Peter Cawdron's Blog, page 10

The case for life on Mars

I’m highly skeptical about the prospect of life on Mars.

Mars has no global magnetic field to protect any fragile, budding life.

Whereas our magnetic field extends some 20 times the radius of Earth, Mars has little to no magnetic field, with just small, localized pockets. Not only does this mean the surface of the planet is bombarded with solar and cosmic radiation, but the solar wind strips away light elements in the atmosphere, leaving predominantly heavy gases like carbon dioxide.

Earth has a massive, global magnetic field. Picture credit: Illinois University

On Mars, magentic fields are small & localized. Picture credit: NASA

In addition to this, Mars is considerably smaller than Earth.

Mars is closer in size to our Moon than it is to Earth itself, having roughly 1/3 of the gravity. This means it’s escape velocity is much lower, which also allows the atmosphere to bleed off into space, leaving the density of the atmosphere roughly a thousand times lower than ours at sea-level.

Picture credit: NASA

One day, no doubt, we’ll settle Mars, but it will take a gargantuan effort as Mars is not in any way conducive to sustaining human life. Mars isn’t the pick of the bunch, it’s the least lethal of a motley crew.

So why am I writing a blog post about the case for life on Mars? Because there’s something rather startling about the martian atmosphere that may be hinting at the possibility of life.

For decades, astronomers looking for life in outer space have spoken of The Goldilocks Zone, the habitable area around a star where life could arise on an Earth-like planet—an orbit where it is not too hot, not too cold.

Picture credit: Keck Observatory

Now, though, there’s a realization that the Goldilocks Zone is an oversimplification. Jupiter and Saturn, for example, are well outside the Goldilocks Zone, and yet there’s good reason to think their moons may harbor life.

Which of these planets looks hospitable?

Which one do you think is most likely to support life?

Picture credit: NPR

The answer is—all of them.

This image represents what Earth would have looked like at various points in the 3.8 billion years during which life has thrived.

Although Earth is in the Goldilocks Zone, it’s spent time bouncing between extremes, from sweltering temperatures to freezing cold ranges not unlike those found on Mars. Temperatures plummeted to -58F during the Snowball age. Even at the equator, the temperature is estimated to have been at least -4F, and yet life on Earth survived. On the hot side of the equation, there’s good reason to consider that life itself may have arisen on Earth when temperatures were reaching upwards of 300F.

One common retort of creationists when comparing Earth to other planets is, “Look at how perfectly suited Earth is to life. Look at how moderate it is compared to the hellish conditions on Venus, or the frozen wastelands of Mars.” But this fails to consider Earth’s dynamic history. Earth is perfectly suited to life, but that’s not by coincidence or providence. Life has transformed Earth. Microbes have taken an inhospitable planet with a choking toxic atmosphere and transformed it into the oasis we enjoy today.

Life is astonishing. Natural Selection has allowed life to exploit finely balanced chemical pathways. The free energy involved in supporting life tends to be around 3 kcal/mol, which is low, right on the borderline of what’s useful. Chemicals react. Chemicals react a lot. And when chemicals react, they produce reactants rather than being funneled into useful products, so life has evolved to avoid the startling reactions you’re used to in high school chemistry, instead it tip toes on the edge of a chemical cliff, at energies less than those required to break a hydrogen bond. That might sound overly complex (and a diversion from the topic) but it’s important to understand, as life carves out a niche for itself. Every day, trillions upon trillions of these tiny mini-reactions keep us alive.

The point is… (a) life exploits chemistry to sustain itself and (b) life transforms its environment to support itself.

So what about Mars?

Ah… this is where it gets interesting…

As I’ve documented in another post, Mars has methane, something that is surprising as methane is easily broken down by ultraviolet light, so for us to detect methane in the atmosphere, it must be replenished by some process. As best we understand it, methane is a byproduct of either volcanic activity or life. As there are no active volcanoes or flatulent cows on Mars, it does raise the question, where is the methane coming from? The odds are that it’s arising from some obscure tectonic process. ESA’s ExoMars satellite will arrive in orbit around Mars in October of 2016 to investigate this further.

And this raises another interesting point. When we look at celestial objects, we see them largely unchanged after billions of years. The Moon has craters and geological formations that span four billion years. Unless a planet has an active atmosphere and something like plate tectonics, it tends to be astonishingly stable over long periods of time.

Do you believe in coincidences? I don’t. And so that Mars is producing methane and has an atmosphere that is fine tuned to almost precisely the triple-point of water, seems to be a smoking gun for the possibility of active, subsurface microbial life.

Water can exist in three states—as a solid (ice), liquid (water), gas (vapor). The extremes we observe in space mean that often water has no choice. The environment on Venus, for example, is so hot and highly pressurized, water exists only as vapor. On Pluto, the temperatures and pressures are so low that water is locked away as ice. But on Mars, and on a few of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, there are places where liquid water can be found. Given that this only occurs in an extremely narrow band of temperature and pressure, this is quite astonishing.

Picture credit: MIT

Remember those trillions of finely tuned moderate chemical interactions with free energy around 3 kcal/mol that keep you alive? They all need liquid water as a medium.

It is significant that the atmosphere of Mars is finely balanced so that it hovers around the triple point of water, the point where water can exist in all three states simultaneously (as ice, water and vapor). Coincidence? Or is this an example of what we’ve seen on Earth, where microbial life fights against geological and astronomical odds to sustain itself by transforming and moderating its own environment?

Subsurface water leaking on Mars. Picture credit: NASA

Is it really just a coincidence that the martian atmosphere has settled on a point of equilibrium around the triple-point of water? And that this has been sustained for hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of years?

Life didn’t always dominate Earth. There were points in time where life was almost completely wiped out, like during the snowball Earth phase, but life kept a toehold and fought back.

Is that what we’re observing on Mars? The last refuge of martian microbes fighting to sustain the equilibrium/habitability of their planet? It’s an interesting idea, and one we’ll undoubtedly learn more about as organisations like NASA and ESA continue to explore the red planet.

 

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At this point, WordPress slips in some ads, so I thought I would squeeze one in as well. Here’s my latest novel, Starship Mine.  

Science fiction & science

Recently, I was approached by a university student developing a thesis on the inventions featured in sci-fi films and the likelihood of their actualization. He had some great questions I thought would make for an interesting blog post.

Do you think people feel let down by the lack of real world inventions inspired by modern or even classic works of science fiction?

 

Oh, no. The prescience of science fiction and the pace of innovation we’re seeing in science is astonishing. If anything, we have unrealistic expectations. We’ve come to see spectacular advances as commonplace, failing to appreciate the astonishing scientific advances required to make them possible.

 

In 1865, Jules Verne captured the imagination of the public with his novel From Earth to the Moon. Invariably, his solution to the seemingly insurmountable technical problems of traveling to the Moon were wide of the mark, but the concept was brilliant. Verne understood there was a need to reach escape velocity, but the only means he knew of potentially accomplishing this was with cannons. He knew such a launch would be fatal, so he cleverly introduced the idea of wooden baffles separated by water, which would sequentially break to reduce the trauma of sudden acceleration. For it’s time, it was an ingenious (but impractical) idea, but science fiction isn’t about posing actual engineering solutions, rather it’s to inspire out-of-the-box thinking.

 

Water filled baffles below the floor were to make the launch survivable

In 1903, less than 40 years later, the Wright Brothers flew a mere 120 feet down a sandy beach. Just 12 seconds of flight time, and yet, by the 1960s, planes were crisscrossing the planet, and both the Russians and the Americans were sending probes to the Moon. Barely a century after Verne published his story, Neil Armstrong took one small step on the lunar surface. Cannons played no part in the Apollo program, and yet Verne’s vision inspired lunar exploration.

 

In the same way, Star Trek used handheld communicators and tricorders for making non-invasive medical diagnosis. Half a century later, we think nothing of cell phones, PET and MRI scans. Our devices may not be as small, but miniaturization is just a matter of time.

 

Uh, oh… unknown actor in red shirt. Thankfully, Spock’s got a tricorder

Science is far more radical than science fiction dares imagine. Take the PET scanner as an example. Few people realize what a PET scan actually does—positron emission tomography. Ever heard of a positron before? Not an electron, a positron? Positrons are antimatter (another buzz word bandied about by Star Trek). Low doses of radioactive material allow us to see inside organs and observe the chemical functions taking place within cells, detecting tumor growth, or abnormal organ activity. It’s astonishing technology. In Star Trek, it was an idea. Today, it’s reality.

 

electron/positron pair in a cloud chamber

 

Don’t look to science fiction for scientific accuracy—look for ideas that might become reality.

 

Our best chance of detecting intelligent extraterrestrials comes from the possibility they may use Dyson Spheres, massive structures designed to harness solar energy. Indeed, there’s conjecture the star KIC-8462852 may harbor such a structure.

 

Although this concept was popularize by physicist Freeman Dyson, the concept has it’s roots in the speculative science fiction of the early 20th century, and authors such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Olaf Stapledon‘s Star Maker.

 

Science fiction shouldn’t be confused with science. The two are entirely different fields, and yet the speculation of one can lead to advances in the other.

 

Do you think that we as a species are making scientific progress at a rate we can collectively be pleased by?

 

Our lives are so astonishingly short it’s easy to lose sight of how rapidly we are advancing as a species. Barely a century ago, the Wright Brothers flew 20ft above the ground, today, tens of thousands of people are in the air at any one point in time, soaring 30,000ft above the planet. The Wright Brother’s accomplishment wasn’t that spectacular, but it heralded a technological breakthrough that would change the world.

 

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is seen as a horror story, but it was a progressive look at the prospect of organ and limb transplants a hundred and fifty years before medical science made the concept possible. In the novel, Dr. Frankenstein is repulsed by the monster he created, but the central conceit of the story is that the “monster” wants to be understood—to be human. Far from the Hollywood depictions of villagers with pitchforks, Shelley’s Frankenstein raises ethical concerns rather than mindless violence. Now days, we’ve answered those concerns, and the transplant of lungs, hearts, kidneys, livers, etc is commonplace.

 

Homo sapiens have existed as a distinct species for at least 200,000 years, probably longer. The Homo genus from which we descend is at least 2,000,000 years old. For 99.9% of our existence, we have been plagued by disease. Bacteria and viruses have devastated our population with ruthless efficiency, but no more. The advances of just the past few centuries have seen the introduction of hygiene, vaccines and antibiotics that have allowed us to defy the cruelty of nature.

 

With all that has been discovered in the past hundred years, from relativity to quantum mechanics, from a detailed understanding of evolution to the exploration of the planets, we as a species are on the cusp of a new age. The only impediment is us ourselves. Can we tackle climate change? Can we protect the astonishing biodiversity we’ve inherited? Can we resolve the cultural and religious differences that drive us to war?

 

Do you think we are progressing? And in which field would you like to see more development (e.g. travel or medicine)?

 

A cure for cancer would be nice, but I’d settle for treatments that make malignant cancer a chronic rather than a terminal illness so we don’t lose brilliant minds like Carl Sagan so soon.

 

Carl Sagan with the Mars Viking probe

 

As much as I’d love to see footprints on Mars, I think we need to be judicious in how we use our limited resources. Lots of people lament that we’ve never been back to the Moon, but they lose sight of what we have done instead, with the astonishing insights provided by Pioneer, Voyager, Viking, Hubble, Cassini, the rovers on Mars, and dozens of other scientific satellites.

 

I’ll happily pass on Buck Rogers for good science being done in space. We, as a species, stand to gain much more from scientific advancement than joyrides to satisfy patriotic fever.

 

Saturn as viewed by Cassini

 

What do you think is the biggest hindrance when it comes to our development (both scientific and social)?

 

We have progressed so fast in the past century, there’s been an inevitable backlash, particularly in recent years with the rise of anti-intellectualism. Vaccines have become the target of suspicion. People still cling to the creation myths of old.  Conspiracy theories often hold more credence than reality.  Few people realize how science pervades every aspect of our lives, from the way food is packaged and stored, to being able to watch live sports on television. Vast sections of society repudiate the notion of climate change, but they fail to see that the same scientific method that gave them iPhones and laptops is warning them about our impact on the environment.

 

We need to stop seeing science as magic performed on stage, and realize it’s the foundation upon which modern society is built. If we don’t understand it, we should make an effort to learn more. That doesn’t mean everyone needs to be a scientist, but everyone should understand the scientific method as, without it, most of us would be dead, having been killed off by some hideous disease in childhood.

 

As a science fiction writer, I make science the hero, and try to get readers to see science in a positive light.

 

Calvin & Hobbes

The best advice I can give anyone in life is: stay curious, always be willing to learn.

My Top 10 (Actually 12) Favorite Short Stories of 2015

Author Will Swardstrom shares his top ten (or so) short stories from 2016

Will Swardstrom - Author

2015 is almost up, and you know what that means…

That’s right — excessive weight gain around the holidays!

Also Top 10 Lists!!

Last year I loved making my Top 10 books of the year (which ended up being around 17 or something), but this year I’m going to break down my lists into smaller categories. One of those will be the Top 10 (Actually 12) Short Stories I read in 2015.

Obviously not comprehensive, and not all were written in the past year, but all made a big impression on me. I’m terrible at telling you exactly which was THE BEST, so I’m just going to give them to you in alphabetical order by the author’s last name. Fair warning — many of them are in the Future Chronicles anthologies since I’ve read each of them this year making them a significant reading source for me each time one…

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Earth

Earth is an astonishing planet for numerous reasons, but perhaps the most remarkable fact is that life didn’t arise on this wonderfully moderate, temperate planet. Instead, the reverse is true, life arose in spite of hellish conditions. Life transformed this planet into an oasis.

Here are some awesome facts about Earth.

 

Cassini duck-dive

Cassini just dove toward Enceladus, reaching down to 30km. On Earth, we’d call this re-entry as it would dip into the stratosphere. As a point of comparison, 747’s routinely fly at 12-14km above Earth, while Mt Everest reaches up to almost 9km above sea-level.

There’s going to be some awesome imagery and some great learning coming in over the next few days.

Here’s an infographic on Enceladus produced by NASA

#31ZombieAuthors – Day 23 Interview – Peter Cawdron – Outsmarting Zombies

pcawdron:

What are the two most important considerations in the zombie apocalypse?

Read this interview to find out.

Originally posted on Bookshelf Battle:

FIND THIS ZOMBIE AUTHOR ON:

Amazon        Website      Twitter

My guest today is Peter Cawdron, who comes from the land down under.  I don’t have to pay the Men At Work a royalty for saying that because Peter is an honest to God Australian zombie enthusiast.

Peter’s the author of the Z is for Zombie series of books which include What We Left Behind and All Our Tomorrows.  These books tell the story of teenager Hazel, who in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, searches for Steve, David, and Jane, the only people who ever understood her.

An avid fan of such classic science fiction writers as Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke and Michael Crichton, Peter is also a prolific science fiction author in his own right.

I wonder if there’s an extra charge to call Australia?  Aw screw it, the bill…

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Meet You

Meet Dave

“Meet Dave” is a somewhat forgettable comedy about miniature aliens landing on Earth in a spaceship replicating a human body. It’s a popcorn flick with a bit of humor and a corny love story.

Dave is controlled by tiny people living inside him who have to work together to coordinate his responses in life. As crazy as this sounds, it’s not that far removed from reality.

We intuitively see our lives at a superficial level. I am me. You are you. Somehow, we each have this mysterious concept of personal awareness/consciousness, and we get busy with “life,” meaning going to work, watching a movie, taking the dog for a walk in the park, etc. Only, that’s not life. That’s an abstract built upon life.

In reality, our lives are more like “Meet Dave” than we would ever imagine. Our bodies are a Rube-Goldberg machine of extraordinary complexity.

Ordinarily, we ignore this biological/mechanical support mechanism, and stop only to smell the roses, until things go wrong. And there’s a lot of wrong that can occur, from catching a virus, picking up a bacterial infection or something more insidious like cancer.

The fundamental building blocks of life are cells. They’re the Lego blocks of this crazy whirlwind adventure we call life, and yet we barely give them any thought at all. Just like the tiny aliens inside Dave, cells differentiate, taking the same basic instruction set but applying it in different ways to form heart, lungs, liver, skin, etc. And we call this complicated mishmash of cells, you. How this occurred from an evolutionary standpoint is remarkable, and a tale told over billions of years.

Dictyostelium Discoideum is a single cell amoeba, just an average joe leading a normal single celled life. And yet when faced with a scarcity of resources, Dict (if I may be informal) bands together to create a multicellular organism that resembles a slug. Individual cells that functioned perfectly well as living organisms on their own switch into a cooperative mode that is a basic model for complex animals such as us. Individual amoebas give up their independence and become role-specific. Some cells form a head, others the body, still others take on the role of an immune system protecting the entire organism. Although amoebas are blind, the newly formed slug will seek out light. It is a remarkable transformation to be hold.

Dictyostelium Discoideum is the biological equivalent of a bunch of Lego blocks independently rearranging themselves to form the bat mobile.

A self-assembling bat-mobile still wouldn’t be as cool as Dictyostelium Discoideum

At some point in the last billion years, cells figured out how to do this on a permanent basis and realized the massive evolutionary advantage of such a cooperative strategy. Branching out from microbial competition, plants and animals were able to exploit ecological niches to survive and pass on their DNA in more and more varied forms.

Our bodies are comprised of anywhere from 50 to 75 trillion individual cells, depending on how many cheeseburgers you’ve eaten. Cells are small. A single gram of average human tissue contains roughly a billion cells, while the largest cell in the human body is the egg from which we all came, and that’s roughly the size of the full stop at the end of this sentence.

Our bodies are a hot bed of action. In any given minute, roughly a hundred million cells in your body will die. And that’s not a bad thing, because at the same time, other cells are replicating, dividing to replace those lost cells.

Cancer is a complex disease that has many forms, but these all share a common cellular problem–cells that continue to replicate without dying off, and these malfunctioning cells form a tumour. The problem with cancer is cells that should serve a specific purpose for a brief period of time forget that they’re part of a greater whole, you, and start living for themselves. Unfortunately, that’s not sustainable, and so we have developed a variety of treatments to isolate and remove these rogue cells before they cause irreparable damage.

It might be over simplistic, but one way to think of cancer is it’s a reversion to the cellular equivalent of every man (cell) for himself. And instead of working together in a harmonious whole, cells behave as though they’re loners again, only interested in replicating and surviving as long as possible. It’s as though the Dictyostelium Discoideum slug has disbanded.

There’s some exciting research being done along these lines by scientists such as Paul Davies. I don’t mean to oversimplify the problem, but I think cancer research is akin to the assaults on Mt. Everest in the early 1900s. At the time, it looked impossible. Now days, with the right training, guidance and planning, any fit individual can stand on top of the world. In the same way, in the near future, we’ll look back on cancer as being another major medical milestone we have consigned to the history books, like polio and smallpox.

I look forward to the day we gain a mastery over the Rube-Goldberg machine that is our bodies.

Vampires and Space Porn

Okay, I admit it. I’m guilty of click-bait, but this really is a post about vampires and space porn.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been working on a couple of novellas, Alien Space Tentacle Porn and Vampires, although it’s important to note that these two stories are completely unrelated.

Anyone that’s read any of my novels has probably already figured out that I like to take risks with my writing. Rather than a nice, safe, easy bet on the hero’s journey adapted to stars, or wars, or whatever, I like to get outside my comfort zone.

When mulling over stories I’d like to write, I gravitate toward challenging plot lines rather than run-of-the-mill well-worn concepts. Unfortunately, this means my stories aren’t exactly commercially astute and don’t tend to soar high in the Amazon rankings. I know I’d be better served pumping out some pulp fiction, but I just can’t bring myself to write cliché stories when there’s so much more to explore.

Don’t judge a book by its cover

Or in this case, by it’s title. Books like My Sweet Satan have gone on to succeed on Amazon in spite of their lousy titles.

Alien Space Tentacle Porn is a fascinating look at how off-the-wall First Contact could be—in a Men-In-Black kind of way. It’s crazy fun.

Despite it’s provocative title, Alien Space Tentacle Porn is actually quite demur. There’s the literary equivalent of a flash of flesh in a prison cell, but nothing sleazy or graphic. Instead, the novella has some thought-provoking ideas on what it takes for society to advance, all woven against an alien encounter of delusional and often hilarious proportions.



Vampire, on the other hand, is sober, being a classic suspense/horror story. This novella revisits Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but without becoming bogged down in the sensational aspects of sucking blood from neck wounds.

Instead of following the standard clichés, Vampire exploits plot points from Stoker’s original work, weaving an all-too-plausible look at how the vampire legend could have arisen, and how it could perpetuate in modern times without being noticed.

In writing Vampire, I wanted to return to the uncertainty and creepy atmosphere that haunts Dracula as a novel, and revive some of the foreboding sense of evil so masterfully portrayed by Bram Stoker.

This is very much a tribute work, and I hope it comes across as such. Although it’s a novella, coming in at 16,000 words, it packs quite a punch, with an ending few will see coming.

Thanks again for supporting independent science fiction. I hope you take a chance on these works as they’re both memorable stories that are thoroughly enjoyable.

Real world Encounters with other stars

Today, science fiction author Matthew Mather launches his latest book, NOMAD.

All too often, we see life on Earth as distinct and separate from outer space, but the reality is, we are in space, not separate from it. As Carl Sagan noted when Voyager turned around and took a snap shot of Earth at a distance of 6 billion kilometers, out beyond Pluto, our world is little more than a pale blue dot, a speck of dust floating on a sunbeam. What would it take to upset life on Earth? The dinosaurs found that out the hard way, and Matthew explores some other possibilities that are all too plausible.

In this article, Matthew discusses the background behind his novel, which is a page-turner and based on hard science. NOMAD is on special today for 99c, so grab it while it’s hot.

~~~

Before writing my newest book Nomad, released on August 12th, I spent months talking to astronomers and astrophysicists to build up the science behind the encounter I envisioned. At first, the physicists said the event would totally destroy the Earth, but slowly, I managed to piece together a physics-based scenario where it was possible life could survive on the surface—otherwise it wouldn’t make for much of a story!

I won’t give away a spoiler and say exactly what the anomaly is in Nomad, except to say that it’s on the order of a hundred times the mass of the sun, totally invisible, and coming at us quickly. It’s based on real-world science, and I spent a lot of time working with the astrophysicists to work out a scenario of how we would miss detecting this kind of anomaly.

In the end, I managed to convince a team of post-graduate researchers build a full three-dimensional gravity simulation of the entire solar system to lob my Nomad  anomaly through the middle of. All of the elements of the story—all the forces involved and the paths of the planets afterward—are based on real-world physics (at the end of the book, I have instructions on where to watch a video of me running the simulation).

There have been many books and movies illustrating the idea that the Earth is part of the ecosystem of asteroids and comets, planets and even our Sun, and that from time to time, an object may hit the Earth, or the Sun may flare, triggering catastrophic events. But what hasn’t been explored as much is the effect of an ecosystem on a much larger scale—the effect exerted on the Earth by objects in our interstellar and even intergalactic neighborhood.

It might sound far-fetched, but it isn’t.

In fact, much of the events we’d attributed previously to chance, like the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, might not be random at all, but the direct result of the interstellar interactions the Earth has with passing stars (still random, but on a much larger scale). In school, we’re taught that the closest star, apart from the Sun, is Proxima Centuri, at just over four light years of distance. It may seem like the interstellar neighborhood is static.

But it’s not.

In February of 2015, researchers were dumbfounded to discover that just 70,000 years ago, near enough in time that our direct ancestors would have seen it, Scholz’s star, a red dwarf, passed about a half light year from us. This led to a flurry of data crunching, leading scientists to discover that, for instance, four million years ago, a giant star, more than twice the mass of the sun, passed less than a third of a light year from us, and in just over a million years from now, another star will pass at just over a hundredth (yes, a hundredth) of a light year from our sun, grazing the solar system itself and possibly affecting the orbits of the planets.

Now scientists are saying that Sedna, the 10th planetoid of the Sun, the one after Pluto, isn’t even an original planet of our Sun. It was captured from a passing star over a billion years ago, when our solar system collided with an alien star’s planetary system. Hundreds of objects in the Kuiper Belt, the collection of planetoids past Uranus, are believed to have been captured from passing stars.

So we are continually mixing together with others stars and interstellar objects, and not on a time scale of billions of years, but on a regular basis every few million years—some scientists now even think that alien stars transit our solar system’s Oort cloud as often as every few hundred thousand years ( BBC )

A change in Earth’s orbit might have triggered one of the biggest global warming events in its history ( Daily Mail ). And scientists now think that a massive ice age, started 35 million years ago, might have been also been caused by another shift in Earth’s orbit, and that this same event disturbed the asteroid belt enough to precipitate several large asteroid impacts, one of which formed the Chesapeake Bay. Some now believe these sorts of events might have been caused by the gravitational effect of a passing star.

Asteroids and comets transiting the inner solar system will of course hit the Earth from time to time, but there is an added element of the influence of passing stars that churn these objects into new and dangerous orbits, and even pulling the Earth itself into a slightly different orbit around the Sun. Which leads to speculation about the root cause of some large comet/asteroid impacts, such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. The point is that there are a lot of things in our universe, happening right around us, that we have no idea about.

And we haven’t even talked about the 95% of “stuff” floating around us, dark matter, that we can’t see or detect, other than knowing it’s there from its gravitational signature. With upgraded sensors and increased power in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2015, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, many scientists had hoped to see evidence of dark matter.

But they’ve found nothing. Despite all of our technology and hundreds of years of peering into the cosmos, we still have no idea what makes up the vast majority of our universe.

The scenario is Nomad  is perhaps farfetched, but perhaps not—truth is often stranger than fiction—and this is the story of Nomad.

Click here to go to Nomad’s Amazon Page.

Chronicles Week! (with Kindle Paperwhite Giveaway!)

pcawdron:

Author Will Swardstrom talks about his involvement in The Future Chronicles series of anthologies and has a Kindle Paperwhite giveaway with all the Chronicles preloaded. Jump in and join the party!

Originally posted on Will Swardstrom - Author:

Been radio silence around here for a couple months. Sorry about that…I’ll fill you in later. Suffice it to say this summer didn’t go exactly as planned on the writing front, but was still productive as well.

(Yes, yes…I’ll get to the Kindle Paperwhite giveaway in a bit…)

But while I haven’t been updating Ye Olde Blog at all this summer, I’m breaking that fast now for Chronicles Week.

Let me back up a bit. When I started writing, I credited a lot of the reasons why to one man — Hugh Howey. After reading his blog and WOOL, I was heartened by his approach and the success he had. Not success as in worldwide blockbuster multi-millionaire success, but rather just simply getting that book written and published success. I told anyone and everyone that it was due to Hugh Howey’s career that I had one as well.

While…

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