James L. Cambias's Blog, page 4

France Excursion 2023 Part Three: Chambord, Ezia, and Magic

We got moving early on the 22nd. I got the car out of the underground garage, and we set out eastward on the Autoroute heading for Blois. From there we followed smaller roads to the great palace of Chambord. This was Francis I's personal dream house, and he poured treasure into the project ��� and then only got to live there about three months.

Chambord's position reflects some of Francis's geopolitical ambitions. He was pushing his claim to various Italian kingdoms, especially Milan, but other major powers in the area were trying to stop him. As is customary with Renaissance politics, they all switched sides and made temporary coalitions so that at any given time Francis might be allied with the Papal States or the Holy Roman Empire, or he might be fighting them. But all this activity in Italy made it useful for the King's center of government to be located south of the Loire, saving days of time for couriers from Italy. Also, in an era when wealth still equated more or less directly to food, putting the court right in the middle of France's breadbasket was good policy.

Anyway, the chateau itself is immense and fantastic. Here's a picture.

Inside, there's no attempt at consistency. Some of the rooms are fitted out as they might have been in Francis's day, others replicate Louis XIV's era, or the days of the exiled Polish King Stanislaus I, or the tenure of Marshal Saxe, or the last private owner, the Comte de Chambord.

That last figure is a bit obscure, but he's worth learning about. He was the last serious candidate for King of France. In the 1880s, after the fiasco of the Franco-Prussian War, the Royalists had a solid majority in the Assembly and finally managed to agree on a single candidate, the Bourbon Henri V, who used the title Comte de Chambord when he didn't want any snickering.  

Henri's moment had arrived. And then he blew it all by issuing a proclamation from the palace of Chambord stating that he would never accept the throne if France didn't go back to the old royal banner of white with lilies. The French ��� including most of the Royalists in the government ��� decided that the Comte de Chambord was a fool and they'd be better off sticking to the Third Republic. Henri went back home to Austria and France has remained a Republic ever since.

The guidebooks strongly insinuate that the cool double-spiral staircase in the center of the house was designed by Leonardo da Vinci, but they can't actually state it as fact because there's no record. Having climbed up and down it I can attest that it almost certainly was designed by Leonardo because he made the stair riser height inconveniently low to get the right curve of the spiral staircase. That seems very like him.

Having worked up a considerable appetite, we drove to the nearby village of Montlivault for a big fancy lunch at the Michelin-starred restaurant Ezia. It's a nice unpretentious place in a quiet little town. Here's our menu:

Wrasse (it's a fish) with artichoke and a basil cream sauce

Braised carrots with shellfish

Fish (I don't recall what kind) with eggplant

Smoked duck breast or Pigeon (Diane had the duck, I had the pigeon) with beets, rhubarb and juniper

Goat cheese mousse

Elderflower, cucumber, and gin sorbets

All excellent, and we paired them with local wines but I didn't note what we ordered.

Full and happy, we drove over to Blois, which has another famous chateau, but we ignored that completely. Instead we went across the square from the chateau to the Maison de Magie ��� a museum devoted to local boy Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, the famous stage magician and inventor.

Every thirty minutes, giant dragon heads emerge from the museum, but unfortunately my video is too large for me to embed here. So instead here's a link to someone else's video on YouTube.

Inside there's exhibits of stage illusions, three different theaters where magic acts perform, a collection of vintage posters, and lots of stuff about the life and career of M. Robert-Houdin.

Here is one illusion, featuring the disembodied head of Dr. Diane A. Kelly.

We drove back to Tours the slow way, following the Loire, and had a light dinner across the street from our hotel before tumbling into bed early. We were going to be getting up before dawn and wanted our sleep.

 

France Excursion 2023 Part Deux: Stones and Wine

On Wednesday the 21st we had a fabulous lunch at a restaurant chosen at random because we were hungry, then picked up our rental car at the Tours train station and drove out of the city to do some tourism on the north side of the Loire River.

Our first stop was the Dolmen de la Grotte aux F��es: a Neolithic tomb in the middle of a wheat field near the town of Mettray. It has walls and a roof made of slabs of natural stone, presumably moved to the site with rollers and erected by large groups of people working very hard. The tomb originally had dirt walls outside the stone ones, but millennia of erosion have stripped them away.

Here's a photo, with Dr. Diane A. Kelly for scale (170 centimeters).
Like many ancient sites in western Europe, this one has been attributed to the fairies, with the vernacular name "La Grotte aux F��es" (The Fairies' Grotto). Thirty years ago in Brittany, Diane and I stopped to visit a similar structure known locally as "Le Roche des Fees" (The Fairies' Rock).

We moderns may snicker about this, attributing human-built structures to supernatural beings, but it's worth remembering that these things pre-date the arrival of Indo-Europeans to modern France. They were very old a very long time ago. As far as the people of Roman Gaul or Christian France knew, they might as well have been built by fairies.

From the dolmen we took a leisurely drive on country roads to the town of Vouvray. Wine snobs may have already figured out why we were there: a winery tour and tasting. In this case, we visited the Domaine de Thierry-Cosme, and it vastly exceeded expectation. I had figured there would be a brief stroll around the winery building, maybe a look at the "caves" cut into the limestone bluffs, and a taste or two.

But the winery owner (I never caught his name but I assume he is M. Thierry, or M. Thierry-Cosme) had more ambitious plans. He bundled us (and his charming dog) into his truck and drove us up onto the top of the limestone plateau to have a look at the actual vineyard. His tract is right at the edge of the Vouvray region. There's a hedge at one side of his field, and on the other side of it the Touraine region begins.

After looking at the vines, we got to see the harvesting and pressing machinery. Wine making is now thoroughly mechanized. There's a big kind of tractor that straddles the rows of vines and gently shakes the grapes loose, catching them in rubber conveyor belts that dump them into bins.

Back at the winery building the grapes go right into the press, which uses hydraulic pistons to squeeze out every drop. A hectare of vineyard can produce five to six thousand liters of wine, or roughly one bottle per grape plant.

The next stage is fermenting. The winery has something like a dozen enormous stainless-steel fermenting tanks, all temperature-controlled to manage the transition from grape juice to wine as perfectly as possible.

After the ferment, the wine gets bottled (we didn't see how that's done but I assume it involves pouring wine into bottles and then capping them). Then it goes into the cave. The cave is a tunnel cut into the limestone ��� according to our host, his grandfather and his father did a lot of expansion by hand with picks and hammers. The temperature in the cave is always about 15 centigrade (60 Fahrenheit) year-round, and that is perfect for aging wine.

Our host also casually mentioned that his grandmother was born in the cave, as her family had owned it and lived in the front part. They certainly weren't the only ones: even today you can see lots of house fronts right in the limestone cliffs along the Loire.

One thing I learned is that Vouvray is better known in France as a sparkling wine than a still one, which sounded weird because most of the Vouvray I've seen in the U.S. is still wine. So we wound up buying a bottle of Vouvray Demi-Sec, and with careful packing Diane managed to get it back to our own cellar intact.

Winery, with Dr. Diane A. Kelly for scale.

Vouvray in hand, we went back to Tours and had a light supper at the little restaurant across the street from our hotel. That evening (and since this was the day of the summer solstice, at latitude 47 North, evening lasted a very long time) the old quarter of Tours was hosting a music festival. There were musical acts playing every few blocks: a brass band, a hip-hop group, a band doing covers of the Cure, a punk band, an open-mike stage . . . and presumably dozens more I didn't see. The streets were packed. My favorite metric for crowds, "Like Bourbon Street on Mardi Gras" was no hyperbole this time. We wandered about, listened to some music, tried to avoid getting separated by the mob, and at about 10 p.m. decided to pack it in for the night, even though it was still just twilight.

One bit of good news: when I checked my email I found a notice from Objets Trouv��s at De Gaulle airport. They had my bag! I made an appointment to recover it on the day I was to return to Paris.

Next time: Castles and Magic!

France Excursion 2023: Episode 1, The Beginning

The 27th annual meeting of the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology was hosted this year by the University of Tours. When neurobiologist Dr. Diane A. Kelly decided to present a poster session at the conference, my response was, "I guess we're going to France, then!"

So we did. The plan was to cross the Atlantic a week early, base ourselves in Tours in order to see the region and eat some stellar meals, and then I would leave once the actual scientific meeting got underway. The whole journey was bracketed by two key dates: the "Pomme de Terre" fencing tournament in Boston on June 17-18, and the mandatory meeting with my teaching assistant for the Smith summer writing program, which had to happen by June 30. Diane couldn't leave until the 19th, and I had to get home on the 29th.

On June 19 we got dropped off at Bradley Airport, to take advantage of Aer Lingus's international service from there to various places in Europe. Our flight to Dublin was long but uneventful, we made our connection with plenty of time, and the trip to Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris was shorter and also uneventful.

The two of us got off the plane and went through passport control with no problem. Got my suitcase from baggage claim, no problem. Picked up a sandwich because we were both pretty hungry, no problem.

We did have some slight difficulty finding the right platform for the TGV train from De Gaulle to Tours. The problem was that we both misread the letter "S" on the announcement board (meaning the South end of the station) for the numeral "5" for the platform. Even after we figured out the right end of the station we still wound up on the wrong platform, and it was only when the train's arrival was announced that we realized our mistake. So we hurried up, and across, and down, and got to the train in time to board.

And that's when I discovered the really big problem neither of us had noticed: my suitcase was gone. With just a minute before the TGV pulled out I made a quick decision: I told Diane to go ahead to Tours while I stayed behind to find it. "I'll get there somehow," I promised.

From the platform I retraced our steps. It wasn't on the wrong platform, it wasn't in the waiting area, it wasn't where we had paused to figure out the north vs. south end issue. Finally I sprinted up the escalator to the restaurant where we got the sandwiches. Yes, they remembered I had left my bag there. As with all unattended baggage, it had been taken by airport security officers.

I asked where I might find them, and was directed to the "Objets Trouv��s" bureau (i.e. the Lost Luggage office).

France has a reputation for bureaucracy, and I have to say it is one they have earned. Despite one bloody revolution and civil war, five less bloody changes of regime, and a period of enemy occupation, the French bureaucracy has continued to grow and thrive.

The Objets Trouv��s office is a great example. Back in the bad old days, if you lost your luggage, you went there and asked if anyone had found it. They would look around and you'd either find it or not.

Now things are more advanced. You can't just look at what's been handed in any more. Now you have to scan a QR code in order to go to a Web page to file a missing item report ��� be sure to set up your Objets Trouv��s account first! You furnish a complete description, and your contact information. If the object turns up, you may then make an appointment to come in and recover it.

Meanwhile, as near as I can tell, the staff are still on duty, just secure behind steel shutters so no pesky travelers can bother them about missing bags. (At least two French citizens apologized to me on behalf of their country for the bureacratic runaround.)

With no suitcase, I boarded a later train to Tours. It got me there by about 6 p.m., and Diane met me at the station. We bought me some essentials on the way to our hotel, and then got dinner at the lovely old Place Plumereau, a square in the old section of Tours lined with bars and restaurants.

Here's what Tours looks like. Like most European cities, it's a medieval town inside a Baroque town inside a Victorian city inside a modern city. Tours itself dates back to Roman times: Julius Caesar mentions a tribe of Gauls called the "Turones" who lived in the Loire valley. This view is from the north bank of the Loire looking south at the Pont Wilson. The cathedral is on the left, with twin spires. The large pointy-roofed building is the municipal library, and the biggish buildings at the end of the bridge are some of the stores and hotels along the Rue Nationale, Tours's main axis.

After a long flight and a stressful day, I had a big glass of wine with our dinner, then went back to our hotel room and collapsed.  

Tomorrow: Vouvray!

Notes on Worldbuilding Part 15: Ecologies

I'm going to begin this entry with a warning: I am not an ecologist. Some of the terms I use in this blog post may be inaccurate or incorrect, although I think I'm at least close to the technical meanings. I'm trying to generalize from what we know about ecosystems on Earth to what any world with life would be like, and so sometimes I may wind up using terms from Earthly ecology as analogies rather than their specific definitions.

What we call an "ecosystem" is a collection of organisms making use of available energy. Some of that energy comes from the environment, and some comes from other organisms. How organisms get that energy ��� and how much effort they have to put into getting it ��� defines their ecological "niche."

Autotrophs: We'll start at the bottom of what's called the "trophic pyramid" ��� the foundation layer, where ultimately all of the energy enters the system. These are organisms which exploit non-living energy sources, and are known as Autotrophs. On Earth, the best-known examples are plants, but there are also chemosynthetic organisms living in the oceans, making use of chemicals produced by geological processes. We discussed some of those potential chemical systems in the last blog post.

This kind of environmental energy source is likely to be fairly low-powered and diffuse. Sunlight provides 1.3 kilowatts per square meter ��� but that is hedged about with limitations and inefficiencies. Plants typically can only make use of certain wavelengths of light, which is why we have special colored "grow lamps" for indoor gardening. There are daily and seasonal variations in the intensity of light, so that maximum intensity is only available a fraction of the time.

And finally the process of converting sunlight to stored chemical energy has its own inefficiencies. When I burn a kilogram of oak or maple, I get about 14.8 megajoules of energy. That sounds like a lot! Except that it isn't, not really. It took years to make that wood. An oak typically takes 20 years to reach full size, which represents about 10 tons of mass, or 500 kilograms a year. During a single year an oak tree gets exposed to something like 2.4 gigajoules of energy, so the energy content of a full-grown tree represents less than a third of the solar radiation absorbed (and this ignores the not-inconsiderable energy involved in cutting, splitting, hauling, and drying that wood before it can be burned).

All of this is by way of explaining why plants don't move around much. The surface area needed to absorb solar energy is so large that the energy required to move would burn up everything that plant can absorb. This might be different on an energy-rich world with liquid-sulfur life, however.

Chemosynthesis gives a little more energy density, such that microorganisms may be able to swim up the concentration gradients of various chemicals in water, searching for the richest sources. Tubeworms hosting symbiotic bacteria can survive around vents, suggesting that on alien worlds chemosynthesis could support complex organism. But tubeworms don't move around much, either.

In my novel Arkad's World I did come up with an active life form based on plants. The Kchik are large plants resembling banyan trees, extending over a wide area to harvest lots of energy. Like many big plants, they have trouble getting their seeds to good locations far enough from the mother plant so they don't compete. The Kchik evolved motile seeds capable of self-propulsion, and that ultimately evolved into semi-intelligent beings capable of tool use. I assumed the seed-beings were short-lived, but shared memory with their parent plants, so they would "ripen" and drop to the ground as fully functional adults. Even so, the seed beings have a lifespan of just a year before they either take root and leaf out, or run out of stored energy and die.

Another kind of autotrophs are decay organisms, or detritovores, which break down dead matter ��� on Earth the most familiar types are fungi, plus countless varieties of microorganisms. They are technically making use of non-living matter for food, but the matter they use is once-living stuff. This is important because it's not bringing energy into the system. In fantasy roleplaying games you often see underground ecosystems based on "fungus farming" but there's no explanation of how that arrangement is viable for more than a few years.

Ex-living matter does hold considerably more energy than "inorganic" chemicals, so detritovores might be as active as animals. On Earth, slime molds move around when they need to. One could imagine a cross between my Kchik and a type of fungus ��� the fungus is a sessile mass of mycelia spreading through a forest floor to feed on decaying organic matter, but instead of mushrooms releasing spores, it produces mobile young which seek out likely spots to begin growing new mycelia. These mobile fungus creatures might also learn to make their own decaying organic matter, by killing plants and animals . . .

We distinguish between plants (autotrophs) and animals on Earth because they diverged very long ago. That may not be as true on other worlds. What distinguishes the role of an animal from that of a plant is that an animal has to move around to find food. A sessile animal is likely to starve unless it can bring prey to itself. So on an alien world there might be things moving around eating autotrophs which are nevertheless more closely related to those "plants" than they are to other "animals."

Herbivores: Animals which eat autotrophs can generally be lumped together as "herbivores." The main thing to notice about herbivores is that their food can't run away. It may be hard to find sometimes, but it's right there when you do. In many environments on Earth, plant food is so abundant that herbivores can specialize for eating different kinds of plants, or different parts of them. While there's a broad spectrum of herbivores, we can identify two ends of that spectrum: grazers and gatherers.

Grazers eat very abundant, typically low-energy food. Cows munching grass, elephants eating the leaves of shrubs and trees, and so forth. Their whole lifestyle is based on eating nearly all the time. Just keep shoveling it in, and let your symbiotic gut bacteria break down all that cellulose into something you can absorb.

Baleen whales can be seen as a kind of grazer, too: while the food they're eating is tiny animals rather than plants, they can't get away from a whale so the main issue is just how much a given whale can eat, rather than hunting down the food.

Grazers benefit from economies of scale in things like temperature regulation, food absorption, and such. They can be big ��� I mentioned whales, and there were also the sauropod dinosaurs, the biggest land animals that ever lived. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that in just about any evolved ecosystem (as opposed to artificial ones), the largest animals will be grazing herbivores.

At the opposite end of the herbivore spectrum are gatherers. On Earth these are creatures which take advantage of the bribery-based system plants have evolved to spread their seeds: encase the seeds in attractive, energy-rich fruits and let animals eat the fruit and spread the seeds. Other gatherers may look for energy-rich seeds even if there is no bribe, or dig up energy-storing roots and tubers. The important point is that gatherers eat stuff that is rich in concentrated energy, but is harder to locate. They have to search, or dig, or defeat plant defenses to get at the seeds.

This keeps gatherers smaller than grazers ��� mostly. You might define elephants as gatherers, and they're really big. It also (and here I'm definitely generalizing very broadly) makes gatherers tend to be smarter and more mobile than grazers. They have to be able to distinguish between what is food and what isn't (because plants don't care how long the animals which eat their fruit live, and sometimes lace those fruits with insect-killing chemicals that can kill a vertebrate). They may have to do some puzzle-solving to locate edible roots, or get through a thick rind or hard shell to get at the tasty fruit and seeds. All of which requires a bit more brainpower than just "Take a bite of grass. Take another bite of grass." Our own distant ancestors were probably gathering herbivores living in trees.

To me it seems likely that any intelligent tool-using pure herbivores would evolve from gatherer ancestors.

Carnivores: The next big division in how you get your food is eating other animals instead of plants. Animals can run away, they can hide, they can even fight back. Carnivores have to be able to move faster than what they eat (though possibly just for a short distance), they need some kind of "weapon" to quickly kill the prey, and they probably need good senses and the ability to sneak up on what they're planning to kill and eat. Often they team up with other individuals, even a whole pack sometimes, to bring down a big prey animal. This means they need good communication and social abilities.

They aren't sporting about any of this. Predators prefer to kill animals smaller and weaker than themselves. Infants are especially prized ��� or better yet, unhatched eggs! At this end predators function in a very similar way to gathering herbivores, and it's not surprising that many species combine both roles. Another type of carnivore behavior that overlaps with gathering herbivores is scavenging. Meat is meat, whether you killed it yourself or not. And we see lots of omnivores combine scavenging, opportunistic predation, and gathering tubers and fruits.

Again, venturing into massive generalization territory, it seems that predators are also on the cleverer side. They have to outwit other animals to survive, and often evolve fairly complex social systems and methods of communication to organize hunting groups, both of which require brainpower.

On land, most carnivores prey on herbivores. There are very few carnivores I can think of that directly hunt other carnivores. A coyote or a mountain lion will snap up a house cat or a small domestic dog ��� but I suspect that may simply be due to the domesticated animals not recognizing a threat until it's too late. I'd be willing to bet that feral cats and dogs have a better track record against bigger predators.

In the ocean, it's different. Most of the pure herbivores there are pretty small, if only because a lot of the plants are tiny algae. This means that oceans have a trophic pyramid with a lot more levels than most environments on land: plants, small herbivores, small carnivores, bigger carnivores, even bigger carnivores, and apex predators. Shrimp eat algae, herring eat shrimp, jacks eat herring, tuna eat jacks, sharks and orcas eat tuna.

One would expect this would make ocean creatures even more hyper-intelligent than their dry-land counterparts. After all, they not only have to outwit their prey, they probably have to outwit predators as well. But fish, at least, seem rather dull-witted, driven more by pure instinct than cognition. Cetaceans ��� descended from land animals ��� are very clever indeed, and we've learned that cephalopods may well be in the same league. I don't know why there aren't smarter fish.

Naturally, I've stuck to very general terms in this discussion. There are loads of weird and amazing adaptations by animals which defy these broad categories. Trappers, like spiders or antlions, which use non-living structures to catch prey. The whole vast world of parasites, and symbiotes. I certainly can't describe the entire variety of life on Earth in a single blog post. But these general categories should serve in the next few entries as we discuss intelligent alien beings.

Notes on Worldbuilding Part 14: Low-Temperature Biologies

Most of the Universe is really dark and cold, so life which might exist in such conditions is worth thinking about. For every world with oceans of liquid water there are dozens of planets and moons with only ice.

There's an upper temperature limit for As-We-Know-It life: above about 333 Kelvin (60 C, or 140 Fahrenheit) proteins denature, and I suspect bad stuff happens to nucleotides, as well.

But I don't know any lower temperature limit for DNA-based life. DNA has to exist in solution, so as long as whatever it's dissolved in doesn't freeze, I think you can have DNA replication, protein synthesis, and so forth. (Any biochemists reading this PLEASE let me know if I'm off base.) So let's go down the temperature scale and see what's there.

Ammonia: Just colder than liquid water is liquid ammonia (NH4). Ammonia's liquid range is a bit narrower than water's, but not excessively so: 196 to 239 Kelvins (about -77 to -34 Centigrade, or -106 to -29 Fahrenheit). It's very common in the universe, so it's entirely possible to have celestial bodies with ammonia seas or oceans. The DNA and proteins which would form in such an environment would be very different from what we see on Earth, but it seems likely that evolution could come up with a system that would work about the same way, at least on the macroscopic level.

Ammonia and oxygen react fairly readily, so I don't see an ammonia-ocean world developing an oxygen atmosphere, even if something analogous to photosynthesis evolves there.

In fact, photosynthesis on an ammonia world would be a planet-killer: plants turning ammonia and carbon dioxide into sugars would release oxygen and nitrogen into the atmosphere. The oxygen would combine with ammonia, turning that into water and more free nitrogen. The free nitrogen just goes into the atmosphere, no problem, but in a liquid-ammonia environment water is a rock. It would accumulate in a planetary ice cap, permanently taking hydrogen and oxygen out of the environment. Gradually this dries up the ammonia ocean, until eventually all the available hydrogen and oxygen is locked up in glaciers and everything dies.

All of which means that life on an ammonia world would probably use lower-energy chemosynthesis for power ��� either from the start, or after photosynthesis becomes impossible.

It seems plausible that ammonia-based life would make greater use of nitrogen compounds than Earth life does. This is more than a cosmetic detail: notable complex nitrogen compounds include things like TNT and ammonium nitrate. They go boom, even without an oxygen atmosphere. In a cold ammonia world environment they would likely be stable ways to store energy in living tissues, but an ammonia-based being getting exposed to a hot oxygen atmosphere could go off like a bomb!

Chlorine: Chlorine (Cl2) is liquid at a temperature range similar to ammonia, 173 to 239 Kelvin. However, as we've already discussed, it's a lot less abundant in the Universe. I can't easily think of a mechanism which would create large amounts of free chlorine, especially since in most cold environments one could expect a decent amount of hydrogen.

However, hydrogen plus chlorine gives us hydrogen chloride (HCl), which is liquid at a temperature range of 160 to 188 Kelvin, somewhat colder (about -172 to -121 Fahrenheit). In the presence of water, hydrogen chloride forms hydrochloric acid. Where most water is frozen, I'm going to guess you would have oceans of liquid hydrogen chloride with a lot of acid mixed in.

Proteins don't like strong acid any more than they like high temperatures, so life in a hydrogen chloride sea would have to use some other kind of molecules. Non-polar organic compounds like oils or lipids could possibly withstand that environment, so perhaps more complex molecules might form inside globules of oil ��� or maybe evolution could produce an oily, non-polar version of DNA and proteins.

Sulfur Again: We associate sulfur with hot worlds, but there are sulfur compounds which are liquid at very cold temperatures indeed. Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is a liquid between 188 and 213 Kelvin (-85 to -60 Centigrade).

Carbon disulfide (CS2) is liquid across a large range of temperatures, from 161 to 319 Kelvin, or -170 to 114 Fahrenheit. It is another non-polar molecule, which means it is more compatible with oils and similar compounds rather than water and salts.

Both compounds can play a part in sulfur-reduction biochemistry. If one could come up with a light-powered mechanism for making complex sulfur compounds, that could serve as the basis for a cold environment sulfur biosphere.

Note that it's nasty stuff on Earth, so any humans visiting a cold sulfur world, or cold sulfur beings visiting human outposts, will need very good protective suits.

Liquid Methane: Methane is extremely common in the Universe, and is abundant on the colder bodies in our own Solar System. It has a fairly narrow liquid range: 91 to 111 Kelvin, or -296 to -260 Fahrenheit. Though on massive worlds like the gas and ice giants the high atmospheric pressure can likely keep methane liquid even at higher temperatures. It's another non-polar liquid, so again, part of the "oily" family rather than "watery" polar solvents.

As already noted, this could support a biosphere based on lipid-type chemicals. Since methane can't co-exist with oxygen (that's literally how the SpaceX Raptor rocket engine is powered), biological processes on a methane world would have to depend on hydrogen reduction reactions. But hydrogen is exceedingly abundant, so that's not a problem.

However, as we get down into the extremely cold conditions within shouting distance of absolute zero, a new problem arises. Most of the processes within living cells are driven by random molecular motion. RNA molecules or the equivalent don't zoom around the cell nucleus like little forklifts carrying pallets labeled "Amino Acids." They just kind of bounce around via Brownian motion until they bump into some other molecules and interact.

Brownian motion is driven by heat, which thus means the colder the environment is, the slower biological processes go. This isn't a huge problem ��� in fact, in a low-energy environment it's almost an advantage, since energy sources we would disdain as too weak could be fine when integrated over time ��� but it does suggest that low-temperature biospheres will be slow. Slow-growing, slow-moving, slow-spreading . . . and slow-evolving. If each generation takes ten times longer, then natural selection is ten times slower.

This should come as a huge relief to us Earthlings. The fraction of the Universe where low-temperature life might arise and thrive is vastly bigger than the tiny portion where life like ours can exist. If low-temperature life could grow and evolve as fast as we do, we probably wouldn't be here. Earth would be a mining outpost supplying heavy elements for some ammonia-drinking entrepreneurs. Presumably if we ever do discover low-temperature organisms out in the chilly wastes beyond Jupiter's orbit, they will be considerably less advanced than we are, not just in technology but in actual biological complexity.

Liquid Nitrogen and Liquid Hydrogen: These two are primordial gases, and are very abundant. Hydrogen in particular basically makes up the whole Universe with a few trace elements. Both are liquid at very cold temperatures: nitrogen (N2) at 64 to 77 Kelvin, hydrogen (H2) at 15 to 20 Kelvin.

But. Both elements are certain to exist in fairly large amounts in giant planets, where the massive atmospheric pressures can keep them liquid at much warmer temperatures. Much much warmer: part of the interior of Jupiter is thought to be liquid hydrogen at thousands of degrees Kelvin!

What this means is that any gas giant world ��� and exoplanet searches have turned up hundreds of them already ��� could have vast oceans of liquid hydrogen at fairly high temperatures. So even if liquid-hydrogen life is vanishingly rare, the number of places it could arise are immensely greater than the possible origin points for water-based life, and have likely been around longer. If hydrogen-based life is possible, our Universe is optimized for them, not us.

The trouble with liquid hydrogen is that if conditions are cold enough for hydrogren to condense, then just about any other substance other than helium is frozen. And if you raise the pressure, the temperatures increase enough to make most complex molecules impossible. But it may be possible for other structures to exist in a liquid hydorgen or liquid nitrogen environment ��� physical structures like chains of vortexes in the liquid, or complexes of magnetic fields persisting at superconducting cold temperatures. Again, improbable, but the sheer amount of hydrogen in the Universe means lots of chances.

That wraps up the discussion of possible biochemistries. I would very much like to expand these entries, so please contact me if you have more information. Next time I'll tackle what an alien ecosystem might look like.

Notes on Worldbuilding Part 13: Weird Life at Liquid-Water Temperatures

The last entry discussed possible biochemistries for planets hotter than Earth, ranging from "hot" to "incomprehensibly hot." Such life forms may actually exist in the Universe, but for fictional purposes they're a little inconvenient. When either the aliens or the humans have to make brief visits to the other civilization wearing heavy protective gear, it limits your opportunities for dramatic interaction.

So what kind of life might exist on worlds with temperatures comparable to Earth, other than Earth-type life itself?

Solvents which can exist at liquid-water temperatures include sulfuric acid (which I covered last time) and liquid hydrogen cyanide. Sulfuric acid is so inimical to Earth life that temperature would be relatively minor concern for a visiting human astronaut.

Cyanide is poisonous ��� but it's not corrosive. A pressure suit could keep it out and a human could walk around as long as his or her air tanks last. Cyanide could support DNA-based life, though obviously it would be very different from Earthly organisms.

Well, what about alien water worlds? Can we have weird life on an otherwise Earthlike planet? Yes!

One obvious difference would be to have an ecosystem based entirely on anaerobic respiration, with no free oxygen. Maybe plants never evolved on that world ��� my first novel A Darkling Sea takes place in a lightless ocean on an ice-covered moon, and the entire ecosystem is powered by chemosynthesis. Plant-like organisms feed on chemicals from seabottom thermal vents, and then other organisms eat them, and so on.

Anaerobic respiration is a lot less energetic than aerobic. Oxygen really is rocket fuel, after all. In my novel, that meant the Ilmataran characters could only remain active for brief bursts using stored energy, then would go torpid until they recover.  

There are several different kinds of anaerobic respiration. There's fermentation, which breaks down complex organic molecules, releasing energy and waste products like lactic acid or alcohol. Fermentation requires a source of complex organics in the first place, which means it can't be the primary level of an ecosystem ��� you need some way to make those organics, and you can't do it by breaking down other organics for obvious reasons.

There's sulfur chemosynthesis. I alluded to this briefly in the last entry. Some bacteria on Earth use inorganic sulfur compounds as reducing agents, getting energy from reactions that release hydrogen sulfide. This is the deadly "sewer gas" which can turn an enclosed manhole or mine into a deathtrap. Like other anaerobic reactions, it's not as energetic as oxygen respiration.

Finally there's chlorine. It's very reactive element, and could take the place of oxygen in an energetic ecosystem. The only problem is how you produce it. Certainly a salt-water ocean contains plenty of chlorine, but I haven't heard of any reactions which liberate free chlorine in any quantity. Maybe some kind of biochemistry reliant on sodium compounds would produce chlorine as a by-product, just as photosynthesis gives off oxygen. That would give you a planet with a nitrogen-chlorine atmosphere, rainstorms of hydrochloric acid, and blue-green skies.

And of course, even if you have life doing photosynthesis, oxygen respiration, and storing information with DNA, it can still be startlingly weird. Just rearranging what kinds of organism use certain molecules gives us very alien life forms: animals with wooden bones, or skins of natural latex; plants made of chitin or calcium; cell nuclei with just a single giant chomosome, or branching DNA of fractal complexity; and so on.

Next time I'll look at life on cold worlds.

Notes on Worldbuilding Revived!

I know, it's been more than six months, but now I really really am getting back to the worldbuilding series. I promise. Pinky-swear. 

As proof of my sincerity, I've updated the entry on hot planet life forms. You can find the revised version here.

Next time I'll look at variant life for Earthlike worlds, and then on to the cold planets.

Chatbots and Gamemasters

The author of one of my favorite roleplaying game blogs ��� he uses the handle "Noisms" and the blog is called Monsters & Manuals ��� recently tried an interesting experiment to see how well ChatGPT could run a solo roleplaying session using his own published game setting "Yoon-Suin." Short answer: not well. 

It's worth reading his post to see how the chatbot failed.

One problem was that its scenario seemed too generic, but that could be the result of asking it to use a somewhat obscure and quirky game setting. It might have done a better job using something with abundant on-line documentation like the Forgotten Realms or Golarion. (And, to be cranky, both of those settings are pretty generic anyway, so who would notice?)

The second problem was that the GM-bot simply assented to whatever the player decided to do ��� while simultaneously doing its best to "railroad" the player into a specific course of action. I was very amused by this, because this sounds exactly like the style of "cooperative storytelling" gamemastering which exists at one vertex of the Game-Narrative-Simulation triangle. Amused, because the flaws that ChatGPT displays are exactly the things some gamers find unsatisfying about that style of roleplaying: no meaningful challenges, and you're stuck in a plot you can't escape.

"Artificial Intelligence" (a term which gets overused even more egregiously than "force field") has always been unsatisfying at running games. In online fantasy combat games the AI-controlled NPCs are notorious for only being able to draw from a limited menu of canned responses. ChatGPT simply expands that menu to the entire online world, but ultimately it's still just spitting back something vaguely appropriate based on keywords.

In early roleplaying games the GM was often called the Referee or the Judge, a holdover from tabletop wargames, but it's worth remembering that all gamemasters still have that job when running a game. Judging requires judgement, and that's something which ChatGPT just doesn't have.

So for now, at least, gamemasters are safe.

 

In Memoriam

There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

Buy a pup and your money will buy
Love unflinching that cannot lie ���
Perfect passion and worship fed
By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head.
Nevertheless it is hardly fair
To risk your heart for a dog to tear.

When the fourteen years which Nature permits
Are closing in asthma, or tumour, or fits,
And the vet���s unspoken prescription runs
To lethal chambers or loaded guns,
Then you will find ��� it���s your own affair ���
But��� you���ve given your heart to a dog to tear.

When the body that lived at your single will,
With its whimper of welcome, is stilled (how still!).
When the spirit that answered your every mood
Is gone ��� wherever it goes ��� for good,
You will discover how much you care,
And will give your heart to a dog to tear.

We���ve sorrow enough in the natural way,
When it comes to burying Christian clay.
Our loves are not given, but only lent,
At compound interest of cent per cent.
Though it is not always the case, I believe,
That the longer we���ve kept ���em, the more do we grieve:
For, when debts are payable, right or wrong,
A short-time loan is as bad as a long ���
So why in���Heaven (before we are there)
Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear?

��� Rudyard Kipling

"Astra"

2010-2023

Scarab Mission NOW Available

I have eyewitness confirmation from a friend that my new novel The Scarab Mission has reached bookstores. Or a bookstore, anyway. I'm assuming the distributor isn't just shipping to one retailer. So to everyone who has been waiting for a copy, go forth and buy! And if your local store doesn't have The Scarab Mission, demand it!

And for a little lagniappe, here's my latest podcast appearance, on Roger and Janet Carden's The Halfling and the Spaceman. You can listen to it here.