new show.
(Best 10 lists abound online, so I won’t waste your time with another one. Here are a couple if you’re interested, one from space.com and one from wired.com.)
The writing in reviews often is just as hackneyed as the reviewers claim the Picard dialogue is. Case in point: in his review of the first three episodes the Wired writer repeats his favorite phrase “a series of chin-stroking, philosophical debates about the nature of existence in Conference Room A” from his previous review of Discovery. Self-plagiarism, yay.
I even read one reviewer complain that there wasn’t enough “world-building” in the first episode.
Uh. The show has been around for over 50 freaking years. Take your “world building” and shove it.
What I really don’t get is the repetitive whine that Star Trek, and specifically The Next Generation (ST:TNG) represents a pie-in-the-sky ’80s “optimism.”
Um. What?
I lived through the ’80s. I don’t recall the ’80s being full of optimism. I remember airplane hijackings and bombings of embassies, massive earthquakes and race riots, the constant fear of nuclear war. Where is this ridiculous criticism coming from?
Here’s Ars Technica:
“The Next Generation set for us that the future would be full of track lighting and ugly unitards, a vision of utopia conceived through Gene Roddenberry’s almost pathological level of optimism and visualized through all the synthetic fibers and beige interiors the 1980s could offer…”
Ah. So the complaint is that the future shouldn’t be a positive thing? I’m the farthest thing from a glass-is-half-full personality, but since when is optimism a bad thing? And “pathological”? Sweet Jesus.
And, we must “update” Star Trek to “fit” 2020’s reality because “[t]hat TrekTV series was made in the 1980s, the world has changed and our view of the world has changed.“?
Huh?
Here’s the Verge:
“Giving the show the benefit of the doubt, however, feels too much like the hollow centrist play that Star Trek needs to move past if it truly wants to be resonant today. Because the upsetting truth about 2020 is that, when faced with certain disaster, there are people who will ultimately refuse to work together, who’d rather rule over ruins than labor toward an equitable future.”
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Um. I don’t think Star Trek at any point in its history ever argued that people would never refuse to cooperate or disagree. I seem to recall an awful lot of arguing and shouting back and forth in ST:TNG. And fighting. Especially once the so-called “optimistic ’90s” started (the show ended in 1994).
And even though “[h]ere at the dawn of 2020…the mirror of science fiction has a more somber and foreboding reality to reflect back to us,” that doesn’t mean the SF is supposed to reflect reality all the time.
That’s why, guess what, it’s science fiction. You know. Not reality.
To be honest, I’m tired and bored by the endless dystopian, blood-and-gore, life-sucks, people-are-all-evil, lets-blow-shit-up strain of science fiction. There is a place for the “warning” style of SF. There is also a place for the “hope and dreams” style of SF. And as has been observed, “Positive visions of the future are scarce.” (That is, in the “Western world.” There are plenty of positive visions in other countries.)
What’s wrong with hoping that the future might be a better world to live in than now? A place where racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, hunger, disease, and want don’t exist?
An impossible dream?
OK, maybe. “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for.”
Gloom and doom doesn’t inspire. It just makes people miserable and depressed. Star Trek‘s not perfect, but I’ll take hope over misery any day.
(Btw, I hate the term “Easter eggs,” particularly when the references are way too obvious for longtime fans, but’s here’s a good video detailing some of the canon references in the first episode.)
January 24, 2020
January 20, 2020
Have some Proxima Centauri with ESPRESSO
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“Proxima is our closest neighbor in an immense universe. How could we not be charmed by it?”
Well, the planet may or may not exist (the confirmation data won’t be publicly available for another couple years).
And it is most likely not inhabitable — despite being dubbed a “Super-Earth” (which really only refers to size and not whether it’s “Earth-like” or not).
Still, regardless of these facts, the most important part of this article in Scientific American is the science:
“We tried different tools to prove ourselves wrong, but we failed. However, we have to keep the doors open to all possible doubt and skepticism.”
Yes, the astronomers tried to prove their own discovery was a mistake. That’s how it works, folks. Challenge your assumptions, not jump to conclusions.
Now contrast that to the CNN Headline purportedly about the same discovery:
“Researchers have traced a second planetary signal to the nearby Proxima Centauri star. They believe it belongs to a super-Earth.”
The astronomers did NOT say they “believe” there is another planet. They say that Proxima c may exist but still needs to be confirmed with more convincing evidence.
Evidence, not beliefs. Big difference.
Most of the CNN article consists of videos and links to other articles with more videos and links to other articles…oh, and ads, too. Lots of ads.
Science. It’s not sexy and actually requires reading (and thinking). But it works.
Two men make “Earth sandwich” 20,000 kilometers apart
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File under “strange reasons to study Earth science in school” and “things to do when you have far too much free time.”
January 17, 2020
‘PigeonBot’ Brings Robots Closer To Birdlike Flight
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True story: On the first day of our honeymoon, a pigeon shat on the top of my head as we were walking to the mountain hot spa.
I wonder what would come out of robot pigeons 
January 14, 2020
99.9999999% of Your Body Is Empty Space
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Are you sitting down for this? Well, you’re not really. Your butt isn’t actually touching the chair you’re sitting on. Since the meat of your atoms is nestled away in nuclei, when you ‘touch’ someone (or something), you aren’t actually feeling their atoms.
Nobody has ever really touched anything in their lives.
Sleep tight…
(Not exactly a new article, but still interesting; and, yes, I might be using this to justify an awful lot of my soon-to-be-beta-read new novel 
