Christopher McKitterick's Blog, page 7

2015: Welcome to the FUTURE

Happy New Year! It's long past time for an update here, methinks! So, let's start with fun stuff:
Public appearancesOn October 25, I gave a short reading with two awesome spec-fic writers, Don Allmon and Benjamin D. Cartwright, from our novels-in-progress. At The Raven Book Store in Lawrence. I've been on the "Central Standard" on NPR's Kansas City station: KCUR, 89.3 FM show a couple of times in the past month or so:The Future Is Now: How 2015 Stacks Up Against Predictions, where we talked predictions, inventions, and innovations that science fiction suggested would have happened by now, whether or not they have come to be, and why or why not. The other guest was a futurist living in France.Science Fiction and Science Fact in Interstellar, pretty much as it sounds. Other guests included KCUR's resident film guru, plus an astrophysicist from KU and an ecologist fresh from the international meeting in South America.WritingReached 115,270 words as of this morning on Ad Astra Road Trip (book 1 of 3 in The Galactic Adventures of Jack & Stella ). Since completing final grades for Fall semester last week, I've nearly finished the draft of the novel. But being so close to the end reveals many things that require going back through and consistifying, enhancing, filling out, and so forth. I've revised the persistent metaphors and imagery for Stella and Jack, rewritten dialogue, cut extraneous language, etc etc. To paraphrase James Gunn, writing is all about revision: You don't know really what you're doing until you've finished the draft - that's when the real writing begins. SO CLOSE to the end. How much is left? Let's call it less than 10k more. My goal is to wrap up the first complete draft before the start of Spring semester... that's less than two weeks from now, and I have a lot of Work-work to do in that time, as well. Eeek. Wish me luck. (PS: Considering I'd initially targeted 70k words, that means I'm almost done with Book Two? Right? Um, yeah, I don't think it works that way.)

Published a couple nonfiction pieces: "Frederik Pohl: Mr Science Fiction (A Love Story)" for Foundation , and a memorial piece about Fred for Elizabeth Anne Hull's Fredzine: The Frederik Pohl Memorial 'Zine, shared with attendees of the Frederik Pohl Memorial Celebration on August 2.

Wrote another half-dozen fragmentary bits for my memoir, Stories from a Perilous Youth. Really looking forward to diving in to that after sending J&S off for agential attentions.

Sold "Orpheus' Engines" (short story) to the original anthology, Mission Tomorrow: A New Century Of Exploration, due out from Baen next fall.

Also got my largest royalty check to date for Transcendence , which feels pretty awesome, considering that the book came out four years ago! (Four years. Gods.)
PersonalI don't know if I've said here, but my mom died on October 4. It's been really on my mind a lot, especially lately.
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Once again, you're a lot more likely to see things from me over on my Tumblr (mckitterick), but I still drop in here from time to time. It's my homeland!

Best,
Chris

Astro-Porn of the Day: Philae lands on a comet!

First off, apologies for posting here so seldom. Most of my blogs appear first on Tumblr (mckitterick.tumblr.com), because it's so much faster to post stuff there, and it so easily cross-blogs to my Facebook and my Twitter accounts. LJ and DW are just SO SLOW to use.... If you're on Tumblr and/or Twitter, please follow me there and I'll do the same, so we can stay in better contact!

Anyhow. On with the AWESOME.

These are the FIRST PHOTOS FROM THE SURFACE OF A COMET.





And if you want to see the first DRAMATIC AS HELL images of the comet from space, check out yesterday's post here.

Rosetta's little Philae probe lands safely on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko!

The top photo shows one of the lander's feet in the foreground, safely on the ground. The second and third shots show where Philae hoped to land, but bounced: I love this description:

"Soon after the lander touched down yesterday, scientists realized they had a problem. A pair of harpoons designed to tether the probe to the surface of the comet never fired. The probe weighed more than 200 pounds when it was on Earth, but on the comet, it weighs about as much as a sheet of paper. So with nothing to hold it down, it bounced. Data now shows the first bounce took more than two hours. A second bounce lasted just a few minutes. The first photo from the surface showed the lander's leg next to a rugged-looking outcropping of rock or ice. It is humanity's first view from the surface of a comet."

The last image was taken by Philae's down-looking descent ROLIS imager when it was about 40 meters above the surface. The photos reveal a surface covered by dust and debris ranging from millimeter to meter sizes. The large block in the top-right corner is 5 meters across.

We'll get full-panorama shots FROM THE SURFACE OF A COMET later today. The aim of the ROLIS (Rosetta Lander Imaging System) experiment is to study the texture and microstructure of the comet's surface. Photo source.

PS: Bonus photo... someone giffed the Rosetta and Philae landing images from xkcd:

Astro-Porn of the Day: Mars and Comet fun, Giant Sunspot.

Amazing astro-porn thanks to NASA - no Photoshop here.

Hubble captures a comet in the same frame as Mars:


Sunspot group on the Sun that's bigger than Jupiter:


The Sun in hydrogen-alpha, from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory:


For reference about that sunspot group:


Science is awesome.

Astro-Porn of the Day: SOLAR TORNADO. Also: Reading tomorrow.

This is a term I want to use a LOT. What is a SOLAR TORNADO, you ask? It begins with a SOLAR STORMFRONT:



This storm on the Sun is many times the size of Earth. It's spinning at about 12 miles per second, and rising at 90 miles per second:


And here's an animated gif of a SOLAR TORNADO, five times the size of planet Earth:



I frakkin' love science.

PS: I'm doing a reading tomorrow with two other awesome spec-fic writers at The Raven Book Store in Lawrence, KS:



Chris

Alzheimer's and entropy: the physics of loss.

I've been sharing thoughts about my mother's death online (apologies to those not on Facebook - if you want to see my previous posts, here's the first, and here's the second; perhaps I should post them here, too, but I've been distracted). People have written some of the kindest things I've ever had said to me. Last night, all the students from one of my classes got together on a sympathy card, and one of them made me a batch of delicious gluten-free chocolate-oatmeal balls. I appreciate these things more than I can express. Tomorrow is the funeral, in Omaha.

It seems that only when people are kind like that I actually cry, when I feel the pain wash through me, heavy and drowning, dragging me out to sea like an undertow I wasn't aware existed just beyond this calm beach. This crush happens not when I'm alone and thinking about Mom's death, or writing about my feelings, or playing through sad or difficult or happy memories (yes, we had those, too), but when people are kind to me about it. We really lost Mom years ago, during the ungentle decline and destruction of her self that we call, in clean clinical terminology, Alzheimer's, but which in reality is the most brutally destructive event I can imagine, the utter desolation of a person while they're still alive, a meat-grinder of the mind, unemotional gears inexorably crushing all that is a person between the flat surfaces of the machinery, irrevocably tearing through memories and thoughts and the very framework of who we are between sharp steel teeth, hungry, mindless entropy, plaques and proteins and poisons dissolving our past and the people we love from the unique universe of mind that is all we know, that universe shrinking in vast swaths as the information is forever lost, not just like into a black hole, because there the energy still exists, it's contained and stored and available to anyone with sufficiently advanced technology willing to venture beyond the blue event horizon. But no, this is destruction, worse than entropy, utter anarchy and loss and murder, is worse than that, this enfeeblement, it's a disk-grinder polishing minds to a dull featureless gloss, and the machine's operator has no brain, it's a robot - not malevolent like SkyNet or even Saberhagen's Berserkers, but like the physics of half-life decay, the biology of cell putrefaction, apoptosis, erosion, matter-antimatter annihilation, brown-dwarf stars cooling for a billion years alone in the vastness of space, soil blowing in the wind, dry air gradually leaching away its essence and nutrients and moisture and transforming it into toxic shards that suck life when it lands instead of feeding plants as when it took flight.

The machinations of the conscious or subconscious mind are endlessly confusing and fascinating. I've always had faith in the basic laws of physics, that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and yet, and yet – look at our minds, look at the mental cosmos we construct throughout our lives, the sense we make of others' worlds, and how all that in time is lost into the emptiness, forever, unrecoverable. The human mind is a wonder, capable not only of transforming vast quantities of sensory input into models of the physical world, but then even more incredibly capable of communicating with others. New universes are born with each new mind, simple at first, but they quickly expand and grow more complex and begin almost immediately to blend with others tangential to the borders of our own.

Alzheimer's, malevolent force, destroyer of worlds, eater of universes, accelerates the entropy of the mind leading to utter desolation, first extracting all other people's universes from reality, then you from your own world, then you from everyone else's. Veni, vidi, vici. Entire universes, people, stories of who we are and were, destroyed and never to be recovered again, all traces impossibly erased from reality. How can that be? How can a disease consume all that information? But it does, and everything is lost in the belly of the universe-eater, never to be shat out. The only evidence of the crime is a pile of broken connections to the outside, all the rest of us reeling in frayed ends in an effort to remember who they once touched, where they were once moored to another's world before that person was pulled beneath the waves.

Every person we know will be destroyed in time – time, this feeble attempt to construct a sensible explanation for loss. They will be gone, there is no hope for them to be recovered. The same is true for our own bubble. This is the reality of the universe, and something we cannot answer, only seek to come to terms with.

Trying to understand what it means is a hopeless effort, yet it's all that matters. Asking questions, seeking answers, striving to explore within and then beyond the confines of our bubble-universes: This is all that really matters. This is why I got into writing in the first place, and why I am driven to continue doing so. To understand the glories of matter coming to understand itself, of the universe waking up, opening a billion tiny eyes if only for a brief moment to see other eyes also looking around, and sharing what we have learned, and asking what the others have learned, and then building a greater understanding of it all, flawed and limited as it may be, often incompatible with what the others report. Because everything else is only the void.
If ever I figure out human nature, I can write my last words, but I don't fear that'll ever happen.



Thank you to everyone who has said kind and thoughtful things; I really do appreciate it, and if it brought on the tears, then it served a useful purpose, too. To everyone suffering your own tragedies and losses, my heart goes out to you, and I understand, and I hope my sharing here is more helpful than hurtful. We are all fighting our own hard battles, and though we might succeed for a time, loss will ultimately consume us all. So be kind, and understanding, and try to build the most glorious temple to life that you can in the moments your universe intersects with those constructed by others.

Travel time to the Moon, Mars, the Sun, and Jupiter.

I got a good question, and because I'm a big fan of space travel and questions astronomical, I did some research and came up with some fun answers. Hope you enjoy!

The Moon is about 240,000 miles away. To get into Earth orbit, you need to zip along at 17,500 mph. To reach escape velocity from Earth, you must up that to about 23,000 mph. If you traveled at the speed of the Apollo astronauts - who roared atop Saturn V rockets to the Moon in the late 60s through early 70s at 23,000 to 24,000 miles per hour - it would take a little over 3 days (Apollo 11 did it in 3 days, 3 hours, 49 minutes).



But wait - 240/24 = 10 hours, right? What's up with these numbers? Why doesn't a trip to the Moon take just 10 hours? The answer lies in physics.

If you don't care about slowing down to land safely, no biggie. Go ahead and crater into the surface of the Moon 10 hours after launch - it'd be exciting for those of us here on Earth to watch! If you miss, though, you'll keep zooming along past the Moon. If you swing by closely enough, you'll even get a little added gravitational boost to scoot you fast enough to reach the outer Solar System.

This is because escape velocity from the Moon is only about 5,300 mph. Faster than that, you'll just fly by (unless you hit, of course). So, because you need to slow down for insertion into lunar orbit, you lose a lot of time. Then you need to orbit a bit to prep for landing, find a good spot, and so forth.

Now, if you poodle along at highway speeds (just play along - you're using a dark-matter drive so you can ignore escape velocities and such, okay?), it would take about 145 days. Get a co-driver, unless you plan to sleep, in which case add a few months. On the other hand, Apollo 10 holds the record for the the fastest any human has ever traveled: 24,791 mph.

To reach Mars is another matter. At its closest, Mars is 34 million miles away; at its farthest, 249 million miles. Its escape velocity is only 11,000 mph, so you'll want to decelerate a bunch once you get there. But at, say, an average velocity of 25,000 mph, you'll reach Mars in 9960 hours, or 13.6 months.



Flying to the Sun - 93,000,000 miles away (about 400 times farther away than the Moon) - wouldn't take you 400 times as long, because you wouldn't need to slow down at all. That's because the Sun's escape velocity is 1,380,000 mph. That's MILLION miles per hour. Heck, you'll even speed up as you approach this flaming mass of incandescent gas, eliminating even more travel time. Let's say it'll take about 3000 hours (a little over 4 months).



Same deal for travel to Jupiter, which has an escape velocity of 133,300 mph. Basically, just drop as deeply as you can into every planet's gravity well along the way to help get you going as fast as you can, because you'll have trouble attaining speeds higher than its escape velocity without bringing along lots of additional propellant for your fusion drive or whatever. It lies about 391,000,000 miles away at its closest, 577,000,000 miles at its farthest. So, traveling along at 30,000 mph, you'll reach Jupiter in 13,000 to 19,000 hours. Just call it at least two years.



I hope you enjoyed!

India Orbits Mars!

The Indian Space Research Organization's Mars Orbiter Spacecraft successfully entered the orbit of Mars this morning - on their first try!



Go India!



Hello, Mars!



Indian Space Research Organization's press release here.

Emma Watson is a badass.

UN Women's Global Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson just gave a talk to the UN at a special event for the HeForShe campaign at the United Nations' Headquarters in New York on September 20, 2014. This is a brilliant speech. Here it is:



Some important callouts:

"Men: Gender equality is your issue, too."

"For the record, feminism by definition is the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities. It is the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes."

"It's about freedom. I want men to take up this mantle so their daughters, sisters, and mothers can be free from prejudice. But also so their sons have permission to be vulnerable and human, too, and in doing so, be a more true and complete version of themselves."

"How can we affect change in the world when only half of it is invited or feel welcome to participate in the conversation?"

"Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men and women should feel free to be strong. It is time that we all perceive gender on a spectrum instead of two sets of opposing ideals."

"If we stop defining each other by what we are not, and start defining ourselves by who we are, we can all be freer."

"In my nervousness for this speech and in my moments of doubt, I told myself firmly: If not me, who? If not now, when? If you have doubts when the opportunity is presented to you, I hope those words will be helpful."

"I invite you to step forward, to be seen. And ask yourself: If not me, who? If not now, when?"

GO EMMA WATSON. Full transcript here.

Alzheimer's is Hell

Not really up to writing a lot about it right now, but just got back from an impromptu trip to Omaha to see my mom. We're down to her last days.

My friends, Alzheimer's is a damned horrific nightmare. If I ever start looking down the barrels of that living hell, well... I wish we lived in a country where one could choose not to endure years of ever-increasing loss of self, health, and free will, knowing we cannot get better, certain that we will get worse, until one day we cannot remember our loved ones or even who we are. That, my friends, is the worst hell I can imagine. The only words Mom has formed in the past few weeks, and those were barely audible: "Have a headache."

Oof.

Space creatures! Extremophile ecosystems! Story accepted!

How amazing is this? Russian cosmonauts have discovered living organisms clinging to the windows of the International Space Station:


Click the image to see the News.mic article.

Of course, one other little fella has also been proven to survive the harsh conditions of space: the heroic Tardigrade!



Want more evidence that creatures can survive in less-than-Earthly conditions? How about the recent discovery of a complex microbial ecosystem far beneath the Antarctic ice?

So: Creatures can live deep below the ice in the coldest place on Earth. They can live in the violent conditions of space. What else is thriving in the distant reaches of the Solar System? Let's find out!

Speaking of space aliens, I turned in my new story, "Orpheus' Engines," to the editor of Mission Tomorrow: A New Century Of Exploration , which comes out in the fall of 2015 from Baen Books. This story is the second in a series set in the "Jupiter Whispers" universe, but with some major updates to the characters and environment. Ultimately, this'll become a novel, after another story or two.

Chris