Random Updates
Have been reading up on genetics, planetary science and artificial intelligence as ongoing preparation for Antisense. There have been changes in the story. For one thing, my plan to terraform Venus was running on a much longer timeline than the Earth/Moon story, which was a tightly plotted chase covering some months at the most. There is no way Venus can happen in less than a century. The new plan therefore is to show only the beginning of the Venus story in this book, along with the Tira chase tale (lengthened to twelve years now), and reserve the rest of Venus for the next book or books. From which you will deduce that I am planning a series of books to be set in this world.
I now understand why the series is so popular with sci fi writers. World-building in sci fi involves creating everything, history, geography, myth, economics, politics, culture, technology, art, sexuality, and it seems a bit of a waste to use and throw. A world can have many stories told about it, just as Earth has many stories (critics call them realistic fiction, which is a special case of sci fi set on one planet and within one historical, metaphysical and technological timeline). For the first book in my series (which I will call the Florian series, since it all takes place in the Florian Age), I will stick to Earth and Moon with a little bit of near space, so I can concentrate on familiarising my readers with this world and its history and problems. I'm a bit sad about that because I had collected a bunch of awesome stuff about Venus, but it will just have to wait till book 2 which will be called The Lightbearers.
There is still plenty of dynamite that's ready to use. For instance, did you know that mammalian reproduction is impossible without the help of a retrovirus that was included in the mammalian genome millions of years ago, and that without it all fetuses would abort? That ancient infection provided us with a 'gene' that builds the syncytium of the mammalian placenta without which no embryo can survive. What's more, this virus, which all mammals carry, may also be responsible for multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia and and bipolar disorder. There is no human gene that encodes for placenta formation, so this retrovirus has to be accounted the sole and sufficient cause. I have to say that this is weirder than anything I have so far invented for my world, and if i put it in a story without footnotes most people would think I was making it up. Funnily enough, I got a hint on this from Terry Pratchett's Science of Discworld III (thanks Aditya) and followed it up through web sources.
Other musings have involved Darwinism and sexual selection. For instance, one thing that has always puzzled me is, why do men go bald with age? This does not happen in any other animal and is too clearly marked to be a chance phenomenon, although I admit that that's always a dangerous thing to say about Darwinism, because chance often looks very 'clumpy' or coherent. But think about balding: it doesn't help or hinder young men in the sexual selection game, since whether a guy is going to go bald or not is not evident in youth, and isn't going to affect his present attractiveness to mates. Now, suppose we think about some men going bald in middle age, and a few not. If going baldwas a sexual disadvantage, we should expect the trait to die out, as the few who don't go bald would eventually outbreed the others. Instead it is very widespread. It could be that we haven't given it enough time to die out yet, but that too seems a little tendentious to me. So clearly in the case of individual men, going bald doesn't affect their reproductive chances, especially as they will probably have had children (or fluffed it) by then, and their attractiveness is irrelevant after they've added their genes to the population.
But now let us look at the community as a whole. In fact let's take two communities. For both communities, let's assume for the sake of argument that marrying young men makes children fitter than marrying old men. In one community, men mostly go bald age 35, while in the other they don't. Community A will have fitter offspring as a whole than community B because the A women will be able to avoid older mates, since age correlates with scalp hair and can't be hidden (let's assume they don't have access to hair replacement technologies). In the B group, they won't, and overall the genetic outcomes will be more mixed. So even though baldness or no baldness doesn't affect a given man's chance to have babies (since he has time while he has all his hair to marry regardless of whether he goes bald later) it does affect community outcomes and selects one community over the other.
It also works if you assume that marrying older men is better for women. Since both men and women contribute in some way to the upbringing of children except in the most segregated or warlike of societies, a woman will want two things from her man: ability to protect and ability to provide, with the second having a more long term and profound effect. If older men are better providers than younger men, women might actually prefer them, and baldness will then be an indication of suitability (interestingly baldness correlates with testosterone levels). However, this seems counterfactual since not only do women not rate bald men as sexy, the vanity industry makes money from levelling the playing field. Many ancient cultures required men to shave their heads, perhaps retaining a queue or pigtail at the back of the head (the area of hair that is almost never lost in balding men). This also levels the playing field, since in this case both old and young men show similar baldness patterns, thus confusing the female instinct to choose the younger men. This makes sense culturally since patriarchy is skewed towards favouring older men over younger men as well as men over women. In modern times, this skew has been partially reversed, with fashion giving younger men back their preeminent position and older men trying to imitate them.
However, it is also possible that balding is neutral and, like most diseases that strike over 40, isn't selected out of the population becuase mostly everyone's bred by then. But I don't really buy this as humans are group animals. We don't just compete against each other for food and mates, we also cooperate with each other against other species who want to take our food and eat our mates. Although these days the only species we really seem to compete with are insects and microbes. Since we cooperate with each other to increase our chances of survival, these actions become 'transparent' to evolution and begin to be selected from.
Not sure if i have made sense in all of the above.
With AI, I've been theorising the role of the unconscious and emotions in autonomous thought. I have a theory that you need the followign ingredients to build an ai (always lowercased in my book. Notice that it resembles the Japanese word for 'love'). The emergence of ai is an important part of the history of my world.
A body that accesses real world sense data and a way of organising, interpreting and storing that data. An entity which does not have a physical body and is not linked to senses which feed it data on the real world cannot become autonomous or intelligent. It must also learn through organising its sense data and remember what it senses and learns. Learning implies that it self-builds according to broadly given protocols, just as we self-build our brains as we learn.
A community from which it can learn and which interacts with it. Without social context an entity is limited to reinventing the wheel over and over again. Community is a force-multiplier for the intelligent organism.
Emotions and an unconscious mind. Emotions are condensed thought. They allow us to act quickly and sensibly on inadequate information. An unconscious mind allows certain processes to run in the background, like walking down the street while talking to a friend. These may actually be the easiest parts to engineer.
Mortality. A machine could become highly self-organied without mortality, but to become autonomous (and to develop a moral sense) it must be capable of dying and know itself to be so. An entity that cannot die has no morality. I also believe that as a mind becomes more and more complex (and self-building) it will become more and more wedded to its substrate until it cannot be taken out of its 'hardware' without destroying the 'software'. In my book this is the point of atmahood, or selfhood and full citizenship for the young ai. It also means no backup is possible and mortality is real.
I'm now looking for a book called The Emotion Machine by Marvin Minsky. If anyone has seen this in an Indian bookshop, please give me a heads up.
Meanwhile Kalpa is undergoing yet another rescript. Or perhaps this should be called a prescript, since I'm now starting the story much further back in time and showing Alinagar in conflict in parallel with Kalpa's years in hospital. This is because the backstory of both Alinagar and Kalpa herself are very important and interesting, but in the story as it stood they were being squeezed into too few pages and getting kind of jumbled. So the present Kalpa story is going to be number 2 in the series, and will be much faster pacved and snappier as a result, while the present backstory will make vol 1. Thanks to Avijit Chatterjee for the suggestion.
