Ray Jay Perreault's Blog, page 10

Graphene

Graphene

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene

Here is a very interesting new material. I discovered this yesterday while I was talking with a material’s expert.

Graphene is a hexagonal flake of Carbon. It was theorized many years ago but only since 2003 has it been available for testing. Stay with me here I’m an engineer not a chemist so my simple explanation might be humorous to some. If you take a nanotube and split it open you have a piece of Graphene.

If you take carbon with its natural hexagonal molecular shape, a single layer of molecules can be ‘shaved’ off the larger piece of carbon. You end up with a two dimensional surface of carbon ONE molecule thick which makes it TWO dimensional.

There is of course a lot more to this then what I’ve said and you should check out the excellent article on Wikipedia.

The reason I’m bringing up is the amazing properties of this material. It has “perfect” thermal conductivity. Did you see the word perfect? At the molecular level if one molecule vibrates due to temperature then because of the molecular bonds they all vibrate; at once. It is highly conductive with almost ZERO resistance. It is TRANSPARENT and could be the next substrate for TV screens. Because of these properties it could become the next step in computer design which will allow Moore’s Law to continue. Aside from all this it is 100 times stronger than steel for the same thickness.

Now using this in Sci-Fi is interesting. Massive and fast computers become real in the next phase of computing. Potential space ship surfaces because, believe it or not it is also ‘self-repairing’ to a certain extent.

Ray Jay Perreault

http://rayjayperreault.wordpress.com

Automata – Starring Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/automata/

I watched this Sci-Fi on Direct TV last night and I enjoyed it. It is a reasonable movie about robots changing their programming to become sentient. The story is a classic Sci-Fi plot, but in this case I thought the special effects were pretty good. Some of the dialog and acting was a little weak but overall it was worth the $4.99. There was a couple of comments that I enjoyed and I feel relate directly to Sci-Fi authors.

Late in the movie Antonio Banderas made a comment, “Life finds a way,” when he is talking with one of the robots about how and why they changed their programming. The other comments were about how the evolution of a self-repairing robot would vastly outpace the evolution of humans.

Both of these comments, in my opinion relate directly to potential Sci-Fi plots.

The “Life finds a way,” comment is similar to one made in Contact with Jodie Foster and shows us that we’ll find life everywhere and it will occur in unimaginable ways and will occur in amazing environments.

Both, coincidently, are part my SIMPOC series story line. In SIMPOC, two intelligent computers are developed in laboratories before any protocols are created to limit their development. Once the 99.9997% of humans are ‘dealt with’ the computers take different sides facing the ‘reason why the humans died.’ The steps leading up the virus are impacted by life occurring everywhere, finding few intelligent life forms, and rarely finding advanced life forms.

Sleeper spaceship could carry first humans to Mars in hibernation state

http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/07/tech/innovation/mars-hibernation-flight/

 

Very interesting article at CNN. Finally cryo sleep is here. Go to sleep and wake up a thousand years from now in another galaxy. Well maybe not just yet, but this article talks about real research going on that is a step in that future.

This article talks about lowering the human body temperature from 98.6 F to about 93 degrees F and that enables the body to go into an extended sleep. The metabolic processes are slowed down and thus less nourishment is needed, less room to move around and they don’t have to change clothes every day, (Great space saving for those of us that need to keep fashionable in space).

The article mentioned that a three person crew could have two crewmembers asleep for long periods of time while the third monitors everything. Currently they’re talking about two week sleep periods but further research might extent that. After the two week cycle, that crewmembers wakes one of the others up and then they go to sleep. The significant space saving would also allow larger crews.

They also mentioned that by having the sleeping crewmembers under a one G force, they would have less muscle atrophy and by muscle stimulation while sleeping they would wake up in pretty good condition. That’s interesting, I’m trying to come with a practical ship design that would allow a one G environment and I’ll be describing in the next book in my SIMPOC series.

Now if they could just fix those pesky cells that tend to pop when frozen, maybe we’ll get to suspended animation for really long trips. Maybe we’ll call them Popsiclenauts

Transformers: Age of Extinction

Transformers: Age of Extinction

I saw the recent Transformers movie last night and it frustrated me. I’m not going into the engineering plausibility of cramming so much material into something the size of a car, that’s one of those points that an engineer has to look beyond.

I’m frustrated with Hollywood because I’m getting tired of their choice of ‘Bad Guys’. It is so easy for them to grab the stereotypical evil person from either some secret government agency or, in this case, a power hungry Aerospace Company.

I know ‘imagination’ costs money and they always take the ‘easy’ route, but it does get worn out after a while. I worked for a giant aerospace company and, at time or another, I was fortunate to work with every level of management in that company. Apparently I didn’t meet the one guy whose office door read ‘Power Hungry Aerospace Executive’.

Notice how you never see a movie about a power hungry studio executive that choses the stereotypical cop, or lawyer, or doctor, or black family, or oriental family, or gay person; based on their personal agenda, or sometimes their funding source. We never see the producer that says, ‘that’s not how it is in most of America.’

Unfortunately ‘it’s the easy way’ that propagates the stereotypes in the first place and a stereotype is the easiest way to portray anyone, so I guess Hollywood will continue doing it for a while.

Scientists may have just created the world’s strongest material from tiny diamonds

http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20142309-26220.html

Forget carbon nanothreads, here is a great article about creating super strong nanothreads from diamonds.

So if you’re putting a space elevator in your story you may want to make it out of diamond. I might just drop this my follow-on to SIMPOC which is in work. This may also make a great super strong space suit or even bullet proof clothing.

Considering making super strong materials, I was talking with an expert in materials about this article and he mentioned work that is attempting to create hydrogen metal. We debated what the material properties could be for hydrogen metal and we presumed that it could be lighter and many times stronger than titanium or metal. Also give the abundance of hydrogen in the universe it would make an interesting material for space ship hulls.

We’ll move beyond the fact that current attempts at creating hydrogen metal have yielded very small amounts, and they are barely within the definition of metal. Aside from that little issue there are a couple of other ‘minor’ technical issues that need to be solved, but hey; that’s never slowed down a good Sci-Fi author.

Once again, if there is anything I write about that you’d like to use in your story; go for it.

 

Ray Jay Perreault

Scorpion Second Episode

After my less than enthusiastic comments about the technical quality of the CBS Series Scorpion, I watched the second episode to see how well it did.

Once again, I like the characters, and I do have to admit the second episode was less offensive then the first. I am not a microbiologist so I can’t comment too much on their plot line except from what little I’ve read they can’t tailor the flu virus in the way described. I did read a recent article saying that they were looking at the Anthrax Bacteria as a carrier for cancer treatment; which is interesting.

I did have one problem with the show. One of the characters is supposed to have an amazing mathematical mind along with a photographic memory. In one scene early in the story they showed him standing next to blackboard with VERY SIMPLE math and the obligatory plot with a stupid sine wave. I’m surprised they didn’t have E=MC*2 in the corner trying to impress the audience. Next time they put something in front of that genius I hope they hire someone with more than an Algebra background

Is the Ocean a Superorganism?

This is a link to one episode of the series “Through The Wormhole.” It was broadcast late in June and is available on a couple of sources. I’m mentioning this because it interesting from a Sci-Fi -author perspective; namely trying to communicate with a truly alien life form.

The show surmises that when you look at the oceans of the earth from a macro perspective it has many of the characteristics that could define it as a living organism. It has a pulse, a circulatory system and even perhaps, mental synapses occurring.

If we take a giant leap somewhere, and assume that it is an intelligent life form then communication becomes a very interesting challenge. If it does have mental processes then how long would it take for it to form a thought. Does it even know we are here yet? If it takes a thousand years to form a thought, then we might still just emerging in its consciousness. If it takes longer to form a thought then, we’re a long way from communicating with it. Given a life span of billions of years it might take at least thousands of years to form a thought and even longer to create the equivalent of a sentence.

Who knows maybe it’s getting ready to speak to us?

Maybe we won’t want to hear what it says?

This might come into play if we ever send a ship to Europa to explore its oceans. Maybe we will find that the ocean is a living creature on the planet and any smaller organisms living in the water might be just the remora of the planet.

If we meet an alien in real life or in a story and its lifespan is radically different than ours, its rate of forming thoughts will likely be different. We might have to ask it a question then come back next week for the answer. Or in the other direction it might fall asleep from boredom waiting for us to finish the sentence.

Ray Jay Perreault

http://rayjayperreault.wordpress.com

Scorpion (CBS) – What a crock of ….

I watched Scorpion on CBS last night and even though the actors did a good job, the show’s use of technology was so sad that it was fantasy.

Being an engineer, teacher and pilot I am so offended by Hollywood’s assumption that we are so technically ignorant that we could watch that without being offended. Unfortunately many people won’t have a clue how ridiculous their “brilliance” was. I can’t even begin to pick apart their efforts to save those stranded airplanes. Literally every technical statement they made was beyond being misleading they were stupid.

I’m surprised the ending didn’t entail writing out the code and passing it to a low flying plane so the pilot could ‘program’ the computers.

Don’t get me wrong, I realize that we have to ‘suspend’ reality a little when we are entertained. I don’t mind the occasional actor that wires his wristwatch into a giant computer to save the world, but when the entire show is based on technical statements that are ludicrous, I loose any interest in watching stupid garbage.

But then again, I’ve never seen Hollywood show any technical knowledge. Truth always loses to entertainment and aiming at the assumed lowest level of intelligence. I hope our education system starts producing more technical people so we tell Hollywood what to do with this insulting entertainment.

Ray Jay Perreault “Engineer, pilot and proud of it”

SIMPOC – Parallel Stories

Here is a new twist on writing that I’d love some feedback on. In my two novellas in my SIMPOC series I focused on the computers and the characters that had a direct impact on that story line. The characters from the space station Oasis, the moon colony Desert Beach and the President and Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs entered the story at the appropriate points but their stories dealing with the virus attack was mentioned only briefly.

I got feedback from many readers that they would like those stories expanded because of the drama of loosing almost the entire human population to a mysterious virus. Instead of re-writing those two novellas to include these expanded story lines I’m thinking about writing them in an expanded separate book which will take those characters to the same point in time where “SIMPOC – Human Remnants” ends.

With this approach the people who read “SIMPOC – The Thinking Computer” and “SIMPOC – Human Remnants” won’t need to read book 3, which is paralleling that story, unless they’re interested in the parallel story lines. Those that have read the first two books can read book 3 without too much shared story.

What are your comments, should I combine them into one story and re-issue or create this parallel story line?

Let me know.

Ray Jay Perreault

Experts Tackle Question of How Humans Will Evolve

Here is another interesting article from Scientific American. In summary it considers whether human evolution has stopped, which is an interesting topic. All of us Sci-Fi writers imagine future worlds and many of our stories are about humanity in the distant future. Of course there are the stories about us developing huge brains or becoming ethereal in some sense. But what can it mean to the Sci-Fi community if we stop evolving?

The article talks about the historical mechanisms of evolution where populations that are separated will develop different characteristics and those that provide advantages are eventually spread to the other isolated populations.

In our modern world where we account for (and hopefully accept) people with differences and because of the travel and general homogeneous mix of the world population the pressures and mechanisms for evolution are less effective.

The article did mention that the greatest likely impact is the growth of the African population and over time it will spread and integrate with the world which will likely cause future generation’s skin to darken. Wow; that should shake up some people.

If someone writes about humanity 5,000 years from now they may want to think about what they will look like.  Or they might take the path described by neuroscientist Joe. Z. Tsien.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/predictions-experts-tackle-question-of-how-humans-will-evolve /

“Could it be that 5,000 years from now, we will be able to download our minds onto computers, travel to distant worlds and live forever in the network?” ––neuroscientist Joe. Z. Tsien of Georgia Regents University in “The Memory Code” [Scientific American, July 2007]

Ray Jay Perreault

http://rayjayperreault.wordpress.com