Scott Overton's Blog, page 20

COSMIC GAS STATION

A lot has been made this week of the successful reawakening of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft. Rosetta was launched in 2004 to rendezvous with the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The long chase took it beyond the orbit of Jupiter, and because Rosetta is solar powered it was put into hibernation in June 2011 to save energy. Now that Rosetta has come back closer to the sun (673 million kilometers) there’s enough sunlight to run the spacecraft and ESA scientists waited breathlessly this past Monday to see if the probe’s alarm clock would successfully wake it up again. Rosetta still has a long way to go to catch up with the comet. If all goes well, it’ll make a major course alteration in May, rendezvous with the target in August, and then the lander portion of the spacecraft will land on the comet itself on or about November 11th, 2014. That’s a big deal. There have been fly-bys past several other comets over the decades, but this will be the first landing, the first really good chance to have a look around and analyze samples. That’s important, not just to satisfy our curiosity, but to answer some key questions with practical applications.

My interest in comets was probably peaked as a kid reading Jules Verne’s novel Hector Servadac, also called Off On A Comet. Of course, it wouldn’t actually be possible for a comet colliding with the Earth to scoop up some humans—alive—and allow them to survive throughout a two-year orbit and return safely to Earth. But I loved the adventurous potential of the story, and have even written a (so-far-unpublished) novel inspired by it. As for the reality, there’s lots of inspiration there, too.

We already know that comets are mostly made up of water ice, dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide), and dust. While we look at asteroids for the mining of raw metal ores, their lack of an atmosphere is a big impediment if humans are to work them. All of that ice in comets, on the other hand, could be a ready source of atmospheric gases for human bases on asteroids or in open space. Maybe even more important, that ice can be broken up into hydrogen and oxygen and provide rocket fuel in huge quantities. It’s far too expensive to hoist much fuel out of Earth’s gravity, so there have long been plans to mine ice on the Moon for that purpose. But imagine a huge chunk of raw fuel material already in space, and maybe even going roughly in the direction we want it, say, toward the asteroid belt. We could maneuver the comet by using its own fuel. Comets have already been observed undergoing course changes driven by rockets of their own: powerful bursts of CO2 jetting outward from pockets of dry ice melted by the sun’s heat.

Sure, it’s not quite as simple as just steering a giant cosmic gas station all over the sky, but a carefully-calculated orbit change could certainly place a comet in the neighbourhood of a promising asteroid swarm. Some have even suggested that comets could be used to help provide an atmosphere for Mars so humans could eventually colonize it. And all of these plans depend on learning more about these celestial wanderers through missions like Rosetta.

One thing, though: hijacking and using up a comet for our own purposes would remove one of Nature’s most spectacular shows for future generations. Maybe they’ll forgive us when we can offer them a vacation on scenic Mons Olympus?

WILL WE EVER NEED PERSONAL ROBOTS?

If you’re of a certain age the first personal robot in fiction that made an impression on you may have been Rosie the maid from “The Jetsons” animated TV show. The idea of robotic servants has been around much longer than that, of course, and every year we expect to come closer to finding one available in stores. Well, OK, maybe at Neiman Marcus. But if you were keeping an eye on the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, there really wasn’t much that fits our usual concept. You know: the basically humanoid robot, a similar size to us with roughly analogous limbs and sensors that will do all of the jobs around the house that we don’t feel like doing. A few look cute, but aren’t much use as anything but toys or novelty items. The robots that do useful work are specialized: a small robot that will wash your windows, another that will clean your barbecue grill. Yes, there are scientists all over that are working to develop humanoid robots, but my question is: why bother? Why make a general purpose robot that can “do it all”—like us, only better? It’s a massive challenge, and it isn’t necessary. And from what I see, that’s not the direction things are going.

I have a feeling our cities of fifty years from now will surround us with specialized robots that will each do one thing and do it well. There’s no need for a robot that can clean the house and drive you to an appointment. It’s much more likely we’ll build houses with self cleaning rooms, each with its own Roomba and wipers on the windows (especially with dirt and moisture-repellant surfaces everywhere). And we’re getting closer all the time to self-driving cars. (You can read more about them here.) So-called smart appliances will not only order the groceries but assemble and cook them, too. And brain-computer interfaces will connect us to the internet and, through it, to all of our robotic devices, so we won’t even have to lift a finger to set anything in motion. Why would we need a robotic servant that looks sort of like us?

Child care? Maybe. But a daycare space with one smart computer (or human) in charge and a lot of mechanized baby movers or glorified waldos, for the physical tasks, seems more efficient and more likely. Medical care could use robots, but they wouldn’t have to be mobile. We’d go to them, or remote-controlled gurneys would carry us.

I don’t see a practical need for an all-purpose humanoid robot at all, unless it’s for one of the least practical reasons of all: companionship. (No, I’m not going to get into all the movies and books about glorified sex dolls—you can check them out on your own.) But if it’s companionship we want, don’t make a robot that looks like Rosie. A big, cuddly teddy bear would probably be the way to go.

As for me, I hope we still have dogs.

WILL PRIVATE MARS MISSIONS HURT SPACE EXPLORATION?

This week we learned that from more than 200,000 original applicants 1058 people have moved on to the second phase of the selection process for Mars One, a plan to send a team of four volunteers on a one-way trip to Mars in 2024 to found the first colony there. The number will be whittled down to about 40 within the next four years, and those finalists will train for seven years. A reality TV show audience will pick the final four. The ongoing reality show element is one of the core means by which the whole project is supposed to be funded. After all, the estimated cost is about $6 billion.

A somewhat similar undertaking called Inspiration Mars involves a plan to send one man and one woman to within 100 miles of Mars’ surface and back to Earth again in 2018.

I think projects like these constitute a threat to the long-term exploration of space.

I hate to knock anything to do with space, and I’m all in favour of private enterprise getting involved. I’ve applauded the successes of companies like SpaceX, sending supplies to the International Space Station and launching a Thai telecommunications satellite this week. And several new companies intending to get into the business of space mining are backed by some very big names with great track records. But these ventures are based on businesslike profit models—they’ll be done carefully and conservatively because investors will demand it, and failure is too costly.

I would argue that failure is too costly for the Mars projects, too. We love success and adore heroes, but martyrs cause a different reaction. The two space shuttle disasters and the Apollo 1 fire in January of 1967 rocked people’s confidence in the space program. The loss of human life makes the average person question whether the exploration of space is worth it. And I think the Mars missions are setting themselves up for failure.

It’s appropriate that the largest number of the Mars One candidates are Americans and Canadians because this week our continent is suffering the effects of a much-talked-about “polar vortex” that’s wandered too far south and brought killing cold with it. I hope our would-be Mars-dwellers are taking the opportunity to spend a lot of time outdoors to enjoy the kind of brisk temperatures they can look forward to on Mars on the nicest of days. And, oh yeah, there’s no breathable air. I keep picturing four people living in something like those “bouncing inflatables” carnival kiddie rides unable to go outside without a space suit, unable to get emergency support if needed, and unable to ever return to Earth. To me, that doesn’t have the makings of a colony, it has the makings of a disaster. All played out on reality TV for an audience that will probably be drawn to the prospect of death in the same way as people who watch car racing. Good for TV ratings maybe, but if the Mars One crew dies, how many people back here will still have the stomach to see their tax dollars or financial investments going into projects that have that kind of risk? Similarly, even if Inspiration Mars does get two people to the vicinity of Mars and back, will that really be inspiring? How many people remember the names of Apollo astronauts on the missions that orbited the Moon but didn’t land?

We need to get to Mars, but we need to do it right, with a colony mission that has a good chance of long-term success, and the infrastructure for two-way travel. Let’s pool resources and all that enthusiasm and construct a staircase to the stars, instead of some makeshift rope ladders.

That’s what will enable us to take the next step outward, and the next after that.

LOSS OF INFORMATION HURTS US ALL

We call this the “Information Age”, don’t we? Yet several news items I’ve come across this week show that a huge amount of important information is in real danger of vanishing forever, some by neglect and accident, much by willful disregard.

First there came the revelation this month that as much as eighty percent of the data from research studies conducted over the past couple of decades has been unintentionally lost by being sent to no-longer-active email accounts and trusted to electronic storage devices that became outdated and inaccessible, or were replaced but not fully copied. It’s not hard to see how this could happen. How many times have you upgraded a hard drive but accidentally or deliberately left some files behind? In fact, how many files have you saved to CD or even floppy disks, confident that you could always retrieve them later? University of British Columbia researchers tried to access original data from more than five hundred randomly-chosen ecology studies conducted between 1991 and 2011, and found that data usually remained fully accessible for the first two years after publication, but the chances of finding it thereafter declined by 17% with each year that passed. The researchers blame the fact that such data remains in the hands of the original conductors of the research, and so they’re calling for centralized data archives to which all published research data would by transferred and kept. Great idea, but there’s a problem with it, which brings us to the next story.

We have archives of research data already—they’re called libraries. Unfortunately, since many of them are publicly funded, their continued existence remains at the whim of the serving government. In Canada we have a long-reigning conservative government that is a proven enemy of science. Don’t take my word for it—look it up, but keep a box of Kleenex handy. One of their most recent efforts is to close a half-dozen world-renowned research libraries. The government claims that the data in the libraries is being digitized and preserved. Scientists and library staff are saying this is not true: the information is simply being culled and what isn’t deemed worth transporting to the few libraries remaining open is scrapped. Scientists have been scrambling to save irreplaceable volumes destined for the dumpster.

None of us has a crystal ball. We can’t know what old information we will one day need as a baseline for comparison to a new set of circumstances. Many important natural and social trends only become evident after the analysis of data from very long periods of time. The unintentional loss of data is regrettable and can be stopped. The willful destruction of data is unconscionable and must be stopped. Canadians have protested such government cutbacks without success. The rest of the world needs to take notice and shame the Canadian government into stopping this practice, and send a message to any other governments who might consider such a policy. Before the information age is returned to a much darker time in our history.

THE MOON IS COOL AGAIN

If you’re a space geek you’re aware that China has a lunar probe and rover active on the Moon right now. If you haven’t watched the video of the landing you can find it here. A pretty fast drop to the surface but, what the heck, everything seems to be working—the Jade Rabbit rover deployed and is busy checking out the Sea of Rains. The Chang'e-3 spacecraft follows a couple of preparatory fly-by missions by China, and lots of fly-bys by other countries over the past decades, but it’s the first landing since the Russian Luna 24 in 1976. That’s quite a long time between actual visits. Yet it’s just the beginning of a resurgence: missions over the coming decade include a joint Russia/Sweden/Switzerland lander set for 2016, a lander and rover from India in 2017, a lander and rover from Japan in 2018, and a U.S. venture also in 2018 with help from Canada and Japan. Those are just the government projects. We shouldn’t discount the Google Lunar X-Prize competition which will give $20 million to the first private team that successfully lands a spacecraft on the Moon’s surface and sends back some meaningful data. So far, one of the leading contenders is a company called Astrobotic, which plans to deliver a lander there in 2015.

Why the renewed interest in that big ball of dust hanging in the sky? (Now that we know it’s not made of cheese, it can’t be because of a shortage of fancy salad dressing). One possible answer lies in the reasons behind yet another lunar rover project tentatively scheduled for 2018. That one’s from the Shackleton Energy Company, expressly formed in 2007 to get into the business of mining the Moon. Their plan appears to be to harvest significant deposits of ice and/or extract oxygen from lunar rocks to free up gases that can be used as fuel. After all, any further development of the Moon and certainly any exploitation of the rest of the solar system will require a lot of fuel, and the stuff is very expensive to haul up all the way from the Earth’s surface.

Ultimately, the other missions are likely about mining the Moon’s resources, too. China has indicated that they’re especially interested in so called rare earths—minerals that are essential to a whole list of technologies from lasers to X-ray machines to PET scanners and more. They’re not easy to come by in commercial quantities. China is already the largest supplier and has been cutting back on exports, causing worldwide concern.

So it’s not some romantic notion of making inroads into the final frontier, or even the hunt for a big black buried monolith from an alien race that is drawing human interest back to the Moon. It’s money—plain and simple. But then, the end of the Apollo missions should have taught us that national vanity and ideological competition aren’t enough over the long haul.

WE ARE FAMILY

I read this week about a website called modamily.com (as in modern family) that promotes what’s called “non-romantic co-parenting”. The idea is that the website will match you up with someone who has similar goals and principles regarding parenting so the two of you can co-parent a child without any romantic relationship whatsoever. All important details of the arrangement (including the method of conception) would be worked out ahead of time, of course. I guess it’s kind of like a divorce settlement without the animosity.

Our concept of the family has been changed by the high divorce rate, adoption, surrogate parenting, gay marriage and who knows what else? If people are willing to have non-romantic parenting arrangements, why stop at a couple? In this world of the internet, why not half-a-dozen or more parents from various parts of the globe united in raising one child? (Though imagine the grief of having six parents tell you to clean up your room!) Sooner or later someone will try this. Whether or not they should is another question.

SF writers have been trying to imagine future approaches to parenting for decades. Many stories and novels have offered parental arrangements that don’t include co-habiting with each other or the children. Brave New World and numerous others have featured laboratory fertilization and gestation, with the child-rearing handled by entities like daycare centers and sometimes even by robot caregivers. I noticed that the newest Superman movie Man Of Steel showed that type of system in use on Krypton. The question of parenting in space colonies or colony ships has always been an issue because children would be few, the group very close, and there may be compelling reasons for parenting duties to be shared among more than just the two genetic parents. There’s even some precedent for this in small tribal cultures where paternity can often be in doubt. What’s next? Once gestation is taken out of the womb, will it really matter who our “natural” parents are? Perhaps parents will be chosen by the state.

One of the great joys of parenting is watching that little being, from your own flesh and blood, grow and develop and achieve. It works the other way around, too, with children being proud of their parents, wanting to be like them. There’s no question that role-modeling is important to child development. Sons often want to grow up to be “just like Dad”. But say a child on a spaceship crew doesn’t know who his father is. I suspect he’ll choose the man who best represents the qualities he wants in a dad, and emulate him. What if all of the children chose the same guy (the manly and brave captain, no doubt)? Then, with both genetics and behavior, we’d be messing with the mostly random variety that evolution has directed up to this point.

In many cultures family is everything. We use phrases like “blood is thicker than water” to say that blood ties demand the ultimate loyalty. Evolution is behind this, too. But can bonds like that survive forms of family structure that have no basis in genetics or even living under the same roof? And won’t society suffer without them?

The old/new-again expression claims “it takes a village to raise a child”. In these days of the “global village”, it’s pretty hard to predict how all of this will turn out.

BOOKS BY CANADIAN SF AUTHORS

I'm happy to be a member of SFCanada because its ranks include many of the best SF writers the country has to offer, which means some of the best in the world. You have to have some decent publishing credits to be able to join. Although my novel Dead Air is a mystery thriller, not SF, it is included in the SFCanada Bookstore at Amazon. Here's the link to the store so you can pick up some terrific science fiction and fantasy for yourself or people on your gift list. Enjoy!

BOOKS BY CANADIAN AUTHORS

As a member of the Canadian Authors Association I’m glad to see that the CAA has produced a new catalogue. The Bookshelf 2013: A catalogue of books by members of the Canadian Authors Association. There are some very talented writers in Canada and a lot of variety in the catalogue. There are weblinks to help you buy the books, too. My own novel Dead Air is on page two, though you can read more about here on my site. It can also be bought through my publisher Scrivener Press, as well as from Amazon, Chapters-Indigo, and Kobo books

SPACE TRAVEL THE SLOW WAY

Those of us who believe that humankind has a destiny among the stars are convinced that somehow, some day, a faster-than-light method of travel will be found. Warp speed. Jump ships. Convenient wormholes. Whatever will get us to other star systems and their planets in a reasonable amount of time. Physicists and mathematicians look at the formulae, pat us on the heads and say, “Good luck with that.”

The alternative is what became known in science and science fiction as “generation ships”: giant ark-like spacecraft meant to carry hundreds, or even thousands of people, many of whom might be born, live, and die while the ship is still in transit. The concept showed up in novels like Orphans of the Sky by Heinlein, The Songs of Distant Earth by Clarke, even TV shows like the early 70’s clunker The Starlost and parts of the movie WALL-E. After all, even optimistic estimates of near future technology place the travel time to the Centauri system, our nearest stellar neighbours, at more than a hundred years. The human lifespan is edging up to that figure, sure. But we wouldn’t launch a crew of babies, counting on them to build a colony at the end of the trip while in their final years of life. Other stars with potentially promising planets for colonization, like Gliese 581 and Gliese 667C are five times as far. So the spacecraft required would have to be self sufficient and support suitable populations for fifteen to twenty generations.

One of the popular arguments against such a project is that, by the time the first ships reached their goal, technological improvements on Earth would have produced faster ships that would have passed the original colonists and rendered them obsolete. Who’d want to take that risk?

Obviously there are a lot more problems with the concept than just technical ones. What’s the attraction in setting out for the stars knowing you’ll die in space before actually getting anywhere? What would give purpose to the lives of all of those people in the centuries between stops, and what guarantee could there be that they wouldn’t develop completely different priorities along the way, utterly changing the mission? They might become apathetic with no challenges to overcome, or turn to war amongst themselves because of the pressures of confinement and boredom. They might evolve in ways we can’t predict (especially if the ship isn’t completely shielded from cosmic radiation). A lot can happen in a few hundred years. Would such children of space even be recognizable as human by the time they got to their destination?

Still, if there were to be a suitable type of human being for such a long journey in a big tin can, they’d have to be people who are perfectly content with something like an urban environment, never seeing natural settings larger than an inner city park. They’d probably need to be easily occupied by non-physical activity, especially diversions generated by computer—as satisfied with virtual experiences as the real thing. It might help if they’re not overly ambitious, so they don’t get into conflict over things like leadership. Content to spend their time in smallish spaces, interacting in less personal ways, since large gathering areas would be at a premium.

Hmmm. Is it just me, or does that sound a lot like the millennial generation?

Maybe the generation ship idea isn’t dead. It was just waiting for the right humans to come along.

I STILL MISS THE ORIGINAL U.S.S. ENTERPRISE

After ten years of work, some Arizona researchers now claim that when popular TV series come to an end, or even when popular characters are killed off, fans mourn in the same way they grieve at the death of a close friend or relative. When I read this I thought it was ridiculous. Sure, when a favourite show ends after I’ve invested years into it, I feel disappointed, maybe even ripped off if I think the story was ended before it was complete. But mourning? Like over the death of a friend? Come on.

Then my wife busted me by reminding me how hard I took it when the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701 was destroyed in the movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.

It’s true. I didn’t cry, but I felt real pain.

And the Enterprise isn’t even a human character—how could I relate to it so strongly as to feel that kind of reaction at its demise? I didn’t even feel as badly when they killed off Spock at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (probably because we’d all heard rumours that Leonard Nimoy wanted out of the role, but I was pretty sure he’d be back somehow). Yes, I know the Enterprise has been replaced, many times, but they’re not the same. There will only ever be one original ship.

I grew up with that ship. I watched every episode of the original series when it first aired and watched them again numerous times in reruns and from tapes or DVD’s. My brothers and I had models of the Enterprise and the Galileo 7 shuttlecraft. Together with friends, we poured over blueprints—it felt like I’d walked the corridors myself and taken countless rides in the turbolifts. Most of all she took us on extraordinary adventures.

Yet even all that isn’t why I felt such a strong attachment to her. The way I felt was because of the way the characters felt. The Enterprise was Kirk’s first and only true love—he would do anything to defend her (and it could be argued that he might never have permitted her destruction if she hadn’t already been marked for decommissioning). She was far more than just a home to the other members of the crew, too—she defined them, and they her. And even when the original series ended, at least I could imagine the Enterprise voyaging on between the stars, continuing on its five-year mission and beyond. But not after Star Trek III.

Though there have been other Enterprises, I think the TV and movie creators have missed a trick by not invoking the same empathy and love in the audience for the ship herself. William Shatner’s Kirk and his Enterprise were like one being, indivisible. But Chris Pine’s Kirk doesn’t seem to be devoted to the ship at all, even though she’s his first command. I think that’s a mistake. And I think it’s a lesson for filmmakers and SF writers alike.

While we’re creating our heroic, charming, rascally, or just plain lovable human and alien characters, lets not forget their spacecraft, their time machines, their submarines or starbases.

Fans can fall in love with them too.