Peter Cawdron's Blog, page 6
June 11, 2019
Book Review: Reentry by Peter Cawdron
Indieathenaeum reviews my latest release REENTRY
Book Title: Reentry – Retrograde, Book 2
Author: Peter Cawdron
Publication Date: June 11, 2019
Available on: Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other booksellers as an eBook and as a hardcover
Indie Athenaeum Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars
Liz Anderson and two of her compatriots are called home from Mars to account for what happened after the events of “Retrograde”. Still grieving the loss of her love, Jianyu, she has some mixed feelings about returning to Earth. The artificial intelligence that ravaged Mars and Earth in an attempt to destroy humanity has been beaten. Liz takes home the hard drives containing the A.I.’s remnants for research purposes. But also on those drives is what the A.I. downloaded from Jianyu’s brain. Thinking Jianyu might somehow still be in there, she ruminates on the nature of consciousness and whether he can be saved.
Lurking in the…
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June 7, 2019
Book Review: Hello World – An Anthology of Short Stories by Peter Cawdron
Chris Fried from The Indie Athenaeum reviews my short story collection, HELLO WORLD
Book Title: Hello World – An Anthology of Short Stories
Author: Peter Cawdron
Publication Date: March 31, 2019
Available on: Amazon as an eBook and as a paperback
Indie Athenaeum Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars
Peter Cawdron has compiled his many story stories and novellas from the past ten years of publishing independent science-fiction into one collection. It showcases the breadth and depth of the author’s storytelling skills to tell many bold stories filled with ambition and scope. It also kept me immersed in the worlds and characters he has created, each one absorbing and different.
Find out more about these sixteen assorted tales by reading an overview and review of each one, starting with:
“Hello World” – Liz is attending a lecture by her 
favorite professor, Franco Corelli, who believes aliens are studying humanity through Twitter. But when an extremist pulls a gun…
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May 5, 2019
The problem with science fiction
Science fiction author Daniel Arenson recently made the fascinating observation that some prominent writers shy away from being labeled as science fiction authors.
Ian McEwan’s novel Machines Like Me is about artificial intelligence, but he refuses to call it science fiction, because he claims his novel explores “human dilemmas.”
Margaret Atwood, a supremely talented author, also shies away from calling her work “science fiction,” despite her novels often being set in the future and dealing with technology. She explained that science fiction, as opposed to what she herself writes, is “talking squids in outer space.”
Harlan Ellison, another extremely talented author, writes about the future, robots, space, time travel, and artificial intelligence. But he famously said: “Call me a science fiction writer. I’ll come to your house and I’ll nail your pet’s head to a coffee table. I’ll hit you so hard your ancestors will die.”
Daniel Arenson
It’s tempting to think of this as snobbery or prejudice, but remember, these authors deliberately chose to write these stories—they’re inspired by sci-fi concepts but don’t want to be associated with the overall “brand.” Why?
Historically, there’s been resistance to considering science fiction legitimate literature, but I think this runs deeper as that attitude has, itself, slipped into history.
As an avid reader of science fiction, I suspect the real reason is because of the tendency of sci-fi writers to focus on the sensational over character. With broad, sweeping plots involving aliens and lasers, interstellar war and exotic concepts such as black holes and exploding stars, it’s easy for characters to become lost.
For me, this is the problem with science fiction… all too often, it’s showmanship over substance. I’m three chapters into a book by an indie writer and, as enjoyable as it is, the characters are cardboard cutouts. They’re largely irrelevant and interchangeable. If one of them was to die, honestly, I’d barely notice. If only science fiction writers would focus as much on character development as they do on the weird and the wild.
As a science fiction writer, I make a determined effort to read far more broadly than just science fiction, as I think there’s a danger of becoming caught in the sci-fi thought-bubble. While on holiday last month, I read the historical biography Mawson: And the Ice Men of the Heroic Age: Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen. My daughter is a John Green fan, so I’ve read several of his novels and, yes, I cried reading Fault In Our Stars.
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Look at that cover… No spaceships. No gigantic alien super bugs. No lightsabers. No lens flare.
Seriously, though, there’s nothing wrong with a kickass cover, but it has to be backed by character. One without the other is a mistake. And in reality, if you have deep, meaningful characters, you can get away with something as monotonous and boring as this (although I won’t be attempting that)
Science fiction IS literature.
All literature acts as a mirror, providing us with an opportunity to examine ourselves. The reader IS the protagonist as the act of reading allows us to inhabit another’s shoes, to walk in another world, to interact with others in ways we never imagined we ever would.
Science fiction is speculative, letting us see how humanity might cope with the unknown. In that regard, it offers a unique platform upon which to examine humanity. Rather than being an embarrassment, it has the potential to teach us about ourselves, but only if characters are given more credence than concepts.
January 21, 2019
Averages & Climate Change
We humans are notoriously bad at mathematics, especially when it comes to statistics and applying numerical values to real-life situations.
Averages are often misleading. Don’t believe me? Consider this…
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If you’re at a shooting range and your first shot goes one foot to the left of the target, while your second is a foot to the right, you haven’t actually hit anything but, congratulations, your average is a bullseye!
When it comes to climate change, there’s an abundance of thoroughly researched science converging on the conclusion that human technology has significantly changed the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution, causing it to retain more energy (heat). Don’t believe me? I don’t care. Your beliefs (and mine) are irrelevant. The beliefs of the President of the United States, however, have a huge impact on government policy and corporate action, so it’s alarming to see him tweet this.
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It seems this is a perennial complaint from conservatives during winter. But complaining it’s cold in winter is like complaining it’s dark at night. It kinda misses the point.
Often, on the news, you’ll hear comments such as “climate change is expected to raise the average temperature by 3 degrees,” and it can be tempting to think this is trivial. After all, “a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming” can’t be all that bad if it’s only a few degrees.
The problem is…. this is a gross misunderstanding of averages.
Averages are notoriously misleading.
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The first half of this chart varies from 4-6 while the second varies from 3-7 which means the average in both cases is a nice round 5, and this is the problem with the argument—”Oh, it’s a bitter cold winter, how can there be global warming?”
The answer is, you can’t look at the average. You’ve got to look at the trends and swings, as the average will always soften the picture. The real problem when it comes to climate change is that we’re facing more extreme swings along with the warming.
Speaking of pictures… while you’re going through a bitter cold winter in the northern hemisphere, here in the south, birds and bats are dropping from the sky, having been killed en masse by the heat.
[image error]Tens of thousands of bats (2019)
[image error]Pelicans in Peru (2012)
[image error]Fish starved of oxygen during heatwave (2019)
[image error]Birds in Western Australia (2019)
It’s past time to take climate change seriously. Don’t be fooled by talk of averages or cold winters as that hides the gruesome, horrifying reality that we’re decimating the planet.
November 30, 2018
Free Fall Audiobook Review
If you enjoy audiobooks, check out this review of Free Fall
If you appreciate well-written science fiction that includes a deep and compelling story in as little as sixty pages (or just over an hour in audiobook format), I recommend you pick up “Free Fall” by Peter Cawdron. I was unfamiliar with the work which was released in 2015, and I’m happy I spent my own money on getting a copy and the time to listen. The book was recommended to me by a trusty friend telling me to read it without knowing anything except what information is provided in the publisher’s summary. The story tells the tale of an astronaut returning to earth after a special faster-than-light experiment. What he comes back to is quite different from the planet he let only a few months earlier. The audiobook is skillfully narrated by Jeff Hays, which should not come as a surprise to those who have listened to his works or…
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November 10, 2018
Rocket Lab
Rocket Lab is the quiet contender in the commercial space race brought about by the advent of new fabrication techniques.
Everyone’s heard of SpaceX and the stalwart of US space flight, United Launch Alliance (a conglomeration of Lockheed Martin Space Systems and Boeing Defense), and even Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is wading into the arena with his Blue Origin. Rocket Lab, though, is developing as a niche player. Whereas SpaceX and ULA are after big government contracts, Rocket Lab is focusing on highly repeatable, low cost commercial launches, initially in the southern hemisphere, but they’re moving north as well.
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Why is Rocket Lab important? Well, it’s the first company outside of the Big Five—USA, Europe, Russia, China and Japan—to make orbital launches achievable. Launching the Electron from its New Zealand site in remote Mahia, it promises to make space more accessible.
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Space isn’t the final frontier—it’s the ONLY frontier. In much the same way as the Industrial Revolution ushered in a new era in history, space offers an opportunity to extend our civilisation in ways that are difficult to foresee. Economists and science fiction writers alike are gazing at crystal balls, trying to anticipate the future. We’re expansionists. We’re restless. Starting some 70,000 years ago when we first migrated out of Africa, we’ve always been looking at what lies over the horizon. When it comes to space exploration, the promise is tantalizing.
Blue Origin is looking at suborbital flights. Rocket Lab is focused on low-earth orbital launches of small to medium satellites. SpaceX has lofty ambitions for the Moon and Mars. But all these are baby steps. The real revolution will come when we look at fabricating components in space from asteroids.
It sounds like science fiction, but it’s not. Accenture have released a study on the impact of deep space mining noting that it is 5000x cheaper to deploy large structures in geosynchronous orbit from the asteroid belt than it is from Earth! The challenge is (a) getting there and (b) being able to extract and fabricate in space. NASA is already “getting there” with probes like the Dawn mission visiting Ceres. And that’s where Rocket Labs comes in. No, they’re not looking to launch out of Earth’s orbit (probably for quite some time), but they’re innovating, they’re learning, they’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible today, which is how the breakthroughs of tomorrow will come.
At some point, we’ll go for deep space. The technology to do so will come from the likes of Rocket Lab, ULA, Blue Origin and SpaceX. As these companies perfect the construction, automation and fabrication processes required for exploration, they’re laying the foundations for how we’ll conquer space in the decades to come.
Until then, as a Kiwi, I’m proud of the New Zealand startup that’s launching satellites into orbit. Onwards and upwards.
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October 13, 2018
The Politics of Storytelling
First Man is a movie about Neil Armstrong’s torturous journey to walk on the Moon. Watching the film, it’s easy to become swept up in the astonishing courage and technological marvel of reaching the Lunar surface, but right before Apollo 11 launches, there’s a shot of protestors with the Saturn V in the background. The music that plays is ‘Whitey on the Moon.’
For the entire movie, we’ve been in the insular world of Neil Armstrong and his immediate family, and suddenly we’re made aware of the Vietnam protests and dissent such as ‘Whitey on the Moon,’ which makes the juxtaposition incredibly powerful. I didn’t see it coming. I guess that was the point, showing us how easy it was to become swept up in the moment.
Interweaved within the film is historical footage, including an interview with Kurt Vonnegut saying, “I don’t care about making the Moon habitable. Let’s make New York City habitable.” Arthur C. Clarke is sitting beside Vonnegut and gives him a filthy look, which again, provides a powerful counterpoint to the overall arc of the film.
Politics, it seems, is about being honest with life. I love the Apollo programme. I think it rates up there with the building of the pyramids as one of the greatest accomplishments of our species, and yet there’s no denying it was conducted against a time of astonishing upheaval in American society.
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Recently, I’ve had a run of negative reviews against my novel Losing Mars because of “politics,” which is something I find curious as there’s no political ideology in the book whatsoever.
Losing Mars chronicles the challenges of six crew members at Shepherd base on the edge of the Vallis Marineris. Three couples. One of the couples (which doesn’t contain our protagonist) is gay and has to deal with the kind of criticisms commonly leveled against the LGBT+ community. Rather than being a human rights issue, this is somehow “political.”
Why did I include a gay couple? I didn’t. Society did. My story is simply a reflection of society, whether you want to recognize that or not.
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All storytelling is political. All of it. Whether by inclusion or omission, regardless of whether the story is set in the past or the future, EVERY novel says something about our society now. Whether we’re dealing with sexism, racism, homophobia or ableism, the absence of social issues is as much a statement as their inclusion. Their absence simply means those readers/writers are happy to ignore reality—which is not a position everyone can take as discrimination is forced on them.
I’ve written about people of color (Galactic Exploration), disabilities (Welcome to the Occupied States of America), homophobia (Starship Mine), etc, because THIS is the world in which we live.
Call me slow, but I’m spotting a bit of a pattern. Just today, author Chuck Wendig was fired from Marvel comics “for profanity” (despite Deadpool making Chuck look like a kindergarten teacher). My novels are somehow considered “political.” Then you’ve got situations like African-American football players being criticised for kneeling as “disrespecting the flag.” I don’t know about you, but to me none of these criticisms are honest.
Chuck wasn’t fired for profanity—but because he was challenging racism and sexism in his stories.
My novel isn’t political—it’s simply reflecting issues real people have to deal with in real life because of inequality.
African-American football players aren’t kneeling to disrespect the flag—they’re honoring their fallen brothers and sisters unjustly killed by US police at alarming rates.
If you’re going to be critical of anyone for speaking up against injustice, at least have the courage to be honest and admit you hate the idea of equality rather than hiding behind weasel words.
When Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse Five it was an affront to the Hollywood ideal of war as a noble endeavour. Fiction is fiction—it’s not true, it’s not real, but it is a reflection of the reality in which we live and should make us think a little deeper about life.
August 17, 2018
When Galaxies Collide
Professor Lisa Harvey-Smith recently released a popular science book called When Galaxies Collide. I loved it so I reached out to her and she kindly agreed to a blog interview.
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There are a lot of popular science books about astronomy, but the thing I enjoyed about When Galaxies Collide is the down-to-earth approach you have to astrophysics. Interwoven within the book are numerous anecdotes covering everything from your time at the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico (which featured in Carl Sagan’s novel/movie CONTACT) to the remote Australian Outback (and Mullewa, home of ‘the bathroom at the end of the universe’). Did you ever imagine science taking you to the far-flung corners of the planet?
Thanks – I’ve always had quite a simplistic mind I think, I get bored easily with dreary explanations so I wanted to create a book that had a really human element and capture the reality of what it is to be an astronomer. That does include a lot of travel, often to odd and remote places where we (deliberately) hide telescopes from the light and radio pollution generated by big towns and cities. I don’t think I ever expected my life to turn out so interesting when I was growing up in a small village in Essex. Travel was for ‘other people’, people with money and choices. I find it astonishing how big my life is turning out to be in terms of travel and meeting incredible people.
Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Your book tackles complex subjects but with an air of simplicity. I loved the way you describe the spiral arms of a galaxy as a celestial traffic jam, moving as a wave rather than being any kind of actual structure—being caught in traffic is something we can relate to and now we know the cosmic version leads to star formation. Is there any one favorite fact or commonly misunderstood point you personally find fascinating that you’d like to share with us?
I think Einstein was annoyingly accurate in almost everything he said! But it’s very true that a lot of science is obscured with jargon and acronyms and complexity that need not be there. I do like explaining black holes – a lot of people think that black holes will suck everything in like a terrible pit of death. It’s not true at all, in terms of gravitational pull they simply behave as if a star were sitting there. They don’t have an unusually large gravitational pull. They are just a deep ‘hole’ so if you fall in, you can’t get out again.
It’s rare that an author admits to being a weirdo, even in jest, but you do while recounting an incident while out jogging with a wild emu running along the track ahead of you. For me, this was a Lisa moment rather than a professor moment within the book, and highlights something important about science—the need for people to relate to scientists. We live in fractured times. Sometimes, scientists are revered as high priests. At other points, they’re dismissed and ignored. Neither position is healthy, so I loved the way you gave us a glimpse into the person behind the astrophysicist. Is scicomm (science communication to the public) an important part of your role?
Science communication is a very big part of what I do. It has evolved that way in recent years because I genuinely enjoy explaining and sharing science in a way that breaks down the barriers between a scientist as some sort of revered ‘keeper of knowledge’ and a perfectly intelligent member of the public who simply haven’t met that particular concept before. Showing that scientists are real people with hobbies and faults is a big part of that. I like to talk about my sporting interests too – running and the like.
Why is astronomy important in modern society? In your book you talk about the history of astronomy and the awe people from around the world share when sitting by a campfire, watching sparks rise in the air with the Milky Way shining brightly above, but today we have Netflix and Candy Crush, mortgages and careers, nightclubs and football games. Why should people care about galaxies colliding billions of light years away?
The stars have played a huge role in all our histories, from their role as gods and guides in ancient times to their use as maps, navigation tools and even as stories that guided our moral compasses.
The night sky is an integral part of nature, but we are losing our connection. Light pollution means that most of us cannot even see the Milky Way from where we live, so it is unsurprising that most people cannot identify a single constellation in the sky.
Aliens are always a hot topic. Given the immense distances involved and the fact that potential alien signals are easily drowned out by stars, pulsars, quasars and the like, do you think we have or could develop equipment sensitive enough to listen in on ET? Given the (literally) astronomical sizes and timescales involved, are we likely to ever hear from extraterrestrials?
The search for extraterrestrial technological civilisations is a natural one since humans are curious to know whether we are alone in this universe. The methods we employ include ‘listening’ with large radio telescopes for signals from other nearby planets that are send towards us either deliberately or as a result of them communicating with one another. It is a sensible method but unlikely to succeed for now because our telescopes are only sensitive enough to ‘see’ them if they live on planets around the closest 100 or so stars to Earth. Unless their signals are extremely bright, or we build far larger telescopes, it seems unlikely to me that this method will succeed in the next 50 years. I hope I’m wrong!
There’s a lot of interest in astronomy at the moment, with the Juno in orbit around Jupiter, Curiosity on Mars, the Parker solar probe on its way to explore our closest star, the Sun, the TESS exoplanet finder and grand projects like the James Webb Space Telescope launching in a few years. TESS and JWST in particular might find life elsewhere, perhaps not intelligent life, but if they do find evidence for any kind of exolife how will that change our world? Do you think such knowledge will transform our perspective on life?
I would love to see us discover extra-terrestrial life and embrace the finding as a transformational moment in our collective human consciousness. Sadly, given the way we behave to one another on Earth, I think it would probably make us retreat further into our shells and spend more on ‘defence’.
Does the sheer size of the universe boggle your mind? You’re dealing with colliding galaxies on a daily basis, but galaxies collide over hundreds of millions of years. As you note in your book, all we get is a snapshot of galaxies in freeze frame. It’s only by collecting and ordering images from tens of thousands of observations that we get to understand what’s actually happening. Do you ever feel daunted by that?
I don’t think the human mind is designed to take in the size of things much larger or smaller than ourselves. So when I say ‘trillion’ I know what it means mathematically, but I don’t really have any more insight than anyone else as to its true meaning. Even flying across Australia from Sydney-Perth fills me with awe at the size of a single continent. The scale of the universe will never be comprehensible to me or any other astrophysicist.
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In your book, there’s a picture of you with Buzz Aldrin, one of the first men on the Moon. Would you like to go into space? It’s long been a dream in science fiction and within popular culture. Some, like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, are trying to make spaceflight accessible, but it remains elusive. Do you think it’s a pipe dream? Or are we on the cusp of making spaceflight commonplace?
Meeting Buzz Aldrin and spending three days with him introducing his first Australian live tour was an absolute thrill. He’s a global icon and was one of my biggest heroes when I was growing up.
I think space will become more accessible once the price comes down sufficiently. It’s the same as air travel. ‘Make it available and they will pay for it’. Or something.
Thank you for taking the time to respond to this interview. I thoroughly enjoyed your book and rated five out of five stars. It’s beautifully written, so I was thrilled when your publisher allowed me to quote a paragraph (below). Keep up the great work making science easily accessible to the general public.
When Galaxies Collide is available in paperback and as an ebook. You can learn more at www.lisaharveysmith.com
August 10, 2018
Grazing the Sun
The Parker Solar Probe launches today in what is an ambitious scientific endeavour, flying in to graze the Sun in an elliptical orbit comparable to that of a comet.
Falling seems easy. For us, it’s hard to avoid and we have to be careful climbing ladders, trees, etc, but falling into the Sun is hard. Seems counterintuitive but remember Earth orbits the Sun at 108,000 km/hr. That is crazy fast, but we don’t notice our speed in the same way someone sitting in the back seat of a car racing down the highway, lost in the glare of their smartphone, might not realize they’ve pulled out of the parking lot.
Imagine falling into the Sun like throwing a ball from a car on the highway. If you aim for a highway sign, you’ll miss. Why? Because the ball has your momentum. Your aim might be true and perfectly good if the car was sitting still, but as you’re in motion you’ll miss and the ball will sail past the sign. In the same way, the Parker Solar Probe needs to lose a lot of the orbital momentum it gets from Earth. To do this, scientists have devised a neat trick. They’re going to loop the probe around both the Sun and Venus. With each pass of Venus, it’ll lose a little more momentum and fall deeper in toward the Sun. This process will take several years to complete.
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Slowly closing in on the Sun with the orbits of Earth, Venus and Mercury shown
The Sun is massive. It’s far bigger than most people realize. We live on Earth, which is massive. We look at other planets like Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus which all dwarf Earth, but the Sun is the monster powering this system, containing 99.8% of ALL the mass in our solar system. Yep, the planets are a rounding error in the formation of the Sun.
At its closest approach, the Sun will look something like this…
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Image credit: Spacecraft: ESA/ATG medialab; Sun: NASA/SDO/P. Testa (CfA)
The Parker Solar Probe is going to pass within roughly 4 million miles of the Sun, whereas Earth orbits at an average of 97 million miles. Falling in that close to such a massive body, the probe is going to pick up some tremendous speed, traveling at upwards of 700,000 kilometers an hour (or 430,000 mph relative to the sun)! That’s the equivalent of traveling from Philadelphia to Washington DC in a second, or New York to LA in 20 seconds!
Temperatures on the probe are expected to hit around 1370°C/2500°F in the sunlight and 30°C/85°F in the shade. While in sunlight, the temperature will be hot enough to melt aluminum, copper, brass, cast iron, nickel, etc and is right on the verge of melting silicon itself, making the design particularly tricky. It’s interesting to note that the probe will fly through a portion of the corona that reaches well over a million degrees, but as it is rarified (extremely thin) the temperature of the probe won’t exceed 2500F.
As with all scientific experiments, decades of planning has gone into the mission. We are yet again on the verge of unraveling more of the cosmic mystery surrounding our origins and how the universe works as we take our first close observations of a star.
The Parker Solar Probe is named after the 91 year old Eugene Parker who first proposed the concept of solar winds, and he’ll be watching the launch live!
July 22, 2018
Anti-Science Fiction
It comes as no surprise to anyone that science fiction is fictitious. It’s make-believe—speculative entertainment for our over-active imaginations, whisking us away to far flung worlds and allowing us to consider “What if?” But what happens when fiction transcends the page and enters popular culture? What influence does it have?
In this blog post I’d like to put forward the proposition that popular scifi that’s inherently anti-scientific has unjustly eroded our confidence in science.
Anti-science is popular, and not just in the absurd form of Flat Earthers. From creationists to anti-vaxxers and those that deny climate change, we’re surrounded by skeptics, but this isn’t healthy skepticism, where one challenges ideas to learn, but rather is based in stubborn ignorance, often to the detriment of those that hold these beliefs. And this isn’t hyperbole on my part. Those that chase “alternative” or “complimentary” medicine have TWICE the mortality rate. Why? Because there is no alternative or complimentary medicine. There’s just medicine—evidence-based and scientifically researched, and then there’s feel good guesswork. Which do you trust? Choose wisely, as your life literally depends on it.
Where do these notions come from? Why are we so ready to accept the latest craze and yet doubt hard-fought scientific research?
It’s really quite counterintuitive. Think about the times in which we live and the prevalence of science in everyday life. From smart phones to airplanes, we’re surrounded with the rewards of science. No longer plagued by Smallpox or Polio, we have significant proportions of the population questioning the need for vaccines. Why?
Consider this quote from James Henry Robinson’s The Mind in the Making.
We sometimes fine ourselves changing our minds without any resistance or heavy emotion, but if we are told we are wrong we resent the imputation and harden our hearts. We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but fine ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas themselves that are dear to us, but our self-esteem which is threatened.
Ego is the great enemy.
I often hear people say “science is just commonsense.” Nope. No it isn’t. If it was, the world would be very different. It wouldn’t have taken us thousands of years to figure out a few basic steps. Our natural “sense” is inherently biased by a whole raft of prejudices. Science is the discipline of removing those influences so we can see clearly, which makes it all the more galling when uninformed and ignorant people challenge it without any reason beyond their feelings.
Is science perfect? No, but it is self-correcting.
Science is a particularly human affair and is subject to the same foibles as any other endeavor, including cultural biases like racism and sexism, ala #metoo, the difference is, it ACCEPTS rather than defends these challenges (or it should and will given time). All these fearful conspiracies theories that scientists are some how in cohorts over climate change couldn’t be more wrong. There’s not a scientist alive that wouldn’t love to discover something that overturned their field. That’s what science is all about—challenging norms, seeing if they continue to hold. If they do, wonderful. If they don’t, change. Einstein did that to Newton.
Why is our ego so pernicious?
The little word my is the most important word in human affairs, and properly to reckon with it is the beginning of wisdom. It has the same force whether it is my dinner, my dog, my house or my faith, my country or my God. We not only resent the imputation that our watch has the wrong time or that our car is shabby, but that our conception of the canals of Mars is in error, or our pronunciation of Epictetus is subject to revision.
It’s me.
You can tell everyone else they’re wrong, but not me—that’s our nature. Ironically, that’s something that’s systematically challenged by university professors teaching the next generation of scientists. There are no absolutes in science. Everything is subject to revision if the evidence demands it.
We like to continue to believe what we have been accustomed to accept as true, and the resentment aroused when doubt is cast upon any of our assumptions leads us to seek every manner of excuse for clinging to it. The result is that most of our so-called reasoning consists of finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.
And that brings us back to our proposition: science fiction that is inherently anti-scientific erodes our confidence in science.
It’s an unpopular opinion, I know, but Michael Crichton was a luddite. More often than not, in his novels science was the enemy. Science was elitist, arrogant. And this isn’t just a writer’s ploy of building different characters, in several of his novels including Jurassic Park and State of Fear Crichton undertakes MAJOR information dumps shitting on science. For me, it’s no surprise to see the modern aversion to science as it was born out of the attitudes he fomented in the 90s. His perspective was unthinkingly accepted as true, and has been difficult to displace in popular culture.
Consider these sections from Jurassic Park.
…science is a belief system that is hundreds of years old. And like the medieval system before it, science is starting not to fit the world anymore.
Decades later, this is still a common retort. Science (apparently) is just another belief system. That’s a proposition that is so absurd as to defy reason. Belief is anathema to science. In the words of Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Science doesn’t care what you believe.”
Oh, and it’s hundred’s of years old. Nope. Science is NOTHING like it was in the time of either Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein, and it continues to be refined further. The advent of professional scientists as we know them today is less than a hundred years old.
How about this section?
Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but it cannot tell us not to use it… [the challenges we face are] because of ungovernable science.
As pious and self-righteous as this section is, it’s utterly wrong and yet these attitudes are still perpetuated in our culture today.
Scientists were the FIRST ones to speak out against the dangers of nuclear proliferation. It’s the military and government that pressed their use, but who’s going to criticise them? No, let’s take cheap shots at science. Science quickly settled on the use of molten salt reactors, which are astonishingly safe and practical, but don’t produce weapons grade by-products. It wasn’t science that stopped the adoption of these.
As for pesticides, I do believe they’re made by corporations. Scientists were the one’s that raised alarm bells about the use of DDT. Why? Because they study these things! That’s what science does.
The phrase “ungovernable science” is laughable. Governments and corporations have been suppressing good science for decades, doing everything they can to bury genuine science from the harm of tobacco to the dangers of climate change.
Ironically, what’s needed is ungovernable science. Science shouldn’t be answerable to any political ideology. Doh!
Science… [is as] foolish and misguided as the child who jumps off a building because he believes he can fly.
Yep, Michael Crichton wrote that.
Oh, and how about this one? Everyone knows this one…
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Try substituting “politicians, generals and entrepreneurs” and you’ll get far closer to the truth.
Then there’s this pearl of wisdom.
We are witnessing the end of the scientific era. Science, like other outmoded systems, is destroying itself. As it gains in power, it proves itself incapable of handling the power.
If we’re witnessing the end of the scientific era, it’s because Michael helped usher in an era of ignorance and distrust. It won’t be science that destroys itself, but we’re on the verge of destroying ourselves.
These quotes aren’t isolated quips, they’re constant themes throughout Michael Crichton’s works. State of Fear is a manifesto for climate change denial, loosely wrapped in a story about the laughable concept of “eco-terrorism.” While Next, Timeline and Prey are all science-gone-mad novels.
Fiction is, by it’s nature, untrue, and yet it’s still influential in ways few people recognize, shaping culture and attitudes. Popularity breeds acceptance, and perhaps nowhere is that more true than in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park.
Of course, you’re free to disagree with me, but please remember the words of James Henry Robinson, and his warning about how heedless we are in our beliefs, and yet strident in their defense.
The result is that most of our so-called reasoning consists of finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.
Think for yourself. I did. It’s refreshing.
Sorry, Michael. You’re a dinosaur.
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